A Book of Untruths Read online

  Like the lavish three-string circle of pearls, Pat soon disappeared, her pictures and belongings secreted into shoe-boxes, away from Adrian’s gaze.

  Yet ever after Pat would haunt us all.

  Lie 4: You’ve beated me to it

  It was never hidden from Sean that he was adopted. He was reminded of it most days. He’s the cuckoo in our nest, adopted in 1963 from a Catholic orphanage; there is a sense that in the sixties parents were not closely vetted. John Francis – Dad – was just the kind of man they were looking for. He and his wife attended Mass.

  Often Sean tells me of his wish. What he wishes is that on the day Dad came looking for proof that babies are always a blessing, his infant self had been aloud and awake. Yet on that summer morning, to his regret, my father found him asleep.

  Rather like dog and cat homes now, Dad was shown rooms and rooms of caged beds. The place was as noisy as Battersea. Except for one gorgeous black-haired baby, lying on his tummy, fist curled up by his cheek. The nun, Dad told me years later, held nothing back in her long list of reservations. Sean, as the baby had been named, was sickly. And difficult.

  Sean’s grandmother was French, and in Sean’s cot, beside him, was the pale-blue sitty-up bear she had sent him, which perhaps he still has. For me this bear is proof of other possibilities, and of the terrible weight of chance.

  He used his bear for our sex education, making an inch-long slice through the abdomen. Sometimes the bear was a girl, and sometimes, when his stuffing leaked out, Sean moulded it into a pale frazzled penis. Then she became a boy.

  The adoption can only have been my father’s decision. When he talked of that day and the sleeping baby, there was never any mention of his first wife.

  Sean tells me Dad would say before a beating:

  ‘If you carry on like this, you’ll go back to the home,’ or, ‘Adrian’s mother never wanted you,’ or, ‘I only adopted you because Adrian was getting spoiled.’

  Sean’s own mother, the biological one, would grow to be a fantasy parent to each one of us. She was the mother I dreamed about, probably as much as Sean did himself.

  Eventually in the eighties she was located. The Southern Catholic Rescue Society had been her rescuer, and it was they who were able to find his mother again.

  Mary was young when she gave birth to Sean, and from Folkestone. His father was a twenty-one-year-old Persian Muslim student called Esse, who returned to Iran. He has been impossible to locate.

  In Sean’s brown envelope, where he keeps the proof of who he is, there is, amongst the bits and pieces, a certificate of baptism, without godparents, and a list of possible contenders for the role of mother. The list is written in pencil and includes Marys who have been found in Southend, Newcastle, East Glamorgan, Manchester and Crewe.

  The social worker writes a long letter to him with advice on contact, in which Sean is counselled to use the words ‘looking for family’ rather than ‘mother’. She fears that the wrong person could get hold of the correspondence. It has happened before. She wonders whether it might be better to get the priest to call round, which has the advantage of being ‘perhaps a little more delicate in terms of catching [Mary] on her own’.

  Once the introduction is made, Mary writes that she always had ‘every intention of getting in touch’ but Sean had ‘beated’ her to it. After he calls, she writes to him that she ‘cannot always answer questions’. She worries that she will be overheard. ‘We must be very careful. I must not upset the apple cart just yet.’

  The word ‘yet’ implies a future. But with Mary there has been none. Though Sean has called round to her house, apple carts still stand in his way. He is a truth that Mary has never had the courage to confess. His half-siblings have no clue that he is here.

  Lie 5: I’m number three

  Mum often mentioned the baby conceived before me. It died in the womb at thirty-four weeks. It wasn’t until I was pregnant myself that she told me the midwife had not allowed her to see the child, or to know its sex. Her firstborn was taken to the hospital incinerator, neatly wrapped in a plastic bag.

  My arrival was ghosted by grief for this child she never saw. A child that, to her, also represented life’s vengeful balance. Every action had a consequence. One life must be given for another. It wasn’t until after my father was dead that she told me of her very first baby, the one that had come before the dead one. The one she felt she had not been able to have.

