I’ve seen other weddings. Strangers in California, friends in Croydon or Devon; Mexican weddings, Russian weddings, Finnish weddings. In one of the most beautiful ceremonies I have ever seen, I’ve watched processions of couples coming from the casa de matrimonios in a mid-Transylvanian town, the dark-eyed Romanian girls smiling, the men solemn, as they stand for photographs in the gusts of charcoal smoke and the burnt-sugar scent from the braziers along the river bank, where local women cook little sweets called floricele especially for the newlyweds and their guests. Every time I see a wedding, I wonder what the bride and groom expect from it all, and why none of the others there, the old ones, the long-married, do not step up and warn them about the enterprise. I think this, because I watched my parents torture themselves and one another for twenty-odd years, before my mother finally gave up and died, from disappointment more than anything, leaving my father to sit alone in the house, rehearsing what, for him, approximated grief. At my own wedding, I remember the fear I had of making a false promise, but also the sudden realisation that this was exactly what mattered: that we were here to take exactly that risk, to make promises we could only hope to keep, in sickness and in health, madness and sanity, joy and fear, all of them inexplicable, even inexpressible, so that, as often as not, one is mistaken for another.
I imagine that, for the first time perhaps, my father felt wanted that day in a way he had never felt wanted before. It’s in my mother’s face, that small, but perfect victory a woman of her nature feels when she chooses to love a man who is loved for the first time. I have no idea what goes on in the human heart, but I do know, if I know anything, that men and women love for different reasons. I imagine most men love what pleases them, and think no more of it – but for women, love is an imaginative act, a choice, an invention, even. Maybe it has to be. I don’t doubt that there were people who wondered aloud what she saw in him. He was a nobody from nowhere, an illegitimate child, and a non-Catholic into the bargain. Not a great catch, even in his uniform. If they’d known the man she’d supposedly jilted when my father came along, their thoughts that day might well have been with him.
There is something sad about wedding photographs seen long after the event. The picture I have of my mother and father shows hopeful, brave, smiling people that I never knew: all I saw were the disappointments and the lies that, for them, were still to come, still unimagined. Yet now, looking at him in his RAF uniform, with his white bride by his side, I can feel a little better about my father than I did when he was alive. He lied all the time, even when there was no need to lie, but I don’t think he ever thought he was being dishonest. I think he had a sense of himself as someone who had as much right to a history as anybody else, but when he asked his ‘relatives’ to tell him about himself, he must have been received in embarrassed silence, or with kind inventions, part-truths that had served, for strangers and others, in the absence of anything else. That wouldn’t have been enough for him, though. He needed a history, he needed the sense of a self. By a process that demanded some wit – perhaps a little more than he possessed – and only very casual deception, he invented that self. It took more than a little doing, and who can blame him if he wasn’t altogether successful or wholly consistent. If the world says you are nobody from nowhere, then you can choose not to argue, or you can invent yourself as someone other than you first seemed. Nobody wants to be a foundling child, and being something has to be better than being nothing.
CHAPTER 2
It’s unsettling, when a child realises for the first time that his parents existed before he was born – and from that moment on, it gets ever more complicated and worrying: not only did they have a life before they became his parents, but there was also a time before they were married, a time before they had even met, when they were other people, with their own ideas, their own hopes, their own fleeting moments of hapless understanding. Perhaps they were in love with other people, or they swore they would never get married, never have kids. Tracing the line back to its origin, there was a time before all that, when they were children, and even a time before that, when they didn’t exist. As a child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn’t here. Before that, my parents weren’t here. And before that . . . What kind of world was it, when nobody I knew existed? What did people do? How could anything have been there at all, if I wasn’t there to see it?
As far as my father is concerned, I know absolutely nothing about who he was, or what he did, before he was my father. I was shown photographs of my mother when she was a young woman: dark-haired, pale, her lipstick too freely applied, she is standing on a beach, or posing with friends in a garden or park, surprisingly slim in her striped jersey and black slacks. To me, this girl was an impossibility. She was nothing like my mother: carefree, even a little wild-looking, she bore no resemblance to the preoccupied woman who kept trying to make something of our condemned home, trailing offcuts and sale items back from the shops, knitting and sewing all the time so we would have decent clothes, scavenging old magazines and notebooks from anywhere she could find them so she could teach me to read and write before I got to school.
