A Lie About My Father

by John Burnside

  ‘You did not,’ my mother protested. ‘Don’t say things like that,’ she said, ‘even as a joke.’ As soon as she spoke, I knew that she was covering up. I couldn’t believe it. Sooty. I’d had that bear for as long as I’d existed.

  ‘I burned him,’ my father insisted. ‘If you can promise to keep your things tidy, you can have something else,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want something else,’ I said. ‘I want Sooty.’

  My mother looked a little desperate. ‘You must have lost him,’ she said. ‘He’ll turn up.’ She shot my father a scary, warning look. ‘If he doesn’t, we’ll get you another teddy just like him.’

  I didn’t say anything – but I swore I wouldn’t have another bear. I never did. A few weeks later, my father brought a rocket set home for me, one of the items he occasionally got from ‘a friend’. He brought it home in a plain cardboard box and opened it up, so I could see what it was. I didn’t refuse the gift; I didn’t reject him. I took the rocket set, but I didn’t play with it that night and, the next day, I gave it away to a boy called Alan Smith, who was playing outside Stewart Banks’ house.

  Every winter my mother would knit me a new balaclava. This was what she did to keep me safe: the wool was the same colour every time – dark blue, though she never called it that, she always had a new name for it, Navy, or Midnight, or something. The new balaclava would appear at around the same time every year, a few days into November, when the first frosts came. The only thing she ever changed was the pattern: sometimes it looked rounded, like Norman armour, a helmet of woollen chain mail to cover the skull in a tight, meshed fit; sometimes it was almost square on top, with a thick seam that made the corners into pointed, lynx-like ears, but no matter what shape it was, it concealed a little more of my face each year, as if she were trying to cover me so well that I would become invisible. Maybe she thought that, this way, whatever terrible fall I had coming would let me pass unnoticed.

  Meanwhile, I had started attending a primary school for the children of the poor, one of those institutions where to turn up at all and stay awake till the end of the day was an achievement. In that community, Catholics had to be very careful: their children should not stray, their schoolteachers should be seen to be diligent and strong on discipline. To encourage near-perfect attendance, the work was carefully designed so that it was not too difficult, while being mildly rewarding. At least, that was how it seemed to me. I was bored in school, most of the time; the only exception was in Scripture class, when we studied the life of Jesus and looked at beautiful, ancient-looking maps of Palestine and Judaea. I liked the teachers well enough. They lent me books and gave me special problems to solve.

  At five, however, I didn’t much like the children. I imagine this is something many children discover, on their first day of school, but there is so much pressure to socialise, at school and beyond, that they learn to adapt. I didn’t have that pressure, however: my mother’s efforts to improve me at home meant that I was – and stayed – at least a year ahead of my classmates. This meant I received special treatment, sitting off by myself with a book of my own, or more advanced sums to work out, while the others practised their pencraft, or plasticine-doggy-making. At the time, this was considered an enlightened view, though there was no mistaking the look in the eyes of my teachers, a look that suggested they thought of me as a freak, not of nature, so much as of abnormal nurture. Looking back, I realise that the smartest of my primary schoolteachers, Miss Conway, recognised in me a boy made clever, but not particularly intelligent, by an ambitious, or rather, desperate, mother. It would take me another ten years to stop admiring that cleverness. Nevertheless, I was an anomaly in that little coal-town classroom: hypersensitive, overly polite, occasionally cruel, I thought other boys were the strangest little animals and avoided them as much as I could. Unlike the stereotypical ‘sensitive’ child, however, the one who likes books and nice pictures, I was big and ready to defend myself if the need arose. I also had the distinct advantage of being related to the hardest, leanest, most uncompromising older boy in town, my bright, funny and utterly merciless cousin, Kenneth. Kenneth was a boy’s boy, an outdoors type who knew every bird in the woods and every fish in the loch. I admired him from afar; but then, he seemed like an adult to me, the way he knew everything you couldn’t learn from a book. Even then, I saw that there was more to life than my mother had taught me: all I had was words and diagrams, Kenneth had life itself. To me, he was more grown up than most grown-ups, and more alive than anybody I had ever met.

