A Lie About My Father (15 page)

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.

I didn’t know anything personal about Glenn Gould. I didn’t know about his eccentricity, or his rejection of the concert hall, or any of the other aspects of his personality that made him a cult figure in the seventies. Besides, for me, personal was exactly what music was not. Unique, individual, idiosyncratic, even, yes; but personal, no. To me, music was no more personal than the soul. I knew Gould was Canadian, as I had almost been. I knew he was best-known for his Bach recordings. I had seen a picture of him on an album sleeve, but he had been muffled up in a winter coat and a flat cap, an enigmatic being who seemed indifferent to the presence of the camera. He was doing a chore: standing outdoors somewhere, pretending to be a famous pianist. Wherever he was, it looked cold.

I liked that photograph, but I wasn’t really interested in Glenn Gould, the man. I wasn’t even interested in Glenn Gould, musical genius. No: his function in my life was to be the name I gave to the music I had just discovered, the music I imagined as belonging to my missing brother. It was an idea that had been forming for weeks in my mind: now, sitting on the 254 bus, turning the corner at the top of Heathfield Drive, I began inventing the brother I needed from the music I had been listening to all morning. Naturally, this wasn’t a conscious decision, and it’s almost impossible to describe the process, but at the time, it was remarkably easy to do. The difficult part had been coming to the conclusion that it was even possible but, that afternoon, I started to see things through my imagined brother’s eyes.

At the same time, I remembered something that had happened back in the prefabs, a fleeting conversation I’d had with my mother, and didn’t even know I remembered. It was when I was six, or maybe just turned seven, and my mother was standing in the kitchen of our prefab, making split-pea soup. It was an ordinary, late-autumn afternoon, the trees around the chicken runs opposite dusted with the lights we cast by being there, in that little condemned house; the windows were slightly fogged, and the room was a little too warm and muggy. I approached my mother the way I always did when I had some burning question I was afraid she might not answer, waiting till she was busy, then sidling in to stand by the cooker, watching her work. It’s a pre-emptive defence: ask something casually, when someone is otherwise occupied, and there’s at least a chance they won’t be annoyed, even if they don’t provide the answer you need. A large part of my childhood consisted of asking questions that, as soon as they were asked, proved too embarrassing or trivial to answer. My mother, in particular, seemed to hate answering questions, as if she was afraid she would give something away that might be held against her later.

I have no idea what prompted this particular question – maybe something I had seen in a book, or heard on the radio – but it was one that suddenly needed an answer. No doubt it was suggested, in part, by recent events, when we had all been expecting Andrew, the new brother who had mysteriously failed to materialise, though my mother had gone to the hospital, and we had visited her there, in what we knew was the maternity ward. Considering how little time had passed since that particular stillbirth, my question was horribly insensitive.

‘Mum?’ I waited patiently till she looked at me. She raised her spoon and smiled vaguely, but she didn’t say anything. In her face, I saw age – and I realised, with a shock, that she was as old as the other women who lived out there, on the edge of Cowdenbeath, making ends meet.

‘Yes?’ She gave the pot another stir, then set down the spoon.

It suddenly came to me that I hadn’t planned the question well enough, that what I was about to blurt out had some secret and till now unrecognised capacity to harm us both. Not that this stopped me asking.

‘Why don’t I have a twin?’ I said.

She stood still, staring at me, for a long time. She appeared to be doing some difficult calculation in her head, one with lots of carrying over, or division. Then she shook her head and resumed her stirring. ‘What a strange question,’ she said.

‘Is it?’

‘Of course it is,’ she said. ‘Why do you ask?’

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. I was thinking of Freddy and Ferdy in the
Rupert
annuals, how they were always together, how they were really just a single character.

‘Not everybody has a twin,’ my mother said. ‘It’s not that common.’

‘Why?’ I persisted. If it could happen at all, I figured, why didn’t it happen more often? And why hadn’t it happened to me?

‘I don’t know,’ she said. There was upcoming finality in her voice, that I
don’t have time for this
tone just edging in.

‘Wouldn’t they let you have one?’ I asked.

‘What?’ She looked at me again, puzzlement in her eyes.

‘At the hospital,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t they let you have two babies?’

She laughed – I am sure of that. She laughed and her eyes were shining. But she was sad, too, and I knew it was time to stop asking questions. As if to let me know that I should do exactly that, she set to work again, stirring the soup as it thickened so it wouldn’t burn at the bottom of the pot. ‘We didn’t ask for two babies,’ she said at last. ‘We were happy with just you.’

