A Lie About My Father Read online

  One afternoon, my father led us to a warehouse far from the seafront, and we walked around looking at the goods on offer – tennis rackets, china, lamps, plastic flowers – searching for bargains. I remember, now, how keenly I felt the sadness to which their poverty condemned them: the sadness of people who had next to nothing and were judged accordingly, the sadness of people who knew that such things mattered. When my father produced a handful of notes, and we picked out what we wanted, I was struck by the sadness of our possessions; or rather, the possessions we aspired to, the trinkets and baubles and cheap ornaments we were buying with this surprise windfall, worthless, ill-made objects, like the junk they gave out at seaside bingo games. At some level, I guessed that having these things – owning stuff, dusting it, moving it around, showing it to other people – was an enchantment for my parents. They held these objects as others hold talismans, as protection against death, or at least against invisibility. It made me ashamed. It made me want to run away, to have nothing, to have nowhere to go, like Jesus. That day, I didn’t want anything for myself, but I couldn’t have begun to explain why, so I accepted a tennis racket and a grey tennis ball, items that had, from the look and smell of them, been in storage for years, waiting for better times. I can’t remember what anybody else chose, but I think, for them, it was a good day, right at the end of the holiday, the day everybody would talk about, months later.

  I remember that day, too; but what I remember is the cool of the sky that afternoon, when we emerged from the warehouse and walked back to the guest house, clutching our goods, a little sad, a little ashamed. I remember the promenade, the smell of the sea, the smell of Blackpool rock and fish and chips and candyfloss. When the holiday was over, I remember coming home to the same place: the prefabs, school, the cold church, the woods. I remember, on the first day back at school, after the long, empty summer, somebody filled the inkwells with milk during the lunch break, and we had to carry them, brimming and heavy as magnets, to the sink where we did our art work, and carefully pour the pale blue liquor down the drain. I remember the day when a thin, pimply, stone-grey boy called Stanley slipped while he was climbing over the high wall at the back of the school and got his leg caught on one of the old iron spikes. I recall how he hung there, screaming, till a passer-by ran into the playground, climbed the wall, lifted him carefully off and lowered him into the arms of the teachers below. On certain days, I remember it all: the summers, the moorhens’ nests, the night-long fasts before Holidays of Obligation, but I also remember being small in the eye of my father’s rage and I recall, in cinematic detail, the first fall that no one was there to break, and then, as if some magical immunity had been broken, the falls that followed: the broken arm, the tipped ladder, the hospital room where I lay sobbing on a gurney for no reason, while the nurse waited for the drugs to wear off. Forty years later, I remember it all, and I dream those same dreams. Night after night I populate the dark.

  CHAPTER 9

  I could never work out why the Donaldsons lived in the prefabs. Nobody else had a car, but they did. They had a phone too, and a caravan somewhere, and they took holidays in places we’d never heard of. Their son, Daniel, was a strong, unsuspecting, generous-hearted boy with a temper, but he was also the local peacemaker, the one who stopped fights before they went too far, the player-referee in every game from football to rounders, the voice of reason, well served by a workaday imagination and the impenetrable authority of the only child. I suppose, if you had to receive bad news, you would rather Daniel brought it than anybody else – and that is exactly what he did for my mother that winter, just a fortnight after her father finally died of the cancer he’d been fighting for months. She was alone in the house, baking, listening to the wireless in the kitchen, when a shadow appeared at the frosted pane of our back door. I think she would have been happy, that day, even though her father had just passed; she was usually happy when she was allowed to get on with the routine maintenance of our world: the cooking, the cleaning, the baking. Baking was her favourite chore, and she baked a good deal, partly because it was a cheap source of treats and partly, I suppose, because she knew the cakes she made were amazing. Everybody liked them. My cousin Dave, who was notoriously averse to family occasions, would come to our house on any excuse, just to have a slice of my mother’s fruit cake and one of those rich, frighteningly delicious confections she called Melting Moments. Like everything else she did, she baked by feel: there was no clock in her kitchen, no egg timer. She knew every cake was different, and she judged how well it was doing by smell.

