Burnside - A Lie About My Father

By the same author

FICTION

POETRY

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN: 9781409017097

Version 1.0

www.randomhouse.co.uk

Published by Jonathan Cape 2006

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Copyright John Burnside 2006

John Burnside has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain in 2006 by

Jonathan Cape

Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA

Random House Australia (Pty) Limited

20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney,

New South Wales 2061, Australia

Random House New Zealand Limited

18 Poland Road, Glenfield,

Auckland 10, New Zealand

Random House South Africa (Pty) Limited

Isle of Houghton, Corner of Boundary Road & Carse OGowrie,

Houghton 2198, South Africa

The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

www.randomhouse.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0-224-07487-3

Papers used by Random House are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests; the manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin

Typeset in Adobe Garamond by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Polmont, Stirlingshire

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham plc

This book is best treated as a work of fiction. If he were here to discuss it, my father would agree, Im sure, that its as true to say that I never had a father as it is to say that he never had a son.

We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnameable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out of this our cloud upon the precipices edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall this rushing annihilation for the very reason that it involves one of the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it. And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we most impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge. To indulge, for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot. If there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and are destroyed.

Examine these and similar actions as we will, we shall find them resulting solely from the spirit of the Perverse. We perpetrate them merely because we feel that we should not. Beyond or behind this there is no intelligible principle; and we might, indeed, deem this perverseness a direct instigation of the arch-fiend, were it not occasionally known to operate in the furtherance of good.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Imp of the Perverse

Where, during all these years, was my free will? From what deep and hidden place was it called forth in a moment so that I might bend my neck under thy yoke, which is easy, and take up thy burden, which is light?

St Augustine, Confessions

BIRDLAND

Patti Smith

Every year, it comes as a surprise. The leaves flare, for a time, to crimson and butter yellow, the air shifts, in the early morning, from the damp greens of late summer to soft graphites and an occasional, miraculous quail grey. Everything brightens before it burns away, the way a dying man is suddenly filled with new hope, hours before they are laying him out to be washed and dressed for the last time in a cool side room. I was brought up, not necessarily to believe, but to allow for the possibility that the dead come back at Halloween; or rather, not the dead, but their souls: whether as individual wisps of fading consciousness or some single, aggregated mass, it didnt matter. All I knew was that soul was there, in one of its many guises: ghost, or revenant, breath of wind, figment of light or fire, or just some inexplicable memory, some snapshot filed away at the back of my mind, a picture I didnt even know I possessed until that moment.

So it is that, with the usual show of scepticism and something close to total conviction, I have celebrated Halloween all my life. Most years, if I can, I stay at home. I make an occasion of the day, a private, local festival of penance and celebration in more or less equal measure. I think of my own dead, out there among the millions of returning souls permitted, for this one night, to visit the places they once knew, the houses they inhabited, the streets they crossed on their way to work, or to secret assignations, and I remember why, in my part of the world, the living spend this day building fires, so they can light them all at once, all over the darkening land, as night approaches. Its not, as mere superstition says, that they are trying to frighten off evil spirits. No: the purpose of these fires is to light the way, and to offer a little warmth to ghosts who are so like ourselves that we are all interchangeable: living and dead; guest and host; householder and spectre; my father, myself. One day we may all be ghosts, and the ghosts we entertain will live and breathe again. Perhaps, in the past, each of us knew what it was to wander home and find it strange, the garden altered, the kitchen full of strangers.