A Lie About My Father (23 page)

DOBERMANN DAYS

C’est l’inconnu qu’on porte en soi, écrire, c’est ça ou rien
.

Marguerite Duras

CHAPTER 1

I stayed away for as long as I could. I went to college, for something to do, then I drifted around, stopping in at the house now and then, when I thought the coast was clear. I never stayed long and, much to my mother’s disappointment, I was soon off again, wandering from place to place, finding menial jobs, hanging around in pubs with people much like myself, doing odd deals for extra cash. The money never lasted long, but it was put to good use. There were long days in the sun out on Grantchester Meadows, winter afternoons tucked up in bed with a good book and a bottle of rum, trysts in the wee small hours of the morning in Sheffield, or Northampton. I might have gone on like that for much longer, but somebody took the trouble to track me down and let me know that my father had suffered a heart attack. I didn’t really want to go home, but I knew my mother would be upset if I stayed away. I’d barely seen my father since I’d hatched the plan to kill him; now, it seemed, he was doing it by himself.

I got back a few days after I heard the news, expecting to find my father at death’s door, but it was my mother’s appearance that disturbed me most. Of course, once he’d got out of hospital, my father made light of the heart attack. He had been taken to Kettering General, and later discharged with a warning to quit smoking and drinking, something he wasn’t about to do. His argument was that his Uncle Willie, who had gone on to the ripe old age of eighty-four, had smoked sixty a day and had practically lived in the pub. The men in his family, he said, had always been strong; there was nothing to worry about: doctors were constantly telling people to stop smoking, but what was the point of living for ever if you couldn’t enjoy yourself? ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I can get to work. That’s the main thing. I’ve not a missed a day’s work through sickness since I was fourteen. I’m not about to start now.’ It was the usual stuff, but there was an edge to it this time. He seemed nervous, unsure of himself. My mother saw this too, and I knew, as soon as I walked into the house, that she had been taking every opportunity she could to work on him, wheedling, cajoling, flattering, persuading. So, to begin with, I assumed she looked so tired and dark around the eyes because the worry, and her trying to keep my father in line, had taken its toll. Soon, however, I realised that something else was wrong. She looked slight, a little shaky, her mouth tighter than usual, her face drained. One afternoon, when my father was out at the Hazel Tree – his first time since the heart scare – I sat her down for as much of a heart-to-heart as was possible in that house. It turned out Margaret – who had recently moved to a house in Corby Village and started a family of her own – had done the same thing. Even her workmates had had a go at her. Nobody had got through, and there was no chance of my breaking down her defences. Still, I made her a cup of tea, and launched straight in. ‘What’s up?’ I said. ‘You don’t look well.’

‘I’m all right,’ she murmured, wanting not to talk about it, but enjoy her tea, and what she knew was bound to be a fleeting visit from her only son. With my father already back at the pub, she knew I would soon be on my way.

‘No you’re not,’ I insisted. ‘Have you been to the doctor?’

‘I was worried about your dad,’ she said. ‘He’s worse than he thinks.’

I tried not to show my irritation. ‘He’ll be fine,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘No, he won’t,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t look after himself. I know you don’t have much patience with your dad, but somebody’s got to keep an eye on him – ’

‘And who’s keeping an eye on you?’ I interrupted.

She gave me one of her soft, conciliatory smiles. ‘All I need is a bit of a holiday,’ she said. ‘It’s just the worry. Now that your father’s a bit better, I’ll be right in no time.’

I didn’t believe it. I don’t think she believed it herself. There was something wrong with her, something more than anaemia or fatigue, but I can’t imagine she’d guessed it was cancer. She’d had a routine hysterectomy a few years before but, for some reason, the ovaries hadn’t been removed. Now, unknown to us all, she was already past help. I remember the doctor saying, some weeks later:
if only she had come in earlier
. It was the first thought I had when I learned the news. It was probably the first thought my father had too: if it hadn’t been for him, she might have been saved. I’m sure that idea plagued him, after she died.

