A Book of Untruths Read online

  I lost sight of her on the ground floor, arsing about at the perfume counter. I began to zigzag between the racks and shelves, through handbags and stationery, my pace picking up as the minutes began to drag. Where was she?

  I glanced out into the main shopping mall, and up at the chuntering escalators, wondering what happened when teenagers lost their mothers. Long past the stage of being able to utilise the shop tannoy I trailed on and on in a state of faux indifference. Fifteen minutes later I found her, tripping over her bag as I systematically worked the card section. She was slumped on the floor hiding amongst New Baby and Get Well Soon, tearful:

  ‘I saw two friends I’d have liked to have stopped and talked to, but I couldn’t, because YOU were with me.’

  Lie 18: The man will come with big scissors and cut off your thumb

  Sean ruined primary-school Christmases telling everyone the truth about Santa. A boy called Peter ruined ours. Like most people I lied to my children about the man in a red suit who brings gifts. I also claimed that fairies need teeth.

  Once our children find us out on both these counts, there’s often an unwillingness to discuss it. We put this down to the younger generation’s mercenary calculation that if they let on, the presents will dry up. More honestly, the reason neither side raises the subject of Father Christmas is that parents know they have been a disappointment and children know it too. The more investment both sides have made in the lie, the more difficult it is articulating why, even when it comes to Santa, a lie can feel like betrayal. Rather than talk about it many of us will play out the pretence for years with the stocking and its tangerine, because all of us wish that the magic were true.

  The reason children are more gullible with their parents is because they want to believe those whom they love. They make assumptions. The least they expect is that their parents will tell them the truth. When we lie to them, they are put in the difficult position of having to choose between trusting themselves and trusting us.

  To trust is also simpler. The lying landscape is confused. Children are told that lying is a crime. Sometimes they are beaten for it. Yet within hours and days they will hear a parent doing it, or even in some cases find themselves being asked to lie on that parent’s behalf.

  We coax those in our care to keep secrets – the visit with a part-time parent where Roger fell into the pond, or Edith was taken to A&E, a pea lodged up her nose, force a child to collude with one adult, while alienating them from the other. These lies are provoked by self-interest. It is a behaviour children recognise from the playground, where truth privileges the few.

  The lies that parents tell can be coercive. Some of us, facing another meal without any eaten vegetables, have resorted to the word ‘police’. Psychologists, when speaking of these lies, use the term ‘instrumental’ as if there were something innocent in telling a child that you will kick them out at the next service station, or if they don’t quit sucking their thumb the nasty Struwwelpeter man with big scissors will come chop it off.

  Parenting is a not a job that comes naturally. Often we take the easiest option, following blindly the example of those who have gone before. If deceit has been a tool used against us, under pressure we tend to fall into bad habits and use that self-same tool ourselves. There’s nothing like facing the gummy innocence of a primary-schooler asking: ‘How come Jane’s daddy was crying at school?’ or ‘Why did Auntie Barb fall over?’ to force those of us who should know better into making it up on the spot. The whole truth – like Jane’s mummy is having an affair with that smarmy father in year five, or falling over is what happens when Auntie Barb has had too much to drink – just doesn’t seem appropriate. Why wreck innocence? It is this whole truth many argue that we are guarding against, because the truth is more information than anyone under sixteen needs.

  Infidelity is one of those crimes that come under the whole truth umbrella. Fifty-seven per cent of men and 54 per cent of women admit to committing infidelity at some point in their lives. I have done it. Perhaps you have done it. It is a betrayal between two adults, and is unseemly detail that children, we tell ourselves, would not understand. Nor is it anything, we say, that affects them directly. Infidelity is just a symptom of more substantial problems, and under these circumstances we tend to withhold.

  Withholding is a parental favourite. However, like a great novel, where plot is lovingly revealed through behaviour, silence is often partial. The clues are all around: finding one adult on the sofa every morning, and the other furtively going through the texts on the other’s phone, tells a story that seethes with questions which children are too afraid to ask.

