A Lie About My Father

by John Burnside

  I enjoyed this job. It was eerie, and strangely pleasurable, handling the ephemera and junk that had accumulated over a stranger’s lifetime. Most of what I took to the dump was fairly predictable stuff: mildewed books, empty journals, half-finished toiletries from decades past, unwanted clothes, boxes of old magazines or knitting patterns, cheap ornaments and souvenirs from holidays in Spain or Holland, objects no longer useful, broken possessions, things too worn or too pathetic to keep – but that was exactly what I enjoyed about the work. There was a history in all this junk, a secret history of moments and afternoons, a history more intimate and more expressive than the enduring narratives of years and decades. The obituaries in local newspapers told what these people had been, but the knick-knacks and empty bottles they left behind in death told what they had wanted to be. One afternoon in the late fifties, Mr Alfred Gilmour, a gaunt, scare-faced old man who lived by himself at the far edge of the village, had gone to see a play – one of many, perhaps, or perhaps for the first and the last time – and he had been so moved, or inspired by what he saw, that he kept the programme, folded neatly into a book on salmon fishing, till the day he died. Perhaps he had gone to the theatre with a special friend, or a lover; perhaps he had gone on his own and fallen in love with the actress. It didn’t matter: what mattered, to me, was how a few sheets of paper suggested, in their faded, violet beauty, another version of time than the one history imposed, something forensic, something almost homeopathic.

  When I had to clear out a dead resident’s garage, I always made sure I had time to do the task well. I picked through the relics of each life carefully, but I never took anything away (I was too superstitious, I think, for that), and I always bagged things up with an undertaker’s reverence, not for the person who had passed away, but as a gesture of respect for lost time. Yet as I worked, at the back of my mind, I was thinking of my father. Somewhere in all this junk, I half hoped I would find a clue to the keepsake or talisman he would have held on to for half a century, had he lived as these people had. I’m not sure how much of this I recognise after the fact, but I look back now and think that, at the time, I knew I had lost my father – whatever I thought my father had been – and the only way I could bring him back was by this process of sorting and honouring and bagging up somebody else’s junk. If I couldn’t have my own father, I could, perhaps, distil from the possessions of these many fathers a kind of essence: an abstraction gradually made flesh, a creature of my own invention. A homunculus I could take away and seal up in my imagination, where nobody else could see him, beyond the terms of ordinary logic, and so beyond any possibility of denial.

  There is a hummingbird that lives in the cold deserts of Chile and Peru, a tiny, jewelled bird that, every night, when the temperature plunges to below freezing, settles into some half-sheltered spot, some angle of cactus branch, say, and allows itself to die a little, slowing its metabolism till only the heart and the liver still function. Through the dark hours, it sits, ice-cold, immobile; then, when the sun returns, it comes back to life and begins, once again, to flit from cactus to cactus, sipping the sweet nectar. There are worms that live in glaciers, whole lifetimes and generations unfolding in ice, birds that settle on freezing lakes at nightfall and wait, locked in and vulnerable to predators, till morning comes – and there are men who live as I lived then, locked down for weeks or months at a time, only ever coming up for little sips of air, tiny flickers and glimpses of starlight in the long darkness. It suited me, then; and, in modified form, I can see it becoming necessary again, at certain times in this life, an almost Darwinian adaptation, a calculated strategy for survival. It wasn’t Limbo, it wasn’t even Surbiton, but it was close. I couldn’t think of anywhere better to disappear and forget everything that had mattered to me in the past: friends, lovers, enemies, people who thought they knew me, people who thought I owed them, people I owed, people who owed me, helpers and dealers, buyers and sellers. I had been playing for too long and, in the process, I had forgotten what it was I really loved. I’d been sold a very elaborate lie; what I needed to do was practise my new-found invisibility. Draw water, chop logs. Breathe. Say nothing.

