The dishonesty that lurched between us, in retrospect, had robbed our relationship of authenticity. She had often begged me to be honest with her, and I had. Most of the time. Unlike my father, I had never wanted her to be anything other than who she was, imagining that whatever conversation we were having, though flawed, was sincere.
Under her bed, their bed, I found the reusable sorry card, the envelope a catalogue of apologies.
‘John:’ in blue felt-tip – ‘The re-usable card!’ Beneath is her ‘+ again’ in black biro, ‘& back’, in Dad’s handwriting, ‘definitely’ (misspelled) in hers, and then ‘July – Maureen, in pencil in case we run out of space. I’m the one on the right!’ Two more dates follow, both in her hand.
On the cover there is a blushing cartoon mouse with the words: ‘I’m remorseful, regretful, repentant, contrite, humbled, grief-stricken, self-accusing, eating humble pie … Well let’s face it …’ and then inside the card ‘… I’m really very sorry.’ Other than these card manufacturer’s words, it is completely blank.
There is also a pile of Valentine cards, a haul of sentimentality and sweetness I never anticipated. One pictures two birds:
‘Do you love me?’ says the first.
‘Of course I do.’
‘Say it then.’
‘I love you.’
‘Say it with feeling.’
‘I luuurve you.’
‘LOUDER.’
‘I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you!’
There is a gap, the bird who has just spoken awash with sweat. The other whispers:
‘Promise?’
Again, though there are no words inside the card, it passes back and forth between them till finally there is a single entry from 2002, the year Dad died. It is in his handwriting, the letters already crooked with cancer: ‘Thanks for all you’ve done.’
Finally, wedged beneath the cards, in a plastic wallet, is a full sermon, typed up. Delivered in the nineties by Dad alone at pulpits across Scotland, it spread the good news on marriage. Each Sunday he told the congregation that he had realised ‘how impossible it would be to live without each other’.
Lie 70: Always tell the truth
‘I’ is a fragile mark. Apart from the indefinite article ‘a’, which must always be bolstered by a noun, ‘I’ is the shortest word in the English language. Though it looks thin and insubstantial, our ‘I’ feels huge. Capitalised, when ‘me’, ‘he’ and ‘she’ are not, it has a whine, even on the page, like a screaming gull.
The psychologist Robert Kurzban argues that this single line, this shortest word, is a lie. We have no unitary self, because our minds are modular, with distinct biological processes and functional specialisations which are necessarily isolated from one another. Like a governmental institution where departments jealously guard information from each other, the mind is not designed to maximise accuracy. Truth falls between the cracks.
Although ‘representing things that are true is … useful’, such as the speed a car is travelling as we step off the kerb, or that a fire is hot, our brains in a social setting are less motivated to be accurate and therefore honest.
However, our conscious selves do feel motivated. Amongst the most prized qualities of being human, researchers at the University of London found, was honesty. In another study, researchers asked volunteers to lie in order to gain money; although they were speaking to strangers, most chose to tell the truth until the financial loss tipped over the $20 threshold. Many studies corroborate these findings. Humans are prepared to sacrifice economic payoffs in the interest of being honest. We weigh up the benefits of integrity with the benefits of self-interest, and lying to those we are intimate with, for many of us, is just too high a price to pay.
Lies are constructed while truths are retrieved, which leaves a lie at a disadvantage. The brain is motivated to privilege the less costly option. Truthfulness.
Perhaps then we can blame cognitive load, the mental fatigue of lying, for my mother’s deterioration into truth (although she would probably tell you that it was Jesus). However, what she cannot have noticed is that to embark on truth-telling in the midst of a lie is the most exhausting thing of all. Especially once she realised that she’d made a mistake and didn’t want to tell it at all.
