A Lie About My Father

by John Burnside

  It had to end. It surprises me to think it now but, at the time, I would have had no scruple about killing him. To be honest, I have to admit that, in those days, I felt that I could have killed anyone. Yet, even though I’d been thinking about it for a while, it seemed an idle notion, a fantasy, something I would never pluck up the courage to do. After all, I’d had a knife to his throat, and I’d let it go, so it was obvious that I didn’t have the heart to do it. Then something came into my mind that made me think again. It was a minor thing, an incident that had happened a few months before, but it was also a sign, when I came to think about it.

  I had been walking through the town centre on a Saturday afternoon, with my friend Russell, when I spotted my father coming towards us, a faraway look on his face, as if he were dreaming, or not altogether there. It was a look I recognised: most of the time, when he was out of the house, he would take his glasses off and slip them into the inside pocket of his jacket, presumably because they detracted from his supposed resemblance to Robert Mitchum. Without them, he was blind as a bat, though he could see movement, and he had a basic-level sense of what was happening around him that was more to do with instinct than vision. Still, what I knew for sure was that he couldn’t make out details. ‘Look at the fool,’ I said. ‘He can’t see a thing without his glasses.’

  Russell grinned. ‘Is that so?’ he said; then before I could stop him, he sang out, ‘Hiya, Tommy.’

  My father turned to us. What he sensed was a mass, no doubt, that was neither obviously threatening nor particularly interesting. ‘All right?’ he said, his voice non-committal.

  ‘Aye,’ Russell said. ‘Yourself?’

  ‘No sae bad,’ my father replied, ready to go on. He didn’t know who the hell we were.

  ‘Haven’t seen you for a while,’ Russell threw in. ‘You keeping all right?’

  My father looked puzzled, but remained non-committal. ‘Well, ye ken how it is,’ he said.

  Russell began laughing. ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ he asked.

  I’ll give it to the old man, he covered up well. ‘I ken your face,’ he said. He cast around for a name he remembered. ‘I’m no sae good with names –’

  ‘Russell.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Russell. The milk boy.’

  ‘But you know this man here,’ Russell went on quickly, turning to me. I was already tired of the game.

  ‘Oh, aye.’ My father peered at me. ‘How’s it going, son?’ He’d probably got me down as one of Russell’s brothers. I didn’t say anything.

  Russell laughed. ‘This is John,’ he said. ‘Your son.’

  My father grimaced. He was only about six feet away from me. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘So. What are you boys up to?’

  I didn’t want the game to go on, then. It didn’t seem funny any more. But months later, as I sat in one of the disused garages on the Beanfield, soused on cheap wine, this memory was like a gift. A gift; or an omen. A challenge. If I hated my father – and that afternoon, for reasons I can’t even remember now, I hated him utterly – I could solve the problem with one decisive action. I couldn’t stand face to face with him, when he was sober, able to look into my eyes, able to fend me off. But what about when he was drunk, coming home through the court late at night, no glasses, unaware of who was waiting for him in the dark? If I could pull that off, it would be like any other Saturday night: two strangers meet; one of them walks away. Why not? This wasn’t a sober thought – I’d had quite a bit of wine, some speed, other stuff too, I imagine – but that made it all the more compelling. It wouldn’t be easy, of course. Even drunk, I knew that. But I knew what to do, and I knew I could get away with it. My father had so many enemies, nobody would think to suspect his own son.

  I never really intended to carry it through. I know that, now, and I think I knew it then. What matters, though, is the fact that I worked it all out: the best place to wait for him, as he walked home (a narrow alley at the foot of Handcross Court, just at the point where the footpath forked between the lower side of the square and the upper); the choice and disposal of the weapon (single-blade, nine-inch knife, to be tossed into a pool in the woods afterwards); the cover I would need to provide an alibi, if I was ever suspected (I would be in my room all the time, listening to music: my mother could testify to this, as she’d have brought me a cup of tea before she went to bed, as an excuse to check that I wasn’t up to any mischief). Convinced I had everything covered, I placed myself where I needed to be, able to see him coming, but out of sight myself, and I waited. I didn’t believe it, not for a moment, but there I was standing in the shadows, clutching a knife, on the darkest part of my father’s walk home from the pub. It was almost eleven o’clock. He would soon be on his way.

