When I asked my brothers if Mum ever had paid work, Adrian, because we’re not speaking, could not be included in my sample, but Sean responded by text: ‘Yes Mum was a sectary [sic] some thing like that x’. Ed listed secretarial work too amongst a list of voluntary positions – children’s panel, university kindergarten, refugee support. A second email arrived a few hours later. ‘She also ran a small private lunatic asylum. Flexible hours.’
It is probably better then to look at things in terms of intention. Philosophers draw a line between truth and truthfulness. Truthfulness is an intention to be honest and truthfulness is my intention between these pages. Fessing up over the mouse is a naïve tactic. I hope you will trust me more. Naïve, because obviously any suggestion that puts my rememberings in doubt could pollute them all.
Yet we all misremember, and most often our intention is not dishonesty but a self-serving desire to feel more comfortable with who we are. In studies of ten memories which involved disputed ‘achievement’ amongst twins, every individual claimed first place in the sprint, or the spelling prize as their own. The other popular site of argument is victimhood. In the same study only 10 per cent allowed their twin to claim misfortune. We pretend to ourselves that we are the child who was beaten up by older boys, rather than the child who fled. And it is victimhood where we Doyles find the most disagreement.
Much more important than whether I’ve lied about being in a bathroom when a mouse died will be if I’ve fully recognised the extent of my elder brothers’ experiences. I should. In our earliest years we spend more time in the company of our siblings than anyone else. With our brothers and sisters we form anxious attachments, hoping they will love us, fearing that they won’t. What we fear, Rowe suggests, is ‘annihilation’. And those best equipped to annihilate us (intimate as they are with our weaknesses) are our siblings.
Yet if I ever had heroes then Adrian and Sean were mine. I wanted them to love me. But how could they? Life had not been fair. Ed and I were proof. Dad used to say Adrian bore the rest of us resentment because he was ‘spoilt’. I imagine it was less to do with being spoilt than with finding his nest invaded by a Sean-shaped Tigger. This invasion, one sibling by another, can feel like a loss of identity. Rowe tells us that although the ignominy of being unseated may with time diminish, it will never disappear. This trauma was followed a year later by the death of Adrian’s mother.
From Dad’s own jealous account Adrian’s mother loved him so completely, it was as if there could be nobody else. ‘Spoilt’ doesn’t begin to cover the loss he must have felt.
We never escape the idea of ourselves that our family tells. To nail my siblings to the page like this may feel to them like aggression. They would probably find the account I have given unrecognisable. How would they paint me? Adrian’s final correspondence called me a bully (over an incident you’ll hear about later). To Ed I am sometimes hostile, and too preoccupied with the past, while in Sean’s eyes I will always be Miss Piggy. He does a great impersonation of her angry squeal.
‘I’ve been reading this book, Mir,’ he said to me recently, ‘and it could change your life. Really change it. Because anger isn’t healthy.’
Lie 14: I’m your only girl
A year after Brittany it is me who is in Coventry. I stand on the road, the wrong side of the fence, exactly as Sean has told me, hoping that soon Ed will be dumped in favour of me.
It is summer, and every week the three of us have ranged over the fields and fences, Sean in charge. The tree Ed and Sean are climbing is huge above me, its branches spreading out over the road. Every time a car drives past the leaves graze the roof. I can’t see over the wall into the field, and the wooden gate is as high as my forehead. I give up. The verge is steep and grassy and I sit down, listening to the sound of my brothers in the tree above me, Ed being ordered about. There are dandelions and daisies, and the grass has not been cut all summer. It is long and lush. Across the road from the tree is the Hopetoun estate gatehouse cottage, and a cattle grid. A car grumbles across it, disappearing towards the main house. Then everything is still.
Until Sean screams:
‘Mir! MIR! RUN!’
He is already out of the tree and over the fence, his hand reaching for mine. We are running, Sean hauling me towards the gatehouse, I tripping and dropping through the cattle grid, as he shouts and shouts and shouts. I think it is part of the game. But then he is hammering on the cottage door. Hammering like someone might die.
