A Lie About My Father

by John Burnside

  I wasn’t around when he fell because a girl called Jennifer was there when we arrived, and I decided to go home with her. I’d been thinking about Jennifer for quite some time, and this was one night when I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. Maybe I knew trouble was brewing; maybe, for once, I didn’t want to be Rick’s brother and keeper. I did try, though. Before I left – Jennifer had slipped away already and was waiting in her car – I found him at the drinks table and pinned him down. He looked terrible, all of a sudden. ‘You need to sleep,’ I said quietly. I was afraid of being too concerned for him. Concern always inspired his contempt.

  He looked at me in mock disbelief, then he raised the glass and took a long swig. ‘Are you going somewhere?’ he asked. He would have seen Jennifer at the party earlier, and he would have noticed us exchanging words.

  ‘I’m going back with Jen,’ I said. ‘We can drop you off.’

  ‘Nah.’ He shook his head and grimaced. ‘You go and enjoy yourself. They need me here, on the dance floor.’

  I waited. I thought he was going to change his mind. I had such a strong apprehension that something bad was going to happen, that I thought he might feel it too. Then I convinced myself that I’d had that feeling before, on other nights than this, and I let it go. ‘You sure?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘The girls are going to catch you out, one of these days,’ he said.

  I nodded. ‘I can’t help it,’ I said. For a moment, I thought he’d be fine. He would get drunk and doze off in a corner, mumbling to himself. Or he’d go on all night and see me the next day at the pub. He’d walk home and ring his girlfriend in Pittsburgh, or wherever she was, on the payphone outside his room. ‘See you tomorrow?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He nodded. ‘Cheerio.’ He grinned maliciously. ‘Be careful with that girl,’ he said. ‘She looks dangerous.’

  Later, he must have got his second wind. He knew people at the party, but he was always drawn to people he didn’t know, and it was probably somebody he didn’t know who pushed him through a third-storey window at three the next morning. Or maybe he just fell. Nobody really knew what had happened, though; partly because nobody wanted to know, but mostly because Rick was on the pavement outside for half an hour before anybody realised.

  The damage was extensive. I only saw him once, in intensive care, when he was still unconscious; after that, his parents and girlfriend turned up, and decided that I wasn’t to see him again, because it would be too upsetting. I know he regained consciousness, and I know he spoke, but Katie wouldn’t tell me what he said, when she came back from her visit to the IC ward. I heard later that he’d suffered brain damage, that the doctors were afraid that he’d end up having the mind of a twelve-year-old. I don’t know how they work that kind of thing out (why twelve? why not a bright ten-year-old, or a dim fifteen?) but it didn’t matter. I tried a couple of times to get in to see him again, but they wouldn’t let me. I asked Katie if he’d asked for me, or if he’d said anything about that night, but she wouldn’t answer. Maybe she was wondering why I hadn’t been there to stop him falling; maybe she already knew. Either way, it was all over. I never saw her, or Lara, or Jennifer again and, by the time Rick was discharged from hospital into his parents’ care, I had left Brighton for good.

  CHAPTER 9

  Je est un autre. Rimbaud

  My father had his third heart attack the following spring. By that time, I was back in Cambridge, working in a college garden, trying to engineer my own disappearance. It took Margaret three days to track me down: eventually, I was called to the phone at the Eagle, where I sometimes dropped in during the early evening to drink beer and do the crossword with a couple of barflies who had been practising for years the transparency that I was only just beginning to master. It was the landlady who took the call, a warm-hearted, sympathetic, discreet woman named Wendy, patron saint of the sad and the lonely, a petite beauty with long honey-coloured hair who sometimes turned up in rival establishments with an Indian python draped around her neck.

  ‘It’s serious,’ Margaret told me. ‘He’s asking for you.’

  ‘No, he isn’t,’ I said.

  ‘I know you don’t want to hear this, and I’m sorry to disappoint you,’ she said. There was a note of irritation in her voice. ‘But he is asking for you. That’s how serious it is.’

  I had read somewhere that the third heart attack was always the last, that nobody ever recovered from it. I imagine Margaret had read the same article – not true, as my father’s case demonstrates – because she managed to talk me into going back, the very next morning, to see the man I’d thought to erase from my life for ever. As soon as I put down the phone, I regretted making that promise, but I knew I couldn’t go back on it.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Wendy asked, as I thanked her for the use of her private phone.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Somebody I know is ill.’ I gave her an innocent-seeming smile. ‘I’ve not seen him in years,’ I said. ‘But we go back a long way.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ She studied my face; and I could see in her eyes that she knew there was something I wasn’t telling her. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ She lingered a moment, deliberating, then decided, with the tact of the true professional, not to pursue the matter. I believe she knew what I was doing with myself and, because she had seen it all before, she knew the protocols to observe with a man who was trying to disappear.