  As it happened, he was not alone. Bert McKain was with him. This shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise – Bert was an occasional at the Hazel Tree, and his house was just a hundred yards from ours. If anything, I suppose that was a relief. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do, if my father had been alone: if I’d been serious, I could have waited for the next chance to ambush him, and I wouldn’t have had long to wait. But I wasn’t serious. I was acting out a script, a fantasy. The very fact that I could stand there, waiting, in the shadows, was enough for me, really. To know that I wanted to do it, even if I couldn’t see it through – that mattered. I knew I hated him, and I knew I was too sensible, or too much of a coward to act. But it still mattered. It was a piece of knowledge that I needed to possess. When I heard Bert McKain’s familiar, mock-Elvis voice singing out through the night, I was relieved, sure I was. They were walking straight towards me, Bert talking and joking, my father – who was nowhere near as drunk as I’d expected – walking along quietly beside him. He seemed preoccupied, wrapped up in his own thoughts, though I could see, as they passed through a hoop of street light, that he was smiling. He liked Bert. In an odd, detached way, he liked most of the men he knew. I kept to the shadows and waited till they passed; then I ditched the knife, cut through the court on the lower side – I knew I’d still be home first, that my father would stand blethering with Bert for a while – and climbed through the window of my room, where Country Joe was still singing quietly to the bedside lamp.

  The next morning, as soon as I woke, I knew I had to get away. I was certain that my father would see something in my face – or, worse, that my mother would. I was sure you couldn’t think about killing a man without it showing. Even if I had never had the nerve to do it, I’d had the thought – and now I had the knowledge. I wasn’t a Catholic for nothing. Thought, word and deed. There was a truth in the idea that I could understand – and, by mid-morning, my exit strategy was already in motion. I had friends in Kettering; I knew they would offer me refuge, for a while at least, until I could decide what I wanted to do with myself. Not that it mattered what I did, or didn’t do. There was no long-term plan; I just knew it was time to be gone. I’d been running away half-heartedly all my life; now it was time to be gone for good. There would be some explaining to do, especially to my mother, but that could wait for later. For now, all that mattered was to be somewhere else.

  DOBERMANN DAYS

  C’est l’inconnu qu’on porte en soi, écrire, c’est ça ou rien.

  Marguerite Duras

  CHAPTER 1

  I stayed away for as long as I could. I went to college, for something to do, then I drifted around, stopping in at the house now and then, when I thought the coast was clear. I never stayed long and, much to my mother’s disappointment, I was soon off again, wandering from place to place, finding menial jobs, hanging around in pubs with people much like myself, doing odd deals for extra cash. The money never lasted long, but it was put to good use. There were long days in the sun out on Grantchester Meadows, winter afternoons tucked up in bed with a good book and a bottle of rum, trysts in the wee small hours of the morning in Sheffield, or Northampton. I might have gone on like that for much longer, but somebody took the trouble
to track me down and let me know that my father had suffered a heart attack. I didn’t really want to go home, but I knew my mother would be upset if I stayed away. I’d barely seen my father since I’d hatched the plan to kill him; now, it seemed, he was doing it by himself.

