Half-truths & White Lies (5 page)

Nervously, I pushed open my parents' bedroom door
against the heavy pile of the carpet. The room, usually
ordered with almost military precision, was as my
mother had left it after hunting for the red sling-backs.
The doors of the fitted wardrobes that lined the far wall
were open, shoes and handbags spilling out. I sat on the
edge of the bed waiting for a little courage. As I sighed,
I breathed in my mother's favourite perfume, Jasmine,
still lingering. It was as if I suffered a further loss later
when the trace of perfume faded and the room started
to smell differently.

I was starting the slow process of packing away my
memories so that I could put them somewhere safe
until I was in a fit state to deal with them. There had
been no shortage of offers to help me box up my
parents' belongings, but I had said a firm 'No, thank
you' to a nervous Uncle Pete and a relieved Aunty Faye.
It felt wrong to be disturbing anything at all, but I didn't
want to be rushed or be carried along with someone
else's agenda.

I stood on the edge of the bed to reach the top
cupboards where the suitcases were kept. I resisted the
temptation to trampoline, but had a vivid memory of
jumping on my parents' bed and laughing my socks off
as my father pretended that my feeble jumps were
propelling him into the air. A good pull brought the
cases crashing down to the floor followed closely by me,
thrown off balance by their weightlessness.
It's not the
fall that'll kill you
. The luggage labels from last year's
holiday were still attached. I hadn't gone – too old for
family holidays – but Nana had joined them.

'Our little threesome,' she had joked, tucking her
hand into the crook of my mother's elbow, while my
dad pulled faces behind her back.

'Isn't it enough that we share our house with her?' I
had heard his hushed voice through the door as I crept
across the landing after a night out.

'She might not be here next year,' my mother replied.

'What are you talking about? The woman's indestructible.
She'll outlive the lot of us.'

It was clearly a bone of contention between them.
There was no question of who had won that particular
quarrel. And yet Dad had come home referring to Nana
as his gambling buddy. It seems that they found
common ground when they discovered a local casino
and tried their hands at the tables. It was my mother
who was the lemon in the end.

My only plan was to pack away things that I wanted
to keep and to put the rest in bin liners to take to
Oxfam. Simple, you would have thought. But every one
of my father's shirts seemed to hold a memory. As a
little girl, I always helped him pick a shirt and tie to go
with his work suit. Sometimes my mother would
attempt to veto my choices, but my father would go
along with exactly what I had laid out on the bed for
him. It was a question of solidarity between us.
Naturally, I was biased towards the ties that I had
bought him as presents, complete with cartoon
characters or corny slogans. 'Best Dad in the World'.
Essential for creating the right impression in a business
meeting.

Pairs of shoes conjured up an image of him sitting on
the back step of the kitchen, all of his shoe-cleaning
equipment laid out in a neat row in the required order
on a piece of newspaper. He enjoyed the challenge of
making an old pair of shoes look shiny and new almost
as much as he enjoyed polishing the chrome of a bike
or a car. This was a serious business to him. If you think
of a doctor preparing for major surgery, you will get the
picture. My father had a deep respect for tools of any
sort and cared for them lovingly. Nothing was put away
dirty or untidily. Everything had to be just so, exactly as
he would need it the next time. When I wanted to 'help',
he would allow me to pass him the right piece of cleaning
equipment at the right time while he would whistle
to me. I learned to whistle sitting next to my father on
the back step of our house. In time, we mastered some
simple duets, but when my father launched into his
rendition of 'The Man who Sold the World' or 'Stairway
to Heaven', I stopped to listen, hands cupping my face
and elbows on knees. I thought that whistling was the
extent of his musical talents, but it was magical to me.

Jumpers represented Christmases gone by. Nana
always bought a jumper for my dad for Christmas from
Marks & Spencer, resplendent with snowflakes and
reindeer. Most of them were rarely worn other than on
the big day itself, safe in the knowledge that we were
unlikely to leave the house. He would rip off the
wrapping paper enthusiastically, pretend to be surprised
and delighted, and strip off whatever he was wearing in
front of us all to put on the new jumper. Sometimes he
would deliberately put the new jumper on inside out
and back to front and ask, 'What do you think? Isn't it
terrific?' Sometimes he would pretend that his head was
too big to fit through the hole and battle away until I
went to help him. It was always my help that solved the
problem. Sometimes his hands would emerge through
the head hole in a digging motion followed by the top
of his head. We knew this as his mole impression.
Sometimes he would kneel on the floor, leaving the
arms of the jumper dangling with his hands just visible
from underneath the bottom edge, tensed into claws.
He would alternately blink against the light and widen
his eyes, hooting like a half-demented owl. Sometimes
he would rotate the jumper through 90 degrees, put his
head through so that his eyes were visible and his ears
were pushed forward by the unforgiving neck and wave
the empty sleeve about in front of his face, trumpeting
like an elephant.

