A Lie About My Father

by John Burnside

  I sometimes wonder what Arthur Fulton would have done if he had ever caught Sandra and me playing our little game. Oddly enough, even though it gave us so much pleasure, even though we knew it had to be kept secret at all costs, we never thought of it as wrong, or even as anything other than an innocent and private matter. The game was simple: we began by acting out a scenario where I was a burglar breaking into the house and stealing something while her back was turned. Then, when I had made my escape, she had to guess what it was I had taken. This progressed to my ‘breaking in’ when she was there. I would do my best to sneak in and take something without her seeing, but at some point she spotted me, and I had to escape, either by hopping back out of the window, or by overpowering her and tying her up. Which is where it all got interesting. I knew nothing about sex, much less about bondage, but to my eight-year-old self, tying Sandra Fulton up with soft woollen scarves and the belt from her school Burberry was painfully erotic, causing in my pre-adolescent nervous system something close to overload. I have no idea how Sandra felt while all this was going on, though I do recall that she was the one, at every stage of our little game, who took the lead. For a grown-up, nowadays, this might immediately set alarm bells ringing, especially when you consider what her father is supposed to have done to his girlfriend later, but I don’t think she had been schooled in any of this. She was just a year older and a whole lot more imaginative than I was. Where she is now, I have no idea, but I wonder, sometimes, if that game of ours left an enduring impression on her heart – as it did on mine. I hope so. I like to think that, somewhere, a bored housewife, or some tired professional, pauses a moment and remembers those games at the prefabs, when she was tied up with assorted oddments from her school clothes, and lay waiting (in vain, alas) to discover what might happen next, while I stood over her in my makeshift burglar’s mask, flushed with excitement. Nothing ever did happen, of course; though, looking back, and considering the world we inhabited, we’d done pretty well to get that far. It was just bad luck that any further experiments we might have conducted were cut short by a terrible crime, and by my father’s perennial dissatisfaction with his lot.

  CHAPTER 4

  My father disliked his new house. Looking back, I can see that the move was another defeat for him: the prefabs had been intended as temporary accommodation during the post-war period of austerity, but they had lingered on, cheap housing for poor people, an improvement, at least, on the ratty tenements on King Street and elsewhere. Every year, there was talk of demolition, but the fact was that most people who lived in the prefabs were happy with what they had, and nobody on the council was stupid enough to move us back into the overcrowded, noisy, unsanitary ruins from which we had just escaped. To my mother, and many like her, the prefabs were a godsend: detached houses, in effect, with their own gardens, in loose clusters at the greener end of the town, with neighbours just close enough to call on for help in emergencies or for a spot of tea and gossip, but not so close that they got to know all your business. That would have been important to her, for during the seven years we lived in the prefabs, my father became more and more of an unknown quantity. For weeks on end, he would come home from work on a Friday night, or on a Saturday afternoon if there was overtime, and he would be tired to the bone, silent and dulled and uneasy, but he would hand over his wages, and there would be enough for the coming week, for cereals and sausages and cheap cuts of meat. Then, without warning, he would disappear, taking his wage packet with him, turning up drunk with ‘friends’ in the small hours of Sunday morning, loud and jovial and edgy, prepared to be loved, and ready to do damage if love was withheld. Or he would slip in quietly while we were playing in the garden, and sit weeping at the kitchen table, drunk and contrite, promising that this was the last, that, from now on, he would be fine. On those days, we would know, when we came indoors, that for a week or more every meal would be split-pea or lentil soup from the supply of dried foods my mother hoarded in the top cupboard for just such a rainy day, and the milk bottles would disappear from the doorstep for a while, replaced by a printed note, in her neat, slightly cramped hand, that said: No milk today, thank you.