My mother was a maze of contradictions. A dutiful, if not devout Catholic of the simple faith variety so beloved of the clerical trade, she hated Communism which, to her, was politics of any variety. Yet, perhaps because my father wasn’t, and every other male member of her family either was, or had been, associated with the pits, she revered the miners, and she could tell us all about the hardships they had endured, about what they had done in the war, about how the pit bosses had brought in people from all over Scotland to break their will during the General Strike, and how they had stood fast when everyone else had crumbled and given in. She could also tell you how, according to family lore, her father, a devout Catholic, had been picked up by the police, supposedly for drunkenness, and taken to the cells. This was part and parcel of the routine harassment of Catholic men, or ‘the Irish’ as the Protestants called them – and the police in those days were all Protestants in that corner of Scotland. A known Catholic emerged from the pub, none the worse for wear, and was pulled in, to pass the night in a damp cell, his pockets emptied, his belt and shoes removed, all the routine humiliations. My grandfather had endured all this in the steady, stoic manner bred of daily necessity, but when he came to be discharged, the rosary beads he always carried were missing. My mother’s voice brimmed with pride when she told how he finally left the police station that morning, after being threatened with a charge, but kept coming back, day after day, asking for his rosary beads till, one evening, the desk sergeant finally relented.
‘They arrested him for being drunk,’ she would say. ‘Your grandfather has never been drunk in his life.’
This was true. My grandfather could put away as much whisky as anyone, but he would never have been seen out on the street with a drink on him. He always dressed well to go out, in a worn, but clean black suit, a flat cap or bunnet, very polished shoes. He kept a picture of the Virgin Mary in his breast pocket, and his rosary beads in his jacket. He took me aside at a family occasion once – one of the many weddings a man with twelve children was obliged to attend – and offered me a small card, like those collectors’ cards you used to get with cigarettes, or tea. It was a picture of the Virgin.
‘Every man should carry a picture of the Blessed Virgin Mary with him at all times,’ he told me.
I stared at the card and nodded.
‘Take it,’ he said. ‘It’s for you.’
I took it.
‘Look after her,’ he continued, as I put the card in my blazer pocket. ‘And she will look after you.’
It was from her parents that my mother’s values came. Like her father, she disliked people who loved money, yet what she wanted, more than anything, was the most routine form of chintzy respectability. Like her mother, she loved flowers and gardening. She had a reverence for learning that sat heavy on my childhood: every spare moment, I was set to work,
studying, reading, writing – yet she herself never once read what she thought of as a ‘real book’ in all the years I knew her. She was quiet and secretive, and she had the air about her, even when I was very young, of a woman whose loves and friendships were all in the past, or at a distance. She was fierce about family, even when family let her down. Perhaps most of all when they let her down.
My mother’s pictures – photographs of her family, of her friends, of herself on days out with fellow workers from the Co-op, all the scraps and images she treasured – were kept in a large, shabby handbag that my father had brought her from Egypt, when he was stationed out there, but there were no photographs of my father before his air force days, when he is always the one at the back of the group, usually with a glass lifted to his mouth and obscuring his face, a man making it all too clear that he wasn’t interested in posing for snapshots. But then, photographs can be misleading. What we remember, when we truly remember, rather than when we recall the memories that are planted in our minds by others, is the only testament that can be trusted; not because it is precise, but because it is our own. A photograph, a family story, the recollections of some old-timer at a wedding or a funeral, recollections of a time when nobody else in the room was even born, are works of art, not facts. I knew, at a fairly young age, that anything my father told me about himself, anything he told me about anything, was to be treated with suspicion. But why was he the exception? Why should anything I was told be treated as definitely true or absolutely false? When they told stories, when they showed pictures, when they reminisced together with a room full of family, all people communicated was their intentions. Whatever was true, was secret.
My father had no history that he could talk about with others. Nobody reminisced with him about the old days, nobody brought snapshots out of an old box and handed them around so the assembled company could see what he was like as a boy. All he had were his own, unverified stories. His own apocrypha. By the time he was my father, he wasn’t so much a man as a force of nature, something that came out of nowhere, an unpredictable, wild, occasionally absurd creature who could be all smiles and charm one moment, and utterly venomous the next. He was a square-built man of around five eleven, strong, physically ruthless, very quick. Quick with his hands, was the phrase people used when they wanted a euphemism for domestic violence, but my father was almost never actually violent. At some instinctual level he understood that a threat is much more potent than an actual blow: after the first few times, a blow can lose its power, because – as he himself liked to say – people can get used to almost anything. He’d got used to working in a rubber-products factory, standing all day in the heat and stench, at the age of fifteen, and he’d got used to the smell of burning flesh when he worked on the disposal squads during the foot-and-mouth epidemic of the early sixties. He’d got used to a few blows himself, no doubt, over the years, and he could take as good as he gave. He’d come home a few times, when I was a child, with blood on his face and shirt, cuts on his arms, bruises on his knuckles. Yet his injuries never troubled him. ‘It’s a scratch,’ he would say, when my mother tried to get him to go to the hospital; then he’d wash the blood away with warm water and throw his shirt in the dustbin.
