The enmity between my grandparents and Dad meant that heading home to Edinburgh we, on the back seat, would moan about the cheap Izal loo paper in the downstairs lavatory. It was the only example we could find that might make Mum and Dad feel better about the choices they had made.
Lie 9: It’s people crying that puts Dad in a bad mood
It is Shrove Tuesday and Ed is still in his high chair. Not a high chair that holds him in, but a chair with long legs like a spider, so that he can reach his plate. We are all patient. If everyone is good there will be pancakes for tea. So we are. I don’t even suck my thumb.
The living room, where the television is and where guests sit, is in the front of the house, but we are in the back. The kitchen dangles out into the garden beside us like a tube. To get out the back door we have to squeeze past Mum, who’s always at the stove or the sink, past Trudy our poodle, the food bowl, the rubbish bin and the welly boots.
In this room the walls are dark. Really dark. Mum and Dad painted them to help baby Ed sleep; he never did when he was little. Someone told them that they should put him in the farthest corner of the house and leave him. They did that too.
Where Ed had to cry himself to sleep is not a dining room, like the posh one Granny has. It’s just a place to eat, with five chairs, a high seat, the table, a dresser covered in post, homework, school bags, tools, toys. Ed doesn’t have to sleep here any more. He sleeps in my room and I’m in the top bunk. Sean is in a bunk bed too, in the room next to ours. Adrian is in the attic. Adrian doesn’t allow Ed and me into the attic. We are only allowed to stand in the doorway where we admire his papier-mâché train world of tunnels and hills. Ed loves how the engines whirr round and round in circles, but I don’t think the view of the trains is very good from the door. I look out the attic window to the rooftops and the sky. As I watch the birds balance on the neighbour’s aerial I think my eldest brother has a very different life.
Apart from meal times when he has to be here, Adrian isn’t. Maybe because Dad is angry all the time. Sean has lit fires on the stair carpet, and complaints have been made by the neighbours. He has been seen, like Spiderman, on the upstairs window ledge, scaling the house from outside. The belt is out a lot. Adrian got it for crashing his bicycle and when Dad caught my fingers in the car door I got walloped too. Not with the belt, because we were at Blackford Pond.
Dad takes us there every Saturday to feed the ducks. Sean falling into the duck pond definitely puts Dad in a bad mood, because Sean’s done that more than once. Maybe what Dad hates is if we cry. Not that Sean cries, even if he gets soaked in the pond. Ever.
Today is okay though. There will be no crying or falling into ponds. There are pancakes. The door to the kitchen is open. My parents stand in full view, an argument brewing. My stomach grows tight with it. Maybe there will be no pancakes after all, even though we are being so good. We have been really, really good since lunchtime because of the pancakes. Even Sean.
Soon Dad is filling the mouth of the kitchen door.
‘I’ve just bet your mum fifty pounds that I can toss the best pancake.’
Fifty pounds! Does he not know that Mum’s spent a year at finishing school, where the only things she learned were how to toss pancakes and how to get out of a car without putting her knickers on show? Fifty pounds. It is so much money that Mum could fill the bath right the way up to the top with halfpenny chews.
Sean is already off his seat to see. Adrian follows. Ed is clambering down from his chair too. Dad does not seem to be mad about them getting down, though they haven’t asked. In fact he seems happy. Maybe he wants us all to watch him win.
Dad goes first, like he’s going to show us all how it’s done. His confidence eases my stomach ache.
Fifty pounds. He cannot lose.
Things are going well until the toss. The toss is difficult, a game-changing time with pancakes. Everything is at stake. But the batter is not lifting as easily as it should. Dad is shoogling the pan, attacking it with the fish slice.
Pancake finally free, he announces he’s ready to go. Showing off, he flicks the pan so hard that the pancake hits the ceiling. We watch as it falls, then slumps back into the pan, half on, half off, torn, a mess.
