A Lie About My Father (12 page)

In the daytime, I dreamed of what might have been. It was a makeshift and tender fantasy: my father went away – I was very careful never to let him die, even for a moment, in these daydreams – and he was replaced by George Grant, who regained my mother’s affections as easily as a bird returns, at dusk, to a favourite perch. In the evenings, after school, I sometimes sat up late, or lay awake in bed, listening, at the time my father usually got back from Grangemouth, or wherever he was working, and if he was even a minute or two late, I imagined that he wasn’t coming back, that he had gone off into the moonlight on some country road between work and home, walking away on some wide road or vanishing down some alley of bricks and nettles, going back to the darkness from which he had come, when he first displaced George Grant in the life my mother should have had. At the time, I knew this was the best thing for everybody, even for him. He would be happier gone, he could even imagine himself missed, a treasured memory, loved more for being absent, but free to live however he chose.

Everything stayed hidden. My father’s late-night parties, his occasional drunken rampages around the house, my child’s fantasies of death and redemption, my mother’s attempts to hold things together, it was all secret – known by anybody who cared to know, but unacknowledged, like a priest’s feverish brightness around adolescent boys, or the beatings Mrs Wilson endured on those Saturdays when Dunfermline lost at home. Nobody talked about what was going on, as long as it went on behind closed doors. Then, all of a sudden, late in the summer of my ninth year, everybody was talking at once, and the person they were talking about was our neighbour, the gentle giant, Arthur Fulton.

CHAPTER 7

Nobody thought Arthur was guilty. Someone had made a mistake. People from Blackburn Drive, people in the town generally, would gather in shop doorways and talk quietly about what had or had not happened that day. They all agreed Arthur Fulton wasn’t capable of murdering, or attempting to murder, anybody, let alone some slip of a girl just out of her teens, a girl he could have picked up with one hand and crushed the life from the way other men crush beer cans. They said it again and again, in stage whispers, pretending they didn’t want the children to hear, relishing the fine physical details: he could have snapped her neck like a twig, he could have squeezed the life out of her in seconds, he could have . . . All the time, they talked about the girl as if she was already dead, as if Arthur – or not Arthur, but whoever had committed this terrible act – had actually succeeded. Some went so far as to suggest that there was something between them, this girl and Arthur, that she wasn’t some girl he’d met on the road, but someone he cared about, someone he had
loved
. Otherwise, they reasoned, why would she still be alive? Why would Arthur have left her, unconscious, but still breathing, by the side of the public highway?

Listening in on these conversations, I began to understand. Everybody thought Arthur was guilty; there had been no mistake. He was their gentle giant, but nobody thought he was very smart – and that was his failing. A smarter man would have finished the girl off and thrown her into Loch Fitty, where nobody would find her; maybe he would have burned the body, or fixed the scene to look like a bungled robbery. Now, they were angry with Arthur, not for what he had done, but because he hadn’t done it properly. If he really had taken that girl out on to a country road that day to kill her, he should have done what he had set out to do, and left her to rot. Most of all, he shouldn’t have allowed himself to be caught because, by making such a mess of it all, he was forcing them to recognise that they had known nothing about him, and nothing about themselves, all along. He was one of their own, and he had betrayed them. It was a quiet, resentful anger they felt, like the anger people felt towards Mary Bell, when she killed those little boys about a year later, the same anger they felt towards Myra Hindley. Arthur had broken the cardinal rule of small-town life: he had failed to be what he seemed. Nobody had believed him dangerous for all those years, because he seemed so slow-witted, too shy and clumsy to be a killer. They thought criminals were clever, or at least cunning, like the bad men they saw at the pictures, smart-talking, ruthless, accomplished creatures with leather gloves and lengths of knotted cord.