I remembered, that afternoon on the 254 bus, that I hadn’t believed her. At the age of six, I knew several things about babies: I knew that they came from the hospital, where you had to ask for them specially and decide on a name while you waited in the queue for yours to come; I also knew that they sometimes died. I knew that, at least in the case of my sister, Elizabeth, my father was very fond of these dead babies, but found the survivors more of a hindrance than a help. The thing is, my mother knew I didn’t believe her and, even then, I guessed the truth. I guessed that she had, in some way, asked and been refused, and this refusal had been because of some failure on her part. Yet I’d had a brother and, even if he wasn’t a twin, he was mine. Nobody else had claimed him. Nobody could prove to me that Andrew was dead in the ordinary way, the way my grandmother was dead. How could he have died, if he’d never been alive in the first place? Like my sister, Elizabeth, he had never come home from the hospital; but nobody, not even my father, ever compared me to, or even spoke about,
him
. Nobody wished me dead in his place. Or not aloud. Surely he had been there all along, a ghost companion on the long walk to Mass on a Sunday morning, a fellow swimmer, tracking me stroke for stroke the length of the public baths. It seems impossible that I ever forgot him. My mother and father had done their best to expunge him from their world, but that didn’t mean I had to let him go. I had a duty, to Andrew, and to myself, to give him space, to listen for him, to make him welcome. In one form or another, I would keep him by me all my life: my brother, my soul-friend, my other self. He would continue where I left off, and I would live for him, tuned in to the rhythm of an otherworld that nobody else could hear, a whole kingdom of ghost brothers, hidden in the dark.

CHAPTER 3

The consensus opinion on my mother was that she was a simple and decent woman. She attended Mass faithfully every Sunday, accompanied by her children, but not by her husband. She was polite, God-fearing, conventional, a woman who kept the best china she had been given as a wedding gift for when the priest came to call. For her, what mattered was family, and she did all she could to conceal my father’s excesses from the world. I grew up admiring her from a distance: she was the one who taught me to read and write before I started school, the one who scrimped and saved to buy me ‘educational’ toys, the one who kept things together when it would have been easier, and more merciful, to let them fall apart. All she wanted was a little common decency in her life. She was one of those people who dream of a bookcase full of leather-bound classics and a vase of freshly cut flowers on the hall table. Of course, there was no hall table, because there was no hall. Obviously, there were no leather-bound classics.

To begin with, there were no books at all. After we moved to Corby, however, there were library books: for me, the voracious and utterly random studies of the child autodidact; for her, Mills & Boon. She never went to the library herself: I think she thought they would want her to demonstrate some kind of eligibility before she could borrow anything. Instead, she got me to borrow books for her on my ticket. This caused some amusement among the library staff, who couldn’t quite figure out the boy who turned up every fortnight or so, in his faded blue anorak with the torn pockets, to borrow
The Brothers Karamazov
, a book on chess, and two of the latest hospital romances. I could never remember the titles of the Mills & Boon books, but the lurid cover illustrations stayed in my head and, most of the time, I avoided bringing home stuff she had already read.

Once or twice, on a bus home, I would flick through the books I had chosen for her. To begin with, I couldn’t understand why anyone would read books like that. After a while, however, I began to see that the pleasure came not from the stories or the characters so much as from the knowledge that somebody out there knew her daydreams – not just in the broader sense of plot and circumstance, but also in the finer details, in the perfumes and the colours and the late-night conversations. Knew them and, so, knew her finer self: the woman who could have walked on a moonlit beach with some beautiful, difficult man, had things been different; the woman who knew the value of the carefully understated gesture, the tacit agreement, the shared secret. A woman, most of all, who knew the power and beauty of the unspoken. That was what mattered to her, I think: those romances left so much room for the unsayable – and what pleased her most was the idea that somebody out there understood, as she understood, that everything good in life was a secret, a private matter that had to be kept intact in the face of neighbours and Church and common law. It was the only explanation I could work out: she was addicted, not to tacky love stories, but to the unspoken. The unspoken, in which so much trust can be placed, and from which so much comfort can be derived. All the time, I imagine, she was hanging on to an illusion that she saw through, but couldn’t bear to discard. For as long as she could, she wanted to ignore the fact that the limits of any marriage are set by the one who has the least to give. So she read Mills & Boon books, because they renewed her belief in love.

The move to England had come as a shock to her, though. She no longer had family and friends around her, and she hated the house on Handcross Court, not just because it represented an exile to which she had never really agreed, but also because it was something my father had chosen, something my father had waited and worked for. There was nothing obvious to find fault with: it had an upstairs; in a manner of speaking, it had three bedrooms. It was an end-of-row house, with a larger garden than most, and it was far enough from the works that we almost never had smuts on the washing. From time to time, the rain ran grey on the window panes, and on summer days, when all the windows were open, we might find dark smears of iron-scented dust on the window sills. But everybody had that – and it wasn’t as bad as living in a condemned prefab back in Cowdenbeath, with an abandoned garden on one side, and dark, dripping woods on the other. Here, there was a square of grass where the children could play, a new swimming pool, beautiful countryside all around and a town that was growing, with plenty of work for all: a chance to do better, a chance to start again. My mother didn’t believe it. She knew the extra money would disappear on drink, the days out in the country and the foreign holidays would never materialise. She’d spent her entire adult life listening to promises.