A Lie About My Father

by John Burnside

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’

  By then she was little more than skin and bone and a ribbon of sickly-sweet perfume, and sometimes she was only half there, because of the drugs, but that day she was alert and watchful, as she studied my face. ‘Not ever?’ she asked, her voice quiet, but steady.

  ‘Not ever.’

  She nodded. ‘I thought so,’ she said. She looked at her face in the mirror. Her lipstick was almost unbearably red on her thin, grey mouth. She turned back to me, and smiled. ‘Don’t tell your father,’ she said.

  CHAPTER 2

  At the funeral, my father took aside each family member who would listen and explained how my mother had died. It was Margaret and I who had killed her, he said, killed her with worry. We’d been taking drugs since we were thirteen. We’d brought all kinds of strange people into the house. My mother had found a stash of dope in my room, hidden among the books I was supposedly studying. I had admitted to him in so many words that I was hooked on LSD. Since I’d been back home, it had become obvious that I had a serious drug problem. Because of all that – all the drugs, and the drinking, of course – I’d been expelled from school and, even though he’d put me through Cambridge, I wasn’t doing anything with my life. What was the point of him sending me to college, if I was just going to drift about doing God knows what, drinking and taking drugs? I’m not sure if anybody took anything he said to heart – I think some did – but he was utterly convinced, utterly sincere in what he was saying. He believed that my sister and I had killed our mother because he had to. He needed a scapegoat.

  As soon as we got back to the house, after the drinks reception, a pack of cards appeared and, before anybody could protest, his folding card table with the green baize top had been set up in the living room. People were magicking booze from thin air, a half-bottle of rum here, a bottle of whisky there; somebody had gone for a carry-out and come back with twenty-odd cans of beer. It was shaping up to be one of the usual parties, to the disgust of my Aunt Mary and Uncle Dave, who had driven down from Scotland to be there, and were supposedly staying over that night. I could see that this was my father’s revenge for all those years of feeling slighted and despised, the brother-in-law that nobody had liked, the faux-convert who’d not even bothered with the duty Mass and confession once a year to put my mother’s mind at rest about his immortal soul. Here he was, the master of his own house, with his friends around him, cards on the table, a ring of cigarettes burning in the ashtray, half-consumed glasses of beer and whisky everywhere, the men muttering away to one another, making bets, lighting up, mulling over their hands like the mutant denizens of some shebeen in the boonies.

  Uncle Dave had the first go. ‘Tommy,’ he said, standing over the table, a quiet, considerate man, used to doing things right, ‘can I have a wee word?’

  My father looked up, just, from his cards. ‘Aye? Want to sit in, Dave?’

  Dave shook his head. ‘Tommy,’ he said, doing – being – exactly what my father most resented: patient, adult, responsible, reasonable, ‘Mary’s a wee bit upset – ’

  ‘We’re all upset here,’ my father put in. ‘It’s a grievous day – ’

  ‘That’s right. It’s a sad day for everyone. So I think – ’

  My father laid his cards down and looked him in the face. ‘What is it, Dave? What do you want to say?’ His voice was dangerous.

  My uncle’s mouth hardened. He was a reasonable man, but only up to a point. He could see this was useless, but he’d probably known that from the beginning. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’d have thought you and your friends would be wanting to show Tess a bit more respect – ’

  My father stood up. One of the other men took hold of his arm, but Dave stood his ground. My father had always underestimated him, he had always mistaken his kind nature for weakness. They stood toe to toe a minute, silent, my father glowering, Dave deceptively placid. Finally, my father backed down. ‘I’m not like you, Dave,’ he said. ‘I can’t be bothered with all this sitting around with the women. A half-pint of mild and a packet of crisps. Not for me.’ He looked around the room, at his cluttered, bereft kingdom. ‘I don’t tell you how to behave in your house,’ he said. ‘So don’t tell me how to behave in mine, all right?’

  They stood a moment longer, then Dave nodded. ‘It’s your house,’ he said. ‘But I don’t suppose Mary will want to stay, under the circumstances.’

