A Lie About My Father (16 page)

After a while, though, with the compensation money finally in the bank, she decided to call my father’s bluff. She waited until he’d had a few drinks – enough, but not too many – then she raised the subject of our buying a house of our own. With the union money we would have enough to put down a big deposit, and the mortgage wouldn’t be much more than the rent we were paying at Handcross Court.

My father listened, nodding all the time she was speaking, then he smiled ruefully. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘We can’t afford it. It’s not just the mortgage, though that’s bad enough, it’s also the – upkeep – ’

‘What upkeep?’

‘Maintenance. If anything goes wrong, you haven’t got the Corporation to just come out and fix it.’

‘What could go wrong?’

My father snorted. ‘All kinds of things,’ he said. ‘Anything can go wrong with a house . . . ’

I listened for a while as the familiar game played out, then I wandered off. Nothing more was said about houses for a while then, suddenly, like some miracle, we went, as a family, to look at a place my mother had seen in the paper: an old house, with a big, neglected garden, it needed work, as the estate agents said, but it was cheap – cheap enough, my mother thought, that we could
manage
. This was her favourite word, and she used it all the time:
Don’t worry, we’ll manage
;
I don’t know how I’ll manage
;
If we put this much down, we can manage the rest
.

My father was less than enthusiastic from the start. Before he had even seen the place, he was finding potential pitfalls, insurmountable problems. He had been paid an undisclosed, but significant, sum in compensation for his battered skull, his punctured lung, his weeks of inactivity, and my mother was trying to figure out how to make some good use of it, before he pissed it all away at the Hazel Tree or the Corby Candle. With this move to Corby, she was planning a fresh start, the first step into another world – into the new morning of home ownership. It had been unimaginable before, and it was unimaginable still, walking around this empty, slightly shabby house – shabby? what did we care? shabby was genteel compared to our usual habitat: condemned. It had been unimaginable till that moment, but my mother had done her calculations and she carried them in her head all the way round: so much down, so much for decorating, so much in monthly payments, so much for some new used furniture. She had worked it out, and she knew it could be managed. It was inconceivable, in fact, that we would not go ahead: once we had made the down payment, drawn from the compensation money, the remaining payments wouldn’t be any more than the rent we were paying the Corporation, and this would be
ours
.

The house was at the end of a residential street, not on an estate, an older, whitewashed house in its own overgrown, but surprisingly substantial, garden ground. It had a proper hallway, with stairs, banisters, rooms off the hall, a coat rack, everything she had ever wanted. It even had French windows at the back, giving out on to a little patio. We walked around the place in awed silence, but I could see in my father’s face that he was only going through the motions. I wondered if he could see the hope in my mother’s eyes – the hope, the fear, the longing. God, it had
French windows
. Of course it needed work, of course it was shabby – but it was also possible. My mother had worked it out. I could imagine the sacrifices she would have made to live in that house. I could imagine how hard she would have worked. She had been one step up from homeless for so long – a condemned tenement, a prefab – and now, here she stood in a house with French windows and a balustrade. I think she almost believed her troubles would just shrivel up and vanish if she could live in this house. At the same time, I think she knew that she never would.

When my father continued to reject the idea – something wasn’t right, it was too risky, there was too much to do – she didn’t say anything, not while we children were present. She had tried her best, and she had failed. But at that moment – he had said no in front of us for a reason, to close the conversation – in that awful moment, while we all coped with our dashed hopes, I looked into her face and saw that something had been extinguished. Only this wasn’t just some hope – an afternoon’s adventure, a mad dream scotched. This was the very light of her, the spark, the soul. Extinguished. It had been there for days, ever since she had first seen the advertisement in the paper and begun to plot, and it had kindled her eyes, till they seemed more alive than I had ever seen – as alive, as full of hope, as they were in her wedding picture. For a while she seemed young again and I remember, still, the gratitude I felt for this sudden apparition, this living woman who was my mother. I loved that light, for her sake – and I came to believe, as she had, in the house we would soon inhabit. It seemed so reasonable. I’d overheard some of the talk and her plan had convinced me. I couldn’t believe it when my father refused: it seemed nothing more than spite on his part. That day, the light died, and I didn’t see it again. From that moment on, my mother’s face was like the broken kaleidoscope I had once tried to fix. The patterns still appeared, but they were muddy, unclear, incomplete-looking. Some time later, I asked her why we hadn’t tried for the house.