Amongst liars the most common U-turn is when an adulterer wants to make a clean breast of things. Many argue that they are motivated by self-interest. Discomfited by shame and guilt they tell the truth to make themselves feel better, and inevitably make the wronged party feel a good deal worse. Mira Kirshenbaum, author of When Good People Have Affairs, is adamant that an adulterer must never confess, even when asked directly. The choice, as she sees it, is not between good and bad, but between honesty and hurt. Avoiding hurt is always a better moral choice, she argues, than disclosure.
My mother maybe did not imagine that her honesty would be hurtful. However, to me it feels like an attack on my self. Many of the memories I had stacked up in the past became, in the face of her truths, a lie. We define ourselves through memory, and if we cannot rely upon our memories, we feel betrayed.
Is it fair to claim, though, that Mum has trashed my memories? I have more likely trashed them myself. When I check my diaries, my memory has been selective. Mum had tried to embark on some truth-telling before. One entry for December 1983, when I was fifteen, reads: ‘My mother thinks Dad’s having an affair with someone we met in Corfu.’
But at fifteen there were other, more pressing things on my mind. Like how to survive another three years at boarding school. This news provoked only the tired question: why is she telling me? Sitting thousands of miles away from her in Scotland it was information I could do nothing with. I ‘forgot’.
Or did Kurzban’s modular mind – this fractured ‘I’ of mine – out of a sense of inconvenience, compartmentalise and bury? He suggests that the cognitive subsystems that make up our brain are like a ‘Machiavellian spin doctor’. Not sure how the major decisions have been made, the self is like a press secretary with access to limited information that uncomfortably must be explained. We are most at risk of self-deception when we need to explain ourselves. Deceit creeps in through the back door.
So I must apologise. Faced with unreliable memories, self-deceit, some lies and Kurzban’s fractured, out-of-touch self, this narrative, at best, can be only a thin imitation of how things were. In fact someone who features in these stories laughed when she read them:
‘That was not how it was, or how you were.’
Lie 71: I’d just have to kill some people
What is the penultimate lie? Let’s give this one to Sean.
It’s a cliffhanger.
He arrives straight off a night shift at Heathrow. We go out for lunch, just the two of us, and though Dad’s been dead more than a decade, we talk about him. With the two of us he’s a popular subject. Something on which we can both agree. I always concede that for Sean it was worse.
Maybe we talk about Adrian too. We definitely talk about Ed. We are always nice about Ed.
Then we make the obligatory trip to Costa. Sean likes Costa. A lot.
Back home, waiting for the children to get in from school, through the window we see a squirrel digging up the beds. We watch in silence as it begins to tackle the lawn.
‘I’ve got a squirrel trap at home,’ Sean says eventually. ‘They love peanut butter.’
We continue to watch as another dodges between the struts in the fence.
‘Does the trap kill them?’
‘Nah,’ he says. ‘I drop them by my mate’s, in the flat below, and he takes them out with an air rifle.’ He continues to stare into the garden. ‘I don’t like doing it myself.’
At the front of the house we hear my twelve-year-old trailing bags and an indifferent day in with her. Soon the fifteen-year-old tramps home too. He acknowledges us with a nod, and automatically empties the biscuit drawer.
Not waiting for him to start eating, Sean is already on his feet, like a box
er dancing in his corner. Pretending he wants to show the teenager some martial arts moves, he swiftly puts him in a headlock on the kitchen floor, shouting:
‘What are you going to do now? You’re immobilised. Look,’ he pulls the arm tighter. ‘I can do anything.’
A wooden spoon is broken in the melee, and something crashes to the floor.
Finally the teenager struggles back to his feet, and Sean bounds back to the table.
‘From my flat, on a Tuesday,’ he says, ‘you can hear the alarm test at Broadmoor. I keep thinking, you know, that would be the way to live. No rent, no worries, my own little cell. I’d just have to kill some people.’ The twelve-year-old has got a look on her face that mirrors how I feel. ‘More than ten would probably do it and I’ve got a list.’ He looks at me. ‘Adrian’s at the top, but don’t worry, Mir, they’d probably catch me before I got to you. You’re a bit further down.’
