That Glimpse of Truth

by David Miller

  “She asked if you would be willing to see her.”

  “She didn’t say why?”

  “I thought it might be unwise to ask.”

  I drove over the following morning and found Signora Elvira smartly if sternly dressed with a black jacket and cream blouse.

  “I never thought it would come to this,” she said without any preamble, “but I was wondering if you would accept me for therapy, or analysis, or whatever it is exactly you do.”

  This was tricky. Ethically, it must be wrong for me to become the therapist of my lover’s mother. On the other hand I could hardly state the impediment.

  “I wonder if that’s a good idea,” I said “with my wife being your husband’s p.a.”

  “Nonsense,” she declared.

  There was a prickliness about the woman that was intimidating and endearing. I hesitated.

  “Dr Marks,” she said determinedly “I need to learn how to stop being so unpleasant to my daughter, who after all helps me in all kinds of ways, something which is actually quite important for a woman on a wheelchair. The truth is I don’t really understand why she irritates me so much. I was hoping you could guide me.”

  Intrigued, I stayed to listen. The truth is that inhibitions, and even professional vetoes, have less force as one grows older. I thought, why not?

  Needless to say my wife was horrified when she found Kenny in the garden. The creature barked and bared its teeth. He had shat on our small lawn, a steamy liquid shit.

  “Take it right back! At once. Whatever were you thinking of?”

  I explained that as I had had come out of one of my sessions with Signora Elvira - for with her being wheelchair bound, I very unusually went to the client’s house - Emanuela had buttonholed me and begged me, simply begged me to take the Doberman.

  “Just temporarily, until she finds a permanent home. A good deed,” I said. “Apparently it’s the dog that most gets under her parents skin.”

  “You’re going soft,” my wife told me. But that evening she looked at me in a way she hadn’t for some time.

  I sat outside on a garden chair, something I never do, reading and talking to Kenny and trying to pat him whenever he came close. Already the neighbours had complained about the loud barking every time they opened and closed their front door. All day Kenny dragged his bad leg back and forth from the hedge on one side of the garden to the fence on the other, occasionally stopping to growl at me in between.

  “How goes it, old pal?” I asked. “How does it feel to have a territory to defend again?”

  Now, after making love, Emanuela gave me tips for winning the dog’s confidence and imposing a minimum of discipline. She enjoyed getting me to pretend I was the Doberman and she was me. We laughed and tussled. I pretended to bite her fingers and she yelled, “Heel! Bad boy!” But there was also a new caution about Emanuela these days. She hadn’t expected that I would take on Kenny. Even less that I would keep him. Perhaps she feared what I might ask in return. She certainly hadn’t expected that I would become her mother’s therapist.

  “God knows what secrets you’re learning,” she fished.

  “If you only knew!” I teased.

  Nearly a year on it was still enormously exciting making love to Emanuela. It had cheered me up no end. Walking Kenny on the lead every evening, waiting while he dragged his bad leg, picking up his stinking shit in a plastic bag, pulling him away from the other dogs he was always determined to attack, I kept repeating: “I’m not doing this for you, you know, old mate. I’m doing it to keep a certain lady in my bed.”

  But Kenny didn’t seem upset by this deviousness. He had started to lick my fingers and to sit when I told him to. My wife was impressed.

  “I’d have never imagined you had it in you,” she said and she too crouched down to stroke him. Kenny growled, but softly. My wife looked up and our eyes met: this was a very unusual occurrence.

  “By the way,” she said then “Signor Fanna seems rather nervous about your talks with his wife. He hadn’t realised she was planning to go into analysis.”

  “I hope you reassured him that I never talk to you about my patients.”

  “Of course.”

  On another occasion I asked her, “Do you ever get the impression that Signor Fanna is a big shaggy dog? It’s what I always think when I see him.”

  More and more often Signora Elvira’s husband was contriving to be around when our therapy sessions ended. He would appear in the hallway smiling nervously like an expectant father and never failed to ask me how things were going.

