Talented self-deceivers, on the other hand, are more successful at school, at work and in love. The definition of a talented self-deceiver is a person who will answer ‘no’ more often than ‘yes’ to a list of twenty questions compiled in 1974 by psychologists Ruben Gur and Harold Sackeim. The questions, which were put together during a heavy drinking session in a New York bar, are provocatively shaming. They compel people to deny that they have ever wanted to kill someone else, felt hatred towards their parents, or wondered about their sexual orientation. The list finishes with the most difficult question for many to answer: ‘Have you ever wanted to rape, or be raped?’ If we answer no, then we are lying, Gur and Sackeim argue, because all of these questions are ‘universal truths’. Those of us who fail the test, and pretend that we’ve never felt sexually inadequate, never believed that our parents were mean to us, are a good deal happier than those who pass.
Joanna Starek, who is both a psychologist and a swimmer, in wanting to understand why one person outperforms another, gave her swim team the twenty questions. She found a correlation between those who failed the test and those who swam fastest. Intrigued, I circulated the same questions to my high-achieving academic colleagues to see whether the results would be the same. Not surprisingly there were some extreme self-deceivers amongst them. Two people wouldn’t admit to having sexual fantasies, four never got angry, two hadn’t ever enjoyed a bowel movement, and a crazy six had no unpleasant memories. In fact the only one to admit a yes to the sticky question of the rape fantasy was me.
So where does self-deceit leave us with regard to memoir? Truth is extremely important to this genre; it is the fragile wall that holds fiction back. Literary forgery is a crime. To lie about your past, and about who you are, in a book which is marketed as non-fiction, is to piss a lot of people off: ten class actions were filed against James Frey for his memoir, one of the most notorious literary forgeries ever written. The argument is that his intention to lie is what made him culpable, but can we hang a whole literary classification on intent alone?
Memoir will always be a work of self-deception. As an intricate part of the human psyche, being free of self-deceit will be as difficult as clearing dog shit from the tread of a shoe. I have worried over what you will think of me, and whether you’ll find me on the page as I want to be seen. These worries have had their inevitable consequences on the truth.
My greatest worry, for instance, is that I might be boring. Some events have been summarily axed as a result. Editing is conscious, but what silent impact has this had on veracity – exaggeration, embroidery, embellishment perhaps? God forbid that you might find me dull.
Concerns about self-deception are not new. St Augustine, who was the first thinker to address the question, ‘What is a lie?’ and the first to publish an autobiography, Confessions, wrote: ‘I much fear my secret sins, which Your eyes know, mine do not. For in other kinds of temptations I have some sort of means of examining myself; in this, scarce any.’
Lie 37: I’m going home
Back in the seventies British Airways flights out of Saudi Arabia’s east coast departed at one o’clock every morning. Check-in began shortly before midnight. Ed and I would spend the witching hour in one of those seventies airport departure lounges where there was nothing but uncomfortable chairs and the toilet. It was a joyless wait. Through the glass we watched the Dhahran dark, the red lights running away into the desert.
By the time we boarded I was empty, or hungry, I was never sure. But all I remember of those in-flight meals is the sharp orange juice for breakfast. It was as bitter as the five o’clock London morning into which we flew.
During those journeys we were labelled, literally, with red-and-white stripy tickets and a large name badge slung around our necks. The first time, we were picked up before dawn by a ‘proxy parent’, one already in her senior years. The school sleeper train didn’t leave Euston until eight that evening.
Near Leicester Square we ate ‘luncheon’. There was white table linen and stodgy food. Ed spoke little, or not at all. I tried my best. Even in the cinema, watching Moonraker, I couldn’t concentrate for her resentment. It sat square amongst us the entire day.
This arrangement with Universal Aunts was not repeated. A day’s entertainment in central London cost the same as a domestic flight north to Aberdeen. Thereafter we were dragged by equally resentful unaccompanied-minor minders the length of Heathrow’s warren of underground passageways between Terminals 3 and 1 to meet the first flight of the day north. One letter home from Ed reads that our minders ‘just stood there for ten minutes having a granny’s conversation about tights!!!!!!’