  This is where I was when I got the news that my father had died. It was my day off and I’d fallen asleep in the afternoon, only waking as it grew dark, chill and befuddled, with that odd, dislocated sense of being in a strange and mysterious place, even if it was the room I inhabited every day, a place where anything could happen. I’d raised myself from the chair where I’d drifted off over a book, and been drawn to the window by that first impulse of every daytime sleeper: the desire to see that the world is still there, where you left it. What I saw was the street I always saw, the parked cars, the hedges, the one street lamp; but around this pale light, flying in an irregular and utterly unpredictable orbit, a bat was describing wide circles, feeding, no doubt, on the tiny insects that gathered there, drawn to the illusory warmth of the lamp. I don’t know, now, why this solitary bat struck me as so poignant; I don’t know what notion or possibility it represented, but it did seem important, and I stayed a while, to watch, to wait for whatever it was telling me to register. I thought it had something to do with the way I was living, something to do with solitude and nourishment and belonging to a wider world, but the thought escaped me and, at that moment, the telephone rang. I didn’t want to answer, and I considered letting it go. It was late, I thought, but there was still time to walk down to the railway cutting and taste the cool night air. I often ignored the phone, and I don’t know why I was prompted to pick it up on this particular occasion, but I did and, over the next few minutes, as I watched the bat circle in the yellowish light, I listened, responding where necessary, while Margaret told me that my father had died of a heart attack, his fourth and last, the one he had been expecting for so long. When I put the phone down, the bat was gone too, and I had to smile at the thought that crossed my mind: an absurd notion, but one I entertained for several seconds, not just that night, but during the days and nights that followed, sometimes for minutes at a time, like those foolish anecdotes that surround any death, a story that is pleasant in the telling yet, even as it is recounted, is obviously neither fact nor falsehood, simply an anecdote, a fanciful tale that could just as easily have been left untold.

  CHAPTER 10

  I wake in the dark. Something has just dropped off the end of the bed and landed softly, its claws – the whisper of claws is unmistakable, even if it is the sound of two feet landing, not four – its hard, bright claws retracted for the moment as it skitters away across the wooden floor; and I’m suddenly alert, picking up the ghost figures of silver light on the wall, the grey-blue shadows in the mirror, the bird shapes that shiver across the ceiling. I’m scanning for movement, or some deliberate stillness, something animal in the room, something animal and, at the same time, human, or human-seeming, a living blackness, an attentive shape that ought not to be there. For a minute or more this is fear in its purest form, not anxiety or concern, not the ordinary care of the daylight hours, but ancient, blood-level, irrational, utterly compelling fear. I wonder, sometimes, if animals ever feel it, when they lie down in a familiar place, safe from the weather, safe from predators. Do animals experience terror? Do they wake in the dark from cruel nightmares, believing they have screamed or called out, then lie still for minutes, amazed at the silence? I think of myself as a person without phobias: spiders, open spaces, snakes, water, bats – I am indifferent, or slightly attracted to them all. I am not afraid of death. I have no particular terror or dread I could talk about in the daytime; yet I have this: the nightmare, the waking, these blood-begotten spirits.

  They are not long, these terrors by night. After a minute or so, I am shaking my head, dismissing the phantom, half remembering a dream to explain it all away – but I’ll know, too, that I’m being dishonest with myself, that the apparition comes too often not to have some real existence, here in this room, here in my body and mind, and, deeper and older than I am myself, in my b
lood and nerves, in memory and foreboding. It’s something imagined and something real: the two are not exclusive. It’s my fear, is the easiest way to describe it, but it’s my excitement too. It’s thrilling; it’s alive; it’s a form of energy I cannot help but recognise as both alien and mine. I’ve sometimes pictured this phantom – which is always the same, as true and continuous as I am, ageing with me, learning new tricks, becoming darker and more solid as I become darker and more solid – but I cannot fix it long enough to see it whole. All I am left with is the impression of some lithe thing, some creature more malevolent and, at the same time, more innocent than I had expected, half-human, half-animal, a smile hidden in its face, its whole being shaped and drawn from blackness. I do not know what this phantom wants, or whether it even wants anything at all. I do not know if it means me harm, or is the angel of some annunciation that I cannot quite bring myself to accept. I know nothing about it, other than these fleeting impressions, yet I think – or rather, I have convinced myself – that I remember exactly when it was born. No doubt it existed in some embryonic form before I found it and gave it presence, but it was born, it came into being for me, one wet Saturday morning in Crosshill.