  My wife reflected. “Not a menacing dog,” she said. “Not a Kenny.” She hesitated. “Maybe one of those bouncy, friendly things that don’t know what to do with their energy and always try to put their snouts in your crotch.

  “So he has made a pass at you!”

  “No!” she shook her head. “You know I didn’t mean that.” Very unusually, she smiled.

  Having now guessed the Fanna family’s unhappy secret, my problem, but it was also an interesting challenge as a therapist, was how to play it to everyone’s advantage, my own included.

  “Why do you think Emanuela’s so fixated with these situations where people abuse dogs sexually?” Signora Elvira demanded. “You’re a bit slow for an analyst aren’t you?”

  As it turned out my lover was now involved in a campaign to ban websites that showed men having sex with animals.

  I sighed and smiled. If she wanted to bring it out in the open she would have to say it herself.

  “We had such a great love life,” Signora Elvira sighed “Gianni and I, and then of course it all ended very suddenly. I was bedridden for more than a year. And Emanuela had just turned twelve.”

  I listened. It was up to her.

  “The fact is he still dotes on me. It’s as if he’s afraid that if he had sex with anyone else he’d lose me.”

  I nodded.

  “I’m always telling him to find a pretty young p.a. who knows the ropes. Then what does he do? He employs someone like your wife and invites her here with her husband!”

  So often the best policy for a therapist is simply to nod sympathetically.

  “I wish I could help him, but I can’t,” she wailed. She cast around. It was as if she were furious that I wouldn’t tell her what she needed to tell me. “If only Emanuela would find a man who would take her away. But she deliberately chooses people who can’t or won’t marry, or if they will she chases them off by giving them some impossible dog to look after.”

  Did she know about us? How similar to her father was I?

  “What’s the solution?” she asked. “Gianni is dying of guilt, without really being guilty,” she added.

  “Nobody dies of guilt,” I told her. Actually, of the three of them I had the distinct impression that only Signora Elvira was suffering. The others were troubled only in so far as she was unhappy. That week Emanuela was interviewed on the radio about her campaign: “It’s incredible,” she said, “the lengths the Church goes to to stop people using contraceptives and day-after pills, while doing nothing nothing to prevent this monstrous abuse of dogs.”

  To me, out of the blue, she said, “The problem with Dad is he lives in the past. He always treats me like I was twelve years old. You know he doesn’t even close the loo door when he pees?”

  Her mother had already told me this.

  At home my wife had become friendly with Kenny who now greeted her more enthusiastically than he did me. He even wagged his tail. She was buying him treats from the supermarket, a kindness she had once shown to me.

  “It seems someone’s given Emanuela the money to set up a dog refuge of her own,” I told my wife a few months later. “She’ll even have a place to live, over the shop, as it were. In Quinzano.”

  The small house was just out of town. I had had my eye on it for a while.

  “But that’s fantastic,” she said. “Really fantastic. Signor Fanna will be so pleased. They’ve been dying for her to get out.�
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  “I’m surprised he didn’t tell you.”

  Having a heart to heart with Kenny after she had left for work, I told him:

  “Kenny, mate, you and I are now approaching what, with my clients or lovers, I always call the tangling point.”

  The dog growled, tugging on a rubber bone I was holding; I yanked one way and he yanked the other. As any dog-lovers knows, it’s a game that can go on for quite a while.

  “What I mean, Kenny, is the point where it will be impossible to tell the story of your life without telling the story of mine. And vice versa of course. Impossible to talk about Dr Marks without mentioning Kenny.”

  Since I refused to let him win, the dog suddenly let go of the bone and barked fiercely. At which I actually fell off my chair. I couldn’t believe it. I came crashing off my chair and cracked my head on the bottom shelf of the bookcase. It hurt like hell, a really sharp crack on the temple. Yet as I came to my senses I found I was laughing. Crumpled on the floor, my legs caught in the chair, I was laughing and sobbing together. It was strange. I was overcome with an emotion I still can’t begin to explain. Meantime, slobbery red mouth and stinking breath only inches from my face, the dog was barking and barking and barking, and in his excitement piss had begun to dribble out from his hindquarters onto our best rug. I lunged up, grabbed his head and pulled it down squealing and growling next to mine.