Only when it opens and we fall inside do I hear the angry buzz. Five wasps have managed to get into the house with us, and a woman in her pinny is folding a newspaper into a truncheon as more escape out of Sean’s shirt. He tears at his clothes.
‘My little brother’s still in the field,’ he tells her. ‘He’s too small for the gate.’
It’s an age before we hear Ed’s howl. Finally he’s in the tiny front room with us, in a ball at my feet, the woman beating him with her newspaper, on and on and on, as if she would kill him if she could.
Maybe that is why my parents do it. To make up for the wasps. Because a fortnight later, once Ed is back home, he is given a First-Ever-Brand-New-Bike the day after my birthday, and the day after I have been given my First-Ever-Brand-New-Bike too.
As soon as I see his red Chopper with wide white tyres I tear up the stairs to the bathroom and lock myself in. Dad follows, pounding on the door.
‘Ed’s your favourite!’ I shout. ‘It’s not even his birthday.’
‘But Mir,’ he lowers his voice in case the rest of the house might hear, ‘you must know that you are my most favourite little girl.’
I kick the wall.
‘I’m your only girl.’
Lie 15: One day I’ll run off and join the circus
I wish I could remember him for you, but it’s as though my brain has made a unilateral decision to trash what it cannot trust. Like sour milk Dad has been discarded.
He liked milk. In fact he liked all plain food – boiled potatoes, scones and jam, a decent sponge, pork chops, lamb not ruined by any bogus herbs. He hated cooked tomatoes and he hated cooked cheese, but adored a sweet trolley where he could see a selection and be able to choose. He also loved freebies, so if it was a buffet he organised his food across the plate in terms of density and shape, so that it could be efficiently stacked and filled. On flights, before Ryanair ruined everything, he left the plane with blankets, pillows, headphones, in-flight magazine, toothbrushes, and any uneaten food. If the chair hadn’t been bolted down he would probably have lifted that too.
To settle himself he wrote, working things through on the page. In that difficult period between the priest’s edict about marital contraception and Sean’s adoption, he wrote fantasies about escape and other women. All handwritten in faded orange jotters; in one he negotiates with his wife the use of a ‘prophylactic’ (without success), and in another a young woman he meets on a bus carries one in her bag.
Although he discussed with me a Mills & Boon creative writing class, and ideas for a Cold War thriller, neither of these plans for a novel were committed to paper. Perhaps on the page he could not bear to be anything other than himself. Only there could he escape the make-believe that he forced himself to live by.
The judgement of others mattered to him, and therefore by the sheer force of his character it must have mattered massively to me. Perhaps of all his children he needed me to believe that he was a different kind of man. It was me whom he sought out in the gaps between other liaisons. The one woman he hadn’t had sex with, or hadn’t speculated on conquering. His fiction was important to us both.
Dad came from an island on Ireland’s west coast; his Heimat was the beach. Any beach. He’d stride along the breakwater, his wetsuit peeled down so low you could see the seam of his Union Jack Speedos and often the less sightly seam of his bum.
The sixth child of eight, his head had been too big at birth, and with it wedged and crowning the other islanders tipped his mother into a rowing boa
t and sent her ashore. Perhaps this sense of being trapped was a formative experience. He was always trying to escape something. His marriage. His life. I bought him a T-shirt the Christmas of ’89 which read: ‘One day I’ll run off and join the circus’, which he wore off and on for the rest of his life.
Photographs of him show a man salted and brown, smiling, eyes creased and handsome, a Laser dinghy behind him, the windsurfer board propped within reach.
Mum, on the other hand, is always at some distance, often amongst a crowd. She’s only in the shot because she was caught there, and though she always talked of herself as overweight, in these images she’s a woman of average build, with stocky legs, in forgettable clothes.
