A Lie About My Father (33 page)

There were precious few secrets in that little coal-mining community. People knew one another’s business, a man’s fate was written in his face, the old folk looked at a ten-year-old boy and saw his life unfolding like a recipe from some well-kent cookbook: school for a few more years, work at the pit, marriage, children the spit of himself and his wife, old age, death, erasure. The chief pleasure of the place, for men and women alike, was the knowing, the sense of
what can ye expect for folk like us
, the gossip they exchanged in grim, satisfied huddles at the club, or round at the drying green, a long narrative of pretension and comeuppance, of hope, or ambition, or blind desperation and the quiet, inevitable falls that followed. The worst offence, for those people, was the keeping of a secret, yet secrets there were, and one of those secrets, till the darkness in his face gave him away, was Wullie McFee’s illness. I barely knew the man, but I remember his eyes, and his queer smile, and I think he enjoyed it, in some secret chamber of his being, that he alone knew what was coming, that he had something to think about, something to hold in his mind, something to study and wonder at and raise to the light, like a fragment of stained glass that nobody else could see. He was probably afraid, too, and he probably worried about those he would leave behind, but I’d like to think that this secret was precious to him: that, in a life which had belonged mostly to others, his death had been his own, for a while at least.

Naturally, people would have guessed towards the end. Still, it had come as a surprise, one Wednesday afternoon in the early summer, when Wullie had died, sitting upstairs on the bus to Dunfermline, his cigarette sliding from his fingers and burning a hole in the seat, his dwindled body sliding sideways and down, while two girls from the Co-op watched, not quite knowing what to do as the bus rolled on, then finally ringing the bell madly, five, ten, who knows how many times, till the bus came to an unscheduled stop. The conductor had come upstairs then, followed by a gaggle of curious passengers, some of them neighbours of Wullie’s, none of them complete strangers, and I can imagine, now, that Wullie was still there for a minute or so, or maybe longer, while they discussed what to do. Maybe someone loosened his tie, or rolled up a raincoat to stuff under his head while someone – one of the girls, or a keen boy on his way to football practice – ran to fetch help. It was too late, of course, and most of them probably knew that, but they had to do what people did in such situations, and I can imagine Wullie acknowledging that fact, as he slipped away, with something in his head that he wanted to say, and nobody there that he wanted to say it to, or some detail of this life, some wisp of scent, some trick of the light, glowing like an ember in his fading consciousness.

‘If there’s one thing I couldn’t stand,’ my father had said, after he had taken in the news, ‘it would be that. Dying on a bus, in public. Dying with strangers gawping at you, down on the floor, with some complete stranger poking at you – ’

Twenty years later, on his way to the cigarette machine in the Silver Band Club, he suffered his fourth heart attack and died where he fell, with two of his mates, neither of them anywhere near sober, peering down into his face as it turned grey and – in the words of one of his drinking pals, who told me all about it at the funeral – he went out like a light, the life dimmed, the mouth slackened. I have seen three men die in my life and I am grateful I wasn’t there when it was my father’s turn. When I’d gone to visit him after his third attack, there had been something about his fear – the fear of dying, of course, but also the fear of dying among strangers, in a hospital ward – that made me feel twelve years old again. That fear in my father’s eyes brought back a sudden and quite unexpected grief, a grief I had felt years before, and managed to forget, grief for a lost demigod, grief for the beautiful and inexplicably tragic figure he had sometimes cut in my child’s world, sitting at family funerals and weddings with the other men, a dark, bruised presence, shrouded in whisky and smoke. I remembered him, for a moment, as a person of simple pleasures: I recalled his fondness for the newly opened pack of Kensitas, I remembered the glitter on that skin of tobacco scent and foil that he stripped away as he drew out the first smoke, a faint glimmer blowing away in the wind, or sculpted into a child’s fleeting trinket, later on, his tar-stained fingers shaping frogs or butterflies from silver foil and a trace of whisky. The cellophane would glimmer in the fire, a ghost of matter, blue along the snaking tear-strip, but the pack itself he cradled to his inner pocket, where it perched, birdlike and still. I remember loving the way he tapped out a cigarette with one brisk movement, then lit it with a match from nowhere, smoke appearing like the dead in those old photographs of spirit mediums, ghosts of woodbine conjured from the air. In the evenings, after he had gone out, my mother sometimes left the doors and windows standing open for an hour or longer, long enough for frost to settle on a candlewick bedspread, or the kitchen table, the cold kiss of it on my spiced fingertips perfect and chill, like the moment in the Annunciation story when Mary lifts her head and the angel is there, his wings flexed, his purpose suddenly revealed. Back then, I think, there were days when I imagined my father was immortal.

