I ask Dad in the morning: ‘Who is George?’
‘George is anybody. Just anybody.’
The man desperate to be free, even from his name. The anybody. The phantom that no one can catch.
Soon after, our holiday from Mum came to an end. We three packed up our bags and took a plane to Corfu. The Mater, as Dad liked to call her, would land a few hours later from Heathrow.
It was a long wait. There was little to do. We bought red roses as a present for her, roses that by the time she walked into the arrivals hall were faded and in pieces, each head loose on its stem.
Lie 29: We’re staying together for the children
This habjab, as Dad called Mum’s ‘I’m leaving you’, was not her first, nor her last. She would tell me years later that our empty desert summer happened because Dad had gifted her (astonishingly in an Islamic fundamentalist state) another dose of the clap.
Divorce was on everyone’s mind.
There are three legal grounds for divorce: desertion, unreasonable behaviour and adultery, labels that cover everything from poor hygiene to a lack of equality (over 44 per cent of divorces in recent years cited the latter as a contributing factor). The final time Mum left Dad, in the mid-nineties, rather than get to grips with a washing machine he bought in clean clothes from M&S by the week.
Statistics show that there is even a correlation between giving birth to a daughter and calling it a day. In the case of my parents all possible reasons apply, from the most petty to the most ridiculous. So why didn’t they?
No courage.
It is the reason people most often give for not leaving their spouse, and from all the evidence Dad lacked courage. Divorce, for any Doyle, is rare. Some of Dad’s siblings treat marriage like an extreme sport. Endurance is key. However, I’m not sure that Dad enjoyed unhappiness the way they do. He may have reasoned that hanging around for the good of everyone else balanced out the bad. Staying married may have enabled him to feel less ashamed, and less burdened. In those lonely hours before dawn (he was not a good sleeper) he may have even been able to cast himself as a victim.
But Mum? We find her conflicted, wanting both out and in. And she is conflicted, because whatever it is that the pair of them are up to, perhaps it has something to do with love.
You see, there would be another memorable habjab years later, a morning when we wound up in Girvan. Ordering Ed and me into the back of the car, Mum sat with the engine running, passenger door open till Dad climbed aboard.
She took off at a furious pace, heading south.
Locking everyone into a car in order to leave is not a clear message and it wasn’t the first time. She had resorted to kidnap before. There had been an episode in France that frankly is too scary to remember, except as a jigsaw of which only one frail piece remains: Dad’s escape. As the Renault rental slowed to hit the bend he forced open the passenger door, then rolled onto the verge, an untidy sprawl, which in memory never gets up.
France Ed remembers. The morning we ended up in Girvan he does not. And he remembers France, he says, because he thought Mum was trying to kill us. We had watched enough television to know – throwing yourself from a moving vehicle could only be about escaping death.
At Girvan there was no escape. Either the coastal road was too dangerous or, having made the mistake of slowing down the last time, Mum kept up her fierce pace. Barricaded in, we were all forced to swallow her decision to leave.
‘I want a divorce.’
When Dad refused to engage with her flash announcement she hunted out the two of us in the rearview mirror:
‘So?’
I watched the grey shore hurtle past, saying nothing, unable then, as now, to understand what it was we were all doing. A friend has suggested that I hunt for the answer in the lyrics of Randy Newman’s ‘I Want You to Hurt Like I Do’. We did.
Reaching the seafront car park she threw the car into a space, giving her door the inevitable slam. The morning was grey and thick over the roofs, the cars, the sea. We watched her stomp off to the cafe ‘for a coffee’. Dad dragged himself towards shore. I trailed, hands wringing. At the harbour he fell onto a bench, and there beside him I watched as, lost, he heaved dry tears.
Lie 30: I don’t remember
Violet and I arrived at prep school, heads shorn, the same September afternoon. It was 1979. Dad was enjoying Saudi Arabia too much to want to leave. Mum was not enjoying it at all, but for the school fees she was prepared to make a sacrifice.