  A person can disappear in a thousand different ways. For a long time, I’d been toying with the most commonly reported method, where he goes out in his shirtsleeves to buy a loaf of bread, or a pack of cigarillos, and, though his wife waits all afternoon and into the evening for his return, coming to the door from time to time and looking out at the empty street, as the daylight turns to lime green, then to grey, then to the deep, sweet blue of night, nothing is ever heard of him again. For me, this was a necessary myth, in spite of its cruelty. I rewrote it a thousand times, on the walk to work, or on Saturday afternoons when the fair came to town and set up its factory of light and rockabilly on a piece of wasteland sweetened with morning dew, and it was always a necessary myth, even if it seemed a little too easy to act upon, or too selfish to set in motion. For a long time, I had to settle for fiction: building new scenarios over days or weeks and storing them away in my library of mental compilations, like an amateur pornographer thinking up narratives of dominance or submission that he would never dream of enacting. I knew, all along, that this part of my life was a story. Not a fantasy, not that at all, but a story, a fiction, a piece of art. We are, all of us, walking libraries of the unspeakable, whited sepulchres where the real life we imagine is concealed behind talk of the weather, sensible shoes and a received morality that we more or less obey and more or less despise. We are trained to conceal the imagery of our dream lives – yet those images form a world in themselves, they make up an ecology, and it is to this world, this ecology, that I imagine travelling, when I entertain a slow afternoon’s dream of leaving, thinking myself out into the distance and away, with a handful of coins in my pocket and a fresh wind troubling the grass.

  One day, however, it came to me that, while the heart of this story was true, that it was necessary to disappear, I didn’t need to actually go anywhere for the vanishing to happen. The most banal element of the story – and the cruellest – was that gestural element, that walk to the end of the street or the corner shop, that cryptic note on the kitchen table, that abandoned car on a coast road with its scatter of misleading clues. One day it came to me that this disappearing act, this removal from a dishonest and dishonourable existence could happen of itself, at any time. Nothing needed to happen, nothing needed to change. One day, if I did what I needed to do, I could just be gone. A person can disappear in a thousand different ways, but maybe the best method was to stay put and do nothing. After Rick fell, all I wanted was to be a gardener and drift to the end of my life undisturbed. I was all set: a college garden, or some such place, would be my home for as long as I was able
to work, and I would have all the time in the world to practise my vanishing act. I would also have space to clean up my act. To simplify, cut back, pare down. By the time the call came through about my father’s second-to-last heart attack, I thought I was on my way to what the ancients called anachoresis, the calculated withdrawal to a good, or at least neutral, place, in order to remain untouched by the sins of the world. I thought I had it all worked out – and then I met Caroline.

  My childish experiments with Sandra Fulton, back in the prefabs, had aroused in me some difficult predilections that I could never quite explain, to myself, or to anybody else. Not sadomasochism, nothing like that, but a game that resembles that cliché in superficial ways, a game that involves hurt, though not, in most cases, harm. Over the years, I’d met others who shared a taste for this game – in some, nothing more than that, in others, a preference – but I’d never encountered anyone for whom the interest was exclusive. Most of the affairs I’d had, love affairs, one-night stands, sexual friendships, had been as normal as such things can be expected to be, and that was never a matter of regret, on my part at least. The impulse to enter into a particular game only applies to some partners, just as there are some people with whom we enjoy having dinner, or going to the cinema.

  Still, the choice of co-conspirator is crucial: what matters is to inhabit a space where hurting and harming are distinct events, a space where you cannot do to me what I would not have done to myself. It’s simply more of a pleasure when you surprise me. There may be times when one player – one of the co-conspirators – causes the other pain, but that is not the point. There are times when one or the other appears to be ‘in charge’, but that isn’t the point either. What matters is that these two – these conspirators – are making a game of the power that exists in every encounter. They acknowledge that power is part of the game they are playing, and instead of turning aside and pretending not to see, they make it into something graceful. At its best, this game is about transformation. At its worst, it becomes a gamble in which the stakes could be life and death.I didn’t know that until I fell in love with Caroline. She was the one who fulfilled the promise of my early encounters with Sandra, a promise that had lived with me for decades, just beneath the surface, visible to anyone who could see the signs.

  I met Caroline on the District and Circle Line late on a wet Friday evening: I had been to see a film, she was on her way home from a party. As it happened, I’d encountered her once before, in Oxford, but we hadn’t talked. On that occasion, she had appeared to be biding her time with the tanned-blond, minor-public-school, wine-by-the-river, hot-air ballooning crowd that drifted from pub to pub making a lot of noise and drawing attention to themselves, but it was clear that she wasn’t really with them. There was a distant, sardonic expression in her eyes when one of the blond beasts introduced her, a sense she gave out that she could have been anywhere that day, but she just happened to be there. I remembered how striking she was: around five eight, but taller-seeming; long dark hair bound in a tight plait; her eyes dark; her mouth darker. When we met again she was, if anything, even more striking: darker still, her hair and face damp from the rain, her eyes questioning. The way she looked at me, that night, was a warning: whatever else might happen, I was not to imagine that anything would be ordinary between us. Ordinary did not happen in her world.