  I got back a few days after I heard the news, expecting to find my father at death’s door, but it was my mother’s appearance that disturbed me most. Of course, once he’d got out of hospital, my father made light of the heart attack. He had been taken to Kettering General, and later discharged with a warning to quit smoking and drinking, something he wasn’t about to do. His argument was that his Uncle Willie, who had gone on to the ripe old age of eighty-four, had smoked sixty a day and had practically lived in the pub. The men in his family, he said, had always been strong; there was nothing to worry about: doctors were constantly telling people to stop smoking, but what was the point of living for ever if you couldn’t enjoy yourself? ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I can get to work. That’s the main thing. I’ve not a missed a day’s work through sickness since I was fourteen. I’m not about to start now.’ It was the usual stuff, but there was an edge to it this time. He seemed nervous, unsure of himself. My mother saw this too, and I knew, as soon as I walked into the house, that she had been taking every opportunity she could to work on him, wheedling, cajoling, flattering, persuading. So, to begin with, I assumed she looked so tired and dark around the eyes because the worry, and her trying to keep my father in line, had taken its toll. Soon, however, I realised that something else was wrong. She looked slight, a little shaky, her mouth tighter than usual, her face drained. One afternoon, when my father was out at the Hazel Tree – his first time since the heart scare – I sat her down for as much of a heart-to-heart as was possible in that house. It turned out Margaret – who had recently moved to a house in Corby Village and started a family of her own – had done the same thing. Even her workmates had had a go at her. Nobody had got through, and there was no chance of my breaking down her defences. Still, I made her a cup of tea, and launched straight in. ‘What’s up?’ I said. ‘You don’t look well.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ she murmured, wanting not to talk about it, but enjoy her tea, and what she knew was bound to be a fleeting visit from her only son. With my father already back at the pub, she knew I would soon be on my way.

  ‘No you’re not,’ I insisted. ‘Have you been to the doctor?’

  ‘I was worried about your dad,’ she said. ‘He’s worse than he thinks.’

  I tried not to show my irritation. ‘He’ll be fine,’ I said.

  She shook her head. ‘No, he won’t,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t look after himself. I know you don’t have much patience with your dad, but somebody’s got to keep an eye on him – ’

  ‘And who’s keeping an eye on you?’ I interrupted.

  She gave me one of her soft, conciliatory smiles. ‘All I need is a bit of a holiday,’ she said. ‘It’s just the worry. Now that your father’s a bit better, I’ll be right in no time.’

  I didn’t believe it. I don’t think she believed it herself. There was something wrong with her, something more than anaemia or fatigue, but I can’t imagine she’d guessed it was cancer. She’d had a routine hysterectomy a few years before but, for some reason, the ovaries hadn’t been removed. Now, unknown to us all, she was already past help. I remember the doctor saying, some weeks later: if only she had come in earlier. It was the first thought I had when I learned the news. It was probably the first thought my father had too: if it hadn’t been for him, she might have been saved. I’m sure that idea plagued him, after she died.

  Today, looking back, I have difficulty remembering that time. One moment, it’s a seamless fabric and I cannot draw a single thread from this cloth without drawing out the texture and flavour and colours of the whole, so even an apparently innocent image of my mother standing on a kitchen chair, reaching for a strand of loose tinsel on the Christmas tree, is loaded with a grief I cannot explain. When I remember her at all, I remember the extraordinarily long ordeal that followed our conversation: I remember her illness, and how long her dying took, and I want to see her as she was before I was born, before she was married: the young woman in the photographs she kept in the Egyptian bag in her wardrobe, a pretty girl, flirting with the camera, dressed in the latest fashions – not a memory at all, for me, but an indelible moment, a millisecond of limitless possibility, sometime in 1947.

  She wasn’t right in no time, of course. I sensed it that day: there was a darkness about her, an odd, sickly-sweet smell that even she had probably noticed. And at that moment, I resolved to stay home, to make sure she got the care she needed. I’d get a job at one of the factories, and find a way of dealing with my father. If I couldn’t stand being in the house with him, I’d find somewhere else to live. I was full of plans, full of good resolutions. First, though, I had to go somewhere. I wouldn’t be away long, I told myself, and I’d stay home for as long as I was needed, just as soon I got back. I made her promise to see a doctor, and told her I’d be checking up on her. She smiled, and made the promise. It was the closest we had been for years, conspirators, with our own secret, just like the old days, back on Blackburn Drive, when we sat over Look and Learn, or a borrowed novel, learning to read, dreaming of the marvellous future.