  Silence often makes a subject impossible to broach. It is lying without us having to face the fact that we have done so and is a form of deceit sanctioned by the Catholic Church. The doctrine of Mental Reservation stems from St Augustine’s belief that hiding the truth does not qualify as deception. Mental Reservation is a way to fulfil an obligation both to be ‘truthful’ and to keep a secret that is Catholicism at its worst. For instance, although senior clergy in Ireland said they had co-operated with police who were investigating allegations of crimes against children, they omitted the word ‘fully’.

  In the case of infidelity the betrayed parent may choose to ‘protect’ children from the truth because they want to avoid being the bringer of bad news. Better to sacrifice totally to betrayal than risk being labelled the baddie. Poor Mum.

  Though the Protestant God she prayed to did not have the flexibility of his rival, who allows absolution to be dished out by the priest, she shared a bed with a man who was well versed in the Augustinian principles. Dad understood that as long as a Catholic can stay alive for the time it takes a priest to administer the Last Rites, heaven awaits. In fact he was so motivated to have this final forgiveness that on Monday evenings he trained up my mother’s Episcopalian minister to perform it when the time came. The Last Rites are like declaring yourself bankrupt without losing the house or the car.

  But perhaps I am looking at all this the wrong way round. In the end Dad could not trust his children to allow him to be his true self. Particularly me. He colluded, hoping to protect me from my own disappointment. He understood that what I wanted, like the man in a red suit with presents, was the father that he was not.

  Lie 19: The Da was taken

  The week of his twenty-eighth birthday Dad learned in a single telephone call that his father, Michael Doyle, was both still alive and recently expired. It was 1962. Though Michael had been dead to his family since 1938, it took him another twenty-four years to finally pass away, choking to death on the morning of 14 December in Antrim County Lunatic Asylum.

  Dad was the son of a lighthouse keeper. The story went that Michael Doyle fell ill on the Maidens Lighthouse, a treacherous offshore rock in Ireland’s North Channel. Dad was not quite four. His mother, Rose, spoke of a storm and of delays. Many days passed before the weather made it possible to reach him.

  When Rose spoke of her husband’s disappearance, she would insinuate that he was dead by using the phrase ‘When the Da was taken’.

  ‘There were always sayings like that in school,’ Dad told me. ‘The “taken” always implied being escorted to heaven by angels. I had this picture of him with angels and they’re taking him up to heaven, because he was such a good guy.’

  By the time Dad received the phone call in Dartford twenty-four years later, the funeral was scheduled for the next morning, three hours’ drive from Belfast, on the west coast of Ireland, in Sligo, at Rosses Point.

  Death is as important as life to many in Ireland. It would have been disrespectful to let Michael go quietly to his grave. My grandmother must have reasoned that when the time came to bury him, she would brazen it out. In any case ‘taken’ was not an outright lie.

  Dad wrote three versions of his father’s burial, working through the shock of being told and the fury it provoked in Pat, his then wife.

  ‘Your mother had no right to let her family grow
up and go off marrying and having children without them knowing.’

  This and his earlier narratives are handwritten, on loose sheets and in Heriot-Watt examination notebooks stowed in the loft. He writes well. In the first version of the burial, he is diverted from the realisation that his mother has lied to him by chatting up a nurse at the airport. In this story he has given himself more than twenty-four hours’ grace in which he can stay at her flat and tell her his story.

  In the second version, the protagonist sits through a ghastly supper at his wife’s funeral, where despite a generous meal, he feels ‘empty’. He is reminded of an earlier grief, the loss of his father, which he describes as being like a swollen balloon scraping the back of his throat.

