A Lie About My Father

by John Burnside

  ‘Oh, why do you think?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, but I did.

  She sat gazing at me in disbelief. Suddenly, everything had turned upside down: now I was the one trying to believe the best of things, and she was the cynic. ‘Drink, of course,’ she said. ‘All that money. And we’ll not see a penny of it.’ It was an unusually bitter moment – the first such I had witnessed. That day, when my father refused even to entertain her dream, something else happened to my mother, beyond her loss of hope. From now on, she would make far less of an effort to conceal her irritation, even her disgust, with my father. From now on, she was a wife from duty, rather than desire. As a Catholic, and as a mother, she would never have left him, but now, I saw, she thought about it. I would see that look again, in the years to come, and I would see it in her eyes, a few days before she died, when she looked up at me from her dying bed, hazy with morphine, and asked me – at that moment, not her son, but some kind stranger – what it had all been about.

  CHAPTER 4

  I hated Corby from the first, but it felt disloyal to admit as much. On the outside, I must have seemed detached, or indifferent; inside, I was angry all the time. I was angry with my teachers, angry with the neighbours, angry with the parish priest, angry with the cheap shops on Corporation Street where my mother went shopping, angry with my parents for moving to Corby in the first place. Most of all, I was angry with anybody who showed any interest in me, or in what I was thinking or doing, or in what I might want from life. I didn’t want anything from life other than to be left alone. I knew I didn’t belong – and that was a problem because, as I soon realised, Corby was far more conformist than Cowdenbeath had been. People had come there from all over, bringing their families from Scotland, or Wales, or Northern Ireland, all desperate to fit in and be accepted. Corby was all about joining in, all about wanting to belong, a town of clubs and unions that defined who you were and what you were not: the Catholic Club, the Rangers Club, the Latvian Male Voice Choir, the Silver Band, Steelworkers, Tubeside. I hated that. As far as I was concerned, the group, whatever form it took, was an instrument of tyranny. I wouldn’t play for the school football team; I refused to even try cricket; I didn’t talk the playground talk about jamrags and cunt-smells and intriguing ways to eat Mars bars.

  Meanwhile, my father was changing. He had come to a new place, where he was an unknown quantity, but it hadn’t been long before he commanded the same respect – or fear – as he had at home. In fact, he was more frightening now, because he was more unpredictable. His failure to give his wife and children the new life he had convinced himself we wanted had much to do with a new mood of simmering resentment that could spill over at any moment, but something else was going on too, something none of us knew about. Now, when he was in one of his black moods, he hit out at random, without intent, for no reason. His victim might be me, or someone he met on the way out of the pub; it could even be one of his friends. One Saturday afternoon, he came home with his current best friend, a genuinely warm-hearted man called Bill. My mother cooked them both something to eat but suddenly, halfway through the meal, my father announced he was going upstairs to get ready to go out again. He needed a change of shirt, some ‘good’ trousers. Someone would have to clean his good shoes. Bill remonstrated with him: There’s no hurry, eat your food, the usual drunkard’s banter. I’d seen my father and Bill drunk together – swaying back and forth unsteadily, arms linked, calling each other brothers, that kind of rubbish – but I’d never seen them exchange an angry word. That afternoon, however, Bill misjudged the moment, as he got up from the table and tried to take my father’s arm.

  For all the misery he caused me, for all the damage he did, I think that was the first time I realised that my father was more than just routinely dangerous, the first time I realised he was capable of doing real and permanent harm. Bill shrugged it off, later, but he never came to our house again – not because he was afraid of my father, but because he was embarrassed for them both.