She and I would watch him stalk and preen across the sand, giggling. It was the only light relief we’d get all day, cowering like mole rats in pockets of shade on whichever beach he’d dumped us. I suppose my mother laughed at his conceit to make herself feel better. But for me it was a desire to taste humanity. The soft bit of him. Something on which I might chew.
Right up until the end he liked to rescue others: a couple refused respite care for their autistic adult son; the female Pakistani lecturer bullied at work; the youth club threatened with a loss of funds. Always he argued the case for those less bellicose than himself. To many he was a hero. He loathed disparity and unfairness, and thumped MPs’ desks week after week till something was done, wrote letters tirelessly on others’ behalf. He was a mentor and a believer, having courage where others had long since fallen into silence and despair.
Towards the end of his life he became obsessed with senior management corruption at the university where he worked. Evidence of a senior staff member’s foreign holiday trips, his nepotism, his dubious bonuses and his decision to charge the university for garaging his car at home was all documented by hand, and all endlessly discussed.
When the felled principal retired prematurely, Dad stacked his files of evidence in the loft and took retirement himself. His final years were paced away along a stretch of Scottish west coast, awash with flotsam and weed, the dog cantering ahead of him, the wind hard against his face.
Down at the shore, his footprints swept clean by the sea, perhaps he struggled with his lies. The rescuing all done, there was no longer anything to distract him from the fact that what he’d never been able to do was escape himself.
Lie 16: Ma’s gone to get the messages
In a phone call a family friend tells me that it was only after Dad died that Mum realised how indecent his haste had been in replacing his first wife.
‘Your mother must have found the death certificate,’ says the friend, ‘and realised that the poor woman had only been in the grave a few months.’ She hesitates. ‘Maureen didn’t really know what he was about.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Back at the start. She didn’t know what he was about the night we met him.’ There is a pause on the line. ‘I always thought there was something untrustworthy about him. He was just too smooth. Of course a very attractive man, with a good job, but …’ Another pause. ‘I’m sure he was fond of Maureen. But really what he was after was a mother for those children, and any one of us there that night would have done.’ I press my forehead to the plaster wall, wanting the cool of it. ‘Being a widower, there’d have been the threat of those boys going into care.’
Dad came from a family fearful of social workers. You have to have suffered a certain social deprivation and poverty to develop the kind of fear he and all his siblings felt for children’s homes and care. One-way tickets to Australia and institutionalised abuse were truths this family already knew, and they’d been run out of Ireland trying to escape them. Too many handouts at the foodbank, too many busybodies with an opinion on single parents, and too many feral children: all became reasons for the authorities to intervene.
‘I developed an attitude to social workers back then,’ Dad’s brother told me, ‘that I’ve held all my life – Save a Child: Kill a Social Worker. I could smell them from miles off. If they came to the house to see what was going on, I’d not tell them my mammy was working. I’d shout through the door: “She’s gone to get the messages.”’
But even if we try to forgive Dad his indecent haste, this lie was much harder for my mother to live with than any of the others. He had pretended his wife had been dead much longer than the unseemly few months that she was. This first untruth of their relationship, voiced within hours of being introduced, she never spoke of. Perhaps because she felt it was his worst. Or because I was an entirely unsuitable confidante.
Once I’d left home, each time one of Dad’s weekend trips came up for negotiation, or a complaint erupted over how much time he was spending with a colleague, I was primed to take his defence:
‘That’s ridiculous. Come on, what is it exactly that you suspect him of doing?’
One entry in my diary from as late as 1995 noted that ‘Mum and Dad have had another set to.’ Apparently five house guests were kneeling on his carpet. ‘Praying for me,’ he said when he rang.
‘No wonder he’s furious,’ I told her.
But when I bullied her like this she would never answer, swallowing all she might have said.
It was not until eighteen months after his death that she finally broke cover. What provoked her I will never know, because the sexually transmitted disease announcement didn’t come until months later. Was it the dreadful Norfolk campsite we were attempting to holiday on? The rain? Or was it just my irksome credulity? My smug and ignorant tone?