If Granddad had hit the ceiling with a pancake it would be funny, but when Dad does it nobody laughs. Ed, edging between our legs, is too dwarfed by the rest of us to see the greasy ceiling or the tangled pancake on the stove.
My stomach ache is back. But it’s okay because Mum will know not to win. She’ll know that she can’t.
She carelessly wipes the pan with more oil, ladling the batter in. She swirls it out to form a large round disc.
Dad has been giving a speech about going first being an unfair handicap, but now we all watch.
Mum nibbles the edges of it with the fish slice, shakes the pan, watching it slide easily back and forth over the surface. Then she flicks her wrist. A tidy toss, an elegant turn over in mid-air that lands the pancake back directly from where it took off.
I close my eyes. It is a decisive win, for which we are all going to pay.
Ed says loudly into the silence:
‘Who won?’
My stomach flips. If anything’s going to make it worse it is this. Someone jabs his arm. Perhaps it is me.
‘Mum won,’ Dad says spinning round. ‘Mum did.’ He isn’t pointing his finger, and he’s not gritting his teeth. ‘And now she’s going to make all the pancakes,’ he tells us. ‘Just this once she’s been better at it than me.’
No one reminds him that she has also won fifty pounds. We are confused over what has just happened, but not insane. Mum wipes the pan again with oil and ladles the batter in.
‘Who wants the next one?’ she asks.
As I clamber back onto my chair I think they must be playing a different game.
Lie 10: He married well
All of us cheat.
When I asked my husband, who has been known to cheat at Risk, how cheating counts as winning, he said:
‘Winning’s got nothing to do with it. It’s about not losing.’
A more nuanced friend pointed out that losing at Snakes and Ladders, a game of chance, is tolerable, but losing at Scrabble or chess is not. Anything is fair to avoid intellectual defeat.
How we play games tells us a lot about our personality, traits that often remain with us our entire lives. Are we bad losers, cheaters, furiously competitive, saboteurs or rule bores? Scientists at North Eastern University in Massachusetts are developing the Virtual Personality Assessment Laboratory, where their aim is to reveal the authentic personalities of participants through play. It is, they argue, a much better indicator than a simple job interview, because candidates are not thinking ‘I should do this to make myself look better.’ All they are interested in is winning. To me there was never any point. It was always more straightforward to lose.
Contemporary theorists who study cheating have steered away from thinking that there are principled people and unprincipled people. They would suggest that we weigh up the situation. The loss. The gain. Then make a decision. For instance, we are more likely to cheat in a darkened room than a fully lit one. The more powerful we feel the more likely we are to indulge ourselves, too – just sitting in a bigger car, which boasts a more expansive seat, is a good predictor of how likely we are to try to get away with it, pushing in at crammed motorway exits and running the lights. We cheat more in a messy environment, picking up on the chaos and the deviance. We also cheat more when we believe ourselves to be on our own. Therefore it should always be good policy, when we go to the lav, to take our Monopoly money with us.
Psychologists have found that children who have a reputation to maintain are less likely to double-cross. Poor Sean was so ground down and in despair over his reputation he must have wagered that there was nothing to be gained by honesty. It took Ed and me months to realise Sean had creased the Old Maid card in Granny’s pack.
A close friend, who supports children w
ith educational needs, talks of their emotional landscape in terms of poker chips. When good things happen they win more chips, and when bad things happen they lose them. Many kids are so out of chips that they cannot afford to lose Snakes and Ladders or Snap, or even hear the dinner lady tell them to join the back of the queue. For these children, when faced with the roll of the dice, there are three possible courses of action. They can avoid playing; they can, when they see loss loom, sabotage; or they can cheat.
Sean, bored of winning an over-played game, or irritated that he might lose it, often resorted to havoc – changing the rules ten minutes in, or simply abandoning it in the middle. Perhaps he felt that cheating and sabotage were easy to justify. In one study participants, when asked for their motivation, responded that it was less about cheating than about evening the score. You see, the cheater is playing a metagame. Everyone else is playing the board, while he or she is playing them. It is why cheating has become the byword for infidelity.
