‘Where’s Mum?’
Lie 62: We agreed a story and she carried it off well
Mum has already moved on to the next stage of grief. With the jagged Westmorland slate embedded above Dad’s grave she is packing up the house. I haven’t moved on at all. I am still grieving the lie I need to believe in, my father as a trustworthy man. It is not hard. Mum has had the gravestone engraved with the ungrammatical epitaph ‘Righter of Wrongs’.
Beneath his desk, boxes of possessions gather for the new house. On top there are Tupperware containers of floppy disks. I have agreed to go through each of Dad’s computer files to see if there is anything to be kept. But I have no patience for his folders of archived letters and I eject disk after disk, throwing them towards the black bin liner at the centre of the room.
The trouble is that I can’t stay focused. This morning my mother has told me she has burnt some ‘incriminating evidence’. A photograph of Dad and a woman, both naked, and that bloody letter, found amongst his stamp collection, kept for the Italian stamp. It is the letter she mentioned a fortnight ago on a Norfolk campsite, a letter I’ve been trying to forget.
As I lob another disk into the rubbish I speculate again whether it is her imagination. I feel irritated that I have not seen the photograph, or the letter, for myself. My father, with his persistent undermining, has primed me. I never take Mum at her word.
When she heads out with the dog and the children I charge up to the attic. Perhaps I will find more sense of him up there. Wobbling from beam to beam over candyfloss insulation, I pass boxes and boxes of anger. Letters to the university where he last worked fill four crates alone.
I ignore the lever-arch binders, filled with correspondence, and begin to finger through a box which looks more chaotic. Loose sheets of paper and examination booklets lie disordered under an empty file. Here, amongst the weight of rage stretching beneath the eaves, are leaves of old fiction, scant diary entries and notes on an equation for enjoyment. I use his correspondence for 1999 as a seat and scan this last find. He cites enjoyment for a weekend as:
Eating Out;
Bell Ringing;
Swimming;
Squash;
Sex;
Sightseeing.
He has divided this list into two columns: FUN and MUTUAL FUN. In the first column he notes ‘2 hours’ for Pool. In the second he puts only ‘1’. So whilst he continued to swim or snooze or chat, my mother, I presume, grew restless on her lounge chair and wished to go. She did not get any fun out of the Squash, five of the seven hours they spent at the Beach, half of the meals they ate out and one of the two fifteen-minute periods they spent making love. He has converted his ‘100 Hours of Holiday’ to percentages and concludes: ‘Enjoyable (MUTUAL) – 12%; Enjoyable (SELF) – 7.5%’. To the remaining 80.5 per cent he gives a large question mark.
Up here amongst the Heriot-Watt exam notebooks and scraps of lined paper, I smell the grief of a relationship going sour. Of letters drafted and never sent, of words dying on his breath, emptied onto paper, feelings muted by the page.
I leaf through notes for stories that feature prophylactics and escape. Though it feels like letting myself slip somewhere I do not want to go, I carry on reading.
Amongst some incomplete stories are four pages in red biro. Diary entries, Wednesday 13th to Thursday 21st. He is worrying away at a problem. The problem is not explicit and the players are parents of children I once knew. There is much discussion of arrangements, like teenagers planning the next few hours as though they are weeks. It is like a stirred pudding where six thirty-somethings are being slowly folded together until all the ingredients are mixed. On the final page, amongst talk of decanted home-brewed beer and uncooked chicken, he writes: ‘We agreed a story that I’d been with Jan since 3.30 and she carried it off well.’
I trail over the sentences and paragraphs and think this must be fiction. This is not him. This is not him. This is not evidence either. Speaking of lying does not constitute sex.
I struggle down the ladder, the four sheets of foolscap flapping in my hand. I need confirmation. Jan, on her third or fourth husband, is impossible to trace. Much better to contact the German woman, Renata, using an Italian stamp. It will confirm or deny my mother’s version. I feel the frenzy of a jilted lover, excited by thoughts of revenge. At the computer I Google her email address and fantastically it is there. I write to her, in a version of words, that I know of their affair. A lie to flush out the truth.
