A Lie About My Father

by John Burnside

  ‘Are you all right, son?’ he said.

  ‘I’m fine.’ I looked around; as soon as Mull had spoken, they had all turned to look at me.

  ‘Did ye no ken he played for Raith in the old days?’

  I smiled sadly. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Aye.’ Mull studied me sourly. ‘Your dad must have showed you the pictures, though, didn’t he?’

  I shook my head. It was a challenge: I was being called upon to acknowledge something, and I wasn’t having it. If there were pictures, I would believe; but I knew there weren’t. My father had often talked about starting out on a football career before he’d joined the air force. Sometimes he’d played for Raith Rovers, sometimes for Queen of the South. Sometimes his glory days had been cut short by injury, sometimes by money problems. I knew it was all rubbish. ‘I’ve not seen any pictures,’ I said.

  Mull smiled back. He slipped his hand inside his black jacket and pulled out a brown envelope. The envelope was old and worn, but the pictures inside – small, black-and-white images like the ones you used to get from a Box Brownie – were remarkably well-preserved. He handed one over.

  ‘There’s your Dad,’ he said. ‘Back when he was still playing.’

  I took the photograph and studied it. It showed two men in old-style football strips, on a muddy-looking park that might have been the amenity pitch at a local playground. As far as I could see, either of the men could have been my father. ‘What’s this?’ I asked Mull.

  Nat was looking over my shoulder. ‘Is that no the auld Raith strip?’ he said.

  ‘Could be,’ Mull said, his eyes still on me.

  ‘They were no a bad team, back in the auld days,’ Nat said. He looked closer. ‘Some a thae faces look gey familiar.’

  ‘We all know that boy on the left there,’ Mull said.

  I looked again. I had never believed the Raith Rovers story, as told by my father, and I didn’t believe it now, but I was surprised by how keenly these men wanted it to be true. I nodded. ‘Sure enough,’ I said. I hoped Mull would be satisfied.

  ‘You know who he looked like?’ Nat said suddenly. I couldn’t believe it. That old Robert Mitchum thing was still coming up. How had he managed it? These men thought he was a great footballer whose promising career had been ruined when he’d had to go into the RAF to fight Jerry, that he was a mathematical savant, who could do five-figure multiplications in his head, that he’d put me through Cambridge University, where I’d probably scored a double first and been captain of the chess team, and now, in spite of the evidence that was right in front of their eyes, they were still talking about his uncanny resemblance to Robert Mitchum.

  I shook my head and glanced at Mull. ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘Your dad!’ Nat cried, drawing a little ripple of attention from the others around the bar.

  ‘I know,’ I said, keeping my voice low. ‘So – who did he look like?’

  Nat stared at me in amazement. ‘You mean, you never noticed?’ he said, trying to keep his voice down.

  ‘Noticed what?’

  Mull gave me a warning look. I shrugged. Nat looked around in mock appeal. ‘The boy’s no seen it,’ he said. Mull shook his head. I knew he had been there on several occasions when my father did his Norman Wisdom–Robert Mitchum routine. ‘Why, your dad was the perfect spit of Robert Mitchum,’ Nat said. His triumph was wonderful to see. ‘You’re no goan to tell me a Cambridge college boy like you doesnae ken who Robert Mitchum is?’

  I shook my head a little too soon. ‘I’m not a Cambridge college boy,’ I said. ‘I went to the tech.’

  ‘And whereabouts is that?’ Mull enquired, his voice quiet and dangerous.

  ‘In Cambridge,’ I said, exasperated. ‘But it’s not – ’

  ‘No,’ Mull broke in. ‘It’s Cambridge. Nobody here’s ever been to Cambridge, never mind Cambridge college. So you remember that.’ He leaned forward and fixed me with his gaze. I had always admired Mull’s power, his sense of what was right. Now that I was on the receiving end of it, I felt uncomfortable. ‘Your dad was proud of you, going to Cambridge,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget that.’

  ‘I’ve been to Cambridge,’ a slurred voice piped in, from somewhere to my left.

  Everybody at the table turned. It was Billy. Like the dormouse, he’d come up for air long enough to chip in, before sinking back into blissful torpor. Nat smiled ruefully.

  ‘You’ll miss him,’ Mull continued to me, undistracted.

  ‘We all will,’ somebody seconded.

  ‘Aye, but this boy here doesnae know that,’ Mull continued, suddenly aggrieved. ‘And the sad thing is, you will miss him,’ he continued, studying me sadly. ‘More than you know.’

  I nodded. ‘You’re right, Mull,’ I said. ‘I’m not arguing with you.’

  Mull shook his head. He wouldn’t be bought off so easily. ‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘Don’t give me some glib answer. You don’t even know, after all this time, what that man was about.’