  ‘She can do what she wants,’ my father said. He sat down and picked up his cards. ‘I’m not bothered.’ The others around the table, who had been listening to all this with varying degrees of embarrassment, resumed the game. Before he turned and walked out, Dave glanced at me. ‘I’m sorry, son,’ he said. I nodded, but I didn’t say anything. I was still fairly drunk from the afternoon’s proceedings and I’d cleared out what was left of my mother’s medication the night before. Some of it was in my room and some of it was in my bloodstream.

  A few minutes later, my Aunt Mary was standing at the table, glowering at my father. She’d tried for years to get on with him, for her sister’s sake; now there was no further need for niceties. ‘Tess isn’t cold in the ground yet, God bless her,’ she said. ‘And you’ve turned her house into a – ’ She looked about, lost for words. ‘Are you not ashamed of yourself?’

  My father didn’t even bother to reply. He studied his hand, then lit another cigarette. By now, I’d had enough – I knew my uncle and aunt were about to leave, which meant, sooner or later, it would be just me and him in the house. I wasn’t sure I could manage that; besides, I was feeling fairly groggy with the drink and the painkillers. Without waiting for the outcome of the conversation, I took myself upstairs and locked myself in my room. I wasn’t alone, though. I had Pink Floyd, a bottle of vodka and the remainder of a dying woman’s pain-management regime for company. Better than memory; better than kin.

  When I woke, I thought it was the next day. It was light outside, a late morning, summer’s light, and, for a moment, I didn’t know where I was, or what I was, lying in my narrow bed, heavy as stone, blank inside. I floated like that for several minutes, perhaps longer, then I began to piece together the world as I knew it: my room, the house, a sense of the court beyond, abnormally quiet on the other side of the open window, the sound of a bird singing somewhere, the sense of everything reaching away around me, to the woods, to the exit roads, to the sea. The house was hushed, and still as glass. I could tell nobody was home, and I was glad. If it was late morning, my father would be at the Hazel Tree. He had some holiday due him, so I knew he wasn’t at work, but he would have seen no reason to break his normal routine; if anything, it was all he had to keep him going. I wasn’t thinking about this, it was simply there, registered: the knowledge, not of the behaviour of a specific man, but of a set of abstract rules, a system.

  Eventually, I got out of bed. I was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, barefoot, not in the least tired or hung-over, but numb at the surface of the skin, numb all over the way a foot or a hand is numb when you wake up and find you’ve slept in an awkward position. I also felt oddly disjointed, as if one limb weren’t quite connected to another, as if I’d been thrown together hastily on an assembly line. I remembered I’d been drinking vodka, and I’d taken some pills, but everything else was fuzzy. I opened my door and looked out. Nobody. I crossed the dark, narrow landing and peered into my father’s room. Empty. I was alone.

  The back of the house looked out over our neighbours’ gardens. From Margaret’s old bedroom, I could see a row of narrow plots, some of them neat and tidy, with vegetables planted in well-hoed lines, others – including our own – overgrown, a mix of grass that needed mowing, summer weeds, and the more exotic species, trying to hold their own. What caught my eye, though, was a shrub at the edge of the garden two plots down from ours: a tall, dark, almost blood-red weigela – I thought – perched on a slight elevation by the back fence. It was in full flower, but there was something odd, something almost uncanny about it:
it was too large, too vigorous-looking, and it seemed to be flowering, not just profusely, but to excess. I stood for a long time, staring at this red bush, while my body returned, gradually, to its usual state, the numbness bleeding away, the sense of myself as a single, unified entity returning. At the same time, I felt myself detaching, growing apart from everything around me: the house, its history, the objects in this room, my father’s eventual return. It had nothing to do with that particular shrub, of course, but those red flowers focused something that had been happening for years, a sense of myself as coming adrift, finally, of a body – not just a mind, not just a life, but a real, living body – beginning anew, whole again, but utterly separate, utterly apart.

  My father got home at three. He’d been to the pub, but he wasn’t drunk. He was in a grey mood, not angry, not spoiling for a fight, but – and I was surprised how obvious it was – a man who couldn’t quite keep his fear in check. In his face, there was a darkness I’d never seen before: fear, dread, a cold, inner panic that he could control, but couldn’t quite hide. I think he was grateful when he saw I was up and about: it gave him a distraction, a verbal punchbag. ‘So you’re still with us?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought you were never coming out of that room again,’ he said. ‘What have you been doing all this time? Sleeping?’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘You’ve been asleep?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For two days?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘What day is it today? Do you know?’ I had to think. Before I could work it out, he was already off again. ‘You don’t know, do you?’ he said. ‘You’ve been asleep for two days. More than that.’ He sat down in his ‘big chair’ and gazed at me, like a visitor to a zoo facing a rare, and slightly repellent, exhibit. ‘If you were asleep, of course,’ he added.