  The night they met, Dad had been a widower less than a year. He was six foot, and an attractive man in his thirties, with two small boys. If it hadn’t been for the fact he had come from an Irish single-parent family, women would have been queuing round the block. The single parent, my grandmother, was much in evidence during those early months, helping with the boys, her corset stinking of cabbage and cigarettes and the biscuity underside of old woman. To see her was to know what lay in store.

  They met at a Territorial Army event where ladies were at a premium. My mother had been invited to swell the numbers, with a party of friends she had made at secretarial college. They shared a flat, loved the Beatles, and had spent the previous summer hanging out with The Scaffold at the Edinburgh Fringe. It was the sixties, and the county set of Edinburgh were doing their best to catch up.

  She was the only daughter of a Protestant mill owner based in Tillicoultry. As soon as her parents got wind of the affair they dispatched her to London, and a job at the British Medical Association, hoping danger would pass.

  It didn’t. In need of a mother for his children, and a wife for his bed, my father remained focused. He hung around outside her office in Chelsea with flowers on Fridays, though it was six and a half hours by train from Waverley to King’s Cross.

  One weekend Dad described arriving to find a house party in full swing. Aside from his toothbrush, he had with him only a full bottle of gin, which he stingily hid in the oven. It brought the party to an explosive climax in the small hours when one of her flatmates decided to warm up a quiche.

  On one of these visits he got Mum pregnant.

  There was an appointment in Harley Street, she told me. Again Dad paid.

  It was still a couple of years before legalised abortion. However, my mother would have felt there was no other choice. Shotgun weddings were not an option in Perthshire. The worst of it was that it would have proved her parents’ bigotry – John Doyle, as a poor Irish Catholic, was absolutely the wrong man.

  You would think that abortion could lead to other choices, but guilt was the glue that kept them together. The termination sealed her fate.

  Cine footage of their marriage shows a small marquee has been erected in the paddock. Granny, dressed in orange, is so drunk she leans into the camera as if into a stiff wind. Granddad has remained indoors, in tears.

  Lie 6: I looked it up on Google

  A short while after Dad’s death I told Mum about research I’d read, which suggested that a stressful pregnancy often leads to a tearful baby. We were standing on the stairs, the house filled with my own baby’s screams.

  ‘Did any of us cry?’ I asked.

  ‘Ed cried.’

  Of course he did. When he was small and podgy and pale, this youngest blue-eyed boy, with marmalade hair, cried loads. Really cried. The rest of us would rather die than give in to tears, but Ed rolled over as soon as he was poked. Maybe the reason he is so serene now is that he blew it all out of himself before the age of five.

  The staircase was dark as Mum and I spoke, the baby quieting against my shoulder.

  ‘I was ill during your brother’s pregnancy,’ she said.

  ‘Something serious?’

  ‘We were told Ed would lose his sight.’ There was a long pause while she weighed the balance of things. ‘It was something your father gave me.’

  ‘Something he gave you?’ There was another pause. ‘What did he give you?’

  ‘Grounds for divorce.’

  It did not take me as long to process this answer as it should have.
r />   ‘An STD?’

  She didn’t reply, the baby huffing hot breaths against my neck.

  ‘A sexually transmitted disease?’ I squeaked. ‘An STD?’ This was a woman who waved her hands above her head in church each Sunday morning. ‘Which one?’

  And this was a woman who had never to my knowledge slept with any other man. Watching her continue her way quietly down the staircase, I stood on my step a long, long time.

  When I cornered her in the kitchen later she said she didn’t know which STD.

  ‘Come on.’ I wanted to believe her. ‘Hepatitis and herpes you’d know about, because you can’t get rid of them.’

  One beautiful flatmate of mine, in the midst of a flare-up, would spend a good deal of her time in a salted bath, feeling disgraced.

  I tackled Mum again.

  ‘My God, you must know. What medication did they give you?’