  That morning my father said something that stayed with me for years, for no good reason, or none that I could think of. We were standing in a bus shelter, on one of our visits home: I was eleven, maybe twelve, and wishing I didn’t have to go back to Corby; my father was sober, which meant he was in a dark mood, unhappy as he always was in the vicinity of his in-laws, who – as he saw it, and probably in their own hearts – judged him harshly and found him wanting. By then, I was as used to my father’s dark and unhappy moods as I was to his drink-fuelled mania, but that day something was different. He was sad, preoccupied, even a little tender, as if he was concerned for me, as if it had suddenly struck him that I was actually there, as alive and as capable of suffering as he was. I don’t know what could have prompted that recognition in him, and I don’t remember where my mother and Margaret were that day. All I know is that we were alone, and it was raining that slow summer rain I’d known all my life, a warm sooty smoor of it on my face and hair as I ducked into the shelter with this difficult, silent man, so unlike the one I usually knew and feared. It was like being abandoned suddenly to the tender mercies of a complete stranger.

  The shelter was one of those old-fashioned concrete-and-metal affairs with a flat tin roof and tiny panes of reinforced glass. I still see them from time to time on run-down estates, or out on remote country roads, standing empty in the sun like derelict cages, the glass clouding with rust, the cold walls plastered with graffiti. I don’t recall where we had just been, or where we were going, but I do remember that we’d recently heard of the death of a family friend, not quite a relative, but someone my father must have liked. It was hard to know, then, about liking: men didn’t show affection in ways that a child could understand; affection, where it existed, was a matter of hints and allusions, all mysterious glimmer and jokey insult, subtle and fleeting and always at risk from sudden outbursts of random anger. Or so it seemed to me, growing up among these dangerous creatures, navigating my way by guesswork through the world of men whose very presence was both a threat and a wonder. The man who had died, a surly but likeable giant called Wullie McFee, had been one of these beautiful monsters, sharp-tongued and cruelly funny among men, but always ready, when women and children were present, with a half-mocking, half-friendly half-smile that I always found reassuring. He had worked underground at the pits all his life, but I remember him as being retired, sitting in the club with my father and his friends, or walking along the high street in Cowdenbeath, strangely awkward and exposed in the ordinary light of day, among ordinary people and objects, like Gulliver in Lilliput. Not long after we had moved south, Wullie had become ill. We had heard about it, along with all the usual news from home, a Christmas or so back, but there had been no further word, and I suppose my father had assumed that no news was good news. As it turned out, Wullie’s illness had been much more serious than he had pretended to his friends, to his children, even to his wife. No doubt he had decided, as men often do when they are sick, that such weakness was not allowed. Maybe he had decided to ignore the thing, hoping it would go away of its own accord. Or maybe he had sat in the surgery, one damp autumn afternoon, nodding softly, his mouth set, listening to the doctor’s pronouncements and thinking – as all of us had been taught to think – that this was how the world was, birth and work and death and, in my mother’s words, what’s for ye will not go by ye.

  There were precious few secrets in that little coal-mining community. People knew one another’s business, a man’s fate was written in his face, the old folk looked at a ten-year-old boy and saw his life unfolding like a recipe from some well-kent cookbook: school for a few more years, work at the pit, marriage, children the spit of himself and his wife, old age, death, erasure. The chief pleasure of the place, for men and women alike, was the knowing, the sense of what can ye expect for folk like us, the gossip they exchanged in grim, satisfied huddles at the club, or round at the drying green, a long narrative of pretension and comeuppance, of hope, or ambition, or blind desperation and the quiet, inevitable falls that followed. The worst offence, for those people, was the keeping of a secret, yet secrets there were, and one of those secrets, till the darkness in his face gave him away, was Wullie McFee’s illness. I barely knew the man, but I remember his eyes, and his queer smile, and I think he enjoyed it, in some secret chamber of his being, that he alone knew what was coming, that he had something to think about, something to hold in his mind, something to study and wonder at and raise to the light, like a fragment of stained glass that nobody else could see. He was probably afraid, too, and he probably worried about those he would leave behind, but I’d like to think that this secret was precious to him: that, in a life which had belonged mostly to others, his death had been his own, for a while at least.

