A Lie About My Father (17 page)

But then, a father who never shows up is both a curse and a blessing: a curse, because it’s a lonely feeling, to win something and have nobody to show it to; a blessing because, after a while, I didn’t care to do anything other than for its own sake. Not for the prize, not for the regard, not for the approval, but for the thing itself. That can be a lonely experience, too, but it’s a different kind of loneliness, and after a time, it brings its own satisfactions. ‘If I do well, I am blessed,’ says Marianne Moore, ‘whether any bless me or not.’ That’s a difficult lesson for a thirteen-year-old. Eventually, I stopped doing well in school. It was just as easy to coast through, and there was no satisfaction in what my teachers had to offer. I began reading away from the syllabus; I got thrown out of the maths class; when I did my exams, I chose to answer questions on books or topics we’d not been prepared for. It was a game, now. No more straight As, no more science club. From now on, it was just me, and what I wanted to do. Eventually, all I wanted to do was read Edgar Allan Poe and go out to the woods with the other misfits, to build fires and find things to destroy.

There were four of us, in the beginning. We would hang about in garage blocks and derelict buildings, playing with matches, smoking stolen cigarettes, making bonfires and standing over them while they slowly kindled and quickly burned out, lonely souls, lost in the beguilement of fire. We were always making plans for something bigger, but even then, I knew the others weren’t as serious as I was. I had grown up with this
fascination
, in the old, strong sense. I remembered chasing fire engines, back in Cowdenbeath; I remembered the one big fire I had seen when I was about eight, the drama of it, the noise and beauty of the fire, the excitement of watching it burn. It hadn’t occurred to me, then, that this was all in my power to create: a wisp of cloth, some stolen lighter fluid, a box of matches was all it took to make my very own art work. Because that was how it felt at the time: a work of art, a piece of theatre. With the others, it was just bonfires, rubbish bins, piles of cardboard and old papers on pieces of waste ground; but when I was alone, I made real fires, fires that destroyed something, fires that made something beautiful happen. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. I burned stuff from the construction sites on the edge of town, where it was advancing into the countryside around Great Oakley; I made fires in abandoned garages to see how things burned in an enclosed space, black smoke gathering, then billowing out into the sunlight. When my father brought friends home, I would stick around to hear their stories of the furnaces and the coke ovens and the soaking pit. I thought it would almost be worth working on Steelside, just to see those huge furnaces. Oftentimes, I would cycle up to the other side of town, just to watch the Candle burning.

As things turned out, one of the others – I’ll call him Raymond – was on the same path. Like me, he’d grown tired of the little fires we’d been making, and gone out on his own, riding around on his bike, looking for things to burn. Once, he’d found a disused hut next to an old railway line; after he’d set it alight, he’d taken photographs of the blaze with his mother’s camera. He showed me the pictures. They weren’t expert, but they were very moving.

One day he came round to our house and told me to get my bike, there was something he wanted me to see.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked, as we cycled out towards Corby old village.

‘You’ll find out.’ He was enjoying this, being mysterious, looking forward to what was about to happen. Raymond was smart, but he didn’t like school. The only thing he took seriously was RE. If he’d switched sides, he could have been a big cheese in the Vatican, the time he spent thinking about the minor details of theology and Church law. In the fourth year, we had a new teacher, a pretty, slightly manic young woman who had recently converted. She was trained to teach French and Spanish, but she had made the mistake of volunteering for RE duty, a task normally reserved for hardened nuns. I’m sure she was already in trouble, morally, or psychologically – Pope John XXIII Memorial Comprehensive was probably a real shock to her system – but I can’t help thinking, looking back, that Raymond played a part in her eventual breakdown, with his constant, seemingly innocent questions about her new-found faith. I don’t think he actually achieved his ambition of making her abandon the Church; it was just that her pride crumbled when she realised that she couldn’t answer the theological enquiries of someone she probably saw as an overly curious, but essentially well-meaning fifteen-year-old. Perhaps she even thought she had failed him, that she had failed all of us. I wish, now, that I could go back to her and explain that we’d all been very thoroughly and carefully failed, long before she turned up.

