A Lie About My Father

by John Burnside

  ‘How long have you known this?’ I asked. I felt dizzy, confused, unhappy – not because of what she had told me, but because I was beginning to realise, even then, that she was lying. I don’t know how I knew, and I couldn’t figure out what game she was playing, but I knew it was a serious, possibly ugly variation on the life we had already imagined for ourselves. At that moment, all I could see was a strange, theatrical shade of yellow in everything around me: the street, the rain, the shop windows, the lights of passing cars. It was recognisable as the yellow that might be found in a child’s paintbox, but it was strangely faded, on the other side of colour, like the ghastly, jaundiced yellow that suffuses an animal just before it dies. At the same time, it occurred to me that there was no reason not to believe her. She’d always had that brightness, that other-worldly glamour you find in certain characters in old films, like the soldier who pulls out a snapshot in the trenches and shows it to the hero, saying, ‘I never showed you a picture of my girl, did I?’, or the woman who is doomed from the moment the boy genius, who is destined for other things, begins to fall for her. It was perfectly possible that, as she was saying at that very instant, she had kept the truth from me, not knowing how to tell it, maybe hoping that we could enjoy what time we had before the illness took her – and yet it wasn’t possible at all, and I think it showed in my face, if only for a second, that I was unconvinced. A moment later, the necessary mask had slipped into place but, for that one second or two, she had seen, and I saw that she had seen, that I didn’t believe a word of her story.

  For a time, we continued as we had been, playing the game that, till then, had seemed so innocent and, at the same time, so graceful. For geographical reasons, we didn’t see one another that often, so we should have been able to carry on for longer, before things began to seem stale, the game repetitive, the invention strained. That wasn’t how it worked out, however: that deliberate and oddly pointless lie – which had gone nowhere, other than to introduce an air of mistrust into our affair – opened the door to a new sense of desperation, a need to go further, to take things beyond their logical limits. To begin with, what happened could be passed off as accidental; then, one Saturday night, I woke in her bed to find Caroline straddling me, her hands gripping my throat. In the eerie light from the street below, her face looked oddly determined, like the face of a child trying to complete some new task, but she wasn’t about to kill me, and I knew, even as I twisted her off and rolled aside, gasping a little, but more or less unharmed, that she’d been trying out an idea, and hadn’t really believed in her ability to see things through.

  The next attack was far more competent, however. It came a couple of weeks after the half-hearted strangling: it was a Sunday morning and we were in Caroline’s kitchen, making breakfast, not talking much, just enjoying the easy, slow feeling of being up and about a little later than the rest of the world, moving quietly around the kitchen, performing ordinary breakfast chores. There was a good bakery we used to visit on Saturdays, to pick up some of the dense, nutty wholemeal bread that was just right for thick wedges of buttered toast and those dark, sticky fruit spreads they used to sell in the grungey, grain and beeswax wholefood co-ops we both liked. Opening the cutlery drawer, Caroline had found the long, glittering blade of her best carving knife and, before she’d really formed a conscious intention, it was in her hand: that marvellous weight and balance, that miraculous gravitas of a good instrument, so lovingly made, so compelling in its logic. If I’d not turned around at the very moment I did, this beautiful knife would have lodged in a kidney, or between my ribs; but I did turn and, not altogether aware of what I was seeing or doing, I did fend her off and a moment that might have been – in her eyes, and possibly in mine – one of perfect, almost choreographed grace, ended up in a desperate grappling match, as we fell sideways against the counter and I wrestled the blade from her grasp. I was stronger, of course, and I had been lucky; and those two facts conspired, a moment later, to arouse in me the temptation – that gravity of the blade, that steely logic – to use the carving knife on her.

  My choosing not to do so was both a victory for common sense and a terrible betrayal. I had no idea why Caroline had attacked me, but when she saw me hesitate, with the knife in my hand, a sudden contempt darkened her face. I could not see our little game through to its logical conclusion. I could not do what she might have done to me. I doubt, even now, that she’d wanted to kill me, as such. Killing me wasn’t really the point. More likely, she was possessed by a desire for blood, a desire for the way into another, the deep cut, the irreversible pact of a wounding. It was a desire I understood, just as I understood the pact she had imagined between us, a union far more decisive, for her, than marriage could ever have been. Yet, even as I saw what was happening, I was also aware of wanting something else – and what I wanted was a separate, isolated state in which I would be forever intact, untouchable and unharmed, amidst the paraphernalia of my own erasure.

