A Lie About My Father (35 page)

Mull nodded. He knew I was grasping at an escape route, but he didn’t begrudge me that. We were too different, now, to sit all night at the Silver Band Club. ‘He bides down by the White Hart,’ he said. ‘I’ll walk out with you and tell the driver.’

So it was that, together, we carried Billy – who was light as a feather – down the stairs and out, into the light of day. I was surprised that it was still so bright. I looked at Mull as we waited for a taxi, and saw how similar we were: same build, same face, same fears. He could have been anybody, standing on the kerb, waiting for a cab to pull up, but he was more like me, and more familiar, than my father had ever been. For me, there was no mystery to him, only his keen sense of injust-ice and his love for a man who hadn’t ever deserved it. He knew why I was leaving, and he didn’t want to hold me back, but he had been hoping, that day, to say something that would make me see my father in a better light. Now he was disappointed, knowing he’d missed his chance – though he still kept at me, even as I piled Billy into the cab. ‘You keep in touch, son,’ he said. ‘I’ll be here. If you ever want to talk, about your dad, or anything, you just give me a ring.’

‘Thanks, Mull,’ I said. I wanted to say that I had always liked him. I hoped that he knew that. I didn’t agree with him about my father, in spite of the photograph, in spite of the very obvious grief of people like Billy and Nat. It could have been any of them, lying on that floor by the cigarette machine. What they were grieving for wasn’t so much the death of their friend as what it represented: the lives they’d wasted or had taken away, the impossibility of declaring their love for one another, the lonely death that was coming to each of them. In the end, I thought – an absurd but, at that moment, satisfying idea – people drink for two reasons: because they want to die, or because they are afraid of dying. Two sides of the same coin, I told myself. It was all about time, all about trying to beat the clock.

Mull smiled and shook his head. ‘Aye, you’ll miss him right enough,’ he said.

I nodded. ‘I’ve missed him all my life,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll stop now.’ I was being fatuous, and I knew it; I was also being cruel to Mull, and I knew that too; but it felt like cruelty was all I had to make him see that what I was saying had its own element of truth.

His face darkened, but he wasn’t angry. He was considering my words, giving them far more due than they deserved. But he didn’t say anything, not for a moment, not as an answer. ‘I’d better let you get wee Billy home,’ he said. He held out his hand. ‘Take care of yourself.’

I shook his hand. ‘You too, Mull,’ I said; then I climbed into the cab next to Billy, who had slumped sideways and was lying half across the seat, whining softly in his sleep. Mull told the taxi driver Billy’s address and the man nodded. Then he slammed the door shut, and we drove away, leaving him alone on the pavement, a mortal man, standing in the sunlight of an ordinary day, watching us go.

LIES AND DREAMS

The Gospel of Thomas

(Nag Hammadi, Codex 2, Book 2)

A small fishing town on the east coast of Scotland: 1 November 2002, the day after Halloween, the first day of the pagan year. The night was stormy and this morning the wind is still high. Lines of townsfolk have formed at the breakwater to watch the great waves smash against the wall, coming out from rooms haunted by television and muzak, bringing their children to see, bringing cameras and binoculars, a little awed, and letting it show, in spite of themselves. I am taking my son on our usual walk to the lighthouse at the end of the quay, past the boats moored in the inner harbour, past the stacks of creels and old fish crates on the dock, out to where the crab boats come in, on finer days than this. My son is three years old and
here
is his favourite place. He likes to watch the gulls sail overhead and, in season, he tracks our summer visitors: swallows skimming along the line of the breakwater at low tide, catching the flies that are drawn to the tumbles of weed on the shore; Arctic terns hovering over the shallow water, searching for food in the clear light they follow from pole to pole with the changing seasons. Most of all he likes to see the crabs, to exchange a few words with the ‘crab-man’ and loiter a while for the five-fathom scent of the creels and the black-and-orange crab-bodies packed into old boxes dripping with hairweed and a greeny deepwater-light. This is what we know as life: seabirds; caught fish; the odd twenty-foot wave flaring against a wall; the dark scent of unknown water; and, though we are embarrassed to say it, what we need to say, what we need to remember above and beyond all our other concerns is that
this
is the real world, our enduring mystery.

There were no ghosts last night. Nobody came to my little fire, other than the living. Later, though, as I sat up, observing my customary vigil, a memory came to me of a man who, for the child I was during his lifetime, might just as well have been a ghost. He was someone I had never come to know, though I lived in his house for so long; when I try to picture what he was like, all I find are gaps in the fabric of my memory, little tears and holes where something should have been, wisps of nothingness glimmering through, insubstantial, not quite convincing. Yet every Halloween, I’ve had the feeling that there is another,
truer
father that I should be able to recall. Till now, all I’ve come up with is a memory from a film, a character in a book, a surrogate phantom. This last night, however, I sensed that something else was present, and I knew it was real, however flimsy it seemed.

There are psychologists who believe that we record every word we ever read, every picture we see, every event, however small, every window in every house on every street we ever walk in a lifetime of books and streets and pictures. We record it all and file it away, waiting for it to be recollected: the vast, disordered encyclopedia of one human existence. At some point, when they are most needed, we recover images we never knew we had, and make of them what we can: a story, a lie, a dream, a life. The idea makes sense: it is, in its way, Darwinian. In the memory that comes this Halloween, my father is not the brutal, unhappy drunk I knew best, the man who passed his days in a fog of bewilderment, wondering who was to blame for his inconsequentiality, but someone I must have caught a glimpse of, back in Cowdenbeath, even if I don’t remember exactly when it was, or why he was there, standing outside our house one night, alone in the dark, rain dripping from the trees around him. In this memory, he has his back to me, but I sense a stillness, a deep quiet that is not necessarily that of a man at rest, as he stands at the edge of Mr Kirk’s woods, lighting a cigarette, nameless and, for a moment, free to be whoever he wishes. There must be some ordinary reason why he is out there in the wet, a few feet from his front door, but that isn’t what matters now. What matters is that I can see him again, in his white shirt, and I know he is different from the man I learned to fear, the man I wanted to kill. I know his being there is an unusual event, one I may even have misunderstood – in this memory, I am, perhaps, four or five – but it is important that I remember him exactly like this, because this is the father I could bring myself to forgive. I know that it’s just as important to remember the damage he did, and the pointless misery he inflicted on his family; yet, now that
I
am a father, I keep this man in my mind’s eye: a man alone, at the edge of the darkness, listening out, forgetting himself and, as far as he knows,
unseen
. Suddenly, after all these years, this is the most permanent possession I have of him. More enduring than the watch he was wearing when he died, which I have now lost. More enduring than photographs and mementoes, more enduring, even, than his absurd stories. I know most of those tales by heart, even though I know they are lies; if I learned anything from my father, it was that parents tell their children stories all the time, even when they are not aware of it. Sometimes a father’s tales are the same as those a mother would tell, but there are points on the journey where we have different stories to relate, or different versions of the same story, depending on circumstances. Maybe one of the things a father does, for his sons at least, is to let them see the difference between spirits and ghosts, to reveal for them the fabric of the invisible world. Ghosts can be dismissed, or they can be sent on their way, some Halloween night, with a kind word and a warm fire, but spirits are with us always, and it seems that the stories we tell are the only means we have to decide who or what they are, and how they might be accommodated. In the end, ghosts are powerless, but spirits feed our imaginations, and they are capable of anything. The time will come when my son needs me to tell him stories about fathers and sons – about who he is and where he came from – and I want him to be able to distinguish between our ghosts and our spirits. The memory I have of my father, caught between the night and his little prefab, is a story in itself, or at least, the beginnings of one. It is a father’s tale, a myth, and I have to work out how to pass it on, in its best form, to the child with whom I am now walking, on this morning of the saints. I will have to give him something, however flimsy, to imagine himself as a man, with his own history, his own images, his own, very particular, spirits – and if I must start with nothing more than a lonely phantom in a white shirt and flannels, waiting to be realised in the eternal cold of a winter’s night, so be it. What I need, as a father, is just one story, to start things off. The last thing I would want to do is make a lie of it.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘Birdland’ written by Patti Smith © 1975 Linda Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Brigit Pegeen Kelly, excerpt from ‘Dead Doe’ from
Song
. Copyright © 1995 by Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.,
www.boaeditions.org
.

The author is grateful for the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council during the writing of this book.