'Oh, that's a lovely fit, Tom,' my mother would remark
after the commotion was over, or, 'That's a good colour
on you, Tom.' Anything to avoid actually saying, 'I will
never, ever be seen in public with you wearing that,' or,
'Over my dead body will you leave this house wearing
that thing.' My mother was always very particular about
appearances. She felt that people would judge you by
what you wore.

'I've kept the receipt in case you want to change it,'
Nana would say, beaming, lapping up all of the compliments
about her choice. In those days, I would believe
them too.

'Change it, Brenda?' he would reply, horrified at the
suggestion. 'Why on earth would I want to change it?'

It became more and more difficult for my father to
pretend that he liked the Christmas jumpers that hung
unloved in his wardrobe. Eventually, my mother started
to insist on taking Nana Christmas shopping and was
able drag her away from the novelty jumpers. For the
next two years my father was delighted to receive a
cream Aran wool jumper and a chunky fisherman's
jumper that he could genuinely enthuse about.

'What did you say to the old boot?' I caught him
asking my mother as they were canoodling in the
kitchen. He always loved that word. Canoodling.
Canoodling in the kitchen. There's a word that's just
waiting to be caught misbehaving.

'I asked her if she would prefer to buy you something
you could wear the whole year round rather than just in
December.'

'Genius! And that's why I married you.'

But Nana cast a disapproving eye over my father in
his cream Aran. 'Are you sure that you don't want to
change it for something a bit more colourful? I've kept
the receipt.'

For my part, I missed the ritual and the play acting. It
is an unfortunate sign that you are growing up when
you stop appreciating the beauty of cartoon ties and
Christmas jumpers.

I caved when I unfolded his overalls. Once white but
never laundered, every stain represented a morning that
we had spent together washing and polishing, peering
into bonnets as my father showed me how to check the
oil level and change the spark plugs, mending chains on
bicycles and removing the innards of tyres to look for
punctures, as all the while I pretended that I could
recognize a subtle difference in the engine noise after
my father had spent hours doing a spot of fine tuning.
Listening to him talk about cars was like learning a
foreign language. I understood most of the individual
words but much of their meaning was lost on me. I
didn't let on because I didn't want him to think that his
enthusiastic explanations fell on deaf ears. The fact that
parts of it eluded me made it all the more magical and
mysterious. I spent most of my childhood trying to
make up for the fact that I was just a stupid girl, even if
it meant disappointing my mother. It seemed obvious
to me that my father longed to have a son to play with
and to teach.

The world that I inhabited with my father was out in
the back yard, the tool shed or the oil-stained drive at
the front of the house. There was nothing that made me
happier than to be told that I was too dirty to come into
the house for lunch and being asked to undress at the
back door, while my clothes were put straight into
the washing machine. It was a matter of pride when my
mother, in an attempt to save my 'good' clothes, went to
Halfords and bought me a set of boy's overalls.

While other fathers read their children bedtime
stories, my father lulled me to sleep with the Haynes
manual for whichever car he was working on at the
time, pointing at diagrams and elaborating on the workings
of carburettors. If he ever heard my mother coming
up the stairs, he would proclaim loudly, 'And they all
lived happily ever after,' or, 'And that's what happens if
you go into the woods wearing a red cape,' while sitting
on the manual he had been reading from. (I would
always have a second book to hand in case she ever
asked any awkward questions.) If she appeared in the
doorway, he would then pretend to be surprised when
he noticed her and say, 'I didn't see you there, love. You
must stop creeping about like that.' I loved the secrets
that we shared. It was almost as if my father and I were
the children of the house, while my mother and Nana
were the adults. He was as relieved as I was when he got
away with something.

'That was a close escape.' He would wink. 'They're
always checking up on me.'

