A Lie About My Father

by John Burnside

  October, that year, was warm, damp, friendly to the ghosts. Morning and night, I walked back and forth from Tom’s house, just off Mill Road, across Parker’s Piece, and through town to the Arts; the shadows under the silver limes that lined the Piece were still and cool, but it was like a theatre waiting for the curtain to go up. The shadows, the trees, the wide lawns – it was all as it should be, but it was too still, too heavy, waiting for the day when the dead would return, coming through rain, coming through the wind, seeking out the angles and corners they knew, the faces they could name, the bodies that were flesh of their flesh. I was going about my business in the usual way, but all the time, somewhere at the back of my mind, the irrational questions were forming: would my mother find me here, so far from home? Would George Grant know she was dead, even though he hadn’t seen her in twenty-odd years? Was George Grant dead too? Would they walk the earth together, back in Cowdenbeath, or Crosshill, haunting the places they had known before I was even born? What about Elizabeth and Andrew? Were they ghosts, or had they died young and intact enough to enter the next life immediately? Who were they now? Where were they?

  At last the fateful day came. Tom had listened to my ramblings about Halloween and had suggested we have a party at his house to mark the occasion. Some friends of his – people I’d met before and liked – were coming over from Paris and two days after All Hallows they were all going off together, to travel in Spain. His friend Olivier was going too, and there would be nobody around afterwards, so I could stay and look after the house, eat Tom’s muesli, water the dope plants in the lean-to at the back of the garden. It was a great idea. Everybody brought something special to the big day: good French wine packed into the boot of Olivier’s car, eight bottles of Calvados that his friend Leon had smuggled over, some excellent dope, a few hundred bennies, several crates of Italian beer. I had four tabs of blotting paper for my own consumption: I knew none of Tom’s set did acid, they were strictly muesli-and-mushrooms types. If I had stopped for a moment to think about what I was doing, I might even have seen that I was preparing for a fall. Somewhere, at the back of my mind, where stories unfold according to their own logic – not common sense, not wisdom, not folly, but story logic, destiny, character, whatever we choose to call it – I think I did see. I just didn’t acknowledge the fact. At the front of my mind, as I shopped and planned and waited for the day to come, I was expecting to fly. Maybe that’s the secret of this condition, this addictive personality type: that desire to combine falling and flying. And wouldn’t they seem the same, for moments at a time? I thought of flight as a matter of a day, a night, a few hours, but falling was something else. There are some places you can only get to if you stop thinking about them. For a long time, as you fall, you think of the impact, of landing, of touching down – and you just keep falling. It takes a long time to fall, and the only way to make it end is to stop thinking about an ending. Or so it seems now. Back then, I was just planning the best party of my life. I had no idea what kind of machinery I was setting in motion.

  CHAPTER 4

  When I walked out of my father’s house, I thought I had written him off for good. I didn’t want to have to be in the same room as him again, partly because I had no idea what the outcome might be, but mostly because that detachment, that sense of separation I had experienced standing at the window in my sister’s bedroom had been so magical that I was ready to do anything to win it back. I didn’t realise, at the time, that our lives – my father’s, mine – were running on near-parallel lines: like me, he was detached, going through the motions on the surface, but walking the dim chambers of his own mind in the small hours. Like me, he seemed untouched by grief. Even now, when there was nobody to restrict his movements, he kept going to work, preserving the facsimile that had concealed him all his life, fiercely pretending he was the man he said he was. Every now and then, when I spoke to Margaret on the phone, I would get an update: he was no worse, health-wise; he was thinking about getting a dog; one or other of his friends had died or moved back to Scotland. I didn’t care about any of this – or I told myself I didn’t – but I listened to what was said, and I responded as if it mattered. I said I thought the dog was probably a good idea; it would give him some companionship, and he could take the mutt out for walks, which would help his heart. He was still drinking, still smoking sixty to eighty a day, though the doctor had told him if he didn’t quit he would die. Well, I said, there was nothing anybody could do about that. It was up to him. Nobody could do it for him. I caught myself using exactly that kind of language, the language he would have used. Inside that language, it was easy to see how indifferent he had been. Or how indifferent he had wanted to be. It was all too much for him, all that human concern. All that time, he’d just wanted to be left alone to get on with things. Now, I felt the same way.

  Margaret would try to reason with him. If he cut back on the cigarettes, if he drank less, he would feel better, live longer, see his grandchildren grow up.

  ‘What difference does it make?’ he would say. ‘Who wants to live for ever, if you can’t do anything? The kids will be better off not having me around. Anyway, I’ll soon be seeing your mum.’