Finally, Raymond and I arrived at our destination: a disused, late-Victorian or early-Edwardian house, set in its own half-acre of summer grass and fruit trees, a place nobody had lived in for years. I’d been there before, of course: everybody called it the Vicarage, and I think it did belong to the Church of England, though it was too far from the old church, I thought, to have been the vicar’s house. Not that I cared much about its history. For me, it was a place to go, a curiosity, a house that was locked and boarded up and, for that reason alone, a place to break into. How many of us honed our burglary skills on places like that? If they had been left wide open, with a big welcome sign on the door, nobody would have bothered going in.

Raymond hopped off his bike and looked to see if I was thinking what he was thinking.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘So?’

‘We can get in round the back,’ he said.

‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I’ve been here before. There’s nothing much – ’

He took a box of matches from his pocket and shook them next to his ear, grinning madly. ‘Let’s burn the fucker down,’ he said.

I didn’t know if he was serious. I
had
been thinking what he was thinking, but now that he said it, I wasn’t so sure. It was a house. One day, people could live there again, as they had done once. One day they would scrape the old wallpaper off the walls, repaint the woodwork, wash the windows and polish the floors. Absurdly, I even thought of being that person. I thought of how I could live there, make it into a home, hang pictures on the walls. Invite my mother to tea. Show her my library of leather-bound books: Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Melville, Conrad. ‘No, thanks,’ I said. I was annoyed that he’d suggested it, not just because it was a house, but because he’d made me see my own limitations. I liked fires, but I didn’t want to burn
property
.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’ll be fantastic. Can you imagine – ’

‘No.’ I said. The images that had passed through my mind moments before – a fire in the grate, pictures on the walls, a Christmas tree in the corner of the big downstairs room, snow at the windows – made it seem grotesque, as if he was asking me to burn my mother’s house. ‘It’s stupid.’

Raymond gave me a weary look, but he didn’t say anything.

‘Let’s go down to the sludge beds,’ I said. I felt like a twelve-year-old.

He shook his head. ‘I’m going in,’ he said. He propped his bike against a tree and headed round the side of the house, towards the broken window at the back. I waited a moment, then I got on my bike and cycled away. It was summer, late in the afternoon. Soon, it would be evening.

Later, Raymond and I would be expelled within months of one another: for smoking cannabis, for drinking, for not attending Mass – but not for arson. We’d meet on the street now and then, but we didn’t talk much, so I didn’t get to know what he did with himself after school. I bought some acid from his older brother, Gerry, at Bickershaw in 1972, and I asked about him. Gerry was a tall, thin, long-haired guy with little round NH specs, one of a million bargain-basement John Lennons; the rumour going around about Raymond was that he’d had some kind of religious experience after his expulsion, and was contemplating the priesthood. I didn’t believe it, but it didn’t sound impossible. When I asked about it, Gerry laughed. He was so stoned, he would probably have laughed if I’d asked him the time, but I immediately knew the rumour was wrong. Raymond wasn’t planning to become a priest.

‘That’s a good one,’ Gerry said, shaking his head. ‘Got some purple too, if you’re interested.’ He didn’t say anything else. I heard later that Raymond was at art school.

Some time after the vicarage incident, the public library burned down. It was just before Christmas: when I heard the news, I cycled over there in the early morning, a light snow falling, the air blue-grey, nobody else on the streets. In those days, the library was near the woods, just opposite the Corby Bowl, a piece of low-grade quasi-modernism that was a favourite refuge all through my teens, a good place to sit in the warm and study the photographic books after school, when my father was back from day shift. I’d expected some kind of business to be going on: fire investigators, men at work clearing up, making the ruins safe, policemen looking for witnesses. There was nothing. I was free to wander about, picking up charred pages from books I had probably borrowed over the years, my mother’s Mills & Boons, the complete works of Dostoevsky in their gold and scarlet dust covers, the atlases and art books and pharmacy texts I’d pored over in the reading room. It was a sad moment, but it was also beautiful. The woods were full of snow, and a wet snow had fallen on the charred beams and broken remains of the building the night before; the remnants of burned books lay scattered over the snow all around, still as monochrome on a day without wind. It was extraordinary: white, touched here and there with black, silent, wonderfully bleak, and as I stood there, I guessed this fire had been no accident. I knew for sure that Raymond hadn’t started it, and it had nothing to do with me, but from what I’d learned about fires, I also knew that
this
wasn’t a simple act of malice. It was a statement, done for its own sake: a statement, not
of
something specific, but a statement in the way a line of birdsong is a statement. A natural phenomenon, like a storm, or a rose. I stood there a long time, though by the end I wasn’t sure if it was regret for the library that detained me, or the beauty of its ruin. Both, I imagine. By that time, a book was the closest thing to holy that I knew, but I couldn’t deny the frisson of pleasure I experienced, seeing those ashes – those words, those ideas, the foreign beauty of those texts – melting away in the snow.

