A Lie About My Father

by John Burnside

  ‘Didn’t you call for someone?’ I asked him.

  My father shook his head. ‘He was dying,’ he said. ‘I could see that. Let the boy go in peace, I say.’

  ‘They might have been able to save him,’ I ventured.

  My father pursed his lips and looked away. It was late afternoon, an unseasonably cold, wet day. The window was freckled with rain and touched with a sulphury light from the parking bay below. ‘For what?’ he asked, finally. His voice was quiet, buried deep in his chest, as if it was something he wanted to keep to himself, something he begrudged me. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, after a moment, ‘whatever else happens, don’t let me go like that. When my time comes.’

  I nodded. Maybe that was when I felt like a twelve-year-old all over again, quietly forced into making a promise I couldn’t keep. A promise nobody could keep. As it happened, he ended up dying in a public place, and I know he would have hated it, but there was nothing I could have done to prevent that. All I can think is, at least he was among friends, that, in a place like Corby, it could have been worse. I once saw a man die from blood loss on the steps of a pub. He had been stabbed in the neck as he emerged from the Maple Leaf, about a minute before a friend and I pushed open the door to leave: when we found him, he was on the ground, the blood already pooling around him, black and dark-smelling on the night air, and immediately my friend was clutching at my sleeve, telling me we should go, that we shouldn’t get involved. I knew that made sense – our pockets were full of acid and grass – but I lingered a moment, against my will, half drunk, curious, touched. The look in that man’s eyes was a combination of panic – he knew he was going, and he knew nobody could help him – and dismay that he could be dying like this, a door swinging open in his face and two men he didn’t know stopped in their tracks, looking down, then stepping, not quite over, but by him, and hurrying away. My father was lucky not to die like that: the half-drunk faces peering into his after he hit the floor were at least faces he recognised, and by the time a crowd had gathered – so his mates told me – he was long gone.

  This is the problem with death: we always imagine dying alone. We forget that, almost certainly, other things will be going on when we make our exit – that, in all likelihood, death, like everything else, takes place, as Auden says, ‘while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’. It’s a fortunate corpse that flickers out when the world’s back is turned and, though animals are supposed to find private corners and crannies to die in, most of us have to be prepared for company at the end – and the company of strangers at that. Perhaps this idea horrified my father because, all his life, he had kept strangers at bay, one way or another, with his ‘wee stories’, as my mother called them, though she had always known they were outright, and often utterly absurd, lies. I suppose even he knew that death was the one occasion he couldn’t lie his way out of.

  That morning in Crosshill, then, he was thinking about Wullie McFee, and about himself. Thinking about the ignominy of dying on a bus, with strangers gawping into your face, stealing your last breath and tainting it with grease and smoke and cheap perfume – but for my father, Wullie’s death was the sign of some greater insult. By that summer’s morning, I think, he was ready to feel Wullie’s helplessness so keenly because he was just beginning to see how helpless he had become. He hadn’t gone to Corby to start a new life, he had gone because there was nowhere else to go. After his accident, my mother hadn’t wanted him to work on the building any more, and I think he too had been frightened, in spite of himself: frightened by the way his face changed while he was lying in the hospital and frightened by the sheer random force of events that could take a man like him, a man who had stood proud and intact in his own skin for forty years, never once doubting that, physically at least, he was invincible, and alter him overnight into the broken, bewildered creature he had been on the ward. Physical integrity was all he had: his mind wasn’t his own, his history was mostly fake, but he did have his body – to work, to swim, to fight, to drink, to hoist a child high into the air and see its scared, excited face gazing down at him. Now that body had been called into question and he’d been obliged to begin again, to wipe the slate clean, to test himself in new surroundings, coming in from the open air, where he had always worked, to the closed heat and racket of the steelworks. How galling it must have been, when the new start that had cost him so much made no difference to his family, that nobody wanted the Corporation house on Handcross Court, or the leatherette three-piece suite in the front room, or the television and radiogram he bought with his compensation money. How galling to think that they would rather have stayed at home, in Crosshill or Cowdenbeath, back where they started.

  This is hindsight, of course, but I believe he was thinking of all these things, of Wullie’s death, of his fragility, of the death that was waiting for him, like an old mate, down at the bookies, or on the next street corner, and I believe he was thinking about – or rather, not thinking, but feeling, enduring in its rawest form – the ordinary and seemingly inevitable failure into which he had fallen when, all of a sudden, standing in that dreary concrete bus shelter, he raised his fist and smashed one of the reinforced window panes, scattering slivers and pearls of glass over the concrete floor while I stood watching, horrified, suddenly afraid. He smashed one, then another, then another, only pausing for a moment to give me a twisted, oddly quizzical look, as if he was just as surprised as I was – surprised, but pleased too, as he continued to work, smashing one pane after another, his knuckles bleeding now and crusted with broken glass. I had been afraid of my father before that day, but it had always been an indoors affair, a hidden, secret, forgettable terror that lasted through one drunken night and melted away the next morning. I had seen blackness in my father’s face, but it had been a local event, a mood, a passing phenomenon. But that morning, it was different. For the first time, I realised that he wasn’t just afraid of death, in the usual way, he was terrified. At times, his terror infused him with rage and panic, and he didn’t know what to do with himself. I think there must have been times when he wanted to die, just to be free of that almighty fear. Most of the time, though, his fear sat inside his head, a dark, ugly spirit, watching, waiting. I couldn’t help thinking, when Margaret called to tell me that he had died, that it was finally gone now, that he wasn’t afraid any more. And I couldn’t help thinking that a little piece of tainted, fearful blackness had disappeared from my life.