In the days before I receive her reply I read the four pages over and each time I get farther away from believing there is anything wrong – until Renata’s answer arrives in my inbox. Though the woman is sorry for my ‘distress’, she writes, ‘I am not penitent.’ Their affair had lasted a year. Fiction coagulates to form fact. All the times he had berated my mother for Pestering and Interfering and Being Over The Top, she had been none of those things. She had smelt a rat. And he was it.
I go back to the red biro entry another time: ‘We agreed a story that I’d been with Jan since 3.30 and she carried it off well.’
Here is the two-dimensional philanderer I never knew. In his own handwriting Dad shrinks to the pathetic cliché found in novels about lecturers, letcherers, who fuck their students and their colleagues’ wives. A liar.
Or am I as flawed as he? These words of mine, the letters F – U – C – K all strung together omit the anticipation and the guilt. These feelings are the white space around the words. They are what is forgotten when the black lines are all that is left.
Lie 63: The testes are unremarkable
I make the decision that I must see what is left of my father. His brain lies in Glasgow’s Southern General, donated to the team who work on glioblastoma multiforme. His was a tumour that wove insidiously through the folds of cortex above his left ear. It became enmeshed with his synapses, flowering like deceit.
Professor Greig, who cut his brain from its stem, has asked me to go straight up to the Neuropathology Department on the fifth floor.
The lift opens onto scarred double doors and a damp smell of wooden benches. Professor Greig gets up to shake my hand. In his office we sit down opposite one another, and I say:
‘Where does it live?’
The question is out of me before I can think of something more sensible to ask.
Professor Greig rises from his chair and walks across the corridor to another room. He returns with a shallow empty bucket in white.
‘We store our donations in these.’
The consistency of the brain is like jelly, he tells me, and very difficult to work with. And it was in a larger bucket that the material, as he calls it, was ‘fixed’. Once the wet tissue was hard, what was left of my father was cut into fourteen pieces.
He leans over and points out a book lying open next to me on the desk.
I look. The photograph is black and white, and shows a full brain sliced and arranged, left to right. Perhaps, I think, it will be less gruesome to view in pieces than as a bulk of creases and folds, recognisable as a brain. And as something that was once his. In my anxiety at what must come I tear on, saying:
‘I wondered why his testes were not examined in the autopsy. I wondered whether it was a kind of man-to-man thing, that you left this part of him alone as a mark of respect.’
Professor Greig looks at me blankly.
This fact has been bugging me for at least a week. Another pathologist will later explain that the testes might have been omitted from a full autopsy because they’re a bit of a ‘faff’. Usually they need to be poked up into the stomach cavity, and if tissue is ‘retained’, or ‘lost’, a golf ball is thought to make a decent replacement.
I repeat the question.
‘The post-mortem report states that the testes were not examined.’
Professor Greig rises, and it is the only moment that afternoon when he looks flustered, reaching over his desk for the post-mortem report. Carefully he turns the page and apologises. It is an oversight
, he says, asking if I am worried that the cancer had spread.
‘No, I am not worried about the cancer,’ I tell him. ‘It was only that it seemed a glaring omission.’
‘Excuse me?’
Professor Greig has the look of someone in the audience of Wagner’s Ring Cycle who’s neglected to read the plot synopsis. I say how my father was unfaithful to my mother the whole of their married lives. And what has infuriated me the most, and is so bloody typical, is how his testes have defied that damning autopsy label which defined each of his other organs – ‘unremarkable’.
‘Will I be able to take it home?’ I ask a bewildered Professor Greig.
‘The donation?’
‘I was thinking of a sea burial.’ The Ireland question had come up a number of times. Turfing his remains into the Irish Sea from a ferry feels appropriate.