  I had just gone through to the living room, while they sat in what we called the dinette. (The word I most dislike, in the English or any other language, has to be this one: dinette. What could be more ugly, more revealing of the way we lived then? Dinette. Enough room for a sideboard and a table, and a tacky Highland landscape that my father had brought home from God knows where. The canteen of cutlery that someone had given my parents as a wedding present in the sideboard drawer. Cork place mats. Flock wallpaper, badly hung. Fridge in the corner, because the kitchen was too small to get it in.) Suddenly, I heard my mother cry out. She had been in the kitchen, so nobody else saw what had happened: what we did see was Bill on the floor, and my father stamping on his arm, the expression on his face cold and ugly, as if he knew exactly what he was doing. He was like a man performing a routine action, a man at work, doing something he did every day. I tried to grab him and was thrown back against the wall. My mother was shrieking, trying to push him away from Bill, who had rolled over, his arm turning under him, as he tried to scramble back to his feet. Meanwhile, I got my balance and plucked at my father’s sleeve. He turned and grabbed my throat. By that time, Bill was on his feet, my mother had my father by his other arm and, for a moment, we all stood, like a tableau, frozen in the moment, something dimming in my father’s face, Bill making soft, conciliatory noises, not words, just sounds, like the reassuring sounds you make to a horse when it gets spooked. My mother was talking too, saying over and over again, ‘Come on, George. Come on, George. Come on . . . ’ Repetition is key in these situations: repetition; soft, meaningless noises; making space. Nothing more than you would do for a frightened animal. Some of the time, it works.

  For the first three years of our Corby existence, we made the trip home to Scotland in the summer. We travelled all night on a bus that picked us up at Stamford, stopped a while at Scotch Corner, and terminated in Edinburgh at around six in the morning. Everybody hated these long nocturnal journeys; everybody but me, that is. I loved sitting at the window, staring out at the land as it slipped by: the open fields, the towns, the woods, the rivers, the power stations standing massive and elegant in their own smoke, the sky as it darkened over a meadow, reclaiming the trees and the beasts of the field. Most of all, I loved the towns when the street lamps were lit, orange or white or crimson in the blue gloaming. I would try to catch the moment when they came on, the point where day became night; when I saw a street lamp suddenly brighten into crimson or silver, I would feel blessed.

  I didn’t like the visits home half as much as the journey there. We would be cramped together, all of us in the one room, my father always wanting to be off to some new pub where nobody knew him, my mother worried about the holiday money, and what he might do with it if she let him out of her sight. We would stop first in Cowdenbeath and traipse around visiting everybody: my cousin Madeleine, my various aunts, our old neighbour, Mrs Black, who loved to talk about her own and other people’s various operations. Everybody looked the same as they had when we left, but they were also strangely altered: they seemed far away and muffled now, as if they didn’t exist at any other time, and had just come out of storage for the length of our stay, to reassure us that nothing had changed while we had been gone. Their voices had begun to soften and fold in upon themselves, their houses seemed preserved in water glass, their hallways and front rooms stood at one remove from the world I remembered, their wireless sets and china strangely antique, their clothes neat and clean, but somehow wrong, like costumes they were unaccustomed to wearing. Equally unreal was the world my mother described, a world of new possessions and hot water and modern appliances we didn’t own. I knew well enough not to say anything, of course, though I would watch her, as we came away, a crumb of salmon on her lip, or a butter-stain on her sleeve, and I would feel sorry for her, not because she lacked the things she had claimed to have, but because she thought they would make a difference.

  For a while, I was still doing well at school. My mot
her could tell her friends and family, when she went home, or when she wrote the little notes she posted back to Scotland with the Christmas cards, that I had got an A in every subject on my report card (not quite true, but nobody cares about Geography or Art). For a while, she could say I was on the athletics team, I played chess, I was in the science club. When it came round to parents’ days, I was the one who stepped forward out of the choir and read the poem, or the dramatic monologue that Mr Edmunds had adapted from Wuthering Heights. At the open evenings, I was the boy who demonstrated to a succession of bemused, but tolerant visitors the wonders of chromatography. Year after year, I accepted the prize, I ran the relay, I won the chess tournament or recited a soliloquy from Hamlet but, even though this was all duly recounted in letters home, nobody that mattered was there to see me. I wasn’t surprised: I knew my mother couldn’t afford to miss a day’s work; I also knew that, had she taken the time off, she would have been afraid that, by being there, she was showing my father up. Meanwhile, because he worked shifts, and given the fact that he and his workmates were forever negotiating swaps, doing doubles, sometimes, to cover for a club social or a night out, my father had more opportunities to see me enact those childish triumphs – and he was the one I wanted there, truth be told. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s also true that a boy seeks his father’s respect, his father’s recognition, first. Looking back now, I see that my problem wasn’t just that I couldn’t win my father’s approval but that, even if I had, I wouldn’t have wanted it from him. I wanted the regard, not of this wounded, inadequate individual, but of the father I had invented from scraps of literature and hearsay. A father who did not exist, any more than my phantom brother existed, but still the only father I had. This was the man I wanted to step down off the stage, or cross the finishing line for – because I did win the prizes, I did play the leading part in the school play, I did make the speech at parents’ day, occasionally I was the first to cross the finishing line and, all through my school years, he never came.