  In a third and much longer rendering, he and his brother wind through the country roads of Ireland, stuck behind herds of sheep and old tractors. They are late. As they empty out of the car at a run their mother appears from within the church. Standing in front of the coffin, she aims her stick at them like a gun. There is a gap on the page, after a half-finished sentence, for about three lines. Then, centred and hanging on their own, perhaps to emphasise the irony, are her words:

  He’s had his purgatory waiting for you

  Amongst Dad’s jotters and loose sheets I also found a short flashback from within a longer story. The boy described is twelve, alone in a house, hunting for a pencil and some string. Each drawer of the dresser is ‘bung full’, its contents wedged in. Frustrated, the boy empties a drawer onto the floor and there he finds the hospital correspondence that certifies his father insane.

  ‘… but how inaccessible. Remoter than the grave. I simply stuffed everything back in the drawers and walked.’

  The boy walks down to the River Leith and along the bank. There, on the shore, he decides to cut from his life any thought of his father.

  ‘It was easier to accept death than grow up knowing and waiting for a cure. My mother understood that. She had taken the wisest course.’

  Perhaps the emotion that he felt for this lie was less rage against his mother than remorse for a boyhood decision. Shamed by his collusion with her deceit, he found himself unable to unravel her lie from his own.

  Lie 20: I will not cry

  Ed and I are five and seven. In the new house we have our own rooms, and after Saturday night’s Starsky and Hutch, I sneak through to his. He tells me it’s all just ketchup before I climb in beside him. I feel safe here. I am like our cat. She steals up beneath Ed’s duvet, or to the bottom of a sleeping bag. She hides.

  Adrian has a strange girlfriend with grey skin and straight, straight, straight black hair, and Sean is often in trouble at school. I’m helping him to learn his lines for the Christmas play. But I still cannot tell the time, and Dad has lost his temper about it. He has held me up on his shoulder and shouted at me and the kitchen clock. The panic makes it impossible to work out how long each hand is, or even whether three comes after four, and I certainly don’t understand how six can mean both a half and thirty all at once.

  I am sorry.

  Maybe if we were all a bit better behaved, and I could tell the time, then Dad would stop pressing his lips together and pointing his finger and taking out his belt. Sean gets the belt most days. And if we were all a bit better behaved Mum would stay out of bed.

  I find her there when I get home from school, the green floral Laura Ashley curtains closed. She tells me that sleeping makes her eyes water, and that she’ll get up soon.

  Ed is the only person I can trust. He’s good at the ketchup line. He doesn’t fret his way into sleep, but allows himself to fall. He trusts the dark and beside him, I can trust it too. I only wish that I didn’t have to wait till Saturday to use Starsky as an excuse.

  That year, we’ll get an eight-foot Christmas tree, and presents from Father Christmas overflowing down the stairs, and a dinner with six courses. It’s as if Dad knows it’s all going wrong, and he wants to make it up. Or he realises that when he leaves us, what we remember about him needs to be better than he’s been.

  But his leaving will come later. For now, Ed and I are counting our money on the floor in Ed’s room. Two matching porcelain pigs, heavy with shrapnel. I love my little brother so much I want us to have the same. It is not enough that I badger Mum to let us wear the same outfits. I want us to be the same. To be one. We start to count, lining up our pennies and tuppences on the brown carpet, in piles of ten, and once the floor is covered in copper towers we write down the numbers and find that we have different amounts. I have tuppence more. Maybe I am too stupid to realise that if I give Ed one of my pennies we will have the same, or maybe I’m too stingy, but it is definitely my idea to steal the difference from Sean.

  He can smell the lie as soon as he gets home from his rehearsal at school.

  ‘You’ve been through my drawers.’

  We cannot lie for long, and soon confess that we’ve only taken two pence.

  ‘We can give it back.’

  ‘No. I’m telling Dad.’

  ‘Please. Here. Have it back.’

  ‘No. I’m telling Dad. You’ve stolen.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Dad bellows up the stairs.

  ‘Nothing,’ we call.

  But it isn’t nothing and soon Sean is being beaten downstairs.