Professor Greig tells me that there is a daunting amount of paperwork just for it to leave the building, and I would have to be prepared to dig a six-foot hole. Brains have the consistency of Semtex, he says:
‘You wouldn’t get it past security.’
Closing the book he tells me that the viewing of the remains has been arranged downstairs in the mortuary chapel. In the lift, once the doors have concertinaed closed, he says cheerily to another doctor:
‘This young lady has come to discuss a donation her family have made to the department.’
The man colours and the exchange gives me the feeling that in all his years as a pathologist, and he is due for retirement in a month, Professor Greig has never experienced a mission like this.
At the mortuary we ring the bell. A shadow hobbles into view. Mr Stewart, the mortician, has a stick. Professor Greig tells me that Mr Stewart has hurt his back and Mr Stewart, in white coat and blue scrubs, nods.
We enter the chapel, and again Professor Greig tells me that I may not want to see it. But there is nothing that would make me turn back now.
Mr Stewart opens the door to the viewing chamber. There is a small room: no chairs, a glass panel in one wall. The window is curtained. Behind it appears a hospital trolley-bed pushed up beneath the glass. Covered in white linen, it carries the brain.
The sections are placed in three rows on a white tray. Dad’s label is soaked and almost unreadable with its autopsy name, number and place of death: ‘Doyle AO30139: Ayrshire Hospice’.
The grey and white matter are in two diabolical shades of beige, the fan of nerve endings clear as the roots of a tree. The slices increase in size from the prefrontal section through to the diced gristle of the brain stem. The seventh slice has a small hole, the eighth an even larger one, whilst the ninth and tenth show ragged edges. The cavity is enormous.
The men wait for me to speak. It is impossible to imagine that this is him. This, in some essential way, is who Dad was, and who he pretended he wasn’t.
I start to ask questions about the cavity and the discoloration, but I no longer care what the answers are.
I realise I should emulate Professor Greig. As part of his ‘unremarkable’ autopsy he has retained sections of healthy tissue to store alongside what was diseased. He has remained impartial in the face of a rampant brain tumour.
He has accepted my father as he was.
Lie 64: I am good
There are, according to critics, good memoirs and bad ones. Bad ones make their authors, like ‘professional victim’ Dave Pelzer, hundreds of thousands of dollars. A Child Called It remained on the bestseller list for 448 weeks. What is bad is sentimentality and sensational over-indulgence. No memoirist, either (especially if they’re earning tons of money), should be bitter.
Those who write about themselves fall into two camps: sadists and masochists, and it is the sadists, we must presume, who are bad. They ruin literature.
This is a genre for which forgiveness is a highly valued, and a rare commodity. One book chapter on the ethics of misery memoir asks: what are we to do with autobiographers who cannot forgive their parents?
Why should we do anything? Just because these writers cannot forgive, does that really make what they have to say bad? Dave Pelzer’s inability to empathise with his abuser may not be a choice. Neglect literally reduces brain volume. Synaptic pruning, a process which begins in the first one to two years of life, crops axons, dendrites and synapses that have been underused in early childhood. For these children it means shaving love short. Perhaps, rather than being bad, these memoirs are the most honest version of self that they can be, and the most ‘true’.
Am I bad? Even by asking the question, do I haul myself away from giving a truthful account? Or simply reveal myself as desperate to be liked and worried what everyone else thinks? Because I have worried about being good. Being good is often on my mind. I guess in this regard, though, I am bad – I have admitted that I am still struggling to forgive, and even if I haven’t admitted it, my underlying tone will have given me away.
More than forgiveness, it is betrayal that many of those who find themselves subjects of memoir would say is unethical. Being understood comes a distant second when judged against loyalty. These things I have written are private, and the secrets I have told are not mine. In fact loyalty to the Doyles ranks greater than almost anything else. Just as it feels like subjugation to remain dutiful to someone else’s secrets, it is also oppressive when parents and siblings are forced to play a role in a tale they did not write. My brothers may feel as though I’ve hauled them on stage and forced them to speak a series of terrible lines.