‘Oh, why do you think?’ she said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, but I did.

She sat gazing at me in disbelief. Suddenly, everything had turned upside down: now I was the one trying to believe the best of things, and she was the cynic. ‘Drink, of course,’ she said. ‘All that money. And we’ll not see a penny of it.’ It was an unusually bitter moment – the first such I had witnessed. That day, when my father refused even to entertain her dream, something else happened to my mother, beyond her loss of hope. From now on, she would make far less of an effort to conceal her irritation, even her disgust, with my father. From now on, she was a wife from duty, rather than desire. As a Catholic, and as a mother, she would never have left him, but now, I saw, she thought about it. I would see that look again, in the years to come, and I would see it in her eyes, a few days before she died, when she looked up at me from her dying bed, hazy with morphine, and asked me – at that moment, not her son, but some kind stranger – what it had all been about.

CHAPTER 4

I hated Corby from the first, but it felt disloyal to admit as much. On the outside, I must have seemed detached, or indifferent; inside, I was angry all the time. I was angry with my teachers, angry with the neighbours, angry with the parish priest, angry with the cheap shops on Corporation Street where my mother went shopping, angry with my parents for moving to Corby in the first place. Most of all, I was angry with anybody who showed any interest in me, or in what I was thinking or doing, or in what I might want from life. I didn’t want anything from life other than to be left alone. I knew I didn’t belong – and that was a problem because, as I soon realised, Corby was far more conformist than Cowdenbeath had been. People had come there from all over, bringing their families from Scotland, or Wales, or Northern Ireland, all desperate to fit in and be accepted. Corby was all about joining in, all about
wanting
to belong, a town of clubs and unions that defined who you were and what you were not: the Catholic Club, the Rangers Club, the Latvian Male Voice Choir, the Silver Band, Steelworkers, Tubeside. I hated that. As far as I was concerned, the group, whatever form it took, was an instrument of tyranny. I wouldn’t play for the school football team; I refused to even try cricket; I didn’t talk the playground talk about jamrags and cunt-smells and intriguing ways to eat Mars bars.

Meanwhile, my father was changing. He had come to a new place, where he was an unknown quantity, but it hadn’t been long before he commanded the same respect – or fear – as he had at home. In fact, he was more frightening now, because he was more unpredictable. His failure to give his wife and children the new life he had convinced himself we wanted had much to do with a new mood of simmering resentment that could spill over at any moment, but something else was going on too, something none of us knew about. Now, when he was in one of his black moods, he hit out at random, without intent, for no reason. His victim might be me, or someone he met on the way out of the pub; it could even be one of his friends. One Saturday afternoon, he came home with his current best friend, a genuinely warm-hearted man called Bill. My mother cooked them both something to eat but suddenly, halfway through the meal, my father announced he was going upstairs to get ready to go out again. He needed a change of shirt, some ‘good’ trousers. Someone would have to clean his good shoes. Bill remonstrated with him:
There’s no hurry, eat your food
, the usual drunkard’s banter. I’d seen my father and Bill drunk together – swaying back and forth unsteadily, arms linked, calling each other brothers, that kind of rubbish – but I’d never seen them exchange an angry word. That afternoon, however, Bill misjudged the moment, as he got up from the table and tried to take my father’s arm.

For all the misery he caused me, for all the damage he did, I think that was the first time I realised that my father was more than just routinely dangerous, the first time I realised he was capable of doing real and permanent harm. Bill shrugged it off, later, but he never came to our house again – not because he was afraid of my father, but because he was embarrassed for them both.

I had just gone through to the living room, while they sat in what we called the dinette. (The word I most dislike, in the English or any other language, has to be this one:
dinette
. What could be more ugly, more revealing of the way we lived then?
Dinette
. Enough room for a sideboard and a table, and a tacky Highland landscape that my father had brought home from God knows where. The canteen of cutlery that someone had given my parents as a wedding present in the sideboard drawer. Cork place mats. Flock wallpaper, badly hung. Fridge in the corner, because the kitchen was too small to get it in.) Suddenly, I heard my mother cry out. She had been in the kitchen, so nobody else saw what had happened: what we did see was Bill on the floor, and my father stamping on his arm, the expression on his face cold and ugly, as if he knew exactly what he was doing. He was like a man performing a routine action, a man at work, doing something he did every day. I tried to grab him and was thrown back against the wall. My mother was shrieking, trying to push him away from Bill, who had rolled over, his arm turning under him, as he tried to scramble back to his feet. Meanwhile, I got my balance and plucked at my father’s sleeve. He turned and grabbed my throat. By that time, Bill was on his feet, my mother had my father by his other arm and, for a moment, we all stood, like a tableau, frozen in the moment, something dimming in my father’s face, Bill making soft, conciliatory noises, not words, just sounds, like the reassuring sounds you make to a horse when it gets spooked. My mother was talking too, saying over and over again, ‘Come on, George. Come on, George. Come on . . . ’ Repetition is key in these situations: repetition; soft, meaningless noises; making space. Nothing more than you would do for a frightened animal. Some of the time, it works.

