A Lie About My Father Read Free

dropped Mike off and driven away, it occurred to me that there was so much I could have said. I could have said that I’d come to believe that, when a man becomes a father, he is – or he ought to be – transformed into something other than the man he had been until that moment. Every life is a more or less secret narrative, but when a man becomes a father, the story is lived, not for, but in the constant awareness of another, or others. However hard you try to avoid it, fatherhood is a narrative, something that is not only told to, but also told by those others. At certain points in my adult life, I have found myself talking, over dinner, about fathers and sons: the hour late, the coffee drunk, the candles burning to smoke, and men around the table reminiscing about the fathers they have lost, one way or another. The ones who died, and the ones who went astray; the weak and the false; the well-meaning and the malicious, and the ones who were never there in the first place, or not in any recognisable form. Regarding my own father, I could have told Mike the truth. I could have talked about the violence, the drinking, the shameful, maudlin theatre of his penitences. I could have told him about the gambling, and the fits of manic destruction. I could have spoken for hours about his cruelty, his pettiness, the way he picked obsessively at everything I did when I was too small and fearful to defend myself. I could have told him that I had buried my father with gratitude and a sense of what he might well have called closure a long time ago: buried him, not only in the cold, wet clay of the defunct steel town where he died, but also in the icy subsoil of my own forgetting. Ten years before, I had returned him to the earth and walked away, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, abandoning his memory to the blear-eyed strangers who hadn’t had time to move on or die before he had his last heart attack, between the bar and the cigarette machine in the Silver Band Club. I could have said that I had buried my father long ago and walked back to the funeral car in the first smirr of afternoon rain, thinking it was all over, that I was moving on. I could have added that, before my father died, I hadn’t seen him in years, but I hadn’t been able to relax, quite, as long as he was still alive. I had always known he was there, decaying in the old house, enduring a half-life tinged with whisky and heart pills, a dull gleam of anger and regret fading into the remaining sticks of battered and burn-scabbed furniture, into the glow from the absurdly large rented television in the corner, into cupboards emptied of everything except leftover dog food from his brief experiment in keeping a Dobermann and tattered packs of duty-free cigarettes his mates brought back from holidays in Torremolinos and Calais. I could have explained that I hadn’t seen him for years because I had walked out on him, in nothing but my shirtsleeves, with no money and nowhere to go, two days after my mother’s funeral. I could have said that, since that day in 1977, I hadn’t sat down with him, other than on the odd family occasion, but I had carried him with me everywhere, an ember of self-loathing in the quick of my mind, caustic and unquenchable. I could have said that, partly because of my father, I had always been – and still was – one of those binge drinkers you meet from time to time, out on a mission to do as much clandestine damage as possible. I could have explained that I carried myself fairly well, that I was responsible, hard-working, possessed of an almost excessive and clumsy affection for my own, 90 per cent of the time; that, in the normal course of affairs, I could take just about any insult or injury. I could have said that, like most men, I tried hard to maintain the front needed for ordinary social existence, all the time longing for one spontaneous, honest expression of vitality, but that I never saw it coming when, after weeks or months or even