'Me too,' I sympathized.

'Well, you are only seven.'

'How old are you, Daddy?'

'Let me see. It was my birthday last April so that
makes it seven thirty. Isn't it time you were asleep,
Andrea Fellows?'

'Have you forgotten your age again, Daddy?'

'Yes. But it will have changed again by tomorrow, so
there's no point worrying too much.'

Behind his suit jackets, I found what I had been looking
for. Something to link my middle-aged, balding
father to the man I had seen in Uncle Pete's photograph
album. A black leather jacket with
The Spearheads
painted on it in white amid a design of an eagle,
feathers and arrows. Infused with the smell of beer and
smoke, this was the jacket that Uncle Pete had
described.

I picked it up and felt the weight of it. Having seen
the photograph album, it wasn't difficult to imagine my
mother's eyes following my father down the road on the
day that they met and Uncle Pete running after him in
a vain attempt to impress the girl of his dreams, who
would remain just that. I thought of the photos of my
father singing, eyes closed with concentration, and of
my mother focused on the stage, unaware of the camera,
lost in the crowd. And I wished with all my heart that I
had known those people.

It wasn't that I was uninterested in my mother's world.
It was just that oil-stained overalls seemed far more
accessible to me than the treasures of her dressing table.
I was not a pretty child. When strangers met us and
peered at me in my pushchair, the shapes of their
mouths changed from the pre-prepared 'Ahh' reserved
for all babies and toddlers, to the uncertain surprise of
an 'Oh', and they would enquire of my mother
sympathetically, 'Takes after her father, does she?' Being
a tomboy was an obvious choice.

My mother could look glamorous with a rolled-up
towel piled high on her head after washing her hair.
And despite my father's constant assurances that she
would look good in a bin liner, she had a keen sense of
what suited her. She may have looked a million dollars,
but when I was young she made her own clothes,
shopping carefully for offcuts and ends of rolls after she
had calculated exactly how much material she needed.
Money was tight, and my mother was frugal but
resourceful.

I can remember the sound of heavy-handled pinking
shears cutting through the fabric that she had marked
out so carefully using a flat triangle of dressmakers'
chalk; can picture her leaning over the table with a row
of pins in her mouth, each with a different coloured
head, spikes projected outwards. With my jaw still on
the mend, I could do a reasonable impression of her
warnings not to make her talk to save her from swallowing
them. She demonstrated how to thread the sewing
machine, concentration furrowing her forehead as the
material passed under the needle. I loved the sheer
magic of watching a dress take shape. I still do. Nothing
bought in a shop ever fitted her the way that her handmade
clothes did. She made sure of that, adding extra
tucks where the pattern didn't result in the fit that she
was looking for.

I wasn't expecting to find anything old and filled with
memories in my mother's side of the wardrobe. Once
she grew tired of her clothes they were demoted to
dressing-up material or recycled into something new for
me. An unworn dress and jacket bought for a wedding
that hadn't yet taken place brought a lump to my throat.
She would have hated the waste of it. I wondered if I
should put them on one side for Aunty Faye as the
sisters were the same dress size, although they would
both say 'same size, different shape' when asked if they
had ever thought of sharing clothes. The real issue was
not one of body shape but of taste.

I worked my way ruthlessly through her wardrobe,
not daring to stop and look at individual items. After I
had finished I sat on the padded stool at her dressing
table facing the silver-framed photograph of the three of
us, me in the middle, gap-toothed and grinning, flanked
by Mum and Dad. It had been her favourite family
portrait. I must have been about seven, which would
have made her thirty-one, him thirty-two. We had
visited Russell's Photography Studio and Mr Russell
had taken twenty separate poses before he got a single
shot where one of us wasn't squinting or pulling a face.

'He can't be very good,' I had whispered far too loudly
within Mr Russell's earshot, 'Uncle Pete always gets it
right first time.'

Uncle Pete roared when my father told him that, and
picked me up to kiss me on the cheek. 'And I'd have
been cheap at half the price. Who's my clever girl? Let's
see if I've got anything in my magic pockets for you.'