  The whole table pondered this silently for a moment.

  ‘He was larger than life, your dad,’ Mull said. ‘Maybe he made some mistakes, but he lived his life. How many can say that, in this day and age?’ He gave me a look that suggested, of the few who could claim to be living life to the full, I was not one. I didn’t disagree with him.

  It was around then that Billy finally passed out and slid, rather beautifully, to the floor. We all turned to look at him, then Nat stood up. ‘Better get this boy home,’ he said. ‘He never could hold his drink, wee Billy – ’

  I stood up next to him. ‘I’ll do that,’ I said. ‘You stay here and have a drink.’

  Nat looked at me. ‘Are ye sure?’ he asked.

  I nodded. ‘I have to get on, see Margaret,’ I said. ‘She’ll be wondering where I am.’ I turned to Mull. ‘If you’ll help me get him to a taxi, I’ll drop him off, before I go round to hers.’

  Mull nodded. He knew I was grasping at an escape route, but he didn’t begrudge me that. We were too different, now, to sit all night at the Silver Band Club. ‘He bides down by the White Hart,’ he said. ‘I’ll walk out with you and tell the driver.’

  So it was that, together, we carried Billy – who was light as a feather – down the stairs and out, into the light of day. I was surprised that it was still so bright. I looked at Mull as we waited for a taxi, and saw how similar we were: same build, same face, same fears. He could have been anybody, standing on the kerb, waiting for a cab to pull up, but he was more like me, and more familiar, than my father had ever been. For me, there was no mystery to him, only his keen sense of injust-ice and his love for a man who hadn’t ever deserved it. He knew why I was leaving, and he didn’t want to hold me back, but he had been hoping, that day, to say something that would make me see my father in a better light. Now he was disappointed, knowing he’d missed his chance – though he still kept at me, even as I piled Billy into the cab. ‘You keep in touch, son,’ he said. ‘I’ll be here. If you ever want to talk, about your dad, or anything, you just give me a ring.’

  ‘Thanks, Mull,’ I said. I wanted to say that I had always liked him. I hoped that he knew that. I didn’t agree with him about my father, in spite of the photograph, in spite of the very obvious grief of people like Billy and Nat. It could have been any of them, lying on that floor by the cigarette machine. What they were grieving for wasn’t so much the death of their friend as what it represented: the lives they’d wasted or had taken away, the impossibility of declaring their love for one another, the lonely death that was coming to each of them. In the end, I thought – an absurd but, at that moment, satisfying idea – people drink for two reasons: because they want to die, or because they are afraid of dying. Two sides of the same coin, I told myself. It was all about time, all about trying to beat the clock.

  Mull smiled and shook his head. ‘Aye, you’ll miss him right enough,’ he said.

  I nodded. ‘I’ve missed him all my life,’ I said. ‘I don’t
suppose I’ll stop now.’ I was being fatuous, and I knew it; I was also being cruel to Mull, and I knew that too; but it felt like cruelty was all I had to make him see that what I was saying had its own element of truth.

  His face darkened, but he wasn’t angry. He was considering my words, giving them far more due than they deserved. But he didn’t say anything, not for a moment, not as an answer. ‘I’d better let you get wee Billy home,’ he said. He held out his hand. ‘Take care of yourself.’

  I shook his hand. ‘You too, Mull,’ I said; then I climbed into the cab next to Billy, who had slumped sideways and was lying half across the seat, whining softly in his sleep. Mull told the taxi driver Billy’s address and the man nodded. Then he slammed the door shut, and we drove away, leaving him alone on the pavement, a mortal man, standing in the sunlight of an ordinary day, watching us go.

  LIES AND DREAMS

  Jesus said, ‘When you see one who was not born of a woman, prostrate yourself on your faces and worship him. That one is your Father.’

  The Gospel of Thomas

  (Nag Hammadi, Codex 2, Book 2)

  A small fishing town on the east coast of Scotland: 1 November 2002, the day after Halloween, the first day of the pagan year. The night was stormy and this morning the wind is still high. Lines of townsfolk have formed at the breakwater to watch the great waves smash against the wall, coming out from rooms haunted by television and muzak, bringing their children to see, bringing cameras and binoculars, a little awed, and letting it show, in spite of themselves. I am taking my son on our usual walk to the lighthouse at the end of the quay, past the boats moored in the inner harbour, past the stacks of creels and old fish crates on the dock, out to where the crab boats come in, on finer days than this. My son is three years old and here is his favourite place. He likes to watch the gulls sail overhead and, in season, he tracks our summer visitors: swallows skimming along the line of the breakwater at low tide, catching the flies that are drawn to the tumbles of weed on the shore; Arctic terns hovering over the shallow water, searching for food in the clear light they follow from pole to pole with the changing seasons. Most of all he likes to see the crabs, to exchange a few words with the ‘crab-man’ and loiter a while for the five-fathom scent of the creels and the black-and-orange crab-bodies packed into old boxes dripping with hairweed and a greeny deepwater-light. This is what we know as life: seabirds; caught fish; the odd twenty-foot wave flaring against a wall; the dark scent of unknown water; and, though we are embarrassed to say it, what we need to say, what we need to remember above and beyond all our other concerns is that this is the real world, our enduring mystery.