  But then, a father who never shows up is both a curse and a blessing: a curse, because it’s a lonely feeling, to win something and have nobody to show it to; a blessing because, after a while, I didn’t care to do anything other than for its own sake. Not for the prize, not for the regard, not for the approval, but for the thing itself. That can be a lonely experience, too, but it’s a different kind of loneliness, and after a time, it brings its own satisfactions. ‘If I do well, I am blessed,’ says Marianne Moore, ‘whether any bless me or not.’ That’s a difficult lesson for a thirteen-year-old. Eventually, I stopped doing well in school. It was just as easy to coast through, and there was no satisfaction in what my teachers had to offer. I began reading away from the syllabus; I got thrown out of the maths class; when I did my exams, I chose to answer questions on books or topics we’d not been prepared for. It was a game, now. No more straight As, no more science club. From now on, it was just me, and what I wanted to do. Eventually, all I wanted to do was read Edgar Allan Poe and go out to the woods with the other misfits, to build fires and find things to destroy.

  There were four of us, in the beginning. We would hang about in garage blocks and derelict buildings, playing with matches, smoking stolen cigarettes, making bonfires and standing over them while they slowly kindled and quickly burned out, lonely souls, lost in the beguilement of fire. We were always making plans for something bigger, but even then, I knew the others weren’t as serious as I was. I had grown up with this fascination, in the old, strong sense. I remembered chasing fire engines, back in Cowdenbeath; I remembered the one big fire I had seen when I was about eight, the drama of it, the noise and beauty of the fire, the excitement of watching it burn. It hadn’t occurred to me, then, that this was all in my power to create: a wisp of cloth, some stolen lighter fluid, a box of matches was all it took to make my very own art work. Because that was how it felt at the time: a work of art, a piece of theatre. With the others, it was just bonfires, rubbish bins, piles of cardboard and old papers on pieces of waste ground; but when I was alone, I made real fires, fires that destroyed something, fires that made something beautiful happen. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. I burned stuff from the construction sites on the edge of town, where it was advancing into the countryside around Great Oakley; I made fires in abandoned garages to see how things burned in an enclosed space, black smoke gathering, then billowing out into the sunlight. When my father brought friends home, I would stick around to hear their stories of the furnaces and the coke ovens and the soaking pit. I thought it would almost be worth working on Steelside, just to see those huge furnaces. Oftentimes, I would cycle up to the other side of town, just to watch the Candle burning.

  As things turned out, one of the others – I’ll call him Raymond – was on the same path. Like me, he’d grown tired of the little fires we’d been making, and gone out on his own, riding around on his bike, looking for things to burn. Once, he’d found a disused hut next to an old railway line; after he’d set it alight, he’d taken photographs of the blaze with his mother’s camera. He showed me the pictures. They weren’t expert, but they were very moving.

  One day he came round to our house and told me to get my bike, there was something he wanted me to see.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked, as we cycled out towards Corby old village.