While he worried that we would miss our flight, I worried we would crash. Following an episode where we had to ditch in Kuwait City after an engine fire, my mother had begun listing in her letters to me some of the world’s commercial flight disasters. The PIA incident in Jeddah where all 145 passengers and eleven crew died due to a fire in the cabin, and the Garuda Douglas DC-9 hijacked by Komando Jihad. My letter of 6 October 1980 reads: ‘I have just heard about the Tristar that caught fire near Riyadh, because (it is thought) a passenger was using a gas fire in the aisle. Something like 300 people killed!’
Worry was about all Ed and I did, our teeth clenched most of the way. We had long put our backs to trust, and to adults. One lesson had been clearly driven home. We were on our own.
Arriving in Scotland we’d find that it was still dark, a taxi driver holding up a handwritten A4 sheet which read ‘Aberlour House’. Often we were the first to arrive. I would stray between the empty bunk beds upstairs, alone, eyeing the sticky labels on the footboards to see where everyone else was sleeping. On a bottom bunk I would find my Holly Hobbie duvet cover and pillowcase folded on my mattress and like an automaton begin to make up my bed.
As the terms away from home grew, the number of stuffed toys sharing the bed with me grew too. Soon it became difficult to find any place for myself. When I moved on to the secondary school, with regret, I threw these friends away. By the time I was fourteen, while Ed remained in our delegated seats watching the in-flight entertainment, I spent these journeys to and from school at the back of the plane, smoking, getting drinks in with single men I’d befriended in the departure lounge.
I dressed like a homeless person, battered plastic bags in a mess at my fists – wearing an Oxfam overcoat and holed shoes, an inevitable ciggy drooping from my lips. On one flight I ‘snogged’ a member of the Austrian UN Peacekeeping Force, and on another threatened to bunk with a man I’d found in Amsterdam, and leave Ed ‘to it’.
But somehow we would arrive at the customs hall in Dhahran. There, in accordance with sharia law, officials went through every piece of luggage and every women’s magazine with gloved hands. They were after evidence of bare skin: shoulders, ankles, necklines, wrists; and, struggling with their own enjoyment, they would blacken the pages with a marker and leave us to repack.
My parents had started asking me in the arrivals hall:
‘Have you been smoking?’ or ‘Is that drink I smell?’
And I’d shake my head, blundering past them with a trolley load of plastic bags, out into the warm night and the car.
Perhaps they would ask Ed too, and he would lie. All we had left of our relationship was solidarity, and just as I had not abandoned him in Amsterdam, he did not, despite his thorough disapproval, ever tell them how out of control I had become.
The Christmas of 1984 I gave the parental presents much thought. It would be a relief to be able to say that I kept their outrage to myself, so as to save Ed the anxiety. But more likely I had spent much of the journey bragging about how customs-ballbusting my gifts were.
As we approached, the queue snaked long ahead of us, and I’m sure I began to worry too. These flights were often full, and there were many magazines to blight and bags to disembowel, a process I eyed with mounting dread. Once we’d reached the front the customs official held my plastic bag upside down, its vomiting
contents falling against the dam of his bent arm.
Amongst the items rolling across the table was a large tub of Johnson’s talcum that still shook its powder (though to my immense disappointment, he did not bother to check). Hidden inside the white plastic container was a collection of liqueur chocolates, which Dad eked out till Easter, leaving the Drambuie till last.
Also amongst the haul was a Playgirl, camouflaged with wallpaper. It lay unnoticed in my suitcase, along with a decoy copy of Cosmo that they so enjoyed blackening out.