I had been eleven years old for five weeks and four days. Ed was only nine. I counted out the time at school that first term in hours. Violet was older than me by a couple of months, and would have probably preferred to calculate our incarceration in minutes.
She had a tight curl to her hair that required tending with a large Mason and Pearson brush. When she didn’t have it to hand, she flattened the frizz to her skull with a palm. She had pale petal skin and long fingers and this smoothing of her curls, this grief over their loss, became a kind of tic.
Her mother, when she visited, wore Bonnie Cashin. She radiated Knightsbridge and class. My own had the smell of a fading upper class, Mum’s confidence thin and off-key. Unlike Violet’s mother, who remained silent, mine would spend Sports Day with her hand held out firmly to fellow parents.
‘Pleased to meet you. My name’s Maureen Doyle.’
To say it was a relief to me that she was only in a position to pay us one annual visit would be a lie. I longed to be with her. Ached.
Violet’s parents, on the other hand, took all their visiting allocation. As soon after Saturday morning classes as they were allowed, her parents came to collect her, and I’d watch her disappear down the drive to the best hotel. Violet took pity on me once or twice, and I was invited along for lunch. But when no one took pity, the weekend yawned like a sickness. Saturday afternoons were not so bad. Five hours is not for ever. Mr Hartwell, the science master, devised wild games to distract from the empty afternoon. A blindfold three-legged orienteering race over two miles. Or a complicated search and rescue between boys and girls, which ranged between fields and woods, lasting until dark.
Mr Hartwell was a scary man, with hands that he rubbed together like Uriah Heep. Yet he understood children and he understood play. His classroom squirmed with the hideous and the ghastly, with things that crept and crawled, slithered and slunk. A whole glass cage was given over to meals for the snakes. One large black male rat with his hairless tail transfixed me. Imprisoned beside him within their glass hell was a red-eyed female, the raw curl of herself loose in the sawdust. She gave birth over and over to death, one baby ratling sacrificed at a time.
The snakes were irregular feeders. A corn snake, a milk and a king. The corn was owned by a child who rarely took it out. The other two had been abandoned, mute and unmoving. Sometimes it took them hours to notice the terrified rat, though their homes contained little distraction – a thirty-watt bulb, a stick, the sand.
That first week, Violet and I were turfed out onto the grass to dig for earthworms. It was September, the soil damp beneath the plants that bordered the lawn, rhododendron flowers fading. I dithered. Ed was still the only person I could call a friend. And he was over the other side of the stable yard, bewildered and small, lost to me. I had to find the worm myself and pick it up out of the earth with my own hands.
The boys and girls who had already long been away from home giggled amongst themselves, flicking the first fallen leaves at one another, shrieking over their finds. Thick flesh dangled beige from their fingers.
My new culottes rubbed between my thighs, stiff asylum wear which still smelt of the school outfitters and a mothballed trunk. I crouched, prodding at the ground with a stick. Alone. It was the first time since my parents had gone that the tears hardened round my throat. I poked again, the ground blurring, a stripe of snot thinning along the length of my cardigan sleeve.
In the distance Mr Hartwell took a spade to the ground, lifting a squirming heap of ea
rthworms into his bucket. When we all trooped back to the classroom, I, wormless, trailed behind. Perhaps Violet is with me here, though I have no memories of anyone but myself. When I ask her she remembers nothing of that afternoon at all.
I find I am as lonely in memory as I was poking the earth beneath a low autumn sun. And it is from this day that I must count Ed, over on the other side of the stable block, as gone from me too. Ever since, his forehead pleats and he yawns when I try to recover this time.
‘I don’t remember,’ he says.
‘Really?’
Another yawn. It is the signal that the conversation is closed.
He must remember, I tell myself. He must.
Or maybe it’s just that the last person he wants to remember it with is me.