I did ask some of my characters (not Adrian, or Sean yet) if they would like a right to reply, but Violet and Ed declined. Perhaps it is more satisfying to feel justifiably pissed off.
Which they will be. The reaction to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical My Struggle has included hate mail, death threats and lawsuits. The ‘K’ section of a bookshop was torched. In the Paris Review Knausgaard excuses himself: ‘I was so frustrated that I did not foresee the consequences … There was a certain desperation that made it possible.’ Ignorance is not an excuse I can claim. I have foreseen the consequences, and this must make me look worse. I am rather hoping that, as many of my family are not readers, they won’t notice that this has happened.
Which relies heavily on the extremely generous note that Mum wrote once she was no longer able to speak – ‘Miranda, you have my full permission to write anything you want.’ She, more than anyone else, would want me to forgive.
Yet we are only capable of forgiveness when we fully understand one another. Something I am struggling with. The monumental levels of deceit make it difficult to fathom any truths about my parents’ marriage, their motivations, their selves. I will have left out thoughts, ideas, feelings that were enormously important to them. All I can hope is that what I can’t see – my own ignorance about them and about myself – you can, because it is in this space between me and you, writer and reader, that memoir finds its voice.
Lie 65: It was just a joke
Months have passed since the Italian stamp debacle and here we are, me and the children, marking out the long weeks of holiday ‘at Granny’s’. The beach and her love of the children alleviate the resentment of having to visit this tired seaside town that has never been home to me.
My mother has moved to granny-friendly accommodation, and is surrounded by neighbours who are older and more decrepit. Although she is only sixty she talks of converting the bath to a shower, of the convenience of having her bedroom downstairs. Tension plays out over the fact I am holidaying at hers rather than she with us. She freely admits that she would prefer not cooking for us at all.
But irritation over the cooking is camouflage for something much more grave. The lie is still amongst us. We trip over it wherever we step.
Day three I find Mum seated in Dad’s ugly recliner, attempting nonchalance. Yanking on the handle she tips it back, so the footrest kicks up her striped socked feet. There is a hole, which she points out to the two-year-old.
‘Look, Granny’s got a
hole in her sock.’ The toddler toddles over to inspect. The big toe wiggles. Mum reaches over and pulls out some white paper and a red felt-tip and says: ‘Go on and draw Granny a huge red hippopotamus?’ Then calls through to the five-year-old, crouched over a train set in the other room: ‘When you’ve got the track finished I’ll come through and see it.’
I wonder whether she was always this good at mothering, or if it is only mothering me that is so hard. I struggle so with it myself.
Both children now distracted, she pulls the striped polycotton back over her toe.
‘We must not tell the boys.’
‘The boys?’
She must mean my brothers, but it is far too late for that. I have told everyone.
‘I mean,’ she says, ‘if they ask, of course, you can tell them. But only if they ask.’
Which makes this another Catholic lie, where by not speaking the truth the hope is that it will just wither away, a technique she must have picked up from Dad. It is not an observation I make aloud. Partly because I have not admitted to the illicit emails or furtive checks of her address book for all the women Dad might have shagged.
She shuffles forward on the recliner and says calmly:
‘It’s not something they need to know.’
A catalogue of knowing, which she must already regret.
‘So you didn’t know yourself?’ I say. ‘You didn’t know until the Italian stamp?’
She looks at me blandly.
‘This is the first you knew?’ I repeat, meaning generally – that Dad had affairs.
‘Yes,’ she says, getting up to swoop the toddler and her hippopotamus scrawl away from the dog.
Her ‘yes’ is not a lie. It relates, I will later realise, only to the specific case of the German, Renata, rather than his promiscuity in general.
A Book of Untruths Page 17