Then, suddenly, he was small and afraid, and I felt a twelve-year-old’s helplessness as he described how he had wakened in the small hours and watched the man in the opposite bed die, unseen, unnoticed, in a strange place, fading out in his own private world, unaware – at the last – that my father was watching from eight feet away. ‘But what if he did know?’ my father had said. ‘What if he could see me watching him? I’d never even spoken to the boy, and there he was, dying right in front of my eyes.’

‘Didn’t you call for someone?’ I asked him.

My father shook his head. ‘He was dying,’ he said. ‘I could see that. Let the boy go in peace, I say.’

‘They might have been able to save him,’ I ventured.

My father pursed his lips and looked away. It was late afternoon, an unseasonably cold, wet day. The window was freckled with rain and touched with a sulphury light from the parking bay below. ‘For what?’ he asked, finally. His voice was quiet, buried deep in his chest, as if it was something he wanted to keep to himself, something he begrudged me. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, after a moment, ‘whatever else happens, don’t let me go like that. When my time comes.’

I nodded. Maybe that was when I felt like a twelve-year-old all over again, quietly forced into making a promise I couldn’t keep. A promise nobody could keep. As it happened, he ended up dying in a public place, and I know he would have hated it, but there was nothing I could have done to prevent that. All I can think is, at least he was among friends, that, in a place like Corby, it could have been worse. I once saw a man die from blood loss on the steps of a pub. He had been stabbed in the neck as he emerged from the Maple Leaf, about a minute before a friend and I pushed open the door to leave: when we found him, he was on the ground, the blood already pooling around him, black and dark-smelling on the night air, and immediately my friend was clutching at my sleeve, telling me we should go, that we shouldn’t get involved. I knew that made sense – our pockets were full of acid and grass – but I lingered a moment, against my will, half drunk, curious, touched. The look in that man’s eyes was a combination of panic – he knew he was going, and he knew nobody could help him – and dismay that he could be dying like this, a door swinging open in his face and two men he didn’t know stopped in their tracks, looking down, then stepping, not quite over, but by him, and hurrying away. My father was lucky not to die like that: the half-drunk faces peering into his after he hit the floor were at least faces he recognised, and by the time a crowd had gathered – so his mates told me – he was long gone.

This is the problem with death: we always imagine dying alone. We forget that, almost certainly, other things will be going on when we make our exit – that, in all likelihood, death, like everything else, takes place, as Auden says, ‘while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’. It’s a fortunate corpse that flickers out when the world’s back is turned and, though animals are supposed to find private corners and crannies to die in, most of us have to be prepared for company at the end – and the company of strangers at that. Perhaps this idea horrified my father because, all his life, he had kept strangers at bay, one way or another, with his ‘wee stories’, as my mother called them, though she had always known they were outright, and often utterly absurd, lies. I suppose even he knew that death was the one occasion he couldn’t lie his way out of.

That morning in Crosshill, then, he was thinking about Wullie McFee, and about himself. Thinking about the ignominy of dying on a bus, with strangers gawping into your face, stealing your last breath and tainting it with grease and smoke and cheap perfume – but for my father, Wullie’s death was the sign of some greater insult. By that summer’s morning, I think, he was ready to feel Wullie’s helplessness so keenly because he was just beginning to see how helpless he had become. He hadn’t gone to Corby to start a new life, he had gone because there was nowhere else to go. After his accident, my mother hadn’t wanted him to work on the building any more, and I think he too had been frightened, in spite of himself: frightened by the way his face changed while he was lying in the hospital and frightened by the sheer random force of events that could take a man like him, a man who had stood proud and intact in his own skin for forty years, never once doubting that, physically at least, he was invincible, and alter him overnight into the broken, bewildered creature he had been on the ward. Physical integrity was all he had: his mind wasn’t his own, his history was mostly fake, but he did have his body – to work, to swim, to fight, to drink, to hoist a child high into the air and see its scared, excited face gazing down at him. Now that body had been called into question and he’d been obliged to begin again, to wipe the slate clean, to test himself in new surroundings, coming in from the open air, where he had always worked, to the closed heat and racket of the steelworks. How galling it must have been, when the new start that had cost him so much made no difference to his family, that nobody wanted the Corporation house on Handcross Court, or the leatherette three-piece suite in the front room, or the television and radiogram he bought with his compensation money. How galling to think that they would rather have stayed at home, in Crosshill or Cowdenbeath, back where they started.

