A Lie About My Father

by John Burnside

  The history we learned in school wasn’t true. It was just an exercise in facts, an avoidance of obvious errors, rather than any attempt to get at the truth. It was also an exercise in power. All through school, I wondered why we were supposed to be so interested in people like Robert the Bruce, or Winston Churchill, why no real people appeared in the stories we had to memorise. In the Fultons’ house, there was real history. Things had happened there, things I knew about, and things that would always remain a mystery. We heard later that Arthur had known the girl – nobody ever used her name, she was just ‘the girl’ – for several months. This in itself came as a surprise to most people, but then, the nature of a lorry driver’s work meant he could be away from home whenever he needed to be away, so it would have been easy, even for a man like Arthur, to keep the relationship hidden. The girl wasn’t young enough to be his daughter, as some had said – I knew that, because I knew Sandra, and she was just a year and half older than me – but she was young and, by all accounts, fairly naive. Some people thought Arthur had been ‘taking advantage’ of her, but this didn’t make much sense if you knew Arthur. Still, rumour was that they had been seeing each other now and again, over those several months, and nobody really knew what had happened during that time, or what Arthur said to the girl about his life at home, or even if he’d said anything. The day he tried to kill her, he’d driven her out to a lay-by somewhere outside town. Nobody knows what happened then – Arthur pleaded guilty when the case came to court – but whatever had been done or said, Arthur must have panicked. At some stage, he had hit the girl and, after that, he was out of control. The fact that he didn’t just snap her in two, as our neighbours put it, but scrabbled around looking for ways to kill her, indicated that the crime hadn’t been premeditated. It had probably never crossed his mind to kill her. Allegedly, he hit her with his fists, then with something else – the proverbial ‘blunt instrument’ – but he didn’t hit her in the head with it. After that, according to the gossip, he sprayed some kind of chemical in her face, wrapped a length of tow rope around her neck, held something over her mouth, as if to suffocate her – but he saw none of it through. He must have been in two minds all the time and there was some debate as to whether you could call what he did an attempted murder at all. This was a moot point, however, valid only in the people’s court outside Brewster’s or the Co-op: Arthur entered his guilty plea, the judge sentenced him to ten years, the case was closed. Mary Fulton took Sandra away and the house next door to ours fell silent and empty. I never got to find out what happened after the scarves and belts – or not with Sandra, anyhow.

  I vividly remember the day they left. A man I had never seen before drove a light blue Austin Cambridge to the end of our path and parked it right outside number 17, then Mary Fulton carried out several bags, while the mysterious stranger stayed behind the wheel. I happened to be off school with something that day, and I sat at my bedroom window watching it all: I couldn’t see Sandra, but Mary Fulton went to and fro, loading bags into the boot of the car, her face set, ugly with grief and shock. I knew people had been talking about her – they always had thought her a cold fish, now they were speculating about why Arthur had done what he did, and what Mary could have done to keep him out of trouble.

  ‘If he’d been happy at home,’ Mrs Donaldson said, when we met her and Mrs Banks outside the butcher’s, ‘maybe none of this would ever have happened.’

  ‘I don’t think we can blame her for what her husband did,’ Mrs Banks retorted.

  My mother didn’t say anything, but gave me the quick glance that said I shouldn’t be listening to their conversation. I looked away, and kept listening.

  ‘A man needs to be respected in his own house,’ Mrs Donaldson said. ‘It doesn’t matter if he’s a bit slow.’

  My mother seemed uncomfortable. ‘Mary was always good to him, as far as I can tell,’ she said.

  ‘Well,’ Mrs Donaldson said, ‘maybe she wasn’t good enough. It’s hard work, being happy.’