  That day, she was making angel cakes and a Victoria sponge. Nothing got spoiled, because Daniel offered to stay behind after she left and take care of things. He had come to tell her that my father had been hurt in an accident at work: it wasn’t anything to worry about, he said, but somebody had telephoned to say they were sending a car to take her to the hospital in Dunfermline. Daniel didn’t know how extensive my father’s injuries were, but even if he had, he wouldn’t have said anything more or less than what he had been told to say: an accident, a fall, nothing to worry about, no hurry, car coming. Nobody would know how bad it was, anyhow, till the ambulance arrived at Emergency, and the doctors examined him: my father had fallen around thirty feet from a scaffold; now, he was unconscious, barely breathing, his lungs weren’t working properly, his face was badly battered. I didn’t see him for weeks, and even then I didn’t recognise him. We found out, later, that his skull had been fractured, all the ribs on one side were broken, one of his lungs was punctured, he had broken teeth, broken bones in his face and hands, his left leg was broken . . . When she came to break us the news, my mother said it was typical of our father, to do nothing by halves. He hadn’t broken every bone in his body, but he’d broken enough that he could claim he had without fear of contradiction, when it came time to recount the story.

  The next two months were slow and subdued. At first, my mother went as often as she could to sit by my father’s bed as they waited for him to become fully conscious; later, she took flowers from the garden, papers, books, fruit, gifts from the neighbours. My father was sure they all despised him, but there wasn’t one who didn’t send a card, or bring round gifts for my mother to take in. Meanwhile, we children waited dutifully for the day when we would be able to go in with her at visiting time, sitting in the waiting room while she took him our drawings and letters: touching, empty letters from children who didn’t really know what to say, drawings of trees and flowers, drawings of the prefab with smoke coming out of the chimney and the lilac tree in bloom by the back door.

  Finally, we were allowed in. I still recall how damaged he looked, lying in his damp-looking, slightly stale hospital bed, his eyes purple and swollen, his mouth rimmed with dry spittle, his voice a thin croak. This was the biggest shock, for me, that his voice had dwindled so, faded to a shadow of itself – this, and the penitent, humbled air he had about him, the air of one who has been chastened, considerate of others, quiet, thoughtful, plugged in to some undercurrent of fear he’d managed to deny for years, but could no longer evade. He’d almost died, he would say later – and everybody knew he was right. It was a drama, a real event. For once, he didn’t need to make anything up: it was all true.

  Meanwhile, life at the prefabs was close to idyllic. My mother didn’t have any money – even though we’d been told there would be compensation payments, she wasn’t holding her breath – but we were strangely happy in our quiet home, all of us working together, doing our best, looking after one another. My father had sent a message that I would have to be the man of the house for a while and look after my mother and Margaret but, at ten, I was smart enough to ignore that particular piece of advice. Best of all were the nights, when we got back from Mrs Banks’ house and, having sat long enough with my mother to hear the latest news, we forgot my father altogether and moved on to the ordinary things that were so imperilled when he was there: listening to the radio, reading, playing games, sitting quietly around the
fire while my mother knitted a matinée jacket – she was always knitting matinée jackets – for some cousin’s baby. We were happy then and, though we would never have admitted it to ourselves, none of us really wanted it to end.

  NOBODADDY

  and we are not afraid as we watch her soul fly on: paired as the soul always is: with itself:

  with others.

  Two swans . . .

  Child. We are done for

  in the most remarkable ways

  Brigit Pegeen Kelly

  CHAPTER 1

  After the accident, my father sat at home taking stock of his life – casual labouring, a wartime prefab that should have been demolished years before, a depressed, chronically anaemic wife, unhappy children – and he decided, once again, that it was time for a change. I’m not sure how aware of his alcohol problem he was by then, but I believe he was at least partly motivated by an impulse familiar to alcohol counsellors, the ‘geographical solution’, where a drinker leaves behind the bad memories and debts of a place where he has outlived his slender welcome, and moves on to pastures new. I imagine my father understood, at some level, that his wife was sick, and his children confused and fearful, because of his drinking and the uncertainty and occasional violence that went with it. By now, he had forgotten the Birmingham fiasco enough to think he could turn over a new leaf elsewhere; perhaps he thought all we needed was a change of scene to become a family again. Perhaps he thought he’d been changed by his brush with death. Perhaps he even believed that this fall would be his last.

