A Lie About My Father

by John Burnside

  ‘That’s a good one,’ Gerry said, shaking his head. ‘Got some purple too, if you’re interested.’ He didn’t say anything else. I heard later that Raymond was at art school.

  Some time after the vicarage incident, the public library burned down. It was just before Christmas: when I heard the news, I cycled over there in the early morning, a light snow falling, the air blue-grey, nobody else on the streets. In those days, the library was near the woods, just opposite the Corby Bowl, a piece of low-grade quasi-modernism that was a favourite refuge all through my teens, a good place to sit in the warm and study the photographic books after school, when my father was back from day shift. I’d expected some kind of business to be going on: fire investigators, men at work clearing up, making the ruins safe, policemen looking for witnesses. There was nothing. I was free to wander about, picking up charred pages from books I had probably borrowed over the years, my mother’s Mills & Boons, the complete works of Dostoevsky in their gold and scarlet dust covers, the atlases and art books and pharmacy texts I’d pored over in the reading room. It was a sad moment, but it was also beautiful. The woods were full of snow, and a wet snow had fallen on the charred beams and broken remains of the building the night before; the remnants of burned books lay scattered over the snow all around, still as monochrome on a day without wind. It was extraordinary: white, touched here and there with black, silent, wonderfully bleak, and as I stood there, I guessed this fire had been no accident. I knew for sure that Raymond hadn’t started it, and it had nothing to do with me, but from what I’d learned about fires, I also knew that this wasn’t a simple act of malice. It was a statement, done for its own sake: a statement, not of something specific, but a statement in the way a line of birdsong is a statement. A natural phenomenon, like a storm, or a rose. I stood there a long time, though by the end I wasn’t sure if it was regret for the library that detained me, or the beauty of its ruin. Both, I imagine. By that time, a book was the closest thing to holy that I knew, but I couldn’t deny the frisson of pleasure I experienced, seeing those ashes – those words, those ideas, the foreign beauty of those texts – melting away in the snow.

  CHAPTER 5

  There’s a series of paintings by George Shaw called Scenes from the Passion that make me think of Corby in the seventies. Shaw is a painter, born in the mid-sixties, who chooses – for these works, at least – to work in Humbrol enamel on board, giving the work a strangely flat, yet intense quality, as if something that should have been tiny, like a faraway memory, had gradually expanded, becoming an altarpiece, an obsession, something at once quotidian and sacramental. One painting, The Middle of the Week, painted in 2002, shows a row of ruined garages covered in graffiti and littered with the evocative trash you find in such places. Here and there, clumps of dark, virulent weed poke through the concrete; elsewhere, the stone is charred with the remains of bonfires. It reminds me of the garages we smoked in and set fire to when I was growing up, but this isn’t nostalgia working here, it isn’t even memory: this is the locus of an extreme stillness, a place beyond time or ordinary significance. Nothing can be superimposed on this painting: it’s not social commentary, urban realism, autobiographical exploration. It’s a fact: a moment, a natural phenomenon.

  Another picture in the series comes closer to depicting my father’s natural habitat than anything else I can think of. It’s a painting called The New Star, showing a building that might be anything, but happens to be a pub, and it makes me think of the pub my father settled on when he moved to Corby, the place that was, more than any other, his home. The Hazel Tree was a typical estate pub: anonymous, dull, closed off to the outside world, as much prison block as sanctuary, as much dream as architecture. You could walk past the Hazel Tree every day and see nothing remarkable about it; then, in a certain slant of light, or in the sudden stillness after heavy rain, you might catch a glimpse of something else, some inner truth, something that resembles the gravitas of an icon. Shaw’s paintings capture this moment perfectly – and I think, by extension, they capture something about the men who frequent such places, about the dreams they conceal and the stunned tenderness they harbour.