This is hindsight, of course, but I believe he was thinking of all these things, of Wullie’s death, of his fragility, of the death that was waiting for him, like an old mate, down at the bookies, or on the next street corner, and I believe he was thinking about – or rather, not thinking, but feeling, enduring in its rawest form – the ordinary and seemingly inevitable failure into which he had fallen when, all of a sudden, standing in that dreary concrete bus shelter, he raised his fist and smashed one of the reinforced window panes, scattering slivers and pearls of glass over the concrete floor while I stood watching, horrified, suddenly afraid. He smashed one, then another, then another, only pausing for a moment to give me a twisted, oddly quizzical look, as if he was just as surprised as I was – surprised, but pleased too, as he continued to work, smashing one pane after another, his knuckles bleeding now and crusted with broken glass. I had been afraid of my father before that day, but it had always been an indoors affair, a hidden, secret, forgettable terror that lasted through one drunken night and melted away the next morning. I had seen blackness in my father’s face, but it had been a local event, a mood, a passing phenomenon. But that morning, it was different. For the first time, I realised that he wasn’t just afraid of death, in the usual way, he was
terrified
. At times, his terror infused him with rage and panic, and he didn’t know what to do with himself. I think there must have been times when he wanted to die, just to be free of that almighty fear. Most of the time, though, his fear sat inside his head, a dark, ugly spirit, watching, waiting. I couldn’t help thinking, when Margaret called to tell me that he had died, that it was finally gone now, that he wasn’t afraid any more. And I couldn’t help thinking that a little piece of tainted, fearful blackness had disappeared from my life.

The time comes when each of us sees a blackness in the world: a black in the green of leaf and river, a black in the light of noon, a blackness in the gaze of an animal encountered some early morning in the summer grass. There is a blackness in everything that is, a darkness that is hard to see, more often than not, a blackness that is not only necessary, but also for the best.
For the best
. It’s a phrase my grandfather was fond of using, but he used it, not to mean good, or right, or anything else that had to do with human judgement, but as the token of a way of being, a way of accepting what life did that never crumbled into resignation, a way of knowing the difference between submission and surrender. My grandfather saw the black in things and in himself too, and he stood back from it, stood away, holding it at arm’s length, the better to see it. He had also been damaged: like my father, he’d been smashed up in an accident at work – in his case, the collapse of a shaft in the pit – but he’d come through it with more resolve, maybe because his body mattered less to him than his faith. The hurt he had suffered, and the changes he’d been obliged to make as a result, had made him stronger, more compassionate and, at the same time, quieter in himself. At family events, at christenings and weddings and funerals, he might sometimes sit off by himself, a still, unmoving phenomenon, but still the way a pond in the woods is still, a not altogether solid thing that was as much potential as it was presence. I liked to loiter just outside his orbit, waiting to be called in, to be questioned in that soft, coal-dark voice he had, a voice that took itself seriously, but was never solemn or self-conscious. Towards the end, when it was an effort for him to get out of the house at all, he would sit in his chair and watch as the children he had raised, and their children in turn, pursued the life he had more or less relinquished, but when he spoke, his voice was still alive, still vivid, still rich with the black of the earth he had dug and the raw gold of his known history. Not that he ever said anything particularly wise or revealing. He was a man of simple faith, as the priests used to say, a man set in his own beliefs and ways. He had nothing to say, in words; all he possessed, by then, was that dark, live voice, an insinuation in it of knowledge he could never have told, but knew beyond question in his blood and in his bones. Part of that knowledge was light – the light off snow at Christmas, the light of church candles, the pale bronze light of the upper room where he had clumsily tended his wife in her dying – but the rest, I think, was composed of blackness: the blackness in himself, the blackness he had seen in the far reaches of the pits, the blackness of pain and the ordinary fears of the deprived and, beyond all that, the abstract blackness of the world, a blackness he had touched, a blackness he had recognised as kith and kin, a blackness he had held at arm’s length long enough to accommodate it. He was just a working man from Crosshill, a man like his neighbours who had brought up a family on next to nothing, a man who had aged quickly and watched his wife die by degrees in their narrow house, but that soft, dark glow in his voice spoke of something else which, though it was far more complicated than what we usually think of when we use the word, had a definite undertone of victory.