Lie 31: I forgot
To forget is the simplest lie and one that is difficult to challenge. Granny, if asked how much the coat, the shoes or the dress cost, would often claim she had forgotten. It is also the most straightforward way to live with the worst of our pasts. Some of us suffer from what researchers call ‘motivated forgetting’, an unconscious amnesia that clears our heads of what hurts.
But for most of us, forgetting is a measure of age and infirmity. This morning, for instance, I forgot the words for papier-mâché and took it hard. It leaves me with the scary thought: What else is lost, that I don’t yet know?
There are two reasons why we forget. The first is that our brains lack storage. Like Cambridge University Library, which is required to house every word published in the UK and Ireland since 1662, there is just never going to be enough space. Approximately a thousand titles arrive at the library every Thursday in red plastic crates. Piles of books litter most surfaces, snaking spine-up along the floor. There are overflow areas, off-site storage, and platoons of ‘fetchers’ in the basement hunting down, sometimes on handwritten paper slips, requests from upstairs.
The second hypothesis is poor retrieval, and here we have to imagine the library after a decade of austerity, its workforce shrunk by half. Faced with a mountain of unopened red crates, the library, like our brains, is engulfed by misshelved, poorly referenced material. There is no time for cataloguing and filing. It is an institution gone rogue, operating without any regard for management, or for the truth.
Memory retrieval grows worse over time, not necessarily because of underfunding, but rather because the older we get, the more repetitive our lives become. One commute is indistinguishable from another, so although we may remember this morning’s slog on the Northern Line between East Finchley and Embankment, tomorrow only residues of that journey might remain. For the sake of efficiency, our brain will resolve that this information is superfluous. So unless we actively override that decision and consolidate memories, recounting them in the pub or throwing them down in a diary, we are likely to lose them for good.
For liars forgetting is lethal. It is how many of us are found out. It is a serious problem for memoirists too. Not only do we come to the shameful conclusion that we cannot remember vast tracts of the past, but forgetting, at its most brutal, as in the case of Alzheimer’s disease, annihilates the self.
Without memory there can be no identity and without identity there is no self. If we cannot remember we have no frame on which to hang the idea of who we are. Clive Wearing, who at the height of his career as a musician suffered a brain infection, is the worst case of amnesia ever recorded. He has told his wife, Deborah, that to live in a perpetual present is ‘like being dead’.
Each time she entered the room he would greet her effusively, as if he had waited decades for her to come. In an effort to push back the blankness, or the ‘deads’, as Deborah referred to them, he kept a journal, in which there are pages and pages of almost identical entries:
‘I am awake.’
‘2.10 pm This time properly awake.’
‘2.14 pm This time finally awake.’
‘2.35 pm This time completely awake.’
Clive Wearing’s brain, faced again and again with the lie that it had freshly woken, held on to that belief with a daunting conviction, even if it meant ignoring the facts already evidenced down the page.
However, forgetting is not always a catastrophe. To combat Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, scientists are looking at ways to encourage it. They have discovered that bad memories are epigenetically ingrained; memories of war, abuse and torture literally stain our DNA with chemical markers. One review paper in Nature describes how a drug, HDACi, when administered to mice, clears these epigenetic marks. However, it is not known how specific the drug would be in humans. Would HDACi, like a perfectly executed drone strike, take out the single jihadi pedalling like mad through open country, or is the cure a more difficult compromise, where alongside one terrorist a further thousand innocents die?
Forgetting is essential. In fact to survive we must forget. Remembering is balanced and aided by losses that happen without our noticing. Why would we need to remember the name of a work colleague we haven’t seen for ten years? Of course when we run into her it’s embarrassing, but perhaps we should be relieved that we’ve not wasted cognitive energy on holding her in our thoughts during the intervening years.