CHAPTER 5

There’s a series of paintings by George Shaw called
Scenes from the Passion
that make me think of Corby in the seventies. Shaw is a painter, born in the mid-sixties, who chooses – for these works, at least – to work in Humbrol enamel on board, giving the work a strangely flat, yet intense quality, as if something that should have been tiny, like a faraway memory, had gradually expanded, becoming an altarpiece, an obsession, something at once quotidian and sacramental. One painting,
The Middle of the Week
, painted in 2002, shows a row of ruined garages covered in graffiti and littered with the evocative trash you find in such places. Here and there, clumps of dark, virulent weed poke through the concrete; elsewhere, the stone is charred with the remains of bonfires. It reminds me of the garages we smoked in and set fire to when I was growing up, but this isn’t nostalgia working here, it isn’t even memory: this is the locus of an extreme stillness, a place beyond time or ordinary significance. Nothing can be superimposed on this painting: it’s not social commentary, urban realism, autobiographical exploration. It’s a fact: a moment, a natural phenomenon.

Another picture in the series comes closer to depicting my father’s natural habitat than anything else I can think of. It’s a painting called
The New Star
, showing a building that might be anything, but happens to be a pub, and it makes me think of the pub my father settled on when he moved to Corby, the place that was, more than any other, his home. The Hazel Tree was a typical estate pub: anonymous, dull, closed off to the outside world, as much prison block as sanctuary, as much dream as architecture. You could walk past the Hazel Tree every day and see nothing remarkable about it; then, in a certain slant of light, or in the sudden stillness after heavy rain, you might catch a glimpse of something else, some inner truth, something that resembles the
gravitas
of an icon. Shaw’s paintings capture this moment perfectly – and I think, by extension, they capture something about the men who frequent such places, about the dreams they conceal and the stunned tenderness they harbour.

My father started taking me to the Hazel Tree when I was fourteen. I’d gone drinking with him before then, but I’d had to sit outside, in the dark, lonely gardens of the Everard Arms, sipping my pint of cider as the traffic slid by on a Saturday evening. My father would come out every now and then with a packet of crisps and another cider, ask if I was all right, then disappear back inside to see his friends. I knew he was just using me as an excuse to get out of the house, but I liked being there, sitting alone with my drink, listening to the men inside talking, people working in the kitchen, the odd bird singing along the fence line. I’ve enjoyed sitting alone in pub yards ever since, especially in the early evening, or in the morning, before the crowds get in.

At fourteen, though, I was man enough to sit inside with my father and his friends, playing crib or dominoes, man enough to go up to the bar and remember who wanted what in a round of six – beers and shorts – with the tenner my father had just slipped me under the table. This was his idea of an education – and, in a way, it was. I quickly got the hang of crib, and I was a demon at dominoes. We’d play for drinks, and I won more often than I lost.

All this time, my father was getting weaker. I knew this, without being conscious of it. At home, he was becoming more maudlin, more repetitive; all his energy went into keeping up his image at the Hazel Tree. There, he was still the presence he had always been: glowering, dangerous, sarcastic. He was still considered a hard man, and not to be treated lightly. Now and again, though, I saw a softness in him, a hesitation. The accident had taken more of a toll than any of us were admitting. All the clues were there: where he had once been a wanderer, drifting from pub to pub, never hesitating to walk straight into places that other men would think twice about, now he was a regular, always drinking at the Tree, or the Everard, if he had people with him, or at the Silver Band Club, where the other regulars were known to him. Where he had once been so self-possessed, so heavy and still, now he was restless, ready to lash out, brooding and defensive. Where he had been dark and limber and poised, now he was lighter, fatter, looser. One night, a man I didn’t know came up to me in the yard outside the Hazel Tree. He was in his mid-twenties, a big man with a wispy moustache and a dark, tight face.