  I look back now, and I wonder if they were as happy as they pretended to be, these good women of Cowdenbeath. I knew my mother was miserable, much of the time. Everything in her life was uncertain; there was always the threat of some terrifying outburst, whenever my father was at home, and when he was out, she never knew when he would get in, or what condition he would be in when he got back. Yet she pretended with the best of them, out on the street, in the queue at the fishmonger’s, on the steps of the church. What if they were all pretending? I couldn’t imagine marriage was a very satisfying state: like a nautilus shell, it seemed an intricate, unknowable thing; it concealed all manner of secret hurts and slights, every variety of private betrayal and unspoken disappointment. I think I suspected, even then, that nobody should carry all the blame for that state of affairs. I may even have realised that no one can know the inner workings of a marriage: it was a matter of a hundred private moments, all the lies and blows and failures, real or imagined, that went unwitnessed and unrecorded, till the crisis that others see, after years or decades – the breakdown, the affair, the drink problem – appears to come out of nowhere.

  I don’t know if Mary Fulton ever suspected what Arthur was up to. I’m sure his daughter didn’t. For over an hour, I waited at my window, till at last Sandra appeared, pale, but not tearful, clutching a small bag and a raincoat, and got into the car. I wanted to go out and say goodbye, but I knew my mother wouldn’t let me, and I knew I wasn’t wanted. Mrs Fulton, Sandra, even the stranger in the car, all were ashamed of a crime in which they had played no part and now all they could do was run, and hope to start again. What they left was an empty prefab, a garden that quickly became overgrown, and a dark, motionless place that, for the next few years, was to be my special sanctuary, the house that recurs, even now, in my dreams, a house I would fill with the stories I told myself, and so with the boy I was, whenever I managed to escape from the son I was pretending to be.

  I don’t think I ever knew real silence before I discovered that house. With the Fultons gone, and nobody wanting to move into a prefab, much less a prefab where the murderer had lived – of course, Arthur hadn’t actually murdered anybody, but there is no such thing as attempted murder in the stories of gossips – I had the place to myself: the garden, the kitchen, the house, the rooms that had been so familiar, with their cheap furniture and damp coats hanging in the kitchen. That was all gone now, of course. The place I inherited was quiet, empty, utterly perfect. It was also, back then, the very edge of my world. The Fultons had lived at the end of our narrow lane, and the privet hedge that bordered their garden, once kept to five or six feet by Mrs Fulton’s fervent clipping, soon grew out, a huge shaggy mass of emerald green, darkly jewelled and impenetrable. I had no notion of what might be on the other side of that green wall. It was like the hedge around the palace in the story of Sleeping Beauty; every year it grew thicker and darker, a sanctuary for songbirds and spiders.

  When a house falls empty, the angels arrive, coming one by one in the early dark to take up residence, lighting the blackest corners with candles of pollen and wax, blurring the doorways with ice and myrrh, filling the kitchen cupboards with an odd scent, half-incense, half-dust. The first time I broke into the Fultons’ house, I was afraid, wondering what I would find, expecting strange figures to flare out of the walls, waiting to be touched by some dank hand as I made my way from the living room to the hall, and into the bedroom, where Sandra and I had played our exquisite games. After that first time, though, I felt at home there, accompanied by Sandra’s thin, lithe shadow as I remembered what we had done, what she had said to me, what I had said to her. I had nothing to be afraid of in that house: it was all shadows and cold spots and greenery coming in at the windows. My own house was much more frightening. Better the ghosts of other days than the present misery of the living; better the whisper of the unknown than the angry bawling of the all too familiar. For a while, at least, this empty prefab belonged to me, and to me alone. For a whil
e, at least, I had a place I could think of as home.

  CHAPTER 8

  In the summer of 1965, my father wanted to be gone again. The Birmingham adventure had ended in humiliation; now he was making more drastic plans, talking about emigrating, bringing home brochures and papers about Canada and Australia. He led us to believe that all he needed to do was fill in some forms, send them off and wait; then, after all the documents had been processed, we would go to Canada, to live in a new house with a shower, a garage and bedrooms for everybody. I could barely contain my excitement. My mother kept warning me not to get my hopes up, that it wasn’t so easy to emigrate as all that. You needed a skill, and my father was a labourer on the building.