I often think it must have been the latter. She’d plainly run out of patience. Driven off the ugly beach by another squall, she announced:
‘Your father had an affair with that German tour guide in Cyprus. I found a letter in his stamp collection. He must have kept it for the Italian stamp.’
Reaching the caravan door she knocked the sand from her shoes.
‘You know, I had this strange dream last night. I was holding your father’s neck over the kitchen sink, wringing it like a chicken.’
Lie 17: I’ve lost my mother
Guilt has the smell, the taste and the look of love, but is nothing like it. There was the guilt that I was not good enough for my mother, and for my mother’s part, the guilt that she didn’t feel about me the way she wanted to.
I ring one of her friends, casting round, wanting others to tell me what it is I should remember and how I should feel. The first says: ‘Maureen was troubled.’ She means troubled by Dad. The second says simply: ‘I wonder if we ever even knew her.’
Everyone though, when I ask, mentions God. To me religion is like Iraqi WMD. A justification. A fiction. People throw in their lot with God because he confirms beliefs they already hold. For Mum there was also a bonus. Jesus was redress. Jesus trumped everything. And everyone. Dad could not compete. Cuckolded by Christianity, he was probably the first to realise that her infidelity with Christ was more brazen and more enthralling than any of his own affairs. She told me grimly, when I found her crying in bed one afternoon, that Jesus was the only man she could trust.
Rattling my thoughts for the shapes and sounds of her, I’m embarrassed to say I remember the irritation first. Standing beside her in churches and chapels, wishing I were anywhere else. Besides the fact that there would be a sermon to be got through, there was an intensity to her singing that put my teeth on edge.
Yet singing was what she loved most about worship. She would get to her feet to belt out a familiar hymn, her hands raised over her head. Christianity enabled her to help others. Every week she drove all the way over to Lanarkshire and the Dungavel Detention Centre, with toys and food for the imprisoned children, offering practical support with asylum applications, contacting lawyers, sponsoring families so they could be temporarily released, sometimes to be at home with her.
Many people loved her. Yet we both found love so hard. She told me that in one session with a therapist, when asked to arrange her family with chess pieces, she had huddled
herself alongside everyone else. Then parked me way off, she said, gesturing with her hand to the corner of the table:
‘Right over there.’
As a child my mother had not been easy to love, and what follows remorselessly from that fact is that neither was I. With violent red hair and an Elastoplasted left eye (so as to force the laziness out of my right), I was not the most attractive child. Later she would coerce me into attending Jane Fonda exercise classes and going on a diet. Later still there were the poor examination results, and my poorer choice of men. Perhaps it was easier to have these dissatisfied feelings for me, rather than for my elder brothers. Ambivalence towards them she never allowed herself to voice. Escaping those phantom babies must have been difficult too, the first one who was terminated, and the second who died. Not able to take up thumb-sucking or smoking themselves, they weren’t able to disappoint.
Don’t we all want our mothers to love us? Harry Harlow, a primate researcher in the seventies, proved that we are programmed to attach, without judgement, to whoever parents us first. Harlow removed rhesus monkey babies from their mothers at six hours old and gave them over to inanimate substitutes. What he found was that, more than milk, these monkeys, mothered by terry cloth, bottle and wire, wanted their unfriendly surrogates very, very much.
Dubbed the ‘motherless monkeys’ they were as motherless as Mum, mothered herself by little more than cloth and bottle and wire. The unmothered do not, when they come to parent, in Harlow’s view make for ‘competent carers’. They trail their unlove with them.
One afternoon I traipsed after her through John Lewis, moaning about the many things a fifteen-year-old has to moan about. In an attempt to hide my weight I was wearing ugly, oversized clothes, a ragged overcoat bought in Oxfam and a pair of DMs, my eyes ringed with blunt black eyeliner.
A Book of Untruths Page 4