  ‘You’ll find out.’ He was enjoying this, being mysterious, looking forward to what was about to happen. Raymond was smart, but he didn’t like school. The only thing he took seriously was RE. If he’d switched sides, he could have been a big cheese in the Vatican, the time he spent thinking about the minor details of theology and Church law. In the fourth year, we had a new teacher, a pretty, slightly manic young woman who had recently converted. She was trained to teach French and Spanish, but she had made the mistake of volunteering for RE duty, a task normally reserved for hardened nuns. I’m sure she was already in trouble, morally, or psychologically – Pope John XXIII Memorial Comprehensive was probably a real shock to her system – but I can’t help thinking, looking back, that Raymond played a part in her eventual breakdown, with his constant, seemingly innocent questions about her new-found faith. I don’t think he actually achieved his ambition of making her abandon the Church; it was just that her pride crumbled when she realised that she couldn’t answer the theological enquiries of someone she probably saw as an overly curious, but essentially well-meaning fifteen-year-old. Perhaps she even thought she had failed him, that she had failed all of us. I wish, now, that I could go back to her and explain that we’d all been very thoroughly and carefully failed, long before she turned up.

  Finally, Raymond and I arrived at our destination: a disused, late-Victorian or early-Edwardian house, set in its own half-acre of summer grass and fruit trees, a place nobody had lived in for years. I’d been there before, of course: everybody called it the Vicarage, and I think it did belong to the Church of England, though it was too far from the old church, I thought, to have been the vicar’s house. Not that I cared much about its history. For me, it was a place to go, a curiosity, a house that was locked and boarded up and, for that reason alone, a place to break into. How many of us honed our burglary skills on places like that? If they had been left wide open, with a big welcome sign on the door, nobody would have bothered going in.

  Raymond hopped off his bike and looked to see if I was thinking what he was thinking.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘So?’

  ‘We can get in round the back,’ he said.

  ‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I’ve been here before. There’s nothing much – ’

  He took a box of matches from his pocket and shook them next to his ear, grinning madly. ‘Let’s burn the fucker down,’ he said.

  I didn’t know if he was serious. I had been thinking what he was thinking, but now that he said it, I wasn’t so sure. It was a house. One day, people could live there again, as they had done once. One day they would scrape the old wallpaper off the walls, repaint the woodwork,
wash the windows and polish the floors. Absurdly, I even thought of being that person. I thought of how I could live there, make it into a home, hang pictures on the walls. Invite my mother to tea. Show her my library of leather-bound books: Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Melville, Conrad. ‘No, thanks,’ I said. I was annoyed that he’d suggested it, not just because it was a house, but because he’d made me see my own limitations. I liked fires, but I didn’t want to burn property.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’ll be fantastic. Can you imagine – ’

  ‘No.’ I said. The images that had passed through my mind moments before – a fire in the grate, pictures on the walls, a Christmas tree in the corner of the big downstairs room, snow at the windows – made it seem grotesque, as if he was asking me to burn my mother’s house. ‘It’s stupid.’

  Raymond gave me a weary look, but he didn’t say anything.

  ‘Let’s go down to the sludge beds,’ I said. I felt like a twelve-year-old.

  He shook his head. ‘I’m going in,’ he said. He propped his bike against a tree and headed round the side of the house, towards the broken window at the back. I waited a moment, then I got on my bike and cycled away. It was summer, late in the afternoon. Soon, it would be evening.

  Later, Raymond and I would be expelled within months of one another: for smoking cannabis, for drinking, for not attending Mass – but not for arson. We’d meet on the street now and then, but we didn’t talk much, so I didn’t get to know what he did with himself after school. I bought some acid from his older brother, Gerry, at Bickershaw in 1972, and I asked about him. Gerry was a tall, thin, long-haired guy with little round NH specs, one of a million bargain-basement John Lennons; the rumour going around about Raymond was that he’d had some kind of religious experience after his expulsion, and was contemplating the priesthood. I didn’t believe it, but it didn’t sound impossible. When I asked about it, Gerry laughed. He was so stoned, he would probably have laughed if I’d asked him the time, but I immediately knew the rumour was wrong. Raymond wasn’t planning to become a priest.