  My father started taking me to the Hazel Tree when I was fourteen. I’d gone drinking with him before then, but I’d had to sit outside, in the dark, lonely gardens of the Everard Arms, sipping my pint of cider as the traffic slid by on a Saturday evening. My father would come out every now and then with a packet of crisps and another cider, ask if I was all right, then disappear back inside to see his friends. I knew he was just using me as an excuse to get out of the house, but I liked being there, sitting alone with my drink, listening to the men inside talking, people working in the kitchen, the odd bird singing along the fence line. I’ve enjoyed sitting alone in pub yards ever since, especially in the early evening, or in the morning, before the crowds get in.

  At fourteen, though, I was man enough to sit inside with my father and his friends, playing crib or dominoes, man enough to go up to the bar and remember who wanted what in a round of six – beers and shorts – with the tenner my father had just slipped me under the table. This was his idea of an education – and, in a way, it was. I quickly got the hang of crib, and I was a demon at dominoes. We’d play for drinks, and I won more often than I lost.

  All this time, my father was getting weaker. I knew this, without being conscious of it. At home, he was becoming more maudlin, more repetitive; all his energy went into keeping up his image at the Hazel Tree. There, he was still the presence he had always been: glowering, dangerous, sarcastic. He was still considered a hard man, and not to be treated lightly. Now and again, though, I saw a softness in him, a hesitation. The accident had taken more of a toll than any of us were admitting. All the clues were there: where he had once been a wanderer, drifting from pub to pub, never hesitating to walk straight into places that other men would think twice about, now he was a regular, always drinking at the Tree, or the Everard, if he had people with him, or at the Silver Band Club, where the other regulars were known to him. Where he had once been so self-possessed, so heavy and still, now he was restless, ready to lash out, brooding and defensive. Where he had been dark and limber and poised, now he was lighter, fatter, looser. One night, a man I didn’t know came up to me in the yard outside the Hazel Tree. He was in his mid-twenties, a big man with a wispy moustache and a dark, tight face.

  ‘You’re John, right?’ he said.

  I nodded. In that place, you didn’t talk much, especially if you were a hanger-on, as I was. You waited, heard what the other man had to say. Besides, in this situation, I could tell something was coming, and I wanted time to work out how to play it. My father was inside with his usual crew, sitting at their usual table by the high window, throwing banter around and playing dominoes.

  ‘I’m Alastair,’ the man said. He held out his hand and I shook it. ‘Listen, son. I don’t want you to take this the wrong way. All right?’

  Here it comes, I thought. I shook my head.

  ‘Your dad’s a good man,’ he continued. ‘But he’s not the man he used to be. If you get what I’m saying.’

  I didn’t say anything. There were tiny dark spots on his teeth, like rust marks, that showed when he talked.

  ‘What I mean is, I wouldn’t want to see anybody take the piss,’ Alastair said. He wasn’t bothered by my reluctance to engage in conversation. I knew that he knew that I knew I was just there to listen. Still, the whole thing was going to take all night, if I didn’t say something.

  ‘I see what you’re saying,’ I said. Naturally, I had no idea what his point was.

  He nodded. He looked grim now, like he’d just been to the dentist. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘You keep an eye on him, OK?’

  I nodded back. ‘I’ll do that,’ I said. I had no idea what that meant, in real terms, but I knew it was what he needed me to say.

  ‘That’s fine,’ Alastair said. ‘You’re a good man. I didn’t want to keep you from your dad.’

  ‘No pr
oblem,’ I said. I looked at his teeth. ‘I’m just going to the bar. Can I get you one?’

  He almost smiled. I was fifteen years old, and he knew it. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was putting on the most convincing act I could manage, and he knew that too. Trouble was, he was doing the same thing – and, at that moment, I knew that too. It was 99 per cent act, all this hard-man stuff. These men couldn’t smile, or laugh in a certain way, or talk about certain things. Not in public. It was all about display: the strong silent type; the nutter who was too crazy to mess with; the hard man; the heid case; the ex-army, disciplined, kills-with-his-bare-hands bampot. You had to fit a recognised profile, or you’d better stay away. I was there because my father was who he was. I could talk to these men, I could win their money at dominoes, I could listen to their jokes as long as I behaved like my father’s son, and played the game. If I tried to be anybody else, I was yesterday’s papers. Nae use tae naebody. If my father should fall from grace, then I fell with him. Those were the rules. Nobody told you what they were, but you had to learn them quickly, or you’d find yourself walking home with a bar towel pressed to your face, blood on your shirt, and a voice in your head saying, What the fuck were you thinking? What the fuck were you thinking? over and over again.