  “Thanks, Kenny,” I told him as the creature fought like mad to get loose. “Thank you so much.”

  THE COLD OUTSIDE

  John Burnside

  John Burnside (b.1955) was born in Dunfermline and studied in Cambridge. He is a prize-winning poet – Black Cat Bone won both the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prize – and novelist – A Summer of Drowning won the Costa Novel of the Year in 2011 – as well as memoirist – A Lie About My Father won the 2006 Saltire Scottish Book of the Year. His collection of stories Something Like Happy won the 2013 Saltire Scottish Book of the Year. He lives, with his family, in Fife.

  When the cancer came back, I wasn’t surprised. I was upset for Caroline, knowing she’d have to be told eventually, and I was bothered about how Sall would take it, after last time. I was even sorry for Malky, because finding reliable drivers was difficult, and he’d always been a good boss. Still, I wasn’t surprised, not when they told me. I’d been expecting something to go wrong since the summer, when Sall and I had talked about flying over to Montreal to see Caroline and meet her new boyfriend, then given up on the idea. Sall knew I was keen, of course: Caroline had always been Daddy’s little girl, and, ever since she’d left, it had been an effort to hide how empty the house felt without her – an effort I’d sometimes failed to make. Sall probably knew as well as I did that I was on borrowed time, so to begin with she had gone through all the motions of planning the trip, but then she’d started talking about how expensive it was and how tiring it would be for me, having to drive over to Glasgow, then sit on the plane for seven hours, and then, after all that, there was immigration and customs, which took forever. The way she spoke, it was as if she’d made the journey herself, but she hadn’t. She’d never even left Scotland, and all that talk about the Montreal customs was just stuff she’d picked up from Caroline, who’d been back three times in the six years since she got the job in Montreal. Not long before her last visit, though, she had met this new boyfriend and had started making a big thing about how it was our turn to go over there.

  “I understand it’s a long way,” she’d said. “But you’ll love it when you get there. You’ll see. It’ll be a nice holiday. Besides, Jim keeps asking me if you really exist. He thinks I made you up.” She’d laughed, but the invitation was real, even if she didn’t look at Sall when she said it but kept her eyes fixed on me. She was content to work around her mother for my sake, now that the two of them didn’t have to live in the same house. For her, it was all about careful management, about avoiding those occasions when something might be said that couldn’t be taken back. Even before she left, she had come and gone like a ghost, just so she didn’t have to be with Sall. I’d never really understood why. I once overheard Caroline say that her mother could start a fight in an empty room, but that wasn’t altogether fair. The two of them just weren’t able to sit together without arriving at some kind of disagreement or misunderstanding. It was a mismatch of personalities, something that happened all the time, in all kinds of situations. It was shocking only when it happened between a mother and her child.

  Whenever Caroline extended one of those vague invitations, I wanted to tell her that we’d come over as soon as we could, but Sall always got in first. “We’ll see” was all she’d say, and then she would go to work, undermining the idea. That was what she had done during the summer, making up excuses and problems and eventually talking the trip out of existence, till we ended up driving down to Hertfordshire instead, for a sad fortnight of rain and tea shops with Sall’s brother Tom and his second wife. I’d understood what was going on, and I told myself that it was probably for the best, what with the history between them; still, that so-called holiday was more of an upset than I’d expected. At first, I just put it down to the usual disappointment with Sall’s games and the way I never seemed to be able to stand up to her, but somewhere in the midst of it all, wandering around a grimy little bric-a-brac shop in Stevenage, I realized that I’d given up the last chance I would ever have to visit Montreal.