Borges said: ‘We live by leaving behind.’ His protagonist Funes the Memorious, who after hitting his head is blighted by total recollection, describes his memory as ‘a garbage disposal’. A similar view was recently expressed to researchers in California by a woman whose memory is unusually accurate; her recall of past events is ‘nonstop, uncontrollable and automatic’, and it drives her ‘crazy’.
Nietzsche famously pointed out that the existence of forgetting has never been proven. What he means is the strong, irrecoverable forgetting that vanishes the word ‘papier-mâché’ for ever. Rather like trying to prove there is no monster in Loch Ness, absence is always going to be difficult to demonstrate.
To forget is defined as a failure to remember. There is no word for the kind of forgetting that Nietzsche means, the forgetting which is beyond the reach of remembering. A memory that no longer exists at all. We don’t have the language for what theorists call this ‘strong forgetting’, perhaps, because all of us are sometimes assaulted by rememberings provoked by a snatched melody, or the fragrance of cut grass, a moment we never knew we still owned.
Lie 32: I’m Selina
In November 2013 I sign up for group therapy. It is cheaper. One-to-one is difficult to justify. It’s only that I always feel that there is something wrong.
Apart from being cheaper, working in groups reveals the dysfunction of family dynamics. Was it my fault that my parents stayed together? Or maybe there was another reason, because by the time Mum turned thirty-five we had already been put out of the house.
But I do not bring this question to the group. At the first meeting I find half of the others are in a much worse place than me. They are crying, finding it difficult to get out of bed. There is cancer, redundancy, violence, despair. One member says absolutely nothing the first three weeks. Shamefully I wonder how any of it will help me. The other half treat the whole thing like ‘a bloody coffee morning’, one of the more exasperated members of the group says when everything begins to fall apart in week four.
But before the falling apart I play the game the way everyone else does. A bit of sharing about recent events, some platitudes, a lot of holding back. And then in the fourth week someone asks me about my schooldays and I fall into a silent hole of tears. I am almost insensible, definitely inarticulate, mauling a scarf as though I’m trying to wring the life from it. But quickly my fellow group members slide the discussion back to shore and safety, my surrogate family paddling around in the shallows, as I wallow alone at sea.
Week five the one having trouble getting out of bed leaves. She’s just escaped hospital, following a stomach pump at A&E, but somehow the conversation slips away from her, taken ashore by those on their coffee morning, back to somewhere safe.
‘I want to leave now,’ she shouts.
&
nbsp; The therapist holds her back, wanting a better ‘finish’. Endings are important.
‘Like I need to leave now?’ the group member shouts again. ‘All I can think about is a bloody cigarette.’
‘We didn’t listen to her earlier,’ I say, ‘when she told us she’d attempted suicide. Wouldn’t it be a matter of respect to listen to her now?’
Week six, one person down, the observation is over. I’ve been looking for a parent and there is none, though it is plain, especially for the person who still hasn’t spoken a word, that it is all any of us needs.
Week seven and I’m leading the session. Someone has christened me Selina Scott. I go round the group one member at a time and ask directly how things have been. Follow up on points made the previous meeting, and probe deeper.
I don’t want to tell any of them what is going on for me. I have been crying. I cry and cry and cry. When I give up being the parent, I think to myself, who the hell’s going to parent me? Boarding-school angst is such a cliché anyway. I hate myself. Maybe that’s why I am crying. It’s the unspeakable self-hate.
By week eleven, outside the group I am crying more than I am not, and have had to go for decompression in one-to-one sessions at another address.
The therapist asks me:
‘This pre-verbal self?’
‘What?’
‘The incoherent child you become when talking about school?’ she says.
I nod, though I find it hard to go along with the idea that I have regressed.
‘I wondered what it was like to be the pre-verbal Miranda?’ she asks.
I struggle to think how talking about something I don’t remember is going to help me at all.
‘Chaotic? Maybe?’ I say, making it up. ‘I always knew that Sean was adopted, and Adrian’s mum was dead.’ She waits. ‘Mothers died and they went away.’
A Book of Untruths Page 8