The copy of Playgirl was a gift for my mother that was as much about wanting to shock her as any Saudi customs official. An early edition, it pictured double-page spreads of penises, laid across hairless thighs. These docile images came to be celebrated as the ultimate insurrection against Islamic misogyny that any of us women on the compound made. But to me the misogyny was irrelevant. I needed to escape school, and was prepared to risk – alcohol, pornography, sedition – everything to get home. That I never would, or could, has taken me decades to see. Home had long been disbanded, an irrecoverable place in memory to which none of us could return.
Lie 38: I couldn’t get him to change his mind
To be honest, if I had not been asked to, I would not write this lie. My memories of it are too thin. You can attribute this entirely to motivated forgetting. The diary entry for that day reads: ‘This is the very worst day of my life.’
Yet I have to write it, because without it, Sean says, my lies are incomplete.
It was the summer he returned from the Falklands War.
Dad had missed out on active military service in Cyprus in the fifties, which meant that the only real hero our family had, and has, is Sean. However, though there was a massive welcome at Brize Norton for those returning that August, our hero got off the plane from Ascension Island to find none of us there. A sergeant asked him: ‘Hey, don’t you have a home to go to?’
Sean felt that he hadn’t.
But he turned up anyway, arriving in Edinburgh by train. There the annual holiday pretence at happy families was in its fourth week. Dad had fallen out with Adrian (again) – over decorating the sitting room. Roped in as a replacement, I was being told loudly and often where it was that I was going wrong.
In a letter written years later, Dad blames his diabolical mood that summer on the military. Their poor communication was the only reason he had not been at Brize Norton to welcome Sean home. Then he widens his reach. Apparently Adrian had been ‘a bit of a disappointment on a number of fronts’. Therefore he was to blame too. And so was the front room. Dad was decorating, lest we forget. The painting was ‘at a stage (one hell of a mess)’, he writes, where he could not set it aside.
The decorating sticks with me. It sticks strong in memory, and it sticks strong on the letter page. Why does he bring it up?
His rage sticks with me too. ‘Yous yins had to live with my anger,’ he writes. So when Sean got home he found us all with our heads down.
Though the BBC had walked us through the whole sorry war on telly, we were ignorant of what Sean’s experience had been, the death he had seen, and the broken men he had pieced together. We had watched a sanitised account of Thatcher’s war, where there was no mention of bayonets or Tumbledown, and no images that included an army of empty helmets sprawled across the beach. Worse still, we did not think to ask.
Sean did not stay long. He made his escape by bus.
Or as Dad puts it in his letter: ‘Sean walked out and I went after him, but couldn’t get him to change his mind.’
Which was how it was, in a manner of speaking. Sean walked out and Dad could not persuade him to stay. But there is so much missing.
Sean remembers what is missing. But though I was ordered along to the bus stop I can’t.
The shelter, with its stingy plastic bench, was across a busy road, some distance from the house. I’m presuming Dad careered into open traffic. Sean remembers him charging up the street towards him, me in his wake, his fist already up, ‘IN A RAGE’. With his finger pointed at me he roared: ‘It’s Miranda’s birthday.’
Recorded in my diary is the ‘fuck off’ Sean shouted back at him, and the appalling fact that he had to do it ‘in front of a queue of other people!’
In that queue, Sean tells me, there was an older woman with a walking stick, and a man who looked too tough to be using a bus – ‘hard’ is how Sean describes him – and if they had not been there, Sean says, there would have been fists.
‘Miranda can have a birthday every year,’ Sean told him. ‘But you don’t go to war every year.’
It was then that the man who was too hard to ride a bus broke in:
‘So you’ve been to war, have you, pal?’
‘The Falklands.’
The bus pulled up and opened its door, Dad still shouting, his clenched fist still raised. The woman lifted her stick, other people in the queue gathering up behind her.
Dad yelled that he never, ever wanted to see or to speak to Sean ever again.
Soon the bus driver was on his feet too. The shouting was getting louder, and the pointing worse. Only when the driver began to unlock the booth gate that kept him in did Dad stop. He backed away up the pavement, his finger still jabbing the air.