  He was the exception, however. The other children at school, especially the boys, bored and annoyed me and, by the time I was eight, I liked them even less than I had at five. Truth to tell, though I didn’t realise it at the time, they reminded me of my father. They lived in the same world of minor grudges and willed confusion, and I felt fortunate to inhabit my own little universe of books for older children and logic problems, the scriptures and Church Latin. At the time, all Catholic children were supposed to acquire a smattering of medieval Latin, so they could follow the Mass, and I loved it. The words were so beautiful: strange in the mouth, tasting of unleavened bread and church incense, they carried an incontrovertible authority, the authority, not only of the divine, but also – as I had just begun to realise from my extracurricular studies in zoology – of the scientific. I had no words to articulate the feeling but, for me, the fact that Latin was the language of both priests and biologists was a source of excitement, even inspiration, and I was sure there was some great secret out there, waiting to be discovered, a private, arcane knowledge that only the privileged were allowed to share.

  Looking back, I see that I disliked the Catholic children more than the Protestants I knew. This made for difficulties, because Catholics and Protestants, in our little Scottish town, were supposed to be enemies, either politely skirting one another, as adults, or waiting outside the rival school, as children, to administer a mild beating. The local Protestant school – the state school – came out five minutes before St Bride’s, time enough for a gaggle of the bigger, and obviously stupider, Prod boys to gather around the school gates, leering and dangerous, ready to catch any stragglers who happened their way. They never caught me. I was the fastest runner in my class, and I would rather have died than be humiliated by a gang of my obvious inferiors. Yet even then, in the midst of this community of visible, though fairly vague, discrimination, I knew there were Protestant kids on the other side who felt exactly as I did. One of these was Stewart Banks, who was nowhere near as good as me at book learning but, like my cousin Kenneth, knew a thing or two about the wider world.

  Stewart was a neighbour. All our neighbours, on Blackburn Drive and the streets around, were Protestants, whether by accident or some unlikely demographic, I do not know. Stewart’s parents were, by far, the most easygoing, tolerant and disorganised people I had ever encountered. They were the very opposite of my mother, with her obsessive neatness, and her almost desperate desire to get out of the prefabs and live a better life, but they got on with her very well – and they were the only neighbours who did not make it obvious, one way or another, that they disapproved of my father’s goings-on. At the time, even though I had just begun to disapprove of him myself, that mattered a great deal to me. Like most children, I wanted my home life to be just like everybody else’s: in spite of the fact that I knew I was not like other people in that little town, I wanted to appear normal.

  Normal was a big word, back then. If anybody did anything even remotely interesting, they were considered abnormal. Abnormal children were taken off to special places, never to be heard of again. Abnormal men posed a terrifying, though undefined, danger to children. The most abnormal people I knew were the Mormon family who lived a few streets away from us. It was said that Mormon men had several wives, and that Mormon boys could make babies with their sisters. Though I had no clear idea how babies were made – Elizabeth Banks told me, once, that men and women did it by sticking their bottoms tog
ether and taking deep breaths – I was certain that brothers and sisters couldn’t do it. It had to be a man and a woman who were married to each other. That much I knew from Scripture class.

  Stewart was normal; I was not. Stewart had a normal family: his father went to work in the morning and came home at the end of the day, even on the weekends. His job had something to do with the distribution of D.C. Thomson products, which meant that he was allowed to bring home as many magazines and comics as he liked. My mother would not allow me to have comics, partly because of money, but mostly because she didn’t approve of them. Now and again, I got a copy of Look and Learn, which she considered mind-improving, but to have seen me reading the Beano would have broken her heart.