  ‘But he’s a brickie,’ I said. ‘They need brickies.’ My father had told us this, when he explained how easy it would be to get paid passage.

  ‘Your father’s not a brickie,’ my mother said. ‘He’s a brickie’s mate.’

  ‘Well, they must need brickies’ mates, if they need brickies.’

  My mother snorted. ‘They can get brickies’ mates anywhere. That’s not a skill.’ She looked at me sadly. ‘That’s why you have to stick in at school. People don’t want you if you don’t have a skill.’

  I was confused. They weren’t teaching me to lay bricks at school. I was doing sums and memorising bits of Latin. I was drawing birds and studying the New Testament. I was learning the dates of battles and the capital cities of Africa. Once, the priest had come into Scripture class and asked us a whole lot of questions about Jesus. It was fairly embarrassing, but I was the only one got all the answers right, which prompted him to wonder aloud if I might have a vocation. When she heard this, Anne MacKay, the girl I had tried to kiss in the corridor one lunchtime, gave me a funny look, but I was all puffed up about being the centre of attention, and maybe joining the Church one day. I wondered what religion the Canadians practised. Maybe we could get into Canada on the strength of my impending ordination.

  Finally, one Saturday afternoon in 1965, my father came home and announced, with total conviction, that we would be in Canada before the end of the summer. We waited, in a fever of excitement. I was going to play ice hockey and ride a horse. We were going to live in a big house: there was so much space in Canada, and so few people, all the houses were big. We’d have a car. I was more excited than ever, and I was beginning to think my father had vindicated himself, when I noticed that my mother, who had been dead set against the idea from the beginning, didn’t look too worried. Slowly it dawned on me. I still had hopes, but as I watched her calmly going about her usual business I realised we weren’t going anywhere. My father was lying.

  To soften us up for the move, my father booked a holiday in Blackpool. I don’t know where the money came from: probably he’d had a little luck on the horses for once, though there were other possibilities. However he paid for it, though, it was a sad holiday. On the first day, I fled from the cramped little room where I was once again condemned to spend a fortnight with my squabbling parents, and sat on the wall outside our guest house, watching the people go by. I was content, idling, not thinking about anything; it was a sunny day, and I was hoping, against hope, that things might go well – like the last time, when I’d seen Emile Ford at the Winter Gardens. Then, out of nowhere, a boy appeared, a small, pale-faced boy with straw-coloured hair, laughing and saying something I couldn’t hear. Momentarily, I was looking at him, trying to make out what he was saying – and then I was falling: backwards at first, then turning, twisting, my hands coming up over my face, my head darkening . . .

  When I came to, the boy was gone. I was in the basement ground, a fall of around twelve feet on to concrete, and I was hurt. I felt sick and dizzy, cold in my head, tender around the eyes and mouth, but I got on to my hands and knees and started climbing the stairs to the street level. Once out of the basement, I felt the sun on my face, and my head began to clear, but there was nobody there to help me, even though the street had been busy a moment before. Our room was on the second floor of the guest house. Afterwards, I was impressed by the fact that, having crawled up the next flight of stairs to the entranceway, I somehow got the inner door open, and proceeded to crawl up the next two flights, trailing my arm and resting every few steps till I felt strong enough to continue. In all that time, I saw no one – not till I reached the door of our room, where I could hear my parents talking as my mother unpacked. They were arguing about something, still, but it was a casual, passionless argument, something they had gone through a thousand times before, an argument for which they knew the script perfectly. I managed to get to my feet, opened the door with my left hand, and staggered in, collapsing on the nearest bed.

  ‘What is it?’ my mother said. ‘Did you hurt yourself?’

  ‘I fell off the wall,’ I said. I couldn’t think clearly enough to explain.

  ‘What wall?’ my father wanted to know. Neither of them seemed very concerned.

  ‘The wall outside,’ I said.