  ‘They gave me some pills,’ she said.

  ‘And told you there was a risk of infant blindness?’ Dad must have spent the rest of the pregnancy holding his breath. ‘Well that’s gonorrhoea or syphilis, isn’t it? But you’d remember if it was syphilis? You’d have to remember that?’

  When still she wouldn’t answer I asked:

  ‘Who did he catch it off?’

  She looked away.

  ‘He went to one of your uncle’s parties,’ she said. ‘He was drunk.’

  ‘And?’

  I still couldn’t quite believe her. I wanted proof.

  ‘Perhaps they visited a prostitute,’ she said.

  I was not quite speechless:

  ‘Was it the clap?’

  ‘You seem to know a good deal about sexually transmitted diseases.’

  Though I did, I told her I’d Googled it.

  ‘It must have been the clap,’ I said into the silence. ‘I mean gonorrhoea causes blindness and when treated goes away. That must be it, mustn’t it?’

  She gave me a weary look.

  ‘If you say so.’

  I briefed Ed some months later. If it were me, I told myself, I’d want to know. Really, really want to know. Without realising that knowing some things can feel like ruin.

  I got it off my chest in the car on the way to a ferry. It was a few days after Christmas and as I spoke, a service station strayed into view on his right-hand side. Without a word Ed pulled in. I watched as he filled the tank with petrol and strolled into the shop to pay. He was gone many, many minutes, I stewing in the front seat. When he returned to the car he said nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was a silence I could only have breached at huge cost, and I didn’t.

  Lie 7: Memoir is non-fiction

  Derived from the French, the word ‘memoir’ is an amalgam of the masculine le mémoire – ‘a written record’ – and the feminine la mémoire – ‘memory’ – and as a genre, like memory itself, memoir is always biased and open to distortion. In some cases it is entirely false.

  It is only these active lies that we hear about – the autobiographical hoax, such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces or Misha Defonseca’s Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. These are lies that are reported in the broadsheets, and their authors hung out to dry. Oprah Winfrey, when she interviewed Frey a second time, used the word ‘duped’.

  Frey was shamed because the contract between a memoirist and his or her reader is honesty. It is all that stands between autobiography dissolving into fiction and being put out to pulp.

  The crime Frey committed was lying about the facts. It was a conscious premeditated act, like murder, and its perpetrator deserved to be punished. The other kind of deceit that a memoirist faces – nudging a life into shape so that it will read better – is not the same thing at all.

  Some critics find autobiographies morally suspect. In the past in order to write a memoir you had to have done something worthwhile. Whereas today, one journalist writing in the New York Times tells us that the genre has been ‘disgorged by virtually everyone who has ever had cancer’, watched a parent die, or ridden a bike. In fact memoirists are not writers, but sadists who submit the reader to the underwhelming and the banal.

  Admittedly cancer will come up here, some parents do die and there is even mention of a bike. My apologies. Neither have I done anything worthwhile. Perhaps then the answer is to drop the ‘memoir’ label and throw myself in with ‘creative non-fiction’. Here truth is no longer the measure. Anything underwhelming can be overcome by imagination. Or is creative non-fiction really just an excuse to lie?

  And I don’t want to lie.

  Yet even if we sincerely want to tell the truth, whatever the genre, there will be a layer of deceit that none of us can be conscious of. Our brains are not answerable to the reader, or to the self. Every day the cerebral cortex creates new neural pathways and alters existing ones, pruning, strengthening. Our memories are in a state of impermanence. If, as scientists say, our brains are plastic then our memories must be too.

  Remote memories are retrieved and collated in the prefrontal cortex, the neural network from where lies spring. Like a lie, which is adapted over time to suit the listener, so is memory honed with every retelling. If the prefrontal cortex governs both deceit and remembering it may not be too wild a suggestion to imagine that these two functions overlap.