However, like cheating at games, is it easier to be unfaithful in a darkened room? Easier when we drive expensive cars? Or is cheating simply about opportunity? Like being left alone in a room with the Monopoly money, does sleeping with a colleague feel like a chance too good to miss?
I wonder though, for Dad, whether what my mother called ‘marrying well’ was at the root of it. His sprawling Irish family, all loud, poor and disorderly, did not measure well against nannies and number plates, an imbalance that he was forced to swallow every Sunday over afternoon tea.
Although Dad may have used the excuse that he wasn’t having as much sex as he would have liked, maybe his serial unfaithfulness was simply about seeking fairness by unfair means. He was evening the score.
Lie 11: We’ve posted you a present
Apart from pathological lying, cruelty to animals is high on the Hare psychopathy checklist. In fact Schopenhauer, who was a big fan of poodles, said: ‘A person who harms or kills animals cannot be a good person at all.’ Not surprising, then, that it did not cross my mother’s mind to think of asking me to foster her orange-and-white cocker spaniel after her death. More suitable adoptive parents were found.
The earliest animal memory I have is of Dad hauling baby bunny rabbits out from beneath the shed and bagging them. He is angry. Two rabbits have become twelve rabbits. He orders Sean to dig beneath the shed, and reaches into the holes that now ravage the lawn. I watch how the bags squirm, and wonder why bags are a good place for rabbits. Sean tells me that the bags are for taking the rabbits to the river. All I can feel is that I am glad I am not a rabbit, but not because they are going to the river. That might be nice. I am glad, because somehow they make Dad furious.
In those days we lived at St Ninian’s Terrace in Morningside, Edinburgh, next to a Mr and Mrs Keddie, who, amongst other things, complained about the rabbits. I never remember seeing the Keddies, but we heard them most days, hammering on the party wall, screaming for us to shut up. Sean’s footballs, rugby balls, tennis balls, golf balls, all sailed over the Keddie wall, never to be seen again.
Dad had tried scaring Mrs Keddie shitless on a number of occasions, belting her front door with his fists and yelling through the window, but she was made of steelier stuff than anyone else he’d ever met. In the end, our Peugeot packed up for a holiday, the engine running, Dad crammed a very old and smelly kipper through her letterbox. Winning was important.
We would go on to parent animals of every denomination. Budgerigars shrieking from the curtain rail, goldfish won at the fair, many dogs, a cat, rabbits, mice, five bantam hens, and a turkey bought cheap for Christmas. Maybe someone thought that hanging him upside down in the basement would be enough to kill him. He seemed to take days to die.
I wonder if the reason our house was filled with fur and feather was because one of us was an animal lover, but I hesitate to imagine who that might have been. Deaths were not marked by flowers and songs in the garden or by planting a new tree. Instead there would be an announcement over breakfast – one more animal was a goner.
The afternoon we lost the mouse, I was an accessory, leaning against the side of the bath, the edge of it denting my chest. Sean had the tap on and the plug in. The water thundered out of the faucet, two plastic boats rolling in its wake. There had been floods before, but not that day, only because Sean did not want me to be able to touch his boats. They bobbed out of reach. One had a paddle wheel, and Sean wanted to see if, like the neighbour’s hamster, the mouse would make the wheel turn.
A year later two budgerigars were found flat on their backs one morning. They had, in their hunger, eaten the tomato plants. Fairground goldfish, appreciated for their limited life expectancies, were often, if they made it beyond a week, recklessly flushed down toilets where they had been put for safekeeping during a clean.
Throughout this period Trudy, our white miniature poodle, remained understandably nervous. Being in her presence was like looking in the mirror. Morning and evening she was taken out into the garden and yelled at by Dad to ‘BE QUICK’. Promptly, without fail, she was. Until, with age, she became not quite quick enough. Inevitably there were accidents on the new lino, and these embarrassments were fatally hard to forgive.