  Still, to begin with, our brief romance proceeded along fairly predictable lines. If at times a tension was there, a sense of other possibilities that excited and perturbed me, I had to wait a while before the extraordinary began to unfold. Nothing happened quickly, there was all the time in the world; it was only gradually that – with exemplary tact and grace – Caroline introduced brief moments and fleeting passages of tender, and infinitely suggestive, pain. From there we built to something that, in its own way, was a work of art, a shifting and uncertain story that we were telling one another as we went along. The game we were playing was, necessarily, one of tacit understandings and invented rules, a play of unspoken questions and careful interpretations of thought, word and deed. I’m really not talking about S&M here, or not the S&M of media caricature, all belts and chains and SS uniforms. This was plain-clothes stuff, the unadorned work of the imagination. There was some blood, there were negligible burns, but mostly the darker moments were played out in the realm of possibility. For a couple of months, we went on, inventing, unravelling, remaking the rules as we went. All we wanted was that film noir sense of acting out, in our everyday surroundings, the exquisite pleasure of the moment when the plot is figured out: climbing the stairs, as headlamps sweep through the house, or walking home in the rain after a party, we would stop to notice and admire the final twist, that one sweet betrayal that neither of us expected. This, I imagined, was all either of us wanted – the sweet hurt, the grace note of the unexpected gift – and, for a time, I thought things would stay as they were, because there was no need to take things any further.

  A day or so after I got my sister’s call, I made the trip home. My father looked bad, and I guessed he wouldn’t last much longer, but he hadn’t died and that was the kind of thing that he took pride in. We didn’t have much to say to one another. I played one part, he played another, in a scene straight from the basic script unit: working-class son, who has not made good, visits sick father, who tries not to see through working-class son’s pretence of being better off than he is. We talked about the man who had died in the bed opposite earlier that day and, when we had nothing more to say to one another, I left, planning, but not promising, to visit the next evening. Afterwards, I took a bus over to Corby, where I went out drinking with some of the old crowd, but my heart wasn’t in it and soon I drifted off, wandering around town like a lost tourist, a little dismayed by the knowledge that I had grown up there: that I had got drunk or stoned in these garages on lonely sunlit afternoons, that I had sat for hours in this tree, or stood for hours at this gate with a girl whose face I could still remember, talking about everything and nothing, while the snow fell around us like the snow in an old movie. The Magnificent Ambersons, maybe. Everything good that had ever happened had seemed so inasmuch as it resembled a scene in a book or a film. Everything else had been vivid and messy and unacceptable. No wonder we lie, I thought, as I wandered around the streets where my father had come closest to being at home. We want life to be good.

  Then, all at once, I stopped walking and looked at myself in a shop window. I wanted to laugh out loud. What was I playing at? What fresh nonsense was this? I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I felt like one of those characters you see in old sports movies, wandering about his home town the night after his great defeat, alone, disheartened, on the point of giving up. Finally, he comes to a stop and sees himself reflected in a shop window: a half-visible face, confused, hurt, but not quite defeated. He is lost, for the moment, but he is also curious, and ready – too ready – for the moment when the music starts behind him and he decides to go back, to try again, to fight another day. I didn’t really fancy having, or even faking, that moment, but I did have a sense of being lost, of having been weighed down by something for too long. Not by my father, or rather, not by the man I had visited in the heart unit that afternoon. No: it was my own mistake, it was the little father in my own head that I had conspired with since I was old enough to talk, who had kept me bogged down. All my life, I had lived in his world: the things he had won, the things he had lost, the things he had been deprived of long before I even got there. It seemed, suddenly, that I couldn’t bear the burden of his grief, or his blame, any longer. The next day, I went by the hospital, saw that he had other visitors, and used that as an excuse to hurry away, back to my vanishing act, and back to Caroline, who was just beginning to turn against me, for reasons that I never did figure out.

  Our grand romance went sour very quickly. The first sign that something was wrong came on a wet night, a week or so after I got back from my nostalgie de la boue trip. We were walking back to her flat, and I was waitin
g for her to begin the conversation that she’d obviously been wanting to have all afternoon. I was thinking, from her manner, that she wanted to call things off, because she’d got tired or scared, because she’d met someone else, because I wasn’t large, or small, or clever, or dangerous enough for her. Instead, she told me that she was very ill: that nobody knew when, but sooner, rather than later, she was going to die. It had been raining, but now the rain had stopped, and the streets were glistening, wet with rain, the lights from the shops and the church on the corner reflecting on the wet pavements for yards ahead, as if we were walking on some shining, imaginary path. I stopped walking. In the church, a choir was singing, an extraordinary, layered sound that, for me, had to do with the pagan fabric of England, with yew trees and meadows and rain on the near hills, a sound as dark and miraculous as some old wood engraving. It was a perfect moment; it was even, in its way, exemplary – and it seemed strangely appropriate. Too appropriate, as if she had been waiting for the theatre of rain and light and song that it afforded. She said she had a disease that affected the blood and told me what it was called, but I didn’t really hear, and I still can’t recall what she said. I was stunned; yet she seemed very calm, almost content about it all.