A Lie About My Father Read Online Free PDF Page B

rubber shark, or the killer from beyond the grave in his ghostly make-up, you’re more inclined to laugh than scream. My father was one of those men who sit in a room, and you can feel it: the simmer, the sense of some unpredictable force that might, at any moment, break loose and do something terrible. Now and again, he would break something: carefully, deliberately, letting us see how much he enjoyed it, letting us register how easy it was. The worst thing that could happen was when he fell into one of his dark silences and sat brooding all day, waiting for the small provocation that would set things going. I don’t think he could control it, once it began, any more than he could stop drinking, or gambling until all the money in his pockets was gone. Yet he hardly ever hit anybody inside the house. Not in those early days, at least. Maybe I was just sheltered from the worst when I was still so young. Later, he seemed a changed man, a kind of monster; but he might have been that same monster all along, transmuted, by my child’s need, into something like a father, if not a protector. As I grew up, I wondered what was happening to him. I wondered why he was changing. But he didn’t change: he just became real. For years, I would have sworn that I remembered better days, but when I stop to look back, I remember nothing about him, other than what I was told. I do not see him. I barely even see myself.
    For me, memory begins in King Street, in the condemned house where my parents lived after they were first married. I was told so much about the time before I was born that I can imagine I was actually present at the death of my mother’s first child – a girl she called Elizabeth, after her own mother – or if not present at the death, then certainly for it. I seem to know this girl, first as a baby, then as a toddler, a girl who was just over a year ahead of me all the way through childhood. Pretty, fair-haired, but with my mother’s dark, almost motionless eyes, she comes and goes through the home movie of King Street that runs inside my head, a child in a white hand-me-down dress standing beside me in the garden, squinting into the sun; a girl who set off for school one day and came home different, with ink stains on her hands and the smell of dried paint in her hair. I remember this girl because my father talked about her when he was upset, or when he came home drunk and sat in the kitchen muttering to himself. It was characteristic of how they were, I see now, that my mother never once mentioned Elizabeth’s name, while my father talked about her all the time. Even in grief, they were separated.
    I seem to know my ghost sister, but the truth is that she died before I was born. I could never find out how long she was in this world; some stories suggest she died in hospital after a few hours, or a few days; others that she lived for some time before succumbing to whatever it was that ailed her. I always felt kin to her, though, even when my father took me aside, one drunken Saturday afternoon – the first time, this may have happened when we still lived in King Street, but it happened more often than I can recall, and it went on for years – and told me that he and my mother had had another child before me, that her name was Elizabeth, that she had died and that he wished she had lived, and I had died instead. He always told me this as if it would come as a surprise, a piece of unexpected news about his, or my history, and he always went through the steps in the same order, with due solemnity, building up to those final, brutal words, which he uttered without the least hint of brutality, without anything that might, on the surface, be taken for malice. I think he thought, as he confided in my three-, or five-, or eight-year-old self, that I was supposed to feel sorry for him, that I was supposed to express my regret, not only for his loss, but for my own inability to reverse the twist of fate that had left him in