So he rarely hit out. He knew the threat of violence is always stronger than violence itself. It works much the same way horror movies work: if you see the big rubber shark, or the killer from beyond the grave in his ghostly make-up, you’re more inclined to laugh than scream. My father was one of those men who sit in a room, and you can feel it: the simmer, the sense of some unpredictable force that might, at any moment, break loose and do something terrible. Now and again, he would break something: carefully, deliberately, letting us see how much he enjoyed it, letting us register how easy it was. The worst thing that could happen was when he fell into one of his dark silences and sat brooding all day, waiting for the small provocation that would set things going. I don’t think he could control it, once it began, any more than he could stop drinking, or gambling until all the money in his pockets was gone. Yet he hardly ever hit anybody inside the house. Not in those early days, at least. Maybe I was just sheltered from the worst when I was still so young. Later, he seemed a changed man, a kind of monster; but he might have been that same monster all along, transmuted, by my child’s need, into something like a father, if not a protector. As I grew up, I wondered what was happening to him. I wondered why he was changing. But he didn’t change: he just became real. For years, I would have sworn that I remembered better days, but when I stop to look back, I remember nothing about him, other than what I was told. I do not see him. I barely even see myself.
For me, memory begins in King Street, in the condemned house where my parents lived after they were first married. I was told so much about the time before I was born that I can imagine I was actually present at the death of my mother’s first child – a girl she called Elizabeth, after her own mother – or if not present at the death, then certainly for it. I seem to know this girl, first as a baby, then as a toddler, a girl who was just over a year ahead of me all the way through childhood. Pretty, fair-haired, but with my mother’s dark, almost motionless eyes, she comes and goes through the home movie of King Street that runs inside my head, a child in a white hand-me-down dress standing beside me in the garden, squinting into the sun; a girl who set off for school one day and came home different, with ink stains on her hands and the smell of dried paint in her hair. I remember this girl because my father talked about her when he was upset, or when he came home drunk and sat in the kitchen muttering to himself. It was characteristic of how they were, I see now, that my mother never once mentioned Elizabeth’s name, while my father talked about her all the time. Even in grief, they were separated.
I seem to know my ghost sister, but the truth is that she died before I was born. I could never find out how long she was in this world; some stories suggest she died in hospital after a few hours, or a few days; others that she lived for some time before succumbing to whatever it was that ailed her. I always felt kin to her, though, even when my father took me aside, one drunken Saturday afternoon – the first time, this may have happened when we still lived in King Street, but it happened more often than I can recall, and it went on for years – and told me that he and my mother had had another child before me, that her name was Elizabeth, that she had died and that he wished she had lived, and I had died instead. He always told me this as if it would come as a surprise, a piece of unexpected news about his, or my history, and he always went through the steps in the same order, with due solemnity, building up to those final, brutal words, which he uttered without the least hint of brutality, without anything that might, on the surface, be taken for malice. I think he thought, as he confided in my three-, or five-, or eight-year-old self, that I was supposed to feel sorry for him, that I was supposed to express my regret, not only for his loss, but for my own inability to reverse the twist of fate that had left him in such an unfortunate position.
After a while, I would see it coming. He would wait till my mother was out of the room, then he would tell me, very quietly, his voice just barely slurring, ‘You know something?’
I would shake my head.
‘You know, you had a sister once.’
I would wait. There was no point in saying anything. The first thing I learned was that there were times when you didn’t say anything, even if you were called upon to talk.
‘Her name was Elizabeth.’
I nodded dutifully. I knew all this. I knew what was coming. I just didn’t understand why.
‘And she died.’
Once upon a time, there was a little Indian boy who lived by himself in a cave in the mountains. He was all alone in the world, except for his friend, the timber wolf –
‘But you know what?’
This boy had no parents, only the wolf, whose name was –
‘It could have been you that died.’
Mungo. Chano. White Fang. I would try names out
in my head, but I could never find one I liked.
‘It could have been the other way around. You could have died, and she could have lived.’
Lobo. Tonto. Silverado. I have no idea where these names originated. Maybe radio.
‘I wish – ’
It was easy to block it out, after a while. I don’t think I really hated him – not then. I suppose his telling of the story, and my defences against it, became more elaborate as the years passed, and we got to know one another better. I was always taking his measure, figuring out what I needed to do in order to get past him. The best I could come up with was to tell my own stories, stories that countered his half-truths with the pure actuality of fiction. It was self-defence, nothing more; but what better defence than a story, set somewhere in the far north, about a boy and a dog and the secrets they keep, in a country of perpetual snow?
A Lie About My Father Page 3