Today, looking back, I have difficulty remembering that time. One moment, it’s a seamless fabric and I cannot draw a single thread from this cloth without drawing out the texture and flavour and colours of the whole, so even an apparently innocent image of my mother standing on a kitchen chair, reaching for a strand of loose tinsel on the Christmas tree, is loaded with a grief I cannot explain. When I remember her at all, I remember the extraordinarily long ordeal that followed our conversation: I remember her illness, and how long her dying took, and I want to see her as she was before I was born, before she was married: the young woman in the photographs she kept in the Egyptian bag in her wardrobe, a pretty girl, flirting with the camera, dressed in the latest fashions – not a memory at all, for me, but an indelible moment, a millisecond of limitless possibility, sometime in 1947.

She wasn’t right in no time, of course. I sensed it that day: there was a darkness about her, an odd, sickly-sweet smell that even she had probably noticed. And at that moment, I resolved to stay home, to make sure she got the care she needed. I’d get a job at one of the factories, and find a way of dealing with my father. If I couldn’t stand being in the house with him, I’d find somewhere else to live. I was full of plans, full of good resolutions. First, though, I had to go somewhere. I wouldn’t be away long, I told myself, and I’d stay home for as long as I was needed, just as soon I got back. I made her promise to see a doctor, and told her I’d be checking up on her. She smiled, and made the promise. It was the closest we had been for years, conspirators, with our own secret, just like the old days, back on Blackburn Drive, when we sat over
Look and Learn
, or a borrowed novel, learning to read, dreaming of the marvellous future.

Two days later, I was gone. I intended to be away for a week, but I didn’t get back till the end of the month. In those days I hitch-hiked everywhere, and my father wouldn’t have a telephone anyway, so I couldn’t let anybody know I was coming. I just turned up. It was the middle of the afternoon, and my father was alone in the house, doing the dishes, when I got in.

‘Hi,’ I said. I didn’t want to be alone with him; I supposed he felt the same way. ‘Where’s Mum?’

‘She’s in the hospital,’ he said. He picked up a plate and began drying it. I should have guessed. Things had to be bad for him to do the dishes.

‘Is she all right?’

He looked at me. His face was empty, neutral. ‘
No,
’ he said. ‘She’s in the hospital.’

‘You said. So – what is she in for?’

He turned away, put the plate in a cupboard. I wondered if that was how he always did it, washing one plate or bowl at a time, then drying it and putting it away, and I wanted to tell him to stop, to put the tea towel down and talk to me properly. Instead, I stood and watched as he picked up another plate and placed it in the sink.

‘Well?’ I said.

He didn’t reply right away. He let the plate settle into the sink, then he turned to look at me again. ‘You can’t go wandering about here, there and everywhere any more,’ he said. ‘Your mother’s got cancer.’

For a moment, I was stunned. In some back alley of my thinking, I had been expecting bad news – maybe I had even been expecting this – but I hadn’t prepared myself for it. Least of all, for the way he broke it. A minute in, though, my dismay gave way to anger. He’d done this on purpose; I knew it. He’d rehearsed it in his mind, chosen the words; I knew he had, because they sounded calculated, they sounded unnatural. Not like him. ‘Your mother’s got cancer.’ He would never have said that, in those words, if he hadn’t planned to. It was the great taboo, worse than sex even, to say that word.
Cancer
. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘thanks for breaking it to me so gently.’

He didn’t say anything.

‘Does she know?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘And she’s not going to know, either.’

‘What?’

‘She can’t take it,’ he said. ‘It would – ’

‘What?’ I waited, but he didn’t answer. ‘Well? What would it do?’

He turned back to the washing up. ‘She’s not to be told,’ he said, quietly. ‘The doctor agrees. She wouldn’t be able to take it.’ He put another plate on to the draining board, then reached for the tea towel. I watched as he began to dry it.

‘You know what?’ I said.

He looked at me, curious for a moment. He’d planned this moment, now he wanted to see what I would say, what I would do. ‘What?’ he said.

‘It would be a lot quicker,’ I said, ‘if you washed all the dishes at once, then dried them afterwards.’

‘Is that so?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

He finished drying the plate, and set the tea towel down. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, bitter, oddly satisfied with itself. ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ he said.

