Read Online A Lie About My Father by John Burnside - Free Book Online

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