  All the time he’d been talking openly about Canada, my father had been secretly finding out about Corby, an industrial boom town in the East Midlands. He’d heard that men like him, labourers and the unskilled, could get good jobs at Stewart’s and Lloyd’s, the huge steelworks that had grown up around the high-grade iron-ore deposits that ringed this little village in Northamptonshire, making work for thousands and creating, first, a huddle of terraced housing that sat, grey and squat, around the blast furnaces and the tube mills, then, later, when the government realised that this kind of sprawl had to be better represented for the electorate, one of the celebrated New Towns. My father, who had always resisted the idea of working indoors, now decided that Corby was for him: a fresh start in a growing industry, far from my mother’s family, far from the neighbours who had come to see him as a burden, far from the pity and concern and judgement that he saw around him every day. He’d probably known all along that we weren’t going to Canada. Even if Canada had been prepared to have him, my mother would never have moved an ocean away from everything she loved, but Corby was just a coach ride away. The clinching argument would have been that, in those days, anybody who wanted to work in Corby was given ten pounds and a place in a hostel till a house came up. They were building new houses all the time. It would be six weeks, more or less, before a place was available, which gave him plenty of time to work out the lie of the land. He could write home and let her know how things were, and she didn’t have to go for good. If she didn’t like it, we would go straight back, no questions asked.

  The next few weeks were troubled. He did seem different, and we all had hopes that he’d been shocked into a new way of living. I wasn’t really convinced, however. I tried, but there was a lingering sense of once bitten twice shy that I couldn’t quite escape. Now, when my father talked about Canada, I dreamed dutifully of frozen lakes and shy-eyed deer moving silently through maple woods at dawn; when Australia became the topic of conversation, I conjured up images of Christmas on the beach and tropical greenery at the foot of the garden. But my heart wasn’t in it. It just felt cruel, all this dreaming and planning. When we did move – and my mother had agreed, finally, that we had to move, if only to get my father off the building sites – I was sure we were going to somewhere as grey and wet as the pit town we were leaving.

  Finally, on a damp October day, we all gathered with a few belongings on the southbound platform of Cowdenbeath station, said goodbye to the dying coalfields and set out for Corby. My father had been there for several weeks, getting a job, getting a house sorted out. Now he’d come back to get us, to bring us to our new life – and I hated him for it. He’d gone on letting me dream of Canada till the very last minute, and I knew that I would always long for a homeland that would correspond to the snowy woods and little outlying villages of wooden houses and picket fences of my imagination. I had bought into a wide, still darkness, lit here and there by a farmhouse window, or a late tractor working some huge grain field in Manitoba, dirt roads whitening in the moonlight, overgrown tracks leading to blizzards and nothingness. I had bought into that world, and I knew I would always miss it. Decades later, there are times – travelling home from work on a winter’s night, or waiting for a train in a country station – when I realise I am still waiting to complete the journey I began in my ten-year-old mind all those years ago.

  To say I was disappointed by Corby is a massive understatement, but that first day’s disappointment was nothing compared to the misery that followed. Corby was hideously ugly compared to my dream of a northern wilderness: at that time, all it amounted to was a cluster of cheap housing estates clinging like barnacles to the behemoth of Stewart’s and Lloyd’s; huddled and polluted, it befouled the Northamptonshire countryside like some medieval plague town wrapped in a grey-gold cloud of smoke and smuts and simmering in the orange glow from the blast furnaces. Meanwhile, things at home went from bad to worse, as this second and final flit south, which was supposed to provide security and economic freedom, proved to be my father’s undoing. With more money to spend, his drink problems worsened. Very soon, he lost faith in his old policy of simmering threat, of quiet menace: from now on, he would hit out, secretly, unexpectedly, when my mother’s back was turned. I never discovered how often this happened with Margaret – a good deal in her mid-teens, I think – but by the time I was fourteen, I’d come to think of him as just another bully, ready to make me pay for even the smallest mistake: leaving something out that should have been put away, laughing at the wrong moment, staying out too long or coming back too early, there was no logic to any of it. At the same time, he would come home from the pub with his pockets full of change and buy every child playing in the square an ice cream from the van that plied its trade around the Beanfield estate. The local kids would run to him whenever he appeared, his RAF blazer jingling with money, to receive their treat from ‘Uncle Tommy’. The only ones he left out were his own children. We didn’t run to him, because we knew better. Even in a good mood, he wasn’t treating us to ice cream we didn’t deserve.