Dad, you see, was a dab hand at potty training, claiming he’d done me in a weekend. A success that perhaps he should not have crowed over in my hearing; I had seen him train the dogs. If they made the mistake of committing to a hesitant piss in a far corner, he dragged them by the scruff, walloping them all the way through to the garden. All the dogs, bar the last – that much-loved orange-and-white cocker spaniel – lived in fear. Their eyes were glazed with it.
On the whole I would have put the unseemly number of deaths and any attendant zoological panic down to inexperienced parenting, if it weren’t for Cindy.
Cindy was a tabby, a stray, all heat and loyalty. We took her, or more reasonably stole her, from St Ninian’s Terrace when we moved. Mum and Dad locked her into the derelict interior of the new house with only butter on her paws for sustenance. There were mice. She lived there alone for the six months it took to renovate, only to be disappeared a year later, in the autumn of 1977.
Mum thoroughly disliked cats. Her nose wrinkled at the sight of them. When I asked her what had happened to Cindy she said: ‘She went to stay on your uncle’s farm. She joined a whole load of other cats on the farm.’ What’s dubious here is the repetition.
Lie 12: We don’t have favourites
It is the summer of 1974 and we are camping in Brittany. The caravan has been dragged all the way from Edinburgh and plonked behind the grassy dunes. Every night we play cards – bouchon – with a painter and his wife. The game requires quantities of bottles of wine to be drunk first, so as to provide corks.
It must be evening, the adults already a bottle or two in, because the sun is low in the west, the wind blowing horizontal, the way it does in Brittany. The beach, which is never very full, is now deserted, and we are digging a hole. Ed, ignored all day, has in his desperation to be out of Coventry agreed to Sean’s suggestion that he be buried up to his neck. The tide creeps towards us as we dig. Adrian decides that we’ll do him standing up – Ed is small enough to make it only a little more work, and, he and Sean agree, it will make it much harder to escape.
Ed climbs in, his grave nice and deep. Sean, pleased by Adrian’s attention, compacts the sand hard. Ed flinches beneath his hands, the sand splitting the way it does when a body moves beneath it, great cracks opening up. Sean and Adrian bait him to keep still.
Soon he is crying, and I am running over the dune, my bare feet sliding through the sand. Sean and Adrian are with me. I run because I don’t want to be there when Ed is found, the sea circling his neck. Sean and Adrian are running because it is funny. They laugh and shout at our little brother from the safety of the dunes, the tide flooding in. They tell him we are leaving him.
He will drown.
I look back from deep within the mahair grass and I see Ed’s wee head, camouflaged, his red
hair melding with the sand, and I hear the terrible sound of his terror.
Lie 13: I’m the most hard-done-by
What right does anyone have to rewrite their sibling’s story? This is not the tale my brothers would tell of themselves.
Nothing in these pages will match the memories they hold. Our age, size, mood and personality will have dictated how we filed these events, and always there will be much to contest: for instance who was most hard-done-by and who remembers it best? All of us build the sort of memory that is most comfortable to live with. It is not what happens to us, says the psychologist Dorothy Rowe, but how we interpret it.
Our brains create the world for us inside our heads. I literally see things differently from the way my brothers do. A Berlin optician was appalled to discover I held a driving licence. I have amblyopia, or lazy eye. My brain compensates for the misalignment in my eyes by ignoring half the visual input, making depth difficult to calculate. I cannot park.
I also experience life differently. Our birth order, our gender, our genetic inheritance mean that the way we see our ‘growing up’ is unique. This means siblings often have disputed memories. The drowning of the mouse by paddle boat is one example. Maybe Ed was witness, or Adrian, or no one at all. I can only pretend I remember, because Sean recounted the story numerous times. I’d have to concede that watching a mouse’s long struggle to live is not in my memory, and it should be, because death is always going to be hard to watch.
One recent study on how well people remembered their socioeconomic status as children found that 53 per cent of sibling pairs did not agree about the extent of their father’s education and 21 per cent disagreed over how much their mother had worked.
A Book of Untruths Page 3