I looked at myself in the central mirror, while the side
mirrors reflected unfamiliar angles of my face, somehow
making it clearer which features I have inherited
from each parent. Although as a younger child I was
told I was 100 per cent Fellows, I grew to look more like
my mother's side of the family. I've heard it said that
nature has organized things so that babies resemble
their fathers for the first two years of their lives. This is
meant to prevent the fathers from disowning them and
leaving. Nana frequently reminded me when I was a
little girl that everyone is beautiful at some point in
their lives, and that it was not my time yet. She liked to
tell me the story of the Ugly Duckling as if this would
offer some comfort, but the message it reinforced was
that people will love you if you're beautiful, and that
those who are not blessed in the looks department were
going to have a pretty rough time of it. The only place
where I was number one was at home, where I always
knew that I was loved.

'You look just like your Aunty Faye when she was your
age,' my mother would tell me as she brushed my bushy
hair until she was halfway happy with it. 'It's funny how
looks run in families that way. If you ever have a cousin,
she's going to be just like you.'

'Do you think I look like Daddy?'

'Well, of course, you look like your daddy too!' She
swooped to kiss me. 'You're a cross between my
absolute two favourite people, so that makes you
my number-one girl.' Sometimes she would hug me to
her so tightly that all of the breath was forced out of me
and I would gasp for air. When she let go, she would
have tears in her eyes.

'Why are you crying, Mummy?'

'Oh, I'm not sad, darling.' She would dab her eyes.
'These are happy tears. Do you know how much we love
you, baby?'

My teens were tough for me, not because I suffered
from greasy hair and acne like some of the girls at
school, but because exactly the opposite happened. I
was so used to my own image of myself that I didn't
even notice it. It wasn't just the new underwear, clothes
and make-up that my mother encouraged me to
experiment with. At some point between the ages of
twelve and fourteen, I became attractive. I wasn't as
pleased as I should have been. It had delighted my
father that I began life as a tomboy. He never really got
over the fact that I got breasts. C cups. We had to stop
hugging because they got in the way. I was embarrassed
by his embarrassment, almost apologetic. I tried to strap
them in place with sports bras, but occasionally, when I
was alone in the house, I would take off my top in front
of the mirror on my mother's dressing table – the only
way of looking at myself from different angles – to get a
better idea of what they looked like. My mother had
clearly always enjoyed her shape. I hated mine. It took
me years to feel comfortable in my adult body.

To the right of the dressing table, a glass jar of cotton
wool balls sat next to a bottle of Johnson's Baby Lotion
– she said she loved the smell of babies – and her Oil of
Olay. A spray can of Impulse. A bottle of expensive bath
oil that seemed to be for display purposes only. Pond's
Cold Cream. Silvikrin Hairspray. Lavender-scented
talcum powder. Astral hand cream. She was faithful to
her little rituals. These were the products that she had
used as a teenager and that she bought for me until I
took more of an interest and replaced them with other
brands. I lined them up, rotating the labels until they
faced the front. Turning my mother's hairbrush over in
my hand, I looked at the stray hairs still tangled in it,
honey-blonde against the red cushion. She had taken
her make-up bag with her that wretched weekend and I
hadn't yet found the courage to unpack the bag of
belongings that had been returned to me sealed in clear
plastic, but spare nail polishes and lipsticks in various
shades of reds lay in a small wicker basket. I used to love
watching her put on her face. It didn't work if I sat on
her lap as she had to lean so far forward to apply the
mascara and draw a perfect line on her upper lid that
she was almost touching the mirror. I would be pushed
outwards. It was all right if she was just doing a quick
touch-up with powder. Lipstick, blot, then a second
coat, blow kisses in the mirror. I never understood why
you would put lipstick on and then blot it off again. It
seemed a complete waste of effort.

My mother was always more of a mystery to me than
my father. Occasionally, her eyes would glaze over with
a distant look and she would literally switch off her
senses. Even if you were standing right next to her, she
wouldn't be able to hear a word you said. My father
called it her 'selective hearing', but it was almost as if
she was in a trance. If you waved something in front of
her face, she would snap out of it instantly, sometimes
a little cross. When I was small and couldn't reach up
high enough, my daddy would pretend he had
hypnotized her and that only he could bring her back
by snapping his fingers and saying, 'Bananas, bananas,
bananas.' That way, if she was annoyed, it would be with
him and not me.

Having straightened everything out, I found a cardboard
box and swept everything into it with one
movement of my right arm. Half-used cosmetics. No
good to anyone, but I couldn't bear to simply throw
them out.