  The time comes when each of us sees a blackness in the world: a black in the green of leaf and river, a black in the light of noon, a blackness in the gaze of an animal encountered some early morning in the summer grass. There is a blackness in everything that is, a darkness that is hard to see, more often than not, a blackness that is not only necessary, but also for the best. For the best. It’s a phrase my grandfather was fond of using, but he used it, not to mean good, or right, or anything else that had to do with human judgement, but as the token of a way of being, a way of accepting what life did that never crumbled into resignation, a way of knowing the difference between submission and surrender. My grandfather saw the black in things and in himself too, and he stood back from it, stood away, holding it at arm’s length, the better to see it. He had also been damaged: like my father, he’d been smashed up in an accident at work – in his case, the collapse of a shaft in the pit – but he’d come through it with more resolve, maybe because his body mattered less to him than his faith. The hurt he had suffered, and the changes he’d been obliged to make as a result, had made him stronger, more compassionate and, at the same time, quieter in himself. At family events, at christenings and weddings and funerals, he might sometimes sit off by himself, a still, unmoving phenomenon, but still the way a pond in the woods is still, a not altogether solid thing that was as much potential as it was presence. I liked to loiter just outside his orbit, waiting to be called in, to be questioned in that soft, coal-dark voice he had, a voice that took itself seriously, but was never s
olemn or self-conscious. Towards the end, when it was an effort for him to get out of the house at all, he would sit in his chair and watch as the children he had raised, and their children in turn, pursued the life he had more or less relinquished, but when he spoke, his voice was still alive, still vivid, still rich with the black of the earth he had dug and the raw gold of his known history. Not that he ever said anything particularly wise or revealing. He was a man of simple faith, as the priests used to say, a man set in his own beliefs and ways. He had nothing to say, in words; all he possessed, by then, was that dark, live voice, an insinuation in it of knowledge he could never have told, but knew beyond question in his blood and in his bones. Part of that knowledge was light – the light off snow at Christmas, the light of church candles, the pale bronze light of the upper room where he had clumsily tended his wife in her dying – but the rest, I think, was composed of blackness: the blackness in himself, the blackness he had seen in the far reaches of the pits, the blackness of pain and the ordinary fears of the deprived and, beyond all that, the abstract blackness of the world, a blackness he had touched, a blackness he had recognised as kith and kin, a blackness he had held at arm’s length long enough to accommodate it. He was just a working man from Crosshill, a man like his neighbours who had brought up a family on next to nothing, a man who had aged quickly and watched his wife die by degrees in their narrow house, but that soft, dark glow in his voice spoke of something else which, though it was far more complicated than what we usually think of when we use the word, had a definite undertone of victory.

  My father’s blackness was different – and that morning, I saw it for the first time. Where my grandfather had held it out and away, the better to control it, my father took it in, like some brother he would rather have done without, but could not turn from his door. He knew he was afflicted, and had decided to relish the affliction. He made it a piece of himself, a distinguishing feature, but it wasn’t his to own and, over the years, it came to possess him. That morning was the first time I recognised it for what it was and, though I couldn’t have told what I had seen, I knew. I had seen the blackness in things before, out in the fields, in the eyes of a rat draped in a thorn bush, or the hollowed faces of dead lambs; I had seen it in Mr Kirk’s hen house after the fox had got in; I had seen it in ponds dense with frogs’ spawn and in the black shadows of ivy and, once, in the black silt of the leech-infested loch where Stewart Banks and I had swum one bright afternoon, I had gazed down through the lit water at a black that had to do with time and erosion and forces that were indifferent to all human concerns. Finally, that morning, as my father stood smashing those panes of glass one after another with his reddening fist, I saw the darkness in him and I realised it was continuous, running from field to field, from hedge to hedge, from street to street and in, through the town, to the closed rooms where we ate and slept. Continuous, in the life of everything, and continuous from blood to blood, from him to me, an inescapable fact of existence. His darkness is also mine, or rather, it belongs to nobody. It takes up residence where it can – perhaps where it will – and from that point on, all we can do is try to manage it.