  Two days later, I was gone. I intended to be away for a week, but I didn’t get back till the end of the month. In those days I hitch-hiked everywhere, and my father wouldn’t have a telephone anyway, so I couldn’t let anybody know I was coming. I just turned up. It was the middle of the afternoon, and my father was alone in the house, doing the dishes, when I got in.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. I didn’t want to be alone with him; I supposed he felt the same way. ‘Where’s Mum?’

  ‘She’s in the hospital,’ he said. He picked up a plate and began drying it. I should have guessed. Things had to be bad for him to do the dishes.

  ‘Is she all right?’

  He looked at me. His face was empty, neutral. ‘No,’ he said. ‘She’s in the hospital.’

  ‘You said. So – what is she in for?’

  He turned away, put the plate in a cupboard. I wondered if that was how he always did it, washing one plate or bowl at a time, then drying it and putting it away, and I wanted to tell him to stop, to put the tea towel down and talk to me properly. Instead, I stood and watched as he picked up another plate and placed it in the sink.

  ‘Well?’ I said.

  He didn’t reply right away. He let the plate settle into the sink, then he turned to look at me again. ‘You can’t go wandering about here, there and everywhere any more,’ he said. ‘Your mother’s got cancer.’

  For a moment, I was stunned. In some back alley of my thinking, I had been expecting bad news – maybe I had even been expecting this – but I hadn’t prepared myself for it. Least of all, for the way he broke it. A minute in, though, my dismay gave way to anger. He’d done this on purpose; I knew it. He’d rehearsed it in his mind, chosen the words; I knew he had, because they sounded calculated, they sounded unnatural. Not like him. ‘Your mother’s got cancer.’ He would never have said that, in those words, if he hadn’t planned to. It was the great taboo, worse than sex even, to say that word. Cancer. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘thanks for breaking it to me so gently.’

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘Does she know?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘And she’s not going to know, either.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She can’t take it,’ he said. ‘It would – ’

  ‘What?’ I waited, but he didn’t answer. ‘Well? What would it do?’

  He turned back to the washing up. ‘She’s not to be told,’ he said, quietly. ‘The doctor agrees. She wouldn’t be able to take it.’ He put another plate on to the draining board, then reached for the tea towel. I watched as he began to dry it.

  ‘You know what?’ I said.

  He looked at me, curious for a moment. He’
d planned this moment, now he wanted to see what I would say, what I would do. ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘It would be a lot quicker,’ I said, ‘if you washed all the dishes at once, then dried them afterwards.’

  ‘Is that so?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  He finished drying the plate, and set the tea towel down. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, bitter, oddly satisfied with itself. ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ he said.

  In the end, she was told she was dying – because I told her. I didn’t say the word cancer, but she had already guessed that. It was a couple of months after my father broke the news – how that slight, anaemic woman hung on for so long is beyond me – and she had wasted to stick-thin and grey, as nature did its work. My father had kept up the pretence religiously, telling her they would go on holiday just as soon as she was better, carrying home piles of brochures from the travel agents so she could look through and pick what she’d like. He’d get whatever money it took, no problem. I was staying in my old room, and it was my job to look after her in the early evenings, picking up her charcoal-brittle frame and carrying her downstairs, where she would receive friends from work, who’d pop round whenever they could with flowers and fruit that she couldn’t eat. Before these visits, she would sit up in bed, brush her hair and put on a little make-up, looking at her gaunt, inky face in the dressing-table mirror with a strange, almost curious expression. One day, she turned to me as I came in and smiled sadly. ‘I don’t think I’ll be going on that holiday any time soon,’ she said.