  At home, my father was often ugly and violent; but he could also be the standard maudlin drunk, embarrassing and pathetic in ways that shamed me far more than the nights when he came home and tried to smash up my piano, or sat in his ‘big chair’ muttering dark stories about George Grant. He would weep and blurt out things that must have mortified him next day, when he was sober. Or he would listen to his music, full volume, always the same three records: the only ones he owned. Two by Mario Lanza, one by Al Jolson. Some songs he would listen to again and again – ‘Vesti la giubba’ was a particular favourite – and he would try to sing along, weeping all the while, drowsing away and surfacing again to slide the stylus back to the beginning of the track. He would do this when he came home alone, almost too drunk to talk, and I knew he would do it if I was there too, so I usually left him in the Hazel Tree at around ten or so and went off somewhere else. I didn’t like the Hazel Tree that much, but I couldn’t avoid going. It made life easier if we went through certain motions, played certain games. One game was that we were father and son, going out together, him slipping me money and looking the other way when I smoked cigarettes. My mother liked it that we went out together, oddly enough. She made him promise every time not to get me drunk, but she must have imagined, no matter what, that any time we spent together was a good thing.

  It seems sudden, looking back, but this was the time I gave up trying to see his good side, the time when I began to feel contempt for him. This saddens me – because there were moments when somebody else flashed through his act. For example, I can remember now how, when my sister was choking on something she’d swallowed, my father picked her up by her feet and held her upside down, shaking her – gently enough, forcefully enough – to dislodge the object in her throat. I remember the stories he told against himself, stories about his time in the air force, where he made no pretensions to being a hero. In those days, he had been stationed in Germany, and later in Palestine and Egypt. He said he liked the Germans he’d met, and he was clearly disgusted by the post-war prejudice shown towards them; he also liked the ‘wogs’ who worked around the base in Palestine. He didn’t like ‘the Jews’ (it would be hard to find a British serviceman from that time who did), by which he meant the Zionists who blew up the King David Hotel, the only real enemy he ever had, given that he was too young to see action in the European war. He used to tell a sad, rather ugly story against himself about a night’s sentry duty, a ‘who goes there’ and a donkey. Whether it was true, I have no idea; probably it happened to somebody, somewhere and, liking the tale, my father picked it up and made it his own. His version went like this: he was on watch, still a young man, still not quite sure of himself on this new duty, far from the world he knew. He was in what he thought of as desert, guarding the camp, when he heard a noise, somewhere out in the dark, somewhere in ‘the desert’. He called out a warning, but there was no response. He called again, and he realised that something was out there, silent, possibly malicious, something or someone moving towards him out of the dark. He was afraid of ‘the Jews’ (not the Arabs, of course, for they were allies), and he didn’t want to fail in his duty, so he called ‘Who goes there?’ one more time and, on receiving no reply, fired at the figure he thought he saw moving in the dark.

  It was a donkey. ‘I never saw an angry German,’ my father would say about his service days, ‘but I shot a donkey.’ He would try to make a joke of it, but I could see, whenever he told this story, that he was haunted by what he had done, disgusted at his own panic, and shaken – at some deeper level – by the miserable fate of this particular casualty of the Palestine operation. At some level, I know, he blamed ‘the Jews’ for the donkey, just as much as he blamed them for his imagined comrades in the King David – and perhaps because the Zionists were so much at fault, he liked the Arabs, even though he quite freely referred to them as ‘wogs’. The only photographs he brought back from his travels in the service were, in fact, a few bazaar scenes, some postcards of Egypt, and three snapshots of Palestinian men he’d known, ‘wogs’ who had, it seems, performed menial tasks around the place where he was stationed. There’s no way of knowing why, but I think he felt genuine affection for those Palestinian men who, in the world to which he belonged, would have been considered nobodies. The word ‘wogs’ was his one concession to the prejudices of his class and time; secretly, though, he kept those snapshots for forty years, and spoke often of how decent, and how unfairly treated, the Palestinians had been.