  ‘So where have you been?’ I asked him.

  ‘None of your business,’ he said. He took up his paper.

  ‘Down the Tree, I suppose, telling everybody how bad me and Margaret were to our mother.’

  He gave me a sharp look. ‘Well, you were. The two of you. You know as well as I do, it was worry that killed your mother, not – ’

  I waited to see if he’d say the word. Cancer. Even now, he couldn’t get it out. I laughed softly. ‘She never had to worry about you, though, did she?’ I said.

  He ignored that. ‘So what are you going to do now?’ he said. ‘If you’re staying here, you’ll have to get a job. It’s not a free ride, you know. I can’t keep you – ’

  ‘I’m not staying here,’ I said. I was surprised he’d even imagined I would consider it.

  ‘So where are you going? What are you going to do with yourself?’ He leaned forward in his armchair. ‘Do you even know what a disappointment you were to your mother? She thought you were going to do such great things – ’

  ‘Aw, fuck off,’ I said, finally rattled. He’d spoiled it all, taken away that sense of quiet, that stillness I’d been granted, looking out of the window at that red bush in the morning sunlight. That August mood.

  ‘It’s my house,’ he said. ‘You fuck off.’

  I almost laughed. It was like two boys in the school playground. Fuck off. You fuck off. No, you fuck off. ‘It’s nobody’s house,’ I said. ‘This house is empty.’ He stood up. This was it. I had been waiting for this my whole life, and now it was going to happen. We were about equal now: in weight, in strength, in anger, in willingness to do harm. ‘You’re a bastard,’ I said. ‘You always have been – ’

  It wasn’t my intention to refer, in any way, to his family history, or lack of it. It didn’t matter to me that his parents hadn’t been married, that he’d been adopted, or whatever had happened. His illegitimacy made no difference at all to people of my generation. The very idea of legitimacy was quaint, at best. I was just casting around for an insult, a goad, and bastard was the best I came up with. What else was there? Cunt? It just wasn’t a word I used. Motherfucker? We still weren’t fully Americanised yet. Besides, it was hardly appropriate, given the circumstances. No, bastard was the word I needed – and I imagine, at the back of my mind, back where the stories get worked out, the choice was long-pondered and utterly deliberate. It was the goad, the catalyst, the starting gun, and I was ready for the first blow when it came. Except that it didn’t come. He was standing eight feet away from me, at the other side of our little living room, and three steps would have brought him to me; instead, he slumped back into his big chair and sat there, his eyes seemingly drawn to some fascinating detail in the carpet that he’d only just noticed. I stepped towards him, then I stopped. He was pale, oddly bluish around the eyes and mouth; he looked as if he was going to faint. Then I saw that he was struggling to catch his breath.

  ‘Tablets,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  He slumped back further in his chair, and looked at me. He looked frightened again. ‘Get my tablets,’ he said. It was ridiculous, like a scene in some bad television drama. Perry Mason confronts murder suspect with what he knows, suspect crumples in a heap, demanding pills. The little green ones in his coat pocket. The pink pills on the dressing table. Big blue and yellow capsules spilling everywhere as Nature exacts her revenge.

  I hesitated. Was this a heart attack? His second? Or was it his third? Was it genuine? ‘Get them yourself,’ I said, finally.

  He looked up. He was going to die. One pill from the bottle in the kitchen would save him, but he couldn’t get that far by himself. He gave me a look of bitter satisfaction. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said. His voice was only just audible.

  I waited a moment longer, to see what would happen; then, when he didn’t move, I walked through to the kitchen and found his tablets. When I got back, he had laid himself back into the chair, breathing, concentrating. I walked over, opened the bottle and handed it to him. Then, just as I was, in my baseball boots, jeans and shirtsleeves, without waiting to see if he was all right, I walked out into the August sunlight and headed for Gainsborough Road, with a promise to myself that I would never darken his door again.