  There were no ghosts last night. Nobody came to my little fire, other than the living. Later, though, as I sat up, observing my customary vigil, a memory came to me of a man who, for the child I was during his lifetime, might just as well have been a ghost. He was someone I had never come to know, though I lived in his house for so long; when I try to picture what he was like, all I find are gaps in the fabric of my memory, little tears and holes where something should have been, wisps of nothingness glimmering through, insubstantial, not quite convincing. Yet every Halloween, I’ve had the feeling that there is another, truer father that I should be able to recall. Till now, all I’ve come up with is a memory from a film, a character in a book, a surrogate phantom. This last night, however, I sensed that something else was present, and I knew it was real, however flimsy it seemed.

  There are psychologists who believe that we record every word we ever read, every picture we see, every event, however small, every window in every house on every street we ever walk in a lifetime of books and streets and pictures. We record it all and file it away, waiting for it to be recollected: the vast, disordered encyclopedia of one human existence. At some point, when they are most needed, we recover images we never knew we had, and make of them what we can: a story, a lie, a dream, a life. The idea makes sense: it is, in its way, Darwinian. In the memory that comes this Halloween, my father is not the brutal, unhappy drunk I knew best, the man who passed his days in a fog of bewilderment, wondering who was to blame for his inconsequentiality, but someone I must have caught a glimpse of, back in Cowdenbeath, even if I don’t remember exactly when it was, or why he was there, standing outside our house one night, alone in the dark, rain dripping from the trees around him. In this memory, he has his back to me, but I sense a stillness, a deep quiet that is not necessarily that of a man at rest, as he stands at the edge of Mr Kirk’s woods, lighting a cigarette, nameless and, for a moment, free to be whoever he wishes. There must be some ordinary reason why he is out there in the wet, a few feet from his front door, but that isn’t what matters now. What matters is that I can see him again, in his white shirt, and I know he is different from the man I learned to fear, the man I wanted to kill. I know his being there is an unusual event, one I may even have misunderstood – in this memory, I am, perhaps, four or five – but it is important that I remember him exactly like this, because this is the father I could bring myself to forgive. I know that it’s just as important to remember the damage he did, and the pointless misery he inflicted on his family; yet, now that I am a father, I keep this man in my mind’s eye: a man alone, at the edge of the darkness, listening out, forgetting himself and, as far as he knows, unseen. Suddenly, after all these years, this is the most permanent possession I have of him. More enduring than the watch he was wearing when he died, which I have now lost. More enduring than photographs and mementoes, more enduring, even, than his absurd stories. I know most of those tales by heart, even though I know they are lies; if I learned anything from my father, it was that parents tell their children stories all the time, even when they are not aware of it. Sometimes a father’s tales are the same as those a mother would tell, but there are points on the journey where we have different stories to relate, or different versions of the same story, depending on circumstances. Maybe one of the things a father does, for his sons at least, is to let them see the difference between spirits and ghosts, to reveal for them the fabric of the invisible world. Ghosts can be dismissed, or they can be sent on their way, some Halloween night, with a kind word and a warm fire, but spirits are with us always, and it seems that the stories we tell are the only means we have to decide who or what they are, and how they might be accommodated. In the end, ghosts are powerless, but spirits feed our imaginations, and they are capable of anything. The time will come when my son needs me to tell him stories about fathers and sons – about who he is and where he came from – and I want him to be able to distinguish between our ghosts and our spirits. The memory I have of my father, caught between the night and his little prefab, is a story in itself, or at least, the beginnings of one. It is a father’s tale, a myth, and I have to work out how to pass it on, in its best form, to the child with whom I am now walking, on this morning of the saints. I will have to give him something, however flimsy, to imagine himself as a man, with his own history, his own images, his own, very particular, spirits – and if I must start with nothing more than a lonely phantom in a white shirt and flannels, waiting to be realised in the eternal cold of a winter’s night, so be it. What I need, as a father, is just one story, to start things off. The last thing I would want to do is make a lie of it.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ‘Birdland’ written by Patti Smith © 1975 Linda Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Brigit Pegeen Kelly, excerpt from ‘Dead Doe’ from Song. Copyright © 1995 by Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.

  The author is grateful for the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council during the writing of this book.

 

 

 
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