  Dad has a big leather belt with two tails. I have seen it, but never been bent over for it, and now that we have told a lie and we have stolen we are going to get it too. Ed is already crying as we follow Dad to the Laura Ashley bedroom.

  Then I am alone in there with him and bent over. I will not cry, I tell myself, hearing Ed through the door. I will not.

  Lie 21: I didn’t peek at Barney

  Differentiating between lies that are okay and lies that are not takes enormous finesse that some of us never manage. Perhaps this is simply down to developmental arrest, because when we first start to lie, we do not tell any white ones.

  From the age of about three most children lie, and once they’ve got the knack, continue right through primary school. In fact, after eating, walking and talking, lying is the next developmental stage. Until a little person learns to fib they are not quite complete.

  Ed wasn’t yet at that stage when the linoleum was burned. His weakness wasn’t a question of fault, but immaturity. In order to lie we have to make a conscious decision to tell an untruth. It is an elaborate cognitive step. We find ourselves in a situation that offers two possibilities: to do the right thing, or to do the wrong one.

  Curiously scientists have found that good bladder control correlates with competent lying. Apparently the ‘inhibitory spillover effect’, or keeping ourselves on the edge of boiling over, gives us the necessary focus to pull off deceit. Yet I wonder whether it has more to do with learned technique, because when I lied to my father it was always accompanied by a desperate urge to pee.

  The neocortex is the newest part of our brain, and makes up 76 per cent of its total volume. The neocortex is that ruffled blanket, the grey matter, which cloaks the rest. Involved in spatial reasoning, conscious thought and language, its size, neuroscientists argue, makes it possible for us to imagine another person’s point of view, or as psychologists call it, have theory of mind. It is this ability that is most important when we set out to tell a lie. Developmentally, as children, we need to comprehend first that we are alone with our thoughts; that no one else can know them unless we tell. We also need to understand that there is a truth and that it has an opposite. Then we have to consider our audience. What does it want to hear? Finally we must weigh the balance against possible consequences. What are the benefits and what are the risks?

  For Sean there was never any question. When you’re beaten so religiously, there is no gain in honesty. It is always worth the gamble. In our house fury had no light and it had no shade. Lying, stealing, wrecking the lino. It did not matter. The reaction was always the same. For us all, Adrian, Sean, Ed, myself, deceit was an essential skill. The only escape we had was simply to ge
t better and better at it. Which we did.

  However, lying at any age is hard. Younger children find it difficult to exhibit consistency between the initial lie and any follow-up. It is only by age seven that children are better able to control semantic leakage and stick to their story. For instance, in one study kids who had peeked at a toy dinosaur, Barney, and pretended that they hadn’t, responded to the experimenter in ways that reflected their age and ability. When asked: ‘What do you think the toy is?’ two-year-olds immediately folded with ‘Barney.’ One five-year-old said ‘I didn’t peek at it, but it felt purple, so I think it’s Barney.’ By seven they were pleading a very believable ignorance.

  Even from the age of three most children understand that lying is wrong. Yet they lie anyway, perhaps because they observe their parents lying a good deal of the time: ‘Sorry,’ one might say, ‘the traffic was terrible,’ when everyone in the back of the car could tell you that it had nothing to do with traffic, but was down to the rushed hunt for last-minute flowers, a wedding anniversary clean forgot.

  According to Dorothy Rowe, the psychologist, we tell lies as a way to defend the sense of who we are. Lies give us back the control we believe we have lost. ‘The traffic was terrible’ will be used by thousands each evening as they try to steal back something for themselves. Yet if the parent has said, ‘The traffic was terrible,’ to cover for a daughter’s lost shoe and the hour it took to find, then six- to eleven-year-olds would judge that kind of liar more trustworthy. A liar who is dishonest in order to benefit others will earn moral approval, while those who merely lie to benefit themselves earn nothing, because even to a six-year-old self-interest is horrid.