  I didn’t remember this, however. I didn’t remember his occasional flashes of extraordinary competence, his presence of mind when presence of mind was needed. All I saw was the side my friends saw – or rather two sides, at odds with one another: the hard man he put on like a suit of armour for the Hazel Tree, and the pathetic, tearful drunk he slipped into at home. Occasionally, he would be stone-cold sober – but that was no improvement. Sober, he would often be angrier than ever, and even more of a bully. One day, my friend Richard was round at our house when my mother and father were trying to paper the dinette. Richard and I were in the living room, going through some photographs he’d developed. They were good pictures, but pretty soon we found ourselves setting the contact sheets aside, to listen in. My father didn’t like Richard, for his long hair, mostly, which made Richard all the more determined to like him. Eventually, we drifted into the kitchen, so we could sneak furtive glances at the sad little comedy playing out in the dinette. My father was up on the stepladder he’d borrowed from Matt next door, moaning and cursing, haranguing my mother, trying and failing, trying again, failing even more spectacularly. There was ruined wallpaper everywhere. ‘God! What do you think you’re doing?’ he was saying, as my mother tried to rescue yet another Anaglyptic casualty.

  My mother was on the verge of tears, as the wallpaper rolled back off the wall and landed in a crumpled, wet heap on the carpet below, my father’s smoothing brush clattering to the floor. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, trying to remain calm. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘God Almighty! I’d be better off doing it by myself.’ He stepped down off the ladder, crumpled up the fallen sheet of paper and tossed it into the corner. ‘You’re no help.’ He got back up on the ladder and started scraping at the wall.

  Richard couldn’t believe this. His father was a painter and decorator who would wallpaper entire houses before breakfast. But he was as amused as he was puzzled. ‘More paste, less speed,’ he muttered.

  ‘What was that?’ My father was down off the ladder, clutching the brush he’d just retrieved from the floor.

  ‘I was wondering if you needed a hand,’ Richard said, his face the picture of innocence.

  My father threw me a significant look, then turned back to
Richard. ‘No bother,’ he said. ‘But thanks for the thought.’

  Richard nodded, and we went out the back door. He had a ready-rolled joint in his pocket, which he pulled out and lit up as soon as we were away from the house. ‘I have to say it,’ he said, ‘your parents are the craziest people I’ve ever met. Where did you say your dad worked?’

  ‘By-products,’ I answered. ‘Safety.’

  Richard gave a snort. ‘Remind me not to drink the water,’ he said, handing me the spliff.

  ‘Not a problem,’ I said. ‘He’s sober now. He’s never sober at work.’

  ‘I feel better already.’

  ‘You should,’ I said. ‘He’s only dangerous when he’s sober.’

  By now, this was almost true. In the mornings, before he went on day shift, my father would half fill a glass with brandy, break an egg into it, add a dash of milk, then gulp it down in one. His version of egg-nog. He said it warmed him up, got him started for the day ahead, but I don’t think he could have gone through a day without it. The egg and the milk were just a cover, a way of calling this food, rather than a drink. When I started at the works, in the gap between finishing A levels and college, Iremembered this little ritual and tried it myself once, just before I went on night shift. I almost threw up. But then, by that time, I had something better than brandy and eggs to keep me going through the long nights.

  I thought I wouldn’t hear from Alastair again. I knew he wanted me to pass his ‘message’ on, but I didn’t. To do that would have been an insult to my father, a suggestion that he needed somebody to watch his back. Besides, Alastair hadn’t really said anything. I didn’t know what he had in mind, or even if he had anything in mind at all. He’d not made any actual threats, or offered any real warning. It didn’t take me long to forget him. Or almost. I knew, if I saw him, I would be on guard.