  So it went on. On days off, he would still get up early, wash and shave, put on a blazer, clean trousers, his black polished shoes. Then he would go through the paper, seeing what he liked in that day’s racecard. Not that he put a bet on very often. I suppose he didn’t see much point. At around noon, he would go to the Hazel Tree for a few pints, then he would go home and watch television. He still had his ‘big seat’, where he sat, a foot or two from the screen, with his glasses perched on the end of his nose, the sound turned down as far as it would go without becoming completely inaudible. There was no food in the house, Margaret told me. No food, no washing powder, no toilet cleaner. She would go round twice a week to pick up his laundry and do a spot of cleaning, trying to time it so he would be out, or busy with the racing. Now that he was alone, and sliding down, the only person who could be bothered to help him was this daughter he had treated so badly. All her life, he had attacked her – psychologically, emotionally, physically – systematically chipping away at her self-regard, eroding her confidence, bleeding her of any faith she might have had in herself. When I asked her why she bothered, she gave me the same answer my mother would have done in her place. ‘He’s still family,’ she said. ‘You can’t just turn your back on family.’

  My father had always been a conventional man, in spite of his drinking and unpredictable behaviour. He sought refuge in received truths, ideas that were beyond controversy in the world he inhabited, indisputable facts about human nature, politics, religion, warfare, current affairs, the impenetrable labyrinths of history. At one time, he’d been a reader, and he remembered some of the details, very specific pieces of information that, out of context, could be turned to almost any purpose. He was familiar enough with the Bible to be able to misquote it in support of the most bizarre arguments; he had memorised odd snippets of science fact and fiction that he didn’t really understand, but he repeated it all often enough to imagine that he did. His truths, in fact, were as well rehearsed as his lies, and just as unreliable. One of his most prized beliefs – based, not only on the literature, but on personal experience – was that dogs were just as intelligent as people. He would talk about the Alsatians he’d seen in the air force, dogs that could be trained to do anything, even things that it wasn’t necessarily in their nature or their best interests to do. He’d had a dog himself in those days, he said, and that animal was the only living creature he could rely upon in any situation.

  ‘I could have trusted that dog with my life,’ he would say. ‘Which is more than you can say for most people.’

  All the men he knew agreed with this sentiment, even if they didn’t have dogs themselves. It was part of the canon of beliefs: dogs were smart and loyal; women were moody; children were a burden; management was corrupt; union reps were self-serving; clever people were all ver
y well, but you were better off with a bit of common sense. Nobody was surprised, then, when he finally did get himself a dog, after weeks of talking about it. The only surprise was the breed. Margaret had assumed he would get an Alsatian puppy; she had even hoped he might have enough sense to get a smaller, more manageable beast, maybe one that wouldn’t frighten her or her kids when she went round to the house to clean or pick up my father’s dirty laundry. The neighbours had hoped for something he could look after: a wee Scottie, Matt from next door had suggested. Alan, his friend from up the road, had even offered him a pup from a litter of nearly-spaniels his bitch had dropped, but my father had, at some point, entertained a vision of himself with a Dobermann, a dog that, in his view, was a fitting companion to a person of his nature, and that was what he got: a Dobermann.

  ‘Beautiful dog,’ he said, when Margaret remonstrated with him. ‘Not afraid of anything.’

  ‘But it’s too big,’ she’d said. ‘It’s cruel to keep a dog like that in a little house like this – ’

  ‘He’ll get plenty of exercise,’ my father said. ‘I’ll take him out every day.’

  ‘A dog like that needs more than a walk round the court,’ Margaret said. ‘This is a big dog. He’ll want a five-mile run in the countryside – ’

  The argument went on for hours, then days, but it was useless. My father had got himself a dog – he called it Prince, naturally – and he wasn’t going to give it back. He’d paid good money for it, and he was going to train it, RAF style. ‘You don’t need to be scared of him,’ he told Margaret. ‘If that’s what’s bothering you. A dog is only as good or as bad as his master. Once I’ve got him trained, you’ll hardly know he’s there. The girls will love him. Your Dobermann is a great family dog. Most people don’t realise that. All you have to do is show the animal who’s boss.’

  He was still drinking as much as he ever had, but his habits had changed. He had refined his use of alcohol, distilling it to a fine art, finding a near-perfect balance between amnesia and ascesis. It surprises me, still, that people think of drinking as a form of self-indulgence, that they can call it a pleasure, or a vice, when it is so obvious that, for men like my father – for men like me – it is an instrument of self-abnegation. The real drinker doesn’t do it for the high, just as the real gambler doesn’t do it for the money: drinking, gambling, drugs, these are spiritual exercises, a perverse, home-made via negativa that the disciple travels without hope or desire, towards a limbo of his own making. On this road, in this condition, the mind occupies itself with all manner of strange and secret pursuits, whole categories of knowledge and skill become a sanctuary from the quotidian world that, if he is not careful, might at any moment tempt him out into the open. Some days, the drinker’s entire life flashes before him in an instant, the way it is supposed to do when a man drowns, but that instant includes itself, and everything is repeated, again and again, for hours. Some days, he falls asleep and dreams he is in a cinema in the middle of the day – a matinée, probably not many people in the auditorium, though, of course, it’s too dark to see – and he is watching his life play out on the screen, all the blacked-out times late at night, all the conversations and pranks and petty mortifications that he has forgotten, played out, in an excruciating public spectacle, but quietly, almost unnoticed, on a wet Thursday afternoon, among strangers.