Oddly enough, it was my father who made me see all this. He’d always welcomed Arthur into our house at Hogmanay, and on the odd occasion when sociability was unavoidable; now, when everyone else was swearing on a stack of Bibles and mothers’ lives that they’d had no idea, he came out on the side of common sense. ‘Arthur’s big, but he’s a baby, really,’ he said. ‘First sign of trouble, and these big men panic. Remember when they wanted people for the foot-and-mouth? They wouldn’t take Arthur – ’

My mother was annoyed. She knew my father would have no scruples about repeating such things in public. ‘He couldn’t have gone anyway,’ she said. ‘He was driving the long-distance lorries then – ’

‘That’s not the point,’ my father said. ‘These big, stupid men are like children. You can’t really trust them – ’

‘You sound like you think he
did
do it,’ my mother interrupted. ‘I don’t want to hear talk like that when Mary’s around – ’

‘What if he did?’ my father said. ‘Do you think they would have arrested him so fast if he was innocent?’

My mother was horrified. ‘How can you say that?’ she said. ‘I thought you liked Arthur – ’

‘I do,’ my father said. ‘That’s why I’m standing up for him.’

‘You’ve got a funny way of standing up for people – ’

‘What I’m saying is,’ my father went on, with exaggerated patience, ‘is that he probably did do it. But he shouldn’t get the jail for it.’

‘Even if he’s guilty?’

‘Even if he’s guilty. I mean, it was probably an accident. It’s not as if he’ll be doing anything like that again.’

‘And what about that poor girl?’ my mother asked. ‘What happens to her?’

‘I thought you said he couldn’t have done it,’ my father said. He had adopted that tone of voice he would get, when he had you in a corner. Master of the invalid, but pressing argument.

‘I don’t,’ my mother replied. ‘But I still think the girl should get some kind of justice – ’

My father laughed bitterly. ‘It won’t do her any good if Arthur Fulton goes to jail,’ he said. ‘It’s happened. It’s over. Time to get on with her life.’

My mother considered this for a moment and was about to reply – or so it seemed. Then, just like that, she gave up. Maybe she thought my father was just joking, just trying to get a rise out of her. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he did what they said. That would be . . . ’

As she searched for the right word, my father smiled grimly. ‘These things happen,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose Arthur planned to do it. If he had, he’d surely have done a better job.’ He shook his head sadly; it seemed that what bothered him most about the incident wasn’t the possibility that Arthur had tried to kill the girl, but the idea that he’d botched it so badly. ‘It was probably just an accident, one way or another.’

My mother didn’t answer. There was no point, after all. To her, everything happened, or ought to have happened, for a reason. You made a choice, and if you chose the wrong path, it was a sin and you had to pay the penance – and it struck me, then, how odd it was that these two people should be married to one another. It wasn’t just that they were different in temperament, or in what they wanted from life, or in what they believed – it was that they inhabited different worlds. For my mother, life was full of patterns and logic; my father, on the other hand, was haunted by the irrational. Maybe that was what made him so decisive: there was a sense in which no action had any meaningful consequences for him, a sense that there was really no such thing as cause and effect. When he said that Arthur’s pathetic attempt to kill the girl was an accident, he was saying something about life itself. What he meant was that it was
all
an accident: the meeting, whatever history Arthur had with the girl, whatever feelings he or she might have had, the mood Arthur was in that afternoon, the fact that he panicked. Everything that happened was an accident. The only power you had was to act decisively when the accident happened and so make your own mark on the proceedings. And the truth was that, in Arthur Fulton’s place, my father wouldn’t have flunked the job. He would have broken the girl’s neck and left her in a ditch somewhere, then he would have gone to the pub and sat all night playing crib with his friends. I think he was disappointed that Arthur Fulton couldn’t have acted the same way. The one thing Arthur had done wrong was to get himself caught. Had he been in Arthur’s place, my father wouldn’t have made the same mistake.