  Afterwards, she wrote me a beautiful letter. I read it carefully, held it for a moment, then I took it to work and burned it on the great bonfire behind the garden stores. I wanted to go back – I almost did – but I knew that it was over, and I chose to stay away. Not because Caroline had tried to cut me open with a carving knife, but because she had tried and failed. When I left her flat that Sunday morning, walking out into the sunlight and the noise of London, I felt that I was giving up on something that could never be repeated. I know that sounds odd, but fear and desire so often coexist that they seem almost identical, and I knew I would never be able to play that game again. From that moment on, my sense of such things would be by proxy, the way a cinema audience can appreciate it, without really having to be aware of what they are conspiring with: that sense you get in later Hitchcock films, say, or something by Nicholas Ray, or Jacques Tourneur, when you know things aren’t meant to come out right in the end and, even if they do, you know that safety wasn’t what mattered, it was that frisson, that sweet-bitter taste of noir that you wanted. This has nothing to do with the tragic, or the absurd; this is about desiring what you fear and fearing what you desire. This is about the perverse. For years afterwards, I would wake in the small hours and think I could hear someone – a woman, though not necessarily a particular woman – moving quietly about the lower rooms: going to the kitchen, finding a knife, then stopping to listen at the foot of the stairs, noticing some tiny shift, some change in the fabric of the house that was, in fact, my waking. She would pause a moment, then, waiting to see what might happen next – tense, lithe, radiant with anticipation, she would be, in these half-dreams, unaccountably beautiful – and for that split second before I was fully awake, I wanted to go down and meet her halfway, just so she could see that I hadn’t forgotten her, that I had known, all along, that she was there.

  Back in Cambridge, things got out of control again. I was living in a one-room bedsit, with a shared bathroom which I never used; the furniture comprised a bed, a wooden chair and a large, battered-looking wardrobe. After I left Caroline, I was alone and I closed up into that solitude like a spring flower closing against the dark. I called in sick to work, saying I’d be back in a couple of days, then I descended, one more time, into my own slow undercurrents. Technically, I imagine, I was suffering from paranoia: I conceived the notion that I was about to be attacked by some phantom who was roaming the streets of Cambridge searching for me, a phantom who was my not-quite-identical twin, the je to my autre, my own dark self and not myself at all. To protect myself against this imp, I collected bottles, which I then filled with river water, rain water, urine, milk tainted with drops of blue-black ink. It was a fortnight before they found me, but when they did, it was too late for even the most well-meaning intercession. I have no memory of being taken away, watched by the curious, politely concerned fellow tenant who’d found me, but it seems I’d spent days in my room, wrapped in a sheet, surrounded by several dozen bottles filled with various liquids, and covered in words and numbers that I
had drawn on my skin with felt-tip markers. As a final, mysterious touch, someone – presumably myself – had laced green ribbons through my fingers again and again, binding my hands, rendering me powerless, beyond the possibility of touch. It took some time before I could be persuaded to part with these favours – and by the time I did, I was already swimming in the smoky underworld of chlorpromazine.

  Something wonderful happened during my second stay at Fulbourn. On my first visit, I had wanted to be gone as quickly as possible: as soon as my body got accustomed to the drugs, I started trying to fake my way back to the farce in which I had been so caught up. Now, however, I was more engaged with what was happening: maybe the meds were stronger, maybe I was just more susceptible. Maybe it was just that there were no distractions this time around: no Cathy, no visitors, no desire for normality, no fear of falling off the edge of the social world. This time, there was a story.

  As I remember it now – and my memory is at variance with the medical record, which means it is nothing if not suspect – I responded quickly to medication, but as soon as the drugs stabilised me, something new happened. I was, as I saw it, utterly lucid; but I wasn’t back to normal: or rather, I wasn’t back to the functional, everyday rationality that I had been trained to think of as lucid. After my first visit, I had left Fulbourn restored to that rudimentary lucidity: able to function, as long as I kept taking the pills; more or less well adjusted, as they say in old films; capable of making my way in the outside world without too much fuss and mess. This time, however, it was different. This time, I was super-lucid. Hyper-lucid. I could see everything. I understood everything. One morning, when I emerged from what the official record calls the ‘psychotic’ stage, I realised that I could see with perfect clarity; or rather, I was able to give everything I saw its due: the window, the chair, the tree in the grounds, that one cloud in the sky.

  The turning point came when I was sitting in the day room one morning. There was a vase of tulips on the table, and I was gazing at them, trying to work out exactly what they were. I knew they were tulips, of course, but I also sensed that they were something else, fields of energy, fields of colour, and I was trying to descry in them that otherness, that perfect, Platonic form they embodied. It was mid-morning, some time after breakfast, and I was alone in the day room – or, rather, I was alone but for these tulips, and the light that, falling through the window behind me, suddenly changed. Not so very much, really, but enough for the colours of the flowers to change: lemon, to butter-coloured, to a sudden translucent gold. It was breathtaking. Things were changing all the time, pulsing, and I could see it, I could feel it, just the way it felt on acid, only steadier, less feverish, better tuned. I knew this was significant, but I couldn’t have said why – and then I saw that the world itself was an unbreakable secret, not just because I couldn’t have put into words what I was seeing at that moment, but also because, even if I had the words, nobody would understand what it was that I wanted to say. Another person could experience this for himself, but I couldn’t have told him about it. It was like acid; or rather, it was like acid without acid.