  Yet it isn’t that painful, not always. Sometimes he wakes in the middle of the evening, too late to go out, and he feels that something has touched him, leaving a faint stain on his fingers and mouth that is only just beginning to fade. All he has to do is stop time and he will find it, he will guess the truth he’s been looking for, he will reach the white origin where snow begins, or the far, cobalt origin of birdsong and water which is always somewhere else, not wherever he is, isolated, in the real sense of the word: isolated, picked out, defined, illuminated. Everything begins elsewhere, he knows that: dawn, Christmas, love, beauty, terror, the wind, the sky, the horizon, his own soul. It begins far in the woods, or out on some windy field by the sea. He wants to be there, not here; he wants to be where things begin, and he is so close, he is so near. Only – for reasons he cannot explain – something stands in his way, something he didn’t ask for. Reason, terror, unworthiness, he can’t even name it, it takes different guises every time, but it is always there, standing in his way, keeping him from his destiny. I’m sure my father felt these things – but these are my words, and this is the real lie about my father. I cannot talk about him without talking about myself, just as I can never look at myself in the mirror without seeing his face. These days, when Halloween comes around, I observe the rites and I think about the chosen dead – my mother, my grandparents, the four or five people I have lost over the years – but none of them ever comes. Nobody comes but him, the one I don’t choose and would prefer to forget. He comes to the fire and stands just outside the ring of heat and light, not the bully I knew, not the hawk-eyed predator watching for any sign of weakness, ready to pounce whenever he saw an opening, but that quiet man I never knew, that man he became when he was alone in an empty house. He has nothing to say to me, he brings no mercy, no forgiveness. He hasn’t come to deliver a cryptic message or show me what he has found on the other side. All he is here to say is what he has said already: that we are not so very different, he and I; that, no matter how precious I get about it, a lie is a lie is a lie and I am just as much an invention, just as much a pretence, just as much a lie as he ever was.

  He abused the dog, of course. He didn’t mean to, but he did. He began by doing all the right things, but after a while he was feeding it scraps, pushing it out into the garden when it needed exercise, or walking it round the square, letting it get all excited by the fresh air and the thought of distance, then dragging it back to the house and locking it inside while he went off to the pub. Margaret was furious. She didn’t much like dogs, and she wouldn’t let her girls roll around the floor with Prince, but she thought it was cruel to treat any animal like that, and she worried that some bad would come of it. We’d both been bitten by dogs when we were children – and we hadn’t forgotten little Beth Simpson, who had her cheek ripped off by the family dog, a normally good-natured, not very large mongrel called Sam. Margaret had visions of Prince hopping the gate and tearing somebody’s toddler apart out in the court, while my father sat indoors watching the horses on television. She saw things turning nasty, when my father forgot – as he sometimes did – to feed his charge, or to take it out for a walk.

  How it worked out in the end, though, was quite unexpected. After he’d been out for the night, and ended up calling her from a phone box somewhere – he wasn’t quite sure where he was, up on the Lincoln Estate, he thought, though all these estates looked the same – she picked him up at three in the morning and dropped him at the house. She was always doing things like that, and I know that he never once thanked her. One summer, he offered to take her and the kids to Florida, and they all trotted off to endure a fortnight in some ugly resort where he spent the entire vacation in the bar, trying to convince the other customers that he was a former RAF pilot. That night, he’d been worse than usual, but Margaret put it down to too much whisky and not enough food. She didn’t hear from him for a couple of days, then he phoned up and said he was a bit under the weather and needed her to pick a few things up for him. She told him she’d be round the next day after work: the usual arrangement. When she got to Handcross Court, however, she couldn’t get him to answer the door. All she could hear was Prince barking. When she told me the story later, how my father had collapsed in the hall, and the dog had been there with him all that time, without food or water, I thought she was going to say the Dobermann had eaten a chunk out of his face, then settled down to work its way down to the heart and the liver. I’d heard that story somewhere, and it made sense, even if it was an urban myth. All those tales of loyal dogs staying by their fallen masters in blizzards, or under grapeshot fire, they were all about dogs whose owners had loved them an
d treated them as well as, if not better than, their own children. But Prince didn’t owe my father anything. I could have seen the logic, if he’d torn off an ear or a slice of cheek. I would have forgiven him. The animal was hungry, for God’s sake. I was almost disappointed when Margaret told me the dog had done what the cliché would have had him do: he stood guard, barking anxiously and persistently, until somebody came to call an ambulance and open a tin of Winalot. That Dobermann saved my father’s life. It was a story he treasured all his days, I’m sure, though I never got to hear him tell it. I can imagine the extra value his old self would have woven in: freak storms, snow, rescue teams digging their way through, then drilling into a double-locked door while the dog lay beside him, sharing its failing body heat, in the chill of the small hours. But he never did tell that story, as far as I know, and when he got home from the hospital, Prince was gone, passed on to somebody who could look after him properly, somewhere out in the countryside, where my father would have been lost in a matter of minutes.