  Nowadays, I will turn sometimes and find that same blackness staring back at me from a night-time window, or a half-lit mirror. There are days when that dark face is something I can think of as a friend – a primal energy that carries me forward when nothing else will – but more often than not I am face to face with a stranger, a companion to something I recognise as myself, sure enough, but one who knows more than I do, thinks less of danger and propriety than I ever have or will, feels a cool and amused contempt for the rules and rituals by which I live, the duties I too readily accept, the compromises I too willingly allow. We make our meek adjustments – but there is always a dark buzz in the soul that despises any and all adjustments, a careless, erotic energy that wants to break every rule and simply be. This is the creature that rises from my bed in the night and sits there watching, waiting to be realised. When I wake, it drops to the floor and skitters away, dwindling as it goes, fading away into shadows and murmurs, a creature of the night only because I refuse to allow it a daytime existence, I who am a man, in the ordinary and fearful business of living in the world, and keeping my true self hidden. Part of this daytime enterprise is the tissue of lies by which I construct a visible self. Sometimes the lies are authorised, the textbook lies of citizenship and masculinity and employment we are all obliged to tell. Occasionally, they are the lies that reveal the unofficial version of the self, the truth of being. My father was searching for a lie of that calibre all his life. I think he expected to say something, one fine day, and everything would just slip into place: who he was, where he belonged, what was good about his soul. To my knowledge, it never happened. Or maybe it did, and he never realised. Maybe he told the perfect lie, the one that showed him what he really was, just minutes before he stood up, at the Silver Band Club, and walked off to the cigarette machine, half-cut, a little dizzy, and wholly oblivious to the significance of what he had just revealed to a ragtag gathering of old friends and familiar strangers.

  CHAPTER 11

  By the time I got to Corby, he was safely stowed away at the funeral home. Margaret met me, and drove me to the house, which was even more bare than I remembered: the tea service that my mother had kept intact for so long had vanished over the years; all her clothes, and most of his, had been given away, or burned; the kitchen was empty, my old room was empty, the piano was long gone, my father’s room was reduced to a bed and a wardrobe. I wondered what had happened to the things my mother had treasured: the toiletries and knick-knacks on her dressing table; the ornaments that had lined the mantelpiece; the little chiming clock she had won in some raffle – all the objects she had coveted and calculated for and handled with such care. Had they vanished by the usual mysterious processes of time and tide, or had my father disposed of them deliberately? I had visions of him coming home drunk and smashing the little figurines, cascading crockery on to the kitchen floor, pouring old perfume down the sink in the bathroom. More likely, though, these things had just got broken or lost through carelessness.

  Before we left, Margaret handed me a package. ‘It’s not much,’ she said. ‘All I could find, really.’

  I opened it up. It was my father’s wristwatch. I stared at it, not knowing what to say.

  ‘At least it’s something to remember him by,’ she said.

  I smiled. ‘Thanks,’ I said. I didn’t say, though we both knew, that I had no desire to remember him.

  ‘He didn’t make a will,’ she continued. ‘So it’ll be a while before the money gets sorted out.’

  ‘There’s money?’

  She laughed. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Not much, I suppose. About three thousand.’

  ‘Well, that’s a surprise,’ I said. ‘I’d have thought the Hazel Tree would have had it all by now.’ I slipped the watch into my pocket. ‘Anyhow, I don’t want his money. You did all the work. It should go to you.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ she said. She patted me on the arm. ‘I told you he’s to be cremated, didn’t I?’ She seemed anxious. Maybe she thought there was enough Catholic left in me to be upset by his decision.

  ‘If that’s what he wanted,’ I said.

  ‘Mum wouldn’t have liked it,’ she continued.

  ‘No.’ Thinking about it now, I didn’t like it myself. Not because I was troubled by some vestigial Catholic scruple, but because I saw it for what it was: a final gesture of self-disgust, the last defiant act of a man who wanted to be reduced to nothing, to be erased. Ashes to ashes: I had always despised that saying. Living things are wet, dark, mineral, silty. I would have given my body to the earth, to feed insects and plants, the worms, the grass. Someone else might have seen the fire as cleansing but he saw it, I knew, as a removal. At the same time, it was a parting shot at my mother’s faith, and so, by extension, her family. A sad little act of revenge on people who would not be there to see it.

  The funeral w
as surprisingly well attended. It was also a shambles. As soon as the formalities were done with, my father’s cronies took over, and the proceedings moved to the Silver Band Club – to the very place where he had died. This was too much for Margaret, but – for no good reason, or none I can think of – I tagged along with Nat and Mull and the others, a party of dour Scotsmen heading for the bar with a perfect excuse to get totally hammered. Two hours later, one of our number, a spare, pale-lipped individual named Billy, was slumped in a corner seat, while the rest of the gang gabbed at me. They had the air of men on a mission, like crazed evangelists out to bring a stray soul back into the fold – which would have been fine, but the stray they had in their sights was me, and I had no desire to be saved. I’d had less to drink than most of them but I was definitely warmed up, and the more warmed up I got, the more convinced I was that tagging along had been a big mistake. When they talked about the man we had just burned, I had to keep reminding myself that it was my father who was the subject of their conversation; they had accepted his stories as gospel, and now they were reminiscing about events they had never witnessed, remembering the achievements and near misses of a golden youth that none of them had shared. I didn’t say anything to put them right, of course – even I wasn’t ready for that kind of bloody mindedness at a funeral – but some of the boys picked up an incredulous note in my voice, or a flicker of disdain that passed across my face as they were talking about his early footballing career, and eventually, Mull, his oldest friend, pulled me up on it.