Lie 72: With my body I thee worship
I’m a week late delivering my manuscript. It’s a common complaint made about writers. Rather than get on with it, we do the laundry, masturbate, or pretend to be interested in the conversation we have struck up in the Asda queue.
I need distraction. Only yesterday I told Ed and Sean what I was writing, and I’ve had a stomach ache ever since.
So as we reach the inevitable final days, deadline looming, you find me here, in a cramped downstairs lavatory raking through shells. Small scavenged seashells in a dish, housed beside the toilet paper. I think the shells were originally Mum’s, slung together with some scented granules to form a homemade odoriser – a kind of shell pot pourri – and I’m wondering whether I should just bin them. Do they smell good any more, or are they just collecting dust? Toilets cleaned, floor wiped, I am resorting to anything to take my mind off my stomach and what I have written.
Continuing to stir, I wonder if there is any way that I could make everything smell better. My fingers clattering through cockle and whelk, something catches the light.
It is not a shell.
I back out of the lav, the dish at arm’s length.
It is the kind of moment that whispers of faeries, but I am thinking only of gremlins.
What is not shell is gold. A slim circle of it. A finger-sized circle. I sit down and squint at the letters spiralling within. Unreadable.
Or is that an eternity symbol?
If this is Mum’s wedding ring (and it better not be), why isn’t it in her coffin with her? No one would have removed it from her. I would have had it buried with her, had anyone asked.
But if it is her ring, why didn’t any of us notice that she’d ditched it? Or had the motor neurone disease shrunk her so fast, so small that she worried it might get lost? Taking it off was a way of keeping it safe. But then why toss it amongst seashells, stowed on a windowsill that she would not have been able to reach in her wheelchair?
Shells that I had asked Sean to throw out the weekend we emptied the house. Which must be why they’ve ended up with me, too guilty to throw them myself.
I look at the ring again.
What was said when it was slid over knuckle and skin the first time? Were bodies to be honoured? Cherished? Was there talk of faithfulness, fidelity and forsaking all others?
When my daughter appears asking: ‘When’s lunch?’ I am still sitting where I was. Though she offers to get my glasses I ask her if she’ll read to me what the inscription says:
John ∞ Maureen 23.7.66
And so it is that in this final week, as though they have willed it themselves, I find, where I least expect it, proof, for better, for worse, of something true.
Afterword
When, out of the blue, Adrian received the manuscript for this book he was extremely generous, and sent his own memories. They left me sadder than I have felt in years.
My mother died just after my fifth birthday. The period is etched in my memory, trapped in a nursery school from dawn to dusk surrounded by adults who wouldn’t listen to me. They wouldn’t let me see her. Dad swore blind I never visited her in hospital, but I did. I will never forget seeing her lying in her bed, talking to me, reassuring me. It was the last time I ever saw her.
I never had time to grieve. I had to survive. I had to keep Dad awake on the numerous drives between Dartford and Edinburgh, standing in the front of his MG keeping lookout and stopping him from falling asleep.
Dad would never tell me about her. I tried and tried but it was harder than pulling teeth. He would never even tell me where she was buried.
Her death left me in a world full of uncaring, angry and violent adults. Granny Doyle, indifferent, smelly and uncaring, and Dad, a walking bag of rage and suppressed violence. Then Dad brought Maureen into my life. To me she was just another angry adult, much like Dad, but wearing a dress. There was no escape.
So I withdrew. You describe me as remote. An understatement if ever there was one. I withdrew into my own world of Enid Blyton and pulp children’s fiction. I became so independent that I would let no one touch me. From the moment my mother went into hospital until puberty I received no affection. That was my choice.
When you and Ed came along, I changed your nappies, I read you stories, I fed you at meal times, but I never really connected with you. You were too likely to be affectionate, or even worse, need affection.
Dad had mellowed by the time you came along. You seemed to get away with stuff for which I had been soundly beaten. I resented what I saw as an ‘injustice’. Of course in hindsight it was anything but.