  I look back now and see that the move to the prefabs sealed my father’s sense of himself as a failure. For as long as we had been at King Street, on the waiting list, there was a chance of going up in the world, but the simple fact was that, as a casual worker, doing mostly seasonal work, first at the docks, then in the building trade, he would always occupy the bottom of the social pile, just one rung above the unemployed and the unemployable. He was also a drinker, and everybody knew that. People know they cannot depend on a drunk. He could be hired, of course, but he would always be brought in on a seasonal or casual basis, so there were no obligations if anything went wrong. Things usually went wrong, sooner or later. It surprises me, looking back, that my father ever thought his problem with alcohol was a secret. Everybody knew. The child I was could tell, walking along the high street in Cowdenbeath, by the way people behaved towards my mother, combining respect and pity in more or less equal measure, admiring her for the tenacity with which she held her family together, but also pitying, and perhaps even despising a little, this woman whose lack of judgement had not only led her into the mess she was in, but kept her there, hoodwinked, self-deceiving, vainly hoping for something to change.

  My father did not blame himself for his failure, of course. When he had been in the air force, he had been happy; he was always saying he should never have left the RAF, that he’d only come out because of my mother, who didn’t like the idea of having to go and live wherever the MOD might send him, far from her family, maybe in some foreign country – Germany, or Cyprus, say – countries that sounded exciting and exotic to us, but to her would have been a living hell, so far from her own folk, in a place where she would never be able to speak the language. After my father left the RAF, he’d got work at the docks, and there had been some kind of scam going on there, where my father – a seasoned gambler, who could do pretty complex arithmetic in his head – had run a book, before betting shops were made legal. I don’t know the whole story: he and my mother were just married, living in the King Street rat warren, and he was working at the docks, when this opportunity came up. I imagine it was fairly nickel-and-dime stuff but, according to my father, there were days when he came home and dropped a pile of cash on the kitchen table, on top of his wages for the week. In my mother’s version, this did happen once or twice; mostly, however, he’d come home broke, having gambled away the extra – and, as she was always quick to point out, illegal – money he’d been paid. It was a frequent bone of contention and, later, when I was seven or eight, I would hear them arguing about it, my father playing the part of criminal entrepreneur headed for bigger things when my mother’s nervousness had forced him to turn his back on a way of life that would have made us all rich. He would say nobody ever got rich working for somebody else; my mother would reply that she didn’t want to be rich, she just wanted enough to get on with her life, no trouble, no fuss. It was like listening to a bad soap opera, and I couldn’t take much of it. After a while, I’d be up and out of the window, or sitting in the press in the corner of the bedroom, curled up with my toys, blocking them out of my mind.

  So time passed. I was happy enough, at times, playing in the woods, making dens, finding birds’ nests in the scrap piles behind the old abattoirs. Sometimes, I would get to visit Uncle John and Aunt Margaret: Big John would take me out fishing in the loch with his younger sons, Kenneth and Anthony, even though I was too young to fish; sometimes I was allowed to stay over, and the oldest of my cousins, Wee John, who was a prize-winning chemistry student, would tell me about magnetism, or space. I remember he showed me odd experiments with water glass and metal salts, say, and I would wonder how he knew such things, when he was just like his brothers, just like me. When I grew up, I thought, I would know things like that: the periodic table, which cousin John had on a chart on his bedroom wall; the migrations of
birds; the distances between stars. All that knowledge felt like something substantial to hold on to, against the vagaries of everyday life.

  After a while, my mother was pregnant again. My parents were excited; even my father brightened up as they planned for a new baby and, for a while, he settled down and dug in. He got a steadier job at Grangemouth, doing something that kept him out from early morning till late at night, which meant we never saw him. I wasn’t unhappy about that. They worked hard at this new beginning, and my mother tried to stay healthy, but things went badly in the latter months and, finally, when she came to deliver, the baby died. It was a baby boy; he would have been called Andrew. When my mother came home from the hospital she looked pale as death; she went to bed in the room at the back of the house and didn’t speak to anyone for days. My father kept going to work, as if nothing had happened, but I knew he was unhappy, and the nights were quiet, very still, disturbed only by the calls of the tawny owls in Kirk’s woods. I would lie awake, then, listening to the night and thinking about my brother. He was gone before he had even existed, and I’d never even got to see him, but I had a new ghost to entertain.