  Naturally, people would have guessed towards the end. Still, it had come as a surprise, one Wednesday afternoon in the early summer, when Wullie had died, sitting upstairs on the bus to Dunfermline, his cigarette sliding from his fingers and burning a hole in the seat, his dwindled body sliding sideways and down, while two girls from the Co-op watched, not quite knowing what to do as the bus rolled on, then finally ringing the bell madly, five, ten, who knows how many times, till the bus came to an unscheduled stop. The conductor had come upstairs then, followed by a gaggle of curious passengers, some of them neighbours of Wullie’s, none of them complete strangers, and I can imagine, now, that Wullie was still there for a minute or so, or maybe longer, while they discussed what to do. Maybe someone loosened his tie, or rolled up a raincoat to stuff under his head while someone – one of the girls, or a keen boy on his way to football practice – ran to fetch help. It was too late, of course, and most of them probably knew that, but they had to do what people did in such situations, and I can imagine Wullie acknowledging that fact, as he slipped away, with something in his head that he wanted to say, and nobody there that he wanted to say it to, or some detail of this life, some wisp of scent, some trick of the light, glowing like an ember in his fading consciousness.

  ‘If there’s one thing I couldn’t stand,’ my father had said, after he had taken in the news, ‘it would be that. Dying on a bus, in public. Dying with strangers gawping at you, down on the floor, with some complete stranger poking at you – ’

  Twenty years later, on his way to the cigarette machine in the Silver Band Club, he suffered his fourth heart attack and died where he fell, with two of his mates, neither of them anywhere near sober, peering down into his face as it turned grey and – in the words of one of his drinking pals, who told me all about it at the funeral – he went out like a light, the life dimmed, the mouth slackened. I have seen three men die in my life and I am grateful I wasn’t there when it was my father’s turn. When I’d gone to visit him after his third attack, there had been something about his fear – the
fear of dying, of course, but also the fear of dying among strangers, in a hospital ward – that made me feel twelve years old again. That fear in my father’s eyes brought back a sudden and quite unexpected grief, a grief I had felt years before, and managed to forget, grief for a lost demigod, grief for the beautiful and inexplicably tragic figure he had sometimes cut in my child’s world, sitting at family funerals and weddings with the other men, a dark, bruised presence, shrouded in whisky and smoke. I remembered him, for a moment, as a person of simple pleasures: I recalled his fondness for the newly opened pack of Kensitas, I remembered the glitter on that skin of tobacco scent and foil that he stripped away as he drew out the first smoke, a faint glimmer blowing away in the wind, or sculpted into a child’s fleeting trinket, later on, his tar-stained fingers shaping frogs or butterflies from silver foil and a trace of whisky. The cellophane would glimmer in the fire, a ghost of matter, blue along the snaking tear-strip, but the pack itself he cradled to his inner pocket, where it perched, birdlike and still. I remember loving the way he tapped out a cigarette with one brisk movement, then lit it with a match from nowhere, smoke appearing like the dead in those old photographs of spirit mediums, ghosts of woodbine conjured from the air. In the evenings, after he had gone out, my mother sometimes left the doors and windows standing open for an hour or longer, long enough for frost to settle on a candlewick bedspread, or the kitchen table, the cold kiss of it on my spiced fingertips perfect and chill, like the moment in the Annunciation story when Mary lifts her head and the angel is there, his wings flexed, his purpose suddenly revealed. Back then, I think, there were days when I imagined my father was immortal.

  Then, suddenly, he was small and afraid, and I felt a twelve-year-old’s helplessness as he described how he had wakened in the small hours and watched the man in the opposite bed die, unseen, unnoticed, in a strange place, fading out in his own private world, unaware – at the last – that my father was watching from eight feet away. ‘But what if he did know?’ my father had said. ‘What if he could see me watching him? I’d never even spoken to the boy, and there he was, dying right in front of my eyes.’