In the end, she
was
told she was dying – because I told her. I didn’t say the word
cancer
, but she had already guessed that. It was a couple of months after my father broke the news – how that slight, anaemic woman hung on for so long is beyond me – and she had wasted to stick-thin and grey, as nature did its work. My father had kept up the pretence religiously, telling her they would go on holiday just as soon as she was better, carrying home piles of brochures from the travel agents so she could look through and pick what she’d like. He’d get whatever money it took, no problem. I was staying in my old room, and it was my job to look after her in the early evenings, picking up her charcoal-brittle frame and carrying her downstairs, where she would receive friends from work, who’d pop round whenever they could with flowers and fruit that she couldn’t eat. Before these visits, she would sit up in bed, brush her hair and put on a little make-up, looking at her gaunt, inky face in the dressing-table mirror with a strange, almost curious expression. One day, she turned to me as I came in and smiled sadly. ‘I don’t think I’ll be going on that holiday any time soon,’ she said.

I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’

By then she was little more than skin and bone and a ribbon of sickly-sweet perfume, and sometimes she was only half there, because of the drugs, but that day she was alert and watchful, as she studied my face. ‘Not ever?’ she asked, her voice quiet, but steady.

‘Not ever.’

She nodded. ‘I thought so,’ she said. She looked at her face in the mirror. Her lipstick was almost unbearably red on her thin, grey mouth. She turned back to me, and smiled. ‘Don’t tell your father,’ she said.

CHAPTER 2

At the funeral, my father took aside each family member who would listen and explained how my mother had died. It was Margaret and I who had killed her, he said,
killed her with worry
. We’d been taking drugs since we were thirteen. We’d brought all kinds of strange people into the house. My mother had found a stash of dope in my room, hidden among the books I was supposedly studying. I had admitted to him in so many words that I was hooked on LSD. Since I’d been back home, it had become obvious that I had a serious drug problem. Because of all that – all the drugs, and the drinking, of course – I’d been expelled from school and, even though he’d put me through Cambridge, I wasn’t doing anything with my life. What was the point of him sending me to college, if I was just going to drift about doing God knows what, drinking and taking drugs? I’m not sure if anybody took anything he said to heart – I think some did – but he was utterly convinced, utterly sincere in what he was saying. He believed that my sister and I had killed our mother because he had to. He needed a scapegoat.

As soon as we got back to the house, after the drinks reception, a pack of cards appeared and, before anybody could protest, his folding card table with the green baize top had been set up in the living room. People were magicking booze from thin air, a half-bottle of rum here, a bottle of whisky there; somebody had gone for a carry-out and come back with twenty-odd cans of beer. It was shaping up to be one of the usual parties, to the disgust of my Aunt Mary and Uncle Dave, who had driven down from Scotland to be there, and were supposedly staying over that night. I could see that this was my father’s revenge for all those years of feeling slighted and despised, the brother-in-law that nobody had liked, the faux-convert who’d not even bothered with the duty Mass and confession once a year to put my mother’s mind at rest about his immortal soul. Here he was, the master of his own house, with his friends around him, cards on the table, a ring of cigarettes burning in the ashtray, half-consumed glasses of beer and whisky everywhere, the men muttering away to one another, making bets, lighting up, mulling over their hands like the mutant denizens of some shebeen in the boonies.

Uncle Dave had the first go. ‘Tommy,’ he said, standing over the table, a quiet, considerate man, used to doing things right, ‘can I have a wee word?’

My father looked up, just, from his cards. ‘Aye? Want to sit in, Dave?’

Dave shook his head. ‘Tommy,’ he said, doing – being – exactly what my father most resented: patient, adult, responsible, reasonable, ‘Mary’s a wee bit upset – ’

‘We’re all upset here,’ my father put in. ‘It’s a grievous day – ’

‘That’s right. It’s a sad day for everyone. So I think – ’

My father laid his cards down and looked him in the face. ‘What is it, Dave? What do you want to say?’ His voice was dangerous.

My uncle’s mouth hardened. He was a reasonable man, but only up to a point. He could see this was useless, but he’d probably known that from the beginning. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’d have thought you and your friends would be wanting to show Tess a bit more respect – ’