  CHAPTER 3

  When I think of what Robert Frost said about home – how, when you go there, they have to take you in – the one thing I know for certain is that, for me at least, it’s not true. Nobody has to take anybody in, it’s always a choice, never only an obligation. Maybe that’s the view of an essentially homeless – or do I mean, unhoused – person, but I knew Tom Morgan didn’t have to take me in that day, when I turned up in Cambridge in my shirtsleeves, with nothing but loose change in my pocket. I met him in Belinda’s, the day after I left home. I had spent the night in a B&B, and was now spending the last of my money on coffee and cake, waiting for something to happen: to happen, not in the world, but in my own mind, where the plan was laid out, written since the beginning of time – I really thought this – not fate so much as an unread map that was waiting for the circumstances and the moment to come that would allow it to be deciphered. I’d always had that perverse fondness for being lost and, when I was lost, something always happened. It could be an expensive way to make decisions, but I didn’t know how else to do it.

  I was in this frame of mind, then, when I met Tom. I can’t imagine I was making much sense, but he grasped the situation and an hour later I was sitting in his kitchen, listening to Ali Akbar Khan and chomping on muesli. (As far as I knew, Tom never ate anything else, his life was just tea and muesli and a seemingly endless supply of very good dope.) Nobody, least of all Tom, had to take me in, but for the next few weeks his house was my house. His spare room was empty, so I was welcome to sleep there; he fed me, mostly on muesli, which was no bad thing at the time; he lent me clean clothes; he shared his dope with me; he listened patiently to my ravings. He waited till I got a job – as a kitchen porter at the Arts Theatre – before he let me pay anything towards my keep. There was no debt here. In those days, people like Tom had no time for ideas like debt.

>   All this time, I felt like someone who had fallen into the world a few days before, some character in a film who turns up, lost, amnesiac, a man without a history who lives entirely in the moment. There was something there, no doubt, at the back of my mind: something I had to remember, but I didn’t know what it was, and I wasn’t much inclined to push it too hard. I was too busy with my map, too occupied with waiting for the future to consider the past. My mother had just died; I knew that, and it wasn’t her death that I was trying to forget – and it wasn’t a remedy for my present difficulties that I was seeking from the map in my head. I just needed to stay lost for long enough to know why I had ended up where I was. I had fallen into the world a few days before, and I expected to be treated with suspicion by everyone I met: friends, strangers, acquaintances, workmates. Instead, I wandered about Cambridge like a holy fool, tolerated, sometimes even blessed, by everyone I came across.

  My mother had died in August. By September, I had a whole new provisional life in place: a job, digs, a girlfriend called Annie who was funny and easygoing and had no plans for the future – or none, at least, that included me. Life was simple and clear. I was drinking too much, I was also doing drugs every day, but it was mostly dope or bennies, and anyhow, most of the people I knew were doing exactly the same thing. I wasn’t unhappy, and I wasn’t conscious of any real problems in my life. In the daytime, I would go to work, sit around in the Arts Café, or meet Annie at the YMCA opposite Parker’s Piece; at night, I’d sit around in a pub doing crossword puzzles and drinking a fast-acting concoction called snakebite (half-beer, half-cider). Sometimes I would get stoned with Annie and listen to music at her flat. I was going nowhere, which was fine. It wasn’t as if I was in mourning, or anything like that. Something had been adjusted in my head: it was as if I had turned the dial on a radio and tuned in to a new station, quickly forgetting everything I had heard before. It was summer, still, summer at night on the river, summer on Grantchester Meadows, summer on Jesus Green and out on Coe Fen. If I wanted to be alone, I could borrow a bike from somebody and ride out into the flat fenland around about and stand under the wide East Anglian sky, or I could go up to Kettle’s Yard, next to the church where Wittgenstein is buried, and sit a while, suspended in the light and the quiet. Like Alice, I had fallen out of the world I knew, and now it was summer wherever I turned: the deep green of the trees, the wet shadows of evening, whole days of wandering the meadows, going alone through the drowsing cattle, the bodies of the animals shifting aside, first one, then another; swimming in the long afternoons down by Byron’s Pool; nights spent following the cow-paths home in the glimmer of dawn, alone with the mist on the river, eyes on the farther bank. It was an English summer, the idyll I had always imagined. Then, before I knew the summer was over, it was Halloween.