The history we learned in school wasn’t true. It was just an exercise in facts, an avoidance of obvious errors, rather than any attempt to get at the truth. It was also an exercise in power. All through school, I wondered why we were supposed to be so interested in people like Robert the Bruce, or Winston Churchill, why no real people appeared in the stories we had to memorise. In the Fultons’ house, there was real history. Things had happened there, things I knew about, and things that would always remain a mystery. We heard later that Arthur had known the girl – nobody ever used her name, she was just ‘the girl’ – for several months. This in itself came as a surprise to most people, but then, the nature of a lorry driver’s work meant he could be away from home whenever he needed to be away, so it would have been easy, even for a man like Arthur, to keep the relationship hidden. The girl wasn’t young enough to be his daughter, as some had said – I knew that, because I knew Sandra, and she was just a year and half older than me – but she was young and, by all accounts, fairly naive. Some people thought Arthur had been ‘taking advantage’ of her, but this didn’t make much sense if you knew Arthur. Still, rumour was that they had been seeing each other now and again, over those several months, and nobody really knew what had happened during that time, or what Arthur said to the girl about his life at home, or even if he’d said anything. The day he tried to kill her, he’d driven her out to a lay-by somewhere outside town. Nobody knows what happened then – Arthur pleaded guilty when the case came to court – but whatever had been done or said, Arthur must have panicked. At some stage, he had hit the girl and, after that, he was out of control. The fact that he didn’t just snap her in two, as our neighbours put it, but scrabbled around looking for ways to kill her, indicated that the crime hadn’t been premeditated. It had probably never crossed his mind to kill her. Allegedly, he hit her with his fists, then with something else – the proverbial ‘blunt instrument’ – but he didn’t hit her in the head with it. After that, according to the gossip, he sprayed some kind of chemical in her face, wrapped a length of tow rope around her neck, held something over her mouth, as if to suffocate her – but he saw none of it through. He must have been in two minds all the time and there was some debate as to whether you could call what he did an attempted murder at all. This was a moot point, however, valid only in the people’s court outside Brewster’s or the Co-op: Arthur entered his guilty plea, the judge sentenced him to ten years, the case was closed. Mary Fulton took Sandra away and the house next door to ours fell silent and empty. I never got to find out what happened after the scarves and belts – or not with Sandra, anyhow.

I vividly remember the day they left. A man I had never seen before drove a light blue Austin Cambridge to the end of our path and parked it right outside number 17, then Mary Fulton carried out several bags, while the mysterious stranger stayed behind the wheel. I happened to be off school with something that day, and I sat at my bedroom window watching it all: I couldn’t see Sandra, but Mary Fulton went to and fro, loading bags into the boot of the car, her face set, ugly with grief and shock. I knew people had been talking about her – they always had thought her a cold fish, now they were speculating about why Arthur had done what he did, and what Mary could have done to keep him out of trouble.

‘If he’d been happy at home,’ Mrs Donaldson said, when we met her and Mrs Banks outside the butcher’s, ‘maybe none of this would ever have happened.’

‘I don’t think we can blame her for what her husband did,’ Mrs Banks retorted.

My mother didn’t say anything, but gave me the quick glance that said I shouldn’t be listening to their conversation. I looked away, and kept listening.

‘A man needs to be respected in his own house,’ Mrs Donaldson said. ‘It doesn’t matter if he’s a bit slow.’

My mother seemed uncomfortable. ‘Mary was always good to him, as far as I can tell,’ she said.

‘Well,’ Mrs Donaldson said, ‘maybe she wasn’t good enough. It’s hard work, being happy.’

I look back now, and I wonder if they were as happy as they pretended to be, these good women of Cowdenbeath. I knew my mother was miserable, much of the time. Everything in her life was uncertain; there was always the threat of some terrifying outburst, whenever my father was at home, and when he was out, she never knew when he would get in, or what condition he would be in when he got back. Yet she pretended with the best of them, out on the street, in the queue at the fishmonger’s, on the steps of the church. What if they were all pretending? I couldn’t imagine marriage was a very satisfying state: like a nautilus shell, it seemed an intricate, unknowable thing; it concealed all manner of secret hurts and slights, every variety of private betrayal and unspoken disappointment. I think I suspected, even then, that nobody should carry all the blame for that state of affairs. I may even have realised that no one can know the inner workings of a marriage: it was a matter of a hundred private moments, all the lies and blows and failures, real or imagined, that went unwitnessed and unrecorded, till the crisis that others see, after years or decades – the breakdown, the affair, the drink problem – appears to come out of nowhere.