The driver held the bus, the door wide open, until Sean stepped aboard. The driver asked that question again:
‘Are you just back from the war?’
Sean could not answer. He nodded, groping in his pocket for some coins.
‘Don’t worry about the money, pal. Wherever you’re going today it’s free.’
It was then that my brother cried.
Lie 39: I hate Dinah
Mum, because she was more comfortable with the public-school ideal, got to decide which one. Her choice for the next five years was Gordonstoun. Maybe she thought that counting the queen as a fellow parent would prove to Granny and Granddad that she had not married as badly as they thought. It was a decision confirmed when she toured the other option – Roedean. ‘The girl who showed me round, would you believe, was barefoot!’
When I tell the story of those boarding years I moan about how I was dumped in the arse end of Scotland, completely on my own (Ed never counts). There was no one on my side. No one. Yet this is not strictly true. I had one unlikely sympathiser.
Ma Tait, who was one of the housemistresses. Some referred to her as Dinah. These names – the ‘Ma’ and the ‘Di’ – were how we tried to pick holes in her authority, and in our fear.
She was a small woman, thin and spiky, with short black hair and a voice that was easy to mimic. It had a posh grating quality, like the aunt in an Austen novel. Her own children had left home, and her husband too. She told me one Saturday afternoon that I did not need a man to get a lid off a jar. Just plenty of hot water.
Dinah drove her VW Scirocco fast, never giving anyone a lift. We watched her brake lights shrink ahead into the darkness, all of us hissing her off stage like a pantomime baddy.
One report reads that I do not concentrate, I am sulky, and I fool around. She uses the word ‘sheep’. I was. Some mornings I was ordered to wait outside the staff room during break. She would appear, cotton wool in one hand and make-up remover in the other, and scrub at my eyes herself.
So I repeated often and loudly, along with everyone else, that I hated her, but this was not the truth. Later she would give me a copy of Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac as a present, and pretend to overlook my persistent smoking behind the house. I was one of the few girls invited into her living room, where she made me tea and gave me cake. I suspect it was because she had glimpsed my world one Saturday afternoon in October 1981 and she never forgot it.
I had arrived at Gordonstoun with a brand new bike. A navy lady’s model that, looking back, Dad hoped would give me the status his poor Irish background couldn’t. It was a big deal and a ‘monumental’ expense.
An expense I parked in the bike shed. I had more important things to worry about. The new cohort of third-f
orm girls were sorting themselves hierarchically, like grains of sand sliding through mesh. Within a fortnight my small self had been shaken down so far, the best I could hope for was that at breakfast the rest of them wouldn’t get up and move tables as soon as I sat down. Desperate to fit in with the bikeless I pretended I had none. It sat in the shed.
By half term when Dad arrived to pick me up, I was exhausted. I had waited all month, through every hour and every minute, for him to come rescue me. But instead of a tour of the dormitory he jogged round to the back of the house, and to the bike. I trotted after him, dread sitting in my stomach like stone. The last time I’d seen it, the seat and one rear mudguard were gone, its carcass being dismembered one piece at a time.
When he reached the gloom of the corrugated-iron shed, I held back, eyes closed. But nothing dimmed the crash, or his terrible wordlessness as he threw one mangled bike after another out onto the path. Tangled they fell, kicking up dust, my insides heavier and heavier, a need to pee coming on.
And then he was out on the path himself, the unrecognisable piece of junk that my bike had become aloft in his hand. It had been reduced, like me, to its frame.
I would be lying if I recounted the words he shouted. I wouldn’t even have remembered that same afternoon, my thoughts shrunk as they were to a white, hot panic. All I remember is the recognisable pitch of fury. Then his threat – he would be ‘taking it up with Mrs Tait’. I remember too that I ran after him, begging that he wouldn’t.
As we neared her door, Dad’s rage made it impossible to repeat my plea. Instead I dogged him across the grass in silence, the corpse of my bike swinging loose from his hand.
A Book of Untruths Page 10