  We do not conceive of ourselves through the lies we tell, but through the memories that stack up in our past. Without this library to refer to, we would have no sense of who we are. Our selves consist merely of a collection of moments, which we try to cohere through narration. We attempt to make permanent what is not. Like lying, memory is a process of (re)construction. When we remember, we assemble the fragments together, filling in the gaps with expectation and assumption. We construct our memories, in the same way that we build a lie.

  It was in these gaps that Elizabeth Loftus, a researcher specialising in false memory, was able to convince a quarter of her study participants that they had been lost as a child in a shopping centre when they absolutely had not. False memories, she argues, arise from external suggestion and ‘imagination inflation’. When we are hoaxed, as in the lost-in-the-mall scenario, we begin to believe. To construct.

  And construction is essential for this genre. To write a life the author must organise memory into an inauthentic linear structure, selecting only what fits. As she writes she adapts her narrative to suit the perceived reactions of those she is writing for, and the more she sharpens her story the more convincing she will feel.

  Let me be plain then. I have lied just as much as I need to. I have written up dialogue that I can no longer remember, cut characters I don’t need, changed names because I have been ordered to, and generally neatened up a fractured and disjointed life. The narrative, in the end, will be as flawed as its narrator. A narrator who, when she says she has set out to unravel the ‘truth’, can only be described as deluded. Because in refracting the past through deceit, I could never have anticipated that there would be so many lies nor that so many would be my own.

  Lie 8: Happy families

  If we were to assign character roles, there is no question that Mum, Maureen Helen, is our victim.

  What I remember most is how she smelled. The empty sharpness of her breath when she licked her finger to remove food stains from my face, and the Anaïs Anaïs she squirted, eyes closed. This girly, floral scent was an antidote to the totem bottles of Chanel No. 5 that lined the bathroom shelf. Each one a guilt gift from Dad that she never opened.

  Mum must have struggled, in the years after I was born, to define her self at all. A stepmother at twenty-three, she had fallen from a life of personalised number plates and complaints about the ‘help’ into penury and tedium. The stepchildren didn’t like her, her husband couldn’t keep himself to himself, and each Sunday, when she trailed back to Perthshire to check in on her old life, her parents reminded her what a horrible mistake she had made.

  The Patersons owned a woollen factory that her elder brother would later allow to drift into bankrupt
cy. He inherited, too, the house with its turret, stables, lodge houses and acres of farmland, and although there were portraits and landscapes disappearing from the walls, it was always made clear that if we were going to emulate anything then this was it. These people were descended from a long line of women who had ‘come out’ to kings and queens.

  Born for privilege, Mum was mothered by a series of nannies – unhappy nannies, incompetent nannies, and nannies who refused to iron. As early as possible, she was banished to boarding school, an exile from which she never came home.

  Mum told me about a workshop she had attended with a group of Christians in Glasgow. The discussion had deteriorated into competing stories over who had had the lousiest childhood.

  ‘Well,’ she piped up when there was a lull in proceedings, ‘I was raised by nannies.’

  ‘The only nanny I ken’, said an older woman into the silence, ‘is a goat.’

  It was always a bit of a trial to Mum that her privilege denied her any adequate sympathy. And it’s true, the kinds of complaints she and I might make, about boarding schools and maternal neglect, are patently embarrassing when set against poverty, illness, war.

  However, there was often a sense that her parents just didn’t like her. She was a girl. Her elder brother had no need, thanks to primogeniture, to worry on that score, and the younger was a sweet-natured man who brought out the best in his parents. Both siblings had married well.

  Even so, each Sunday we’d drive north along the A7 to the Paterson estate where we were reminded what it was she had forsaken. There was sherry and Sunday lunch, lovingly prepared by Mrs McGregor, the last stalwart ‘help’ my grandmother ever had. Sometimes there was croquet on the lawn, or we children were dispatched to pick raspberries, or play, without irony, the only card games Granny possessed – Happy Families and Old Maid – followed by afternoon tea – drop scones and cake, served on a shiny trolley.