I decided to take the same approach with her
underwear drawer. It didn't seem decent to do anything
else. I removed the drawer and turned round, still seated,
to upend the entire contents on to the bed. Bending down
to gather up the debris scattered around my feet, I noticed
half a dozen photographs among the cotton and silk.
Looking at the heap on the bed, I realized that the drawer
had been lined with paper and that the photos must have
been hidden underneath. There were still more on top of
the mound on the bed, face downwards.

I perched on the edge to gather them up like a deck
of cards, then turned the first one over slowly as if I was
examining a hand. It was a typical photo of a newborn
baby. The colour had faded, but there was no confusing
the child in the photo with me. People may tell you that
all babies look alike, but in this case it was not correct.
I was born with a shock of hair that promptly fell out
and left me bald until I was nearly two but this child
had a neat little tuft of damp, dark hair. There was a
peacefulness about the look on its face that made me
wonder if I was looking at a photo of my stillborn
brother. What other photos would be so private that
they would be hidden away from inquisitive eyes? I
almost felt ashamed to be prying.

The next photo was similar, but the baby's hands were
clenched close to its face. Large hands with fingers
facing the camera, a healthy hint of pink in the nails.
I turned the next photo over. This showed my mother
sitting up in bed, hair loose, pale-faced but beaming,
a white bundle in her arms. Next, a close up of her
face from the side against the child's, a tangle of hair
escaping from behind her ear, the beginnings of crows'
feet just visible. The baby is open-mouthed, face straining
with effort at the discovery of the power of his lungs.
This was no stillborn child. This was one healthy baby.
There were several more shots of my mother, counting
fingers and toes, cooing, kissing the child's forehead.
Then came the shot that I was not expecting. Perhaps
the most natural thing in the world – a couple sitting on
a hospital bed, holding the tiny child up in the centre of
the shot: my mother and a far younger, slimmer version
of Uncle Pete.

I shuffled through the rest of the photos looking for
the shots with my father in them, the pictures of me
seeing my younger brother for the first time, the Fellows
family photographs. There were none.

They gave my grandchild away.

She wouldn't talk about it.

I was interrupted by the doorbell. As I reluctantly
walked down the stairs, photographs still in hand, I
heard Lydia yell, 'Yoo-hoo,' through the letter box. After
it clattered shut, the outline of her head appeared in the
frosted window.

'Hello there!' she said as if surprised to find me at
home. 'Thought I'd drop by and see if anything needs
doing. Haven't seen you these last few days, love.'

'Here I am.'

'You busy? Shall we have a cuppa? I've brought some
milk and biccies.'

I could tell that she wasn't going to take no for an
answer. To tell the truth, I liked Lydia's motiveless
fussing. We had no particular history and there was no
reason for her to drop round other than neighbourly
concern, but she had picked an awkward moment.

As we stood in the hall, I watched her eyes register the
changes that I had made to the framed family tree. I
could see that she was trying not to frown.

'Oh, I see you've . . .' She nodded, ending the sentence
with an explanatory cough.

One evening, I had taken the family tree out of its
frame and inserted the date of my parents' death. It had
seemed a respectful thing to do at the time. Seeing
Lydia's reaction, I wondered if I had been right.

'You don't think—' I began.

'No, no,' she butted in, 'it's just seeing it there in black
and white. Bit of a shock, that's all. Wasn't expecting it.'

I stood in the hall looking at my handiwork while she
unloaded a carton of milk and some chocolate
digestives on to the kitchen work surface and filled the
kettle. I tried to visualize the next update and couldn't
think for the life of me how to make the entry for
my mother's son – my half-brother, if what I was
beginning to suspect was true.

She changed the subject. 'It's lovely out. You should
have a once-round the park if you get the chance.'

'Can't. I've started tidying my parents' room.'

She looked at me with a mixture of surprise and
distaste. 'Isn't it a bit early for that, love? Surely it can
wait until the dust has settled.'

'Actually, no.' I took a seat at the kitchen table and
looked downwards. 'The house has got to go on the
market to pay for Nana's care and, because of what's
happened, everyone wants it looking as impersonal as
possible.'

'Who's this everyone?' She puffed herself up with outrage.
'This is your home, love! Where will you go?' She
sat down on the chair next to mine. My mother's chair.

I shrugged. What happened to me seemed unimportant
in the scheme of things.