For the first three years of our Corby existence, we made the trip home to Scotland in the summer. We travelled all night on a bus that picked us up at Stamford, stopped a while at Scotch Corner, and terminated in Edinburgh at around six in the morning. Everybody hated these long nocturnal journeys; everybody but me, that is. I loved sitting at the window, staring out at the land as it slipped by: the open fields, the towns, the woods, the rivers, the power stations standing massive and elegant in their own smoke, the sky as it darkened over a meadow, reclaiming the trees and the beasts of the field. Most of all, I loved the towns when the street lamps were lit, orange or white or crimson in the blue gloaming. I would try to catch the moment when they came on, the point where day became night; when I saw a street lamp suddenly brighten into crimson or silver, I would feel blessed.

I didn’t like the visits home half as much as the journey there. We would be cramped together, all of us in the one room, my father always wanting to be off to some new pub where nobody knew him, my mother worried about the holiday money, and what he might do with it if she let him out of her sight. We would stop first in Cowdenbeath and traipse around visiting everybody: my cousin Madeleine, my various aunts, our old neighbour, Mrs Black, who loved to talk about her own and other people’s various operations. Everybody looked the same as they had when we left, but they were also strangely altered: they seemed far away and muffled now, as if they didn’t exist at any other time, and had just come out of storage for the length of our stay, to reassure us that nothing had changed while we had been gone. Their voices had begun to soften and fold in upon themselves, their houses seemed preserved in water glass, their hallways and front rooms stood at one remove from the world I remembered, their wireless sets and china strangely antique, their clothes neat and clean, but somehow wrong, like costumes they were unaccustomed to wearing. Equally unreal was the world my mother described, a world of new possessions and hot water and modern appliances we didn’t own. I knew well enough not to say anything, of course, though I would watch her, as we came away, a crumb of salmon on her lip, or a butter-stain on her sleeve, and I would feel sorry for her, not because she lacked the things she had claimed to have, but because she thought they would make a difference.

For a while, I was still doing well at school. My mother could tell her friends and family, when she went home, or when she wrote the little notes she posted back to Scotland with the Christmas cards, that I had got an A in every subject on my report card (not quite true, but nobody cares about Geography or Art). For a while, she could say I was on the athletics team, I played chess, I was in the science club. When it came round to parents’ days, I was the one who stepped forward out of the choir and read the poem, or the dramatic monologue that Mr Edmunds had adapted from
Wuthering Heights
. At the open evenings, I was the boy who demonstrated to a succession of bemused, but tolerant visitors the wonders of chromatography. Year after year, I accepted the prize, I ran the relay, I won the chess tournament or recited a soliloquy from
Hamlet
but, even though this was all duly recounted in letters home, nobody that mattered was there to see me. I wasn’t surprised: I knew my mother couldn’t afford to miss a day’s work; I also knew that, had she taken the time off, she would have been afraid that, by being there, she was showing my father up. Meanwhile, because he worked shifts, and given the fact that he and his workmates were forever negotiating swaps, doing doubles, sometimes, to cover for a club social or a night out, my father had more opportunities to see me enact those childish triumphs – and he was the one I wanted there, truth be told. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s also true that a boy seeks his father’s respect, his father’s recognition, first. Looking back now, I see that my problem wasn’t just that I couldn’t win my father’s approval but that, even if I had, I wouldn’t have wanted it
from him
. I wanted the regard, not of this wounded, inadequate individual, but of the father I had invented from scraps of literature and hearsay. A father who did not exist, any more than my phantom brother existed, but still the only father I had. This was the man I wanted to step down off the stage, or cross the finishing line for – because I
did
win the prizes, I
did
play the leading part in the school play, I
did
make the speech at parents’ day, occasionally I
was
the first to cross the finishing line and, all through my school years, he never came.