  I knew this loss would have consequences – and, gradually, things got worse. My father was bitter about losing the baby, and this led to more frequent binges, but it was still a while before the late-night parties with the friends he’d picked up on his procession through Cowdenbeath’s worst pubs became a regular thing. I remember the men who came as exact clones of my father – big, drunk, edgy, just this side of dangerous – and it seemed to me that they were always different, new names, new faces, new unknown quantities to appease and please and outmanoeuvre. I would be in bed when they arrived, though usually not asleep. By that time I was old enough to worry when he wasn’t home, old enough to feel the tension when Margaret and I were put to bed – I have no explanation for this, but my mother always knew when he was about to go off the rails, as she put it – old enough to wonder whether we would all get safely through the night. I would be in bed, pretending to be asleep, not daring to slip out in case my father came home and found my bed empty when, as was more and more the case, he wanted me up and about, serving drinks, emptying ashtrays, mopping up spillages and the occasional pool of vomit or piss. All evening, I would lie awake, listening to my mother as she went about the house, hiding ornaments, tidying up, doing her best to make the place look good and, at the same time, concealing anything she thought my father and his friends might damage or abuse. Then she would go to bed and close her bedroom door. She would pretend to be asleep too – and when my father eventually got back, he would leave her to it. He didn’t want her about at such times, watching him, making the odd innocent-sounding but wholly calculated remark, asking his friends about their own homes, their own families, trying to shame them into decency.

  With me, though, it was different. My father took real pleasure in rousing me from my bed and having me come through, in my pyjamas, to do those little jobs he felt I could manage, all the time listening to what the men were saying, taking note, ready to speak when spoken to. He would have me perform tricks: feats of mental arithmetic or memory, or he would tell them to ask me questions. The capital of Bolivia came up a good deal, as did the spelling of Mississippi and the attribution of various, usually misquoted, lines from Burns. It was a difficult balancing act, showing off just enough so he would be proud (the father of a smart son, naturally, because he was so smart himself), but not so much that he would be embarrassed, or shown up (maybe the boy’s too smart, a bit of a show-off, when all’s said and done). I quickly learned which questions to answer confidently, which should be hesitated over and which should be left unanswered. A bright boy, bright as a button, and good-natured with it. Not too proud to fetch a rag from the scullery and help out when there was a wee accident, or pop out to the coal bunker for more coal on a chilly night. Bright, yes, but always willing.

  ‘Hey, son. Pour us all another rum, will you?’

  ‘Hey, son. Get us a towel here.’

  ‘Where’s the toilet, wee man?’

  I would pour the rum, or the whisky, or the beer, and I would know I was pouring away our food for the week, the insurance money, probably the rent. I also knew never to let this show. On party nights, we were the richest people in the world. Our hospitality knew no limits. And we regretted nothing.

  Sometimes my father came home earlier in the evening. This meant he was running out of money, and somebody had offered to chip in on a carry-out. When that happened, his usual partner-in-crime was Paddy, a friend of his from the Woodside, his favourite drinking hole. My mother had once made the mistake of saying that Paddy was a gentleman, which allowed my father to pretend, on these early returns from the pub, that he had brought Paddy home to say hello. On the nights when Paddy came back, my father would make sure they brought something for my mother to drink, a Babycham, say. My mother didn’t like alcohol, but she would drink a Babycham now and then to be sociable. My father also knew that she wouldn’t make a scene in front of Paddy, that she would sit nicely for a while, then excuse herself and go off to bed. Maybe she would venture a parting shot along the lines of ‘Don’t sit up too late, now’, or ‘Remember, they’re asleep’. I would hear this as she stood in the hallway, on her way to bed, and I knew what would happen next.