  So the knowledge was there, sitting at the back of my mind, waiting to come true, when the doctor told me. I was almost ready for it: almost accepting, the way you’re supposed to be in all the stories they tell about dying. Not completely but close, just waiting to hear how it was going to be, so I could walk out of the surgery and get on with what was left of my life. I had a matter of months, the specialist thought, and the idea crossed my mind that I could do anything I liked. I was free. Except that there wasn’t anything I wanted to do that much, apart from seeing Caroline, and I knew what Sall would say to that now. I’d heard it all before: how I had never had any time for anybody but my little girl, how I’d spoiled her rotten. To hear Sall talk, you’d have thought that what happened between them was all my fault, but I looked back in my mind’s eye and I tried to find a picture, one reliable image of the two of them happy together, and I couldn’t. Not even when Caroline was a baby. I could see me standing at the window in the back bedroom, rocking her to sleep and singing her Christmas carols, because they were the only songs I could remember, and I could see the two of us, when Caroline was six, going around and around on the horses at Flamingo Park, while Sall sat off by herself, watching, a curious, slightly bewildered look on her face, as if she were ashamed or embarrassed about something. I could see Caroline laughing at my bad jokes as we drove to school in the mornings, and I saw us making a row of snowmen in the garden – four of them, all identical. That was why I liked driving, and that was why I didn’t mind going back on the road so soon, because when I was out there, on my own, I would look at those pictures in my head and I would be happy.

  Anyway, the day after I got the diagnosis, I was back at work, hauling treacle. When Malky called, that first evening, Sall told him I was fine, and that I’d be back in the morning. I didn’t blame her for that; we needed the money. I suppose I should have been disappointed that she didn’t want me at home, at least for a little while, but I wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t really her fault. She just didn’t know how to deal with that kind of thing. Even before we left the surgery, I could feel her edging away, the way she always did whenever there was a problem. She slipped away into her own separate place, as she had done when we were first married and things weren’t what either of us had expected, or during the long weeks after Caroline moved away and we were left stranded, speechless and unable to touch or even look at each other, alone together with the quiet of an empty house and a shelf’s worth of pale photographs in the matching set of Shaker-style frames that Sall had bought at the Sue Ryder.

  So I’m not blaming her. I was just as glad
to go back on the road and not have to sit moping about the house. Besides, I’ve always liked pulling treacle – molasses, to give it its proper name. Every now and then, I run around the countryside, delivering the warm, dark slop that farmers use to supplement the fodder for their cattle, blending the treacle with barley to make a sweet malty mix that the beasts can’t get enough of. I like going out on the farms, all quiet and lonely in the middle of the day; I like talking to the farmers and listening to their stories – men who have never been anywhere in all their born years save these hundred acres of ground, grown men haunted by their own holdings. To be honest, I like hauling treacle more than anything else. There are times when it’s so thick and dark and solid you could walk on it, and we have to work hard to get it pumped out and into the big tanks, which are usually so old and creaky that you think they won’t hold. Sometimes they don’t. On a really warm day, one of the pipes, or maybe the wall of the tank, will give way, and there will be treacle everywhere: treacle and the smell of treacle that makes you dizzy, it’s so sweet and strong.

  It was hard work, but it was good being busy. It gave me less time to dwell. And I knew, when I started out that winter’s morning, that I’d feel better coming home with a full day’s work under my belt, knowing that I wasn’t quite used up. I thought about that all day, driving round the farms in the frosty light – about how I would keep going till I couldn’t go on anymore. All a man has is his work and his sense of himself, all the secret life he holds inside that nobody else can know. That was how it had always been, even at home: my real life was separate from the day-to-day business that Sall knew or cared enough about to make decisions. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her, at least to begin with; we got on well enough in the first few years. It was just that we’d always been private people, in our different ways. That was probably what made it possible for us to stay together after Caroline left. We knew how to keep ourselves to ourselves, a skill we had perfected through the years without even knowing how completely we had mastered it.