That said, even mellowed, he was a tyrant – angry, violent and unpredictable. Life was one ginger step after another. I could never predict what would cause him to fly into a rage. It might be a word, reaching for the marmalade without asking, covering a schoolbook with paper the wrong way.
I dealt with this by spending more and more time outside, virtually coming in only to eat. Your passage about the aftermath of the burnt lino summed up my entire life from age five to sixteen. Then I fought back. He beat me up, but the balance shifted. He could no longer terrorise me.
The terror was not the beatings. I could handle those. The terror was that I never could relax. I smashed the shed window once with my football. I went in to confess and take the punishment (get it over with). He just laughed. I covered a book slightly incorrectly (simple childhood error) and was beaten so hard with a wooden spoon (the nearest weapon to hand) that it broke.
My intellect is what saved me. The only time Mum and Dad smiled at me at the same time was when I got straight As at O-grade. So when Dad tried to beat knowledge into you or Sean I would be sitting on the stairs trying to send you the answers telepathically. I really tried, but I never had the courage to come in and stop him. I could have taught you all those things, but I was too scared. In my imaginary castle, I came to the sorry conclusion that I could not trust anyone, so I drew up the metaphorical drawbridge and posted a big fuck-off sign – STAY AWAY. I was only six or seven years old.
Now I have too much good in my life to think about the past. Why dwell on all that? What’s the point? They were shit parents. It happens. I survived and have done my best to fix myself. Anyway life is not about the past. It’s not really about the future either. It’s what we do today.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Anna Webber for your confidence and your trust, and to Mitzi Angel. It was a privilege to work from your edit. Thank you too to everyone else at Faber: Emmie Francis, Samantha Matthews, Eleanor Rees and Camilla Smallwood for your thoughtfulness and patience. To Donna Payne, I adore your cover design – as perfect an expression of self as any of the words inside.
Thank you to my brothers. You’re heroic – the material has been amazing, and your generosity too. I am more grateful than I can express.
Raquel Bello, Flora Franklin, Victoria Izat and Jennifer Ouvaroff for being such good friends, and allowing me to make you characters in this desperate book.
Bee Wilson and Annabel Lee, my first readers. Your reac
tion was as good as gold. Without you I’d still be writing in secret fib by fib.
Nick Barraclough and Tony Goryn for being there each week. Working with you has been remarkable, and always, always fun.
Kate Rhodes for your unstinting support and faith, to Andrea Porter for reading this twice in only a few days, flattering it with the words: ‘this is fuck central’, and your fabulous poker chip analogy, to Sally Fenn for your honest and empathetic feedback, which made everything better, to Malachi McIntosh for giving me the courage to send out and to Jane Menczer for travelling this road together with me.
Thank you to dear friend Katherine Davies, to Dylan Banarse and Marc Ridyard for sharing with me your views on cheating, and to my colleagues in the Kouzarides and Miska Labs, who very kindly took the Gur/Sackeim test of shame. To Dr Clive Simmonds for revealing the secret of the university library’s red crates and to Pamela Bradshaw for her time and her tissues.
Thank you to Norman, for being a friend and surrogate older man of Leith these past twenty-seven years, and to Judy Eggington for talking with me about the past.
Emma and Holly Hodgson, Barbara and Stuart Mitchell, Nicola Armstrong and Vanessa Stefanak, thank you all for your belief and generosity.
Thank you Blake Morrison, Maura Dooley for an amazing two years at Goldsmiths, and Sally Cline, for opening the lid on what a hoax autobiography is.
To Arts Council England, who years ago treated me like a writer when I was still up to my ears in nappies and blaaah.
To Mark Thomson for putting the fear of God into me about privacy law.
And finally to Matthias, you are the best kind of reader and the best kind of friend. Thank you for taking me on. As Mum predicted, you have been everything. And to my children, I promise not to ever write like this about you.
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