The Telling Error (36 page)

Once upon a time, there was a twelve-year-old boy who had a seventeen-year-old sister. The sister lied to their parents all the time, about almost everything. If she hadn’t, they would have allowed her no privacy. They’d have forced their way into her soul, and whatever they found in there, they’d have torn it to shreds in their determination to improve her character.

Despite her best efforts to deceive her parents, the boy’s sister usually ended up getting caught in her various lies. This resulted in daily rows that the boy had to listen to whether he wanted to or not. Even if he went into his bedroom and closed the door, he could hear his father yelling, sometimes for hours, and his sister crying. The noise always came from the same place: his father’s games room, in which he played snooker and table football and darts. The games room was across the hall from the boy’s bedroom, no more than a few feet away. His father always made sure to close the games room door, but, at that distance, even twenty closed doors wouldn’t have protected the boy from the sound of the fighting.

His sister would always cry and say sorry to her father for lying, but she didn’t mean it, because she would then lie again the next day, and get found out, and then there would be another row, and more yelling and weeping. After a few years of listening to these episodes, the boy decided that his sister’s distress was genuine, but had nothing to do with contrition. Rather, it was that she found it unpleasant to be shouted at for hours at a time about how she’d let herself and her family down. Her father didn’t restrict his shouting to the subject of his daughter’s lies. He also yelled at her for wearing too much make-up, not spending enough time on her homework, making too many phone calls, getting up too late at weekends, liking the wrong music, having the wrong opinion about every subject, wearing the wrong jewellery, choosing the wrong boyfriends, the wrong clothes, the wrong friends, putting the wrong posters on her walