A Lie About My Father (7 page)

Stewart was almost obsessively interested in all things Catholic: what our God was like, whether we believed in the Devil, what the saints did, whether the host really turned to flesh when the priest placed it on your tongue and you walked back up the aisle, trying to stay serious, with all eyes on you as the wafer melted in your mouth. He was amazed when I told him what I had learned in confirmation classes: that it was a sin for a Catholic to marry a Protestant, that if we did, husband and wife and all their children would go to hell. (I worried about this sometimes, as my father was a non-Catholic, but my mother seemed to think we weren’t going to hell because, even if my father rarely attended Mass, he had converted to Catholicism before they actually married. I also worried about the distinction between non-Catholic and Protestant, which seemed to exist, though it was never defined. In the end, I decided the way to look at it was that Protestants were actively not-Catholic, whereas non-Catholics didn’t much care, one way or another.) Stewart wondered if I thought he was going to hell and I had to tell him that it was unavoidable, unless he became a Catholic. He thought about this for a while, then he laughed.

‘So you’ll be going to heaven,’ he said. ‘Guaranteed.’

‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘You can’t go to heaven if you die with a mortal sin on your soul.’ I then proceeded to explain what a mortal sin was.

‘So,’ Stewart said, ‘if you get run over by a bus on your way to confession, with the mortal sin still on your soul, you go to hell, but if you get run over by the next bus, on your way home from confession, you go to heaven.’

‘I suppose so,’ I said, though even I could see the absurdity of the notion.

I think, however, that Stewart was more in awe of
The Catholics
, the more he learned about the strangeness of our beliefs. I think he admired us for entertaining such preposterous convictions. Certainly, he never mocked my religion; he only seemed bemused, and strangely taken in, by it. For a while, I even wondered if he was going to ask me to lead him to the priests’ house, where he would repent his evil ways and join the one holy, Catholic and apostolic Church. But he never did. He came to Mass with me once, and I skipped Mass the following week, to go with him to kirk. I think he liked the statues and the flowers; he couldn’t take his eyes off the foot of the Virgin, crushing the head of the serpent in a damp, incense-flavoured alcove just inside the door. I liked the emptiness of the kirk: the white walls, the clear windows, the fact that you could miss it once in a while. I didn’t go there again, though. When it was discovered, by the Catholic powers that be, not only that I had missed Mass, but that I had taken the opportunity to support the other team, all hell broke loose. My mother was summoned to the school; the priest came to our house and sat gazing at me mournfully, his mouth full of home-made Dundee cake. Eventually, he told me he was surprised by what I had done, as he’d come to think that I might –
Deo
volente
– be a boy who had a vocation. For a while, Stewart and I saw a little less of one another, as the danger to my mortal soul, and my possible vocation, was assessed. In the end, though – a full confession having been made – I was allowed to go on seeing the Protestant boy (or maybe he was just a non-Catholic), as long as I promised never to go to his ‘chapel’ again.

If Stewart was my first and, for a long time, my only friend, then the girl from the prefab next door – I’ll call her Sandra Fulton – was my first and, for a very long time, my only love. She was a year and a half older than me, but we were friends nevertheless. What we had in common, to begin with, was a desire to be left alone, a native mistrust of other children; what we came to share, though I didn’t understand it at the time, would stay with me for years to come. We were conspirators, collaborators in the creation of a world that included nobody but ourselves; some days, Margaret tagged along, and was even allowed to participate in the first stages of our little games, but she never became a full member of the club, and even she didn’t know what happened when Sandra and I were alone.

At the time, we didn’t really know what we were doing either. Gradually, by degrees, we concocted an exquisite game, but it was a mystery to us that it should be so very pleasurable. We knew enough to know that it wasn’t the usual game played by boys and girls: it wasn’t doctors and nurses, it wasn’t ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours’. In fact, there was no obvious sex in the game at all. I’d played those ordinary games – to this day, I remember how odd Annie Simpson’s naked, unfinished-looking little pubis looked, when she slipped off her knickers and showed me what she had in the woods by the chicken farm – and I knew what they were about. I had kissed a girl in school; I had carefully nurtured a crush on my favourite teacher; for a time, I had allowed myself to become infatuated with the classroom vamp. I can still see Geraldine MacInnes, the most beautiful girl in Cowdenbeath, standing on the touchline in the one football game where I gave my all, scoring three goals and bewildering everyone with my sudden enthusiasm. She didn’t notice me at all, though, and I lost all interest in football after that. My father still took me to Cowdenbeath games, when they were at home, and we would stand on the cold terraces, eating hot pies and shouting at the referee, but my heart wasn’t really in it. With Sandra, it wasn’t some childish romance, or curiosity about the body’s machinery that drew us together. It was the fact that we had discovered something together and, even if we had no idea what it was, we knew it had to be kept secret.

Sandra’s mother was an intense, very private Englishwoman, who made friends with considerable difficulty. She was shy, unhappy, and had a tendency to withdraw into herself suddenly and for no obvious reason, like a hedgehog curling up into a prickly, featureless ball. The only person she liked – the one person she talked to, the only person for whom I ever saw her smile – was my mother. The two women seemed to be united by some common, unspoken grief that, by the time the Fulton story was fully played out, had deepened and spread, like a black stain on both their lives. I think what my mother saw, in Mary Fulton, was a woman so much like herself – in her hopes, and in her disappointments – that when the tragedy of Arthur’s crime destroyed, first his family, then Mary Fulton herself, my mother could hardly bear it.

Arthur Fulton was the kind of man everybody refers to as a ‘gentle giant’. He was basketball-player tall, but with a light heavyweight’s build; when he walked into a room, everything stopped for a moment to adjust to his presence. The furniture dwindled, the atmosphere darkened. What made matters worse was that Arthur, a shy, painfully inarticulate man, had a horror of being the object of attention, and would gladly have crept through life unnoticed. It was written in his face, not just embarrassment, but a terror of all things social. My father was fairly asocial too – most of the men in our wider circle were unhappy at public gatherings, or with any form of polite intercourse – but Arthur’s problem was pathological. The only people he ever seemed comfortable around were children. He adored Sandra. He had decided, early on, that she was his princess, his one and only. Nobody ever doted on a child so blatantly – partly, no doubt, because he loved her, but also, I am sure, because she gave him a focus, a reason for not giving up on affection altogether. He was unhappy in his marriage; that was obvious. His wife treated him like a child and, in return, he chose the company of children over adults whenever he could.

I sometimes wonder what Arthur Fulton would have done if he had ever caught Sandra and me playing our little game. Oddly enough, even though it gave us so much pleasure, even though we knew it had to be kept secret at all costs, we never thought of it as wrong, or even as anything other than an innocent and private matter. The game was simple: we began by acting out a scenario where I was a burglar breaking into the house and stealing something while her back was turned. Then, when I had made my escape, she had to guess what it was I had taken. This progressed to my ‘breaking in’ when she was there. I would do my best to sneak in and take something without her seeing, but at some point she spotted me, and I had to escape, either by hopping back out of the window, or by overpowering her and tying her up. Which is where it all got interesting. I knew nothing about sex, much less about bondage, but to my eight-year-old self, tying Sandra Fulton up with soft woollen scarves and the belt from her school Burberry was painfully erotic, causing in my pre-adolescent nervous system something close to overload. I have no idea how Sandra felt while all this was going on, though I do recall that she was the one, at every stage of our little game, who took the lead. For a grown-up, nowadays, this might immediately set alarm bells ringing, especially when you consider what her father is supposed to have done to his girlfriend later, but I don’t think she had been schooled in any of this. She was just a year older and a whole lot more imaginative than I was. Where she is now, I have no idea, but I wonder, sometimes, if that game of ours left an enduring impression on her heart – as it did on mine. I hope so. I like to think that, somewhere, a bored housewife, or some tired professional, pauses a moment and remembers those games at the prefabs, when she was tied up with assorted oddments from her school clothes, and lay waiting (in vain, alas) to discover what might happen next, while I stood over her in my makeshift burglar’s mask, flushed with excitement. Nothing ever did happen, of course; though, looking back, and considering the world we inhabited, we’d done pretty well to get that far. It was just bad luck that any further experiments we might have conducted were cut short by a terrible crime, and by my father’s perennial dissatisfaction with his lot.

CHAPTER 4

My father disliked his new house. Looking back, I can see that the move was another defeat for him: the prefabs had been intended as temporary accommodation during the post-war period of austerity, but they had lingered on, cheap housing for poor people, an improvement, at least, on the ratty tenements on King Street and elsewhere. Every year, there was talk of demolition, but the fact was that most people who lived in the prefabs were happy with what they had, and nobody on the council was stupid enough to move us back into the overcrowded, noisy, unsanitary ruins from which we had just escaped. To my mother, and many like her, the prefabs were a godsend: detached houses, in effect, with their own gardens, in loose clusters at the greener end of the town, with neighbours just close enough to call on for help in emergencies or for a spot of tea and gossip, but not so close that they got to know all your business. That would have been important to her, for during the seven years we lived in the prefabs, my father became more and more of an unknown quantity. For weeks on end, he would come home from work on a Friday night, or on a Saturday afternoon if there was overtime, and he would be tired to the bone, silent and dulled and uneasy, but he would hand over his wages, and there would be enough for the coming week, for cereals and sausages and cheap cuts of meat. Then, without warning, he would disappear, taking his wage packet with him, turning up drunk with ‘friends’ in the small hours of Sunday morning, loud and jovial and edgy, prepared to be loved, and ready to do damage if love was withheld. Or he would slip in quietly while we were playing in the garden, and sit weeping at the kitchen table, drunk and contrite, promising that this was the last, that, from now on, he would be fine. On those days, we would know, when we came indoors, that for a week or more every meal would be split-pea or lentil soup from the supply of dried foods my mother hoarded in the top cupboard for just such a rainy day, and the milk bottles would disappear from the doorstep for a while, replaced by a printed note, in her neat, slightly cramped hand, that said:
No milk today, thank you
.

I look back now and see that the move to the prefabs sealed my father’s sense of himself as a failure. For as long as we had been at King Street, on the waiting list, there was a chance of going up in the world, but the simple fact was that, as a casual worker, doing mostly seasonal work, first at the docks, then in the building trade, he would always occupy the bottom of the social pile, just one rung above the unemployed and the unemployable. He was also a drinker, and everybody knew that. People know they cannot depend on a drunk. He could be hired, of course, but he would always be brought in on a seasonal or casual basis, so there were no obligations if anything went wrong. Things usually went wrong, sooner or later. It surprises me, looking back, that my father ever thought his problem with alcohol was a secret. Everybody knew. The child I was could tell, walking along the high street in Cowdenbeath, by the way people behaved towards my mother, combining respect and pity in more or less equal measure, admiring her for the tenacity with which she held her family together, but also pitying, and perhaps even despising a little, this woman whose lack of judgement had not only led her into the mess she was in, but kept her there, hoodwinked, self-deceiving, vainly hoping for something to change.

My father did not blame himself for his failure, of course. When he had been in the air force, he had been happy; he was always saying he should never have left the RAF, that he’d only come out because of my mother, who didn’t like the idea of having to go and live wherever the MOD might send him, far from her family, maybe in some foreign country – Germany, or Cyprus, say – countries that sounded exciting and exotic to us, but to her would have been a living hell, so far from her own folk, in a place where she would never be able to speak the language. After my father left the RAF, he’d got work at the docks, and there had been some kind of scam going on there, where my father – a seasoned gambler, who could do pretty complex arithmetic in his head – had run a book, before betting shops were made legal. I don’t know the whole story: he and my mother were just married, living in the King Street rat warren, and he was working at the docks, when this opportunity came up. I imagine it was fairly nickel-and-dime stuff but, according to my father, there were days when he came home and dropped a pile of cash on the kitchen table, on top of his wages for the week. In my mother’s version, this did happen once or twice; mostly, however, he’d come home broke, having gambled away the extra – and, as she was always quick to point out,
illegal
– money he’d been paid. It was a frequent bone of contention and, later, when I was seven or eight, I would hear them arguing about it, my father playing the part of criminal entrepreneur headed for bigger things when my mother’s nervousness had forced him to turn his back on a way of life that would have made us all rich. He would say nobody ever got rich working for somebody else; my mother would reply that she didn’t want to be rich, she just wanted enough to get on with her life, no trouble, no fuss. It was like listening to a bad soap opera, and I couldn’t take much of it. After a while, I’d be up and out of the window, or sitting in the press in the corner of the bedroom, curled up with my toys, blocking them out of my mind.