  CHAPTER 2

  That was the year I began inventing my own companions, building ghosts around the given names and spectral images of my lost kin: my dead sister, my brother Andrew, the abandoned and the imaginary who seemed so much happier, so much truer than the living. It seems a necessary enterprise when I look back at the child I was, a strategy that came from somewhere inside, not thought out on the surface, but rising from the mind’s undertow, spontaneous, instinctive. My father was doing me harm, but at some level I could see that he himself was hurt, possibly beyond repair. Every time it seemed that his actions were deliberate, I tried to remind myself that they were not. I am using the language I have now to describe it when I say that he was visiting the sins of a mutant belief system on the only son he had, but I think that, even then, I understood some of what was happening. Meanwhile, my strategy was fairly simple: a simplicity that arose from necessity rather than design. The only thing I could do was resist my father’s power with my own will, my own imagination. He was the man of the house, the one in charge; but I had some choice in how things went; I didn’t have to collaborate with him, or with his sad, angry gods. I had my imagination. He was always saying that to me when I asked him a question he didn’t want to address: What do you think? Use your imagination, for God’s sake. So I did. What I came up with was like a game, but it was more than just play-acting. The game I played, in the language
I have now, was Ghost Brother syndrome.

  The first thing to say about Ghost Brother syndrome is that, to be convincing, it should really be called by another name. Something more exotic, more Central European. Zastra-Serduk’s syndrome. Von Hollstadter’s disease. It was only to be expected that I would suffer from this condition, first as a boy whose father had nothing to teach him, then as an adolescent in the proverbial authority vacuum. With nobody real to measure myself against, I had always needed a brother; but for a long time it hadn’t occurred to me that it was in my power to invent one. Then, when I was around fourteen, I was travelling home in the late afternoon, on the bus that stopped outside Greenhill Rise shops. It was late autumn; it must have been around Guy Fawkes Day, because I could see the occasional firework, a little too pale against the pearl-coloured sky, and the bus was quiet, almost deserted. I had been at the library, and before that with Norman Edmunds, my music teacher. Earlier that day, Mr Edmunds had been playing me a record of Glenn Gould performing the Goldberg Variations.

  Norman Edmunds was around seventy years old when he offered to teach me to play the piano. I had wanted to learn for a long time, but my father had forbidden it; he wasn’t going to have me practising scales day and night, not when he worked shifts and had to get some sleep. Besides, pianos cost money. It took the intervention of my mother and Father Duane, one of the priests at St Brendan’s, to shift him. For some reason, my mother liked the idea; I imagine she thought it would be a useful part of my development. Meanwhile, Father Duane had taken an inexplicable shine to me. I look back now and realise that he saw a boy at the crossroads: a boy who could either make his family and parish proud, or go to hell with all the stops pulled out. Father Duane was the one who browbeat one of his parishioners into donating a rickety, but more or less viable piano to the cause; he was the one who persuaded Mr Edmunds to give up two or three hours of his time, on a Saturday morning, for almost nothing – and, to his credit, it almost worked. Those music lessons provided me with all the education I ever received. After the lesson proper, Mr Edmunds would talk about music and books; he would play me records from his collection, or give me poems and passages from the classics to read aloud. Or he would talk about his youth, and all the public and private errors he had seen in his lifetime. Mostly, though, we listened to Bach and Schubert, his all-time favourite composers. I hadn’t known it till then, of course, but those were the days of the legendary performers: Richter, Curzon, Schwarzkopf, Klemperer. Kathleen Ferrier was ten years dead, but her spirit would never die in Norman Edmunds’ stricken heart. And Glenn Gould was alive somewhere, playing the piano or drinking coffee, while I sat listening to him play Bach toccatas.