  Then, quietly, with no great fanfare, it occurred to me that I’d finally become invisible. I had, in fact, been invisible for some time: not altogether, of course, there was something in the world that people could still see, but what they didn’t see was the self I was, the self that sees, the self that sees them. I was invisible – but I hadn’t got that way by being mad, or ill, or whatever the social world wanted to call me. I had become invisible just by being there, isolated in that dark garden. I had achieved the Limbo state merely by being prepared for it: I had entered another space, and it would have been perfectly possible to stay there for ever. Not, perhaps, in that place as such, but the choice was there, nonetheless. I could go back to the outside world, or I could pass years in these bright parentheses, learning the etiquette of invisibility till some new life was awakened in my body, some new energy that might begin at the base of the spine, or behind the eyes, or in the quick of the fingernails, a quick within the quick, a life within the life. I was in Limbo, but I wasn’t in some strange, altered state. My Limbo was the long corridor to the front door at evening, the view of the great cedar tree in the grounds, the still of the night when I could get up and wander about, or sit in the day room in the blessed absence of television. It was the anonymity of the walls; the wide space of the refectory; the smell of rain on the windows. On my first visit, I had been painfully aware of the other guests; now, I barely noticed them, and the nurses were the merest phantoms, dressed in civilian clothes and, so, almost indistinguishable from their charges, except when they came, at the appointed hours, to dispense the benedictions of Heminevrin and Largactil. Before, I had been intent on getting well; now, I had entered the stillest possible world, a world where everything came into view slowly, perfectly, all the good objects surfacing, as if from a sleep, into the light. On my last visit to Fulbourn I’d been too lost, too desperate to get back to the fray of the outside world to see its possibilities. I’d also been distracted, once I’d emerged from the week-long nightmare of Atropa belladonna, by the desire to prove myself sane. Now, I didn’t care about that: I was beyond human concerns, out in a world of glass and darkness and rain, the world I had always inhabited in my imagination. In heaven, they might dine on ambrosia, or manna, or some other pure substance; in Limbo, I could switch back and forth between Largactil and acid: perfect stillness alternating with endless vibrancy; sub specie aeternitatis with forensic detail; Buddhic detachment with monotheist passion. Fullness, pleroma, satori. Chemically induced, of course, but satori nonetheless.

  Looking back, I think I came much closer to making myself at home in that artificial Limbo than I realised, once the story was over. I call it a story because, from here on in, everything is narrative: a delusion, in conventional terms, but for me a story, a series of imagined, vividly real moments. As I walked away from Fulbourn after that second, and final, stay, I remembered a time, long before, of walking in a gas-coloured light at the edge of a wide estuary somewhere, and hearing, out across the water, an enormous commotion of geese, moving towards me. Hearing them first, then seeing them: a thick wave of muscle and plumage; flecked, insistent wings and dark, smooth heads surging onwards, wave after wave, including me somehow in their flight, so I felt they would carry me with them, felt that I could almost have burst with joy at their sheer sense of purpose, surging onward for no reason, other than the thrill of the air and the imperative of their migratory blood. That day, on the road back to the city, I knew I would never allow myself to be taken in again. I had nowhere to go, but I had people who would help me – and I had a plan. I was tired of the life I had been living; I was tired of the drugs and the parties; I was tired of the road of excess; I was tired of living at the edge all the time, trying not to fall away into the dark. Most of all, I was tired of self. The doctors hadn’t been altogether convinced I was ready to leave, but they had never had any real power over me; I hadn’t been committed, and I could go any time I chose. So I chose. They were good enough to send me off with an ample supply of medication, and some kind words along with the inevitable warnings – and I was on my way, armed with a pocketful of normality and a whole set of good intentions. I didn’t care where I ended up, and I didn’t care what I had to do, but I did have a plan, however tentative. To put that plan into action, I needed somewhere new to hide and, given the situation, there was only one thing to do. It was time to go to Surbiton.

  For several weeks, I drifted, ending up in Surrey, where I found a job as a dogsbody in a retirement village near Cranleigh. Not exactly Surbiton, but close enough and, to begin with, this was exactly what I wanted. It was my job to keep the grounds neat, maintain the perimeter fencing, mow the lawns and trim the hedges. I was the one who went out in the cold to dig spent mushroom compost into the shrub beds or spread a mulch of chipped bark on the borders. It was all outdoor work, and it had mostly to do with the gardens. Once a week
I had to drive a mini-tractor and trailer around the village, collecting the garbage. This was a dull job and, because it brought me into more regular contact with the appalling Supervisor of Outdoor Maintenance, an ex-services type called Graham, one I would have preferred to do without. The only time it engaged me was on those few occasions when one of the residents had died. Not surprisingly, this happened fairly often, and it was the job of the Supervisor of Indoor Services – a hatchet-faced little woman named Alice – to ensure that the decedent’s personal effects were disposed of. Sometimes family would come and retrieve anything of monetary or sentimental value; what was left after they had gone was dumped in the miniature garage or shed that abutted each dwelling, for me to bag up and take away.