  One night my father came home about nine thirty and discovered that my mother had already turned in. All her life, she suffered from anaemia; she would get headaches and mysterious dizzy spells; if she sat down for any length of time, just knitting, or listening to the wireless, she would suddenly fall asleep and sit, head slumped forward on to her chest, lost to us. Sometimes, when my father was out, she would send us to bed at the usual time, then she would go through to the living room, turn the lights off, stoke up the fire, and go to bed, presumably because she thought my father would be out for hours, and she could get some proper rest. I think that was when she was most content, alone in bed, drifting away, letting her worries slide. That night, she’d had a headache, though, and she looked pale and thin-mouthed, with dark blue circles around the eyes. When my father got in, I was pretty sure she was asleep, but I knew he wouldn’t disturb her anyway.

  Half an hour passed, before he slipped into my room. ‘Hey, son,’ he said, peering down at me. ‘You’re no asleep already, are you?’ He could see I wasn’t. ‘Come on, put your jumper and your trousers on. There’s somebody here to see you.’

  I got up and slipped my clothes on over my pyjamas. I didn’t really want to see Paddy – oddly enough, I felt more uncomfortable with him than with my father’s other, less gentlemanly friends. With them, it was just a matter of doing what needed to be done, but Paddy embarrassed me. I think he embarrassed himself, when he’d had too much to drink. He at least knew he could do better.

  Paddy was sitting in the living room, by the fire. There was always a fire in the grate, except in high summer: the prefabs had no other heating, and where we were, by the woods, it was damp. Damp was much worse than cold, everybody said so. You could walk miles in a freezing gale, as long as you stayed dry, but everybody knew stories about the wifie who’d just washed her hair, then popped out for some coal and died two days later, in a high fever. So the fire was there to keep out the damp, and it was a godsend to Paddy, who always looked a little damp himself, a man in a worn suit that looked like it had just come off a rail in a second-hand shop, and still needed a bit of an iron.

  ‘You no sleeping yet, son?’ was his greeting. As always, he looked embarrassed.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Paddy’s not had his tea,’ my father said. ‘I bet you’d like some chips. Would you like some chips?’ I didn’t know who he was talking to, me or Paddy. He took a banknote from his pocket and held it out to me. ‘Run down to the shop and get us a couple of fish suppers,’ he said. ‘And some chips for yourself.’

  ‘Aw, come on, Tommy,’ Paddy protested. He looked more embarrassed than ever. ‘You’re not sending him out like that,
are ye?’

  My father kept his eyes on me. ‘He’s all right,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you, son?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, he’ll need a coat on,’ Paddy said.

  My father gave a snort. ‘He’ll not need a coat,’ he said. ‘Will you?’

  I shook my head. I didn’t really have a coat. ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  My father nodded his approval. ‘He never feels the cold,’ he said. ‘Do you, son? Takes after his Dad.’ He looked at my feet. ‘You better put your shoes on, though,’ he said. ‘We don’t want your feet getting cold.’ He turned away, heading off towards the kitchen.

  Paddy sat staring at me dolefully. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘You have to keep your feet warm.’ he said. He looked wretched and it suddenly occurred to me that he was going to die, not some day, but soon. He looked like he knew it, too. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.

  For the week or so after one of these parties, we ate soup and scraps. My mother would go traipsing around the high street, come Monday morning, asking the butcher for offcuts as a treat for our imaginary dog, bits of bone with a little meat on, or bacon rashers, to give the soup a little body. We had free milk in school, but we either didn’t qualify, or were too proud to take, free dinners. Sometimes, Mr Kirk from the poultry farm would give us a few eggs, after I’d supposedly helped him out with his birds, and there was always plenty of flour in the house, for real emergencies. One autumn afternoon, when school was out and we were hungry, Margaret came home with a couple of turnips that she had found on the road. My mother was suspicious, but she started preparing vegetable soup, with barley and a few scraps of fat, right away. It was always a pleasure, watching the prefab windows steam up while my mother cooked us soup, and we were all gathered round, my sister and I sitting at the kitchen table, my mother standing at the cooker, when the farmer arrived. He explained that he’d seen a girl pulling turnips from his field, and that he’d followed her along the Old Perth Road. He wasn’t annoyed with her, he said, he just wanted to say that, if she wanted a neep for Halloween, she should just come and ask, and he’d be happy to let her have one.