  In Stewart’s house, on the other hand, every available surface was piled high with comics, newspapers, magazines. His mother read all the women’s magazines, The People’s Friend, anything to do with knitting and jam recipes, anything with those ‘Stranger Than Fiction’, true-life stories that were all the rage. Stewart liked strip cartoons of the Eagle, Roy of the Rovers, Boy’s Own variety. I liked the funny stuff. Every Saturday, I rose early and hopped over the fence to the Banks’. Stewart and his family would stay in bed till late – ten thirty, eleven, even, which I assumed was one of the bad habits of Protestants – but the back door was never locked, and I was welcome to come in any time, Mrs Banks said, even if nobody was about. This meant that I usually had an hour or two to study the Dandy and the Beano, or whatever else Mr Banks had brought home that week. It was the first of many forbidden pleasures.

  Stewart was my only friend. In the summer, we went bird-nesting together, or we filched pieces of linoleum and tobogganed down the slag heaps that surrounded the town, tumbling off when we reached the bottom and making delicious red scrapes on our hands and knees, those red scrapes with hard little pieces of coal and slag buried just under the skin. In winter, if it snowed, we climbed trees in the woods – it was more fun to climb trees in the winter, when the leaves had fallen; we could see so much further, out and away from the town, to the fields and the graveyard beyond – or we made our own sleds from oddments of timber and careered down the little hill opposite Stewart’s house. Together, we were the best bottle collectors in town, traipsing along the rims of ditches and foraging in the mouse-scented undergrowth for anything we could take to the shops and redeem. Most weeks, we made enough money that way to get us into the matinée at the Picture House.

  Stewart was almost obsessively interested in all things Catholic: what our God was like, whether we believed in the Devil, what the saints did, whether the host really turned to flesh when the priest placed it on your tongue and you walked back up the aisle, trying to stay serious, with all eyes on you as the wafer melted in your mouth. He was amazed when I told him what I had learned in confirmation classes: that it was a sin for a Catholic to marry a Protestant, that if we did, husband and wife and all their children would go to hell. (I worried about this sometimes, as my father was a non-Catholic, but my mother seemed to think we weren’t going to hell because, even if my father rarely attended Mass, he had converted to Catholicism before they actually married. I also worried about the distinction between non-Catholic and Protestant, which seemed to exist, though it was never defined. In the end, I decided the way to look at it was that Protestants were actively not-Catholic, whereas non-Catholics didn’t much care, one way or another.) Stewart wondered if I thought he was going to hell and I had to tell him that it was unavoidable, unless he became a Catholic. He thought about this for a while, then he laughed.

  ‘So you’ll be going to heaven,’ he said. ‘Guaranteed.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘You can’t go to heaven if you die with a mortal sin on your soul.’ I then proceeded to explain what a mortal sin was.

  ‘So,’ Stewart said, ‘if you get run over by a bus on your way to confession, with the mortal sin still on your soul, you go to hell, but if you get run over by the next bus, on your way home from confession, you go to heaven.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said, though even I could see the absurdity of the notion.

  I think, however, that Stewart was more in awe of The Catholics, the more he learned about the strangeness of our beliefs. I think he admired us for entertaining such preposterous convictions. Certainly, he never mocked my religion; he only seemed bemused, and strangely taken in, by it. For a while, I even wondered if he was going to ask me to lead him to the priests’ house, where he would repent his evil ways and join the one holy, Catholic and apostolic Church. But he never did. He came to Mass with me once, and I skipped Mass the following week, to go with him to kirk. I think he liked the statues and the flowers; he couldn’t take his eyes off the foot of the Virgin, crushing the head of the serpent in a damp, incense-flavoured alcove just inside the door. I liked the emptiness of the kirk: the white walls, the clear windows, the fact that you could miss it once in a while. I didn’t go there again, though. When it was discovered, by the Catholic powers that be, not only that I had missed Mass, but that I had taken the opportunity to support the other team, all hell broke loose. My mother was summoned to the school; the priest came to our house and sat gazing at me mournfully, his mouth full of home-made Dundee cake. Eventually, he told me he was surprised by what I had done, as he’d come to think that I might – Deo volente – be a boy who had a vocation. For a while, Stewart and I saw a little less of one another, as the danger to my mortal soul, and my possible vocation, was assessed. In the end, though – a full confession having been made – I was allowed to go on seeing the Protestant boy (or maybe he was just a non-Catholic), as long as I promised never to go to his ‘chapel’ again.

  If Stewart was my first and, for a long time, my only friend, then the girl from the prefab next door – I’ll call her Sandra Fulton – was my first and, for a very long time, my only love. She was a year and a half older than me, but we were friends nevertheless. What we had in common, to begin with, was a desire to be left alone, a native mistrust of other children; what we came to share, though I didn’t understand it at the time, would stay with me for years to come. We were conspirators, collaborators in the creation of a world that included nobody but ourselves; some days, Margaret tagged along, and was even allowed to participate in the first stages of our little games, but she never became a full member of the club, and even she didn’t know what happened when Sandra and I were alone.

  At the time, we didn’t really know what we were doing either. Gradually, by degrees, we concocted an exquisite game, but it was a mystery to us that it should be so very pleasurable. We knew enough to know that it wasn’t the usual game played by boys and girls: it wasn’t doctors and nurses, it wasn’t ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours’. In fact, there was no obvious sex in the game at all. I’d played those ordinary games – to this day, I remember how odd Annie Simpson’s naked, unfinished-looking little pubis looked, when she slipped off her knickers and showed me what she had in the woods by the chicken farm – and I knew what they were about. I had kissed a girl in school; I had carefully nurtured a crush on my favourite teacher; for a time, I had allowed myself to become infatuated with the classroom vamp. I can still see Geraldine MacInnes, the most beautiful girl in Cowdenbeath, standing on the touchline in the one football game where I gave my all, scoring three goals and bewildering everyone with my sudden enthusiasm. She didn’t notice me at all, though, and I lost all interest in football after that. My father still took me to Cowdenbeath games, when they were at home, and we would stand on the cold terraces, eating hot pies and shouting at the referee, but my heart wasn’t really in it. With Sandra, it wasn’t some childish romance, or curiosity about the body’s machinery that drew us together. It was the fact that we had discovered something together and, even if we had no idea what it was, we knew it had to be kept secret.

  Sandra’s mother was an intense, very private Englishwoman, who made friends with considerable difficulty. She was shy, unhappy, and had a tendency to withd
raw into herself suddenly and for no obvious reason, like a hedgehog curling up into a prickly, featureless ball. The only person she liked – the one person she talked to, the only person for whom I ever saw her smile – was my mother. The two women seemed to be united by some common, unspoken grief that, by the time the Fulton story was fully played out, had deepened and spread, like a black stain on both their lives. I think what my mother saw, in Mary Fulton, was a woman so much like herself – in her hopes, and in her disappointments – that when the tragedy of Arthur’s crime destroyed, first his family, then Mary Fulton herself, my mother could hardly bear it.

  Arthur Fulton was the kind of man everybody refers to as a ‘gentle giant’. He was basketball-player tall, but with a light heavyweight’s build; when he walked into a room, everything stopped for a moment to adjust to his presence. The furniture dwindled, the atmosphere darkened. What made matters worse was that Arthur, a shy, painfully inarticulate man, had a horror of being the object of attention, and would gladly have crept through life unnoticed. It was written in his face, not just embarrassment, but a terror of all things social. My father was fairly asocial too – most of the men in our wider circle were unhappy at public gatherings, or with any form of polite intercourse – but Arthur’s problem was pathological. The only people he ever seemed comfortable around were children. He adored Sandra. He had decided, early on, that she was his princess, his one and only. Nobody ever doted on a child so blatantly – partly, no doubt, because he loved her, but also, I am sure, because she gave him a focus, a reason for not giving up on affection altogether. He was unhappy in his marriage; that was obvious. His wife treated him like a child and, in return, he chose the company of children over adults whenever he could.