Free A Lie About My Father by John Burnside

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.
    So time passed. I was happy enough, at times, playing in the woods, making dens, finding birds’ nests in the scrap piles behind the old abattoirs. Sometimes, I would get to visit Uncle John and Aunt Margaret: Big John would take me out fishing in the loch with his younger sons, Kenneth and Anthony, even though I was too young to fish; sometimes I was allowed to stay over, and the oldest of my cousins, Wee John, who was a prize-winning chemistry student, would tell me about magnetism, or space. I remember he showed me odd experiments with water glass and metal salts, say, and I would wonder how he knew such things, when he was just like his brothers, just like me. When I grew up, I thought, I would know things like that: the periodic table, which cousin John had on a chart on his bedroom wall; the migrations of birds; the distances between stars. All that knowledge felt like something substantial to hold on to, against the vagaries of everyday life.
    After a while, my mother was pregnant again. My parents were excited; even my father brightened up as they planned for a new baby and, for a while, he settled down and dug in. He got a steadier job at Grangemouth, doing something that kept him out from early morning till late at night, which meant we never saw him. I wasn’t unhappy about that. They worked hard at this new beginning, and my mother tried to stay healthy, but things went badly in the latter months and, finally, when she came to deliver, the baby died. It was a baby boy; he would have been called Andrew. When my mother came home from the hospital she looked pale as death; she went to bed in the room at the back of the house and didn’t speak to anyone for days. My father kept going to work, as if nothing had happened, but I knew he was unhappy, and the nights were quiet, very still, disturbed only by the calls of the tawny owls in Kirk’s woods. I would lie awake, then, listening to the night and thinking about my brother. He was gone before he had even existed, and I’d never even got to see him, but I had a new ghost to entertain.
    I knew this loss would have consequences – and, gradually, things got worse. My father was bitter about losing the baby, and this led to more frequent binges, but it was still a while before the late-night parties with the friends he’d picked up on his procession through Cowdenbeath’s worst pubs became a regular thing. I remember the men who came as exact clones of my father – big, drunk, edgy, just this side of dangerous – and it seemed to me that they were always different, new