  ‘Oh.’ In retrospect, I see that my father must have thought I meant the low wall to the street, not the wall to the basement. The wall to the street was about two and a half feet high, hardly dangerous. ‘Let’s see you, then,’ he said. I rolled over and sat up, my arm screaming pain. My father studied my face. ‘You’ll live,’ he said.

  ‘My arm hurts,’ I said.

  He smiled grimly. ‘Of course it does,’ he said. ‘You have to be more careful.’

  Everybody, including me, was determined that my fall shouldn’t spoil our holiday. For the next fortnight, I sat on the beach in a deckchair, nursing my hurt arm. It was broken, but nobody knew that. I did what I could to conceal the pain. What was needed was an effort of will, nothing more. I remembered the times my father had been hurt at work, how he’d worked on when he’d broken his fingers, or the time when he had to go to hospital, bleeding like a sheep, to get stitched up, but had got back to work the same day and finished what he had to do. That was what I wanted to do. When my arm sent urgent, angry messages along the nerve lines to the brain, my brain ignored them, telling the arm to pull itself together, to take it like a man. It wasn’t until three weeks later, when the swollen fracture turned black from wrist to elbow, and I was finally packed off to see a doctor, that I understood how bad it was. The doctor, a Polish émigré, took one look at my blackened forearm and jumped from his chair.

  ‘How long has it been like this?’ he cried. I thought he was so excitable because he was a foreigner.

  ‘A little while,’ I said.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Since we were in Blackpool,’ I answered, shamefaced now, and worried somebody might get into trouble. He stared at me, exasperated. ‘About three weeks,’ I added softly.

  ‘Three weeks!’ He was genuinely upset. He probably saw things like this all the time – and I wanted to tell him, then, that it wasn’t anybody’s fault, that I didn’t think my parents were neglectful. It had never once occurred to me that they should have known better than to let me go three weeks, playing football, trying to swim, doing all I could to appear normal, with a broken arm. If I could have explained it, I would have said that it wasn’t their fault: they were incompetents, sad, preoccupied, one with his drinking, the other with surviving the fallout from his increasingly erratic behaviour. And at that moment, all of a sudden, I felt superior to them, smarter, more capable. I could have told them this would happen. The arm was broken, anybody could see that. It didn’t occur to me that I hadn’t seen it myself till the doctor pointed it out. ‘This arm is broken. Probably in several places. We have to get you to the hospital right away.’ He studied my face for a moment – a placid ten-year-old in bad clothes who had come to see him alone, and was planning to go on to school afterwards – and his face softened. ‘Where are your parents?’ he asked.

  ‘My dad’s at work,’ I answered. ‘My mum’s at home.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Stay there. Don’t move an inch. We’ll sort this out.’


  And with that, before I could explain it was all a big mistake, I became one of the neglected, one of the children society has to protect. Looking back, I can imagine the doctor probably didn’t even believe my story about falling off a wall, when I got to give it. He probably had his own suspicions about parents who would let their child go three weeks with a black, swollen, obviously broken arm, then send him off to the surgery – if they had even sent him at all – on his own. I didn’t know it then, but I had blown our cover as a family. From that point on, nothing we did in Cowdenbeath would be a private matter. It was all subject to scrutiny.

  For that fortnight in Blackpool, though, we didn’t know any of this. We sat on the beach, we made sandcastles and ate ice creams, Margaret and I went on donkey rides, while my mother watched and my father took photographs. We went to Mass in a strange church and I wandered off and got lost on the way back to the guest house. I liked being lost. It reassured me that it was so easy just to detach myself and slip away. I had fantasies of being found, hours later, by a policeman or a good-hearted stranger who would take me off to some good, clean, friendly place while they tried to find my parents; then, when that plan failed, I would be taken in, shown to my own room, sent to a new school, looked after by kindly women, given new clothes and brand new books, with that straight-from-the-bookshop smell. Every street that led somewhere else, every tree I’d never seen before, every house with strange curtains was a new life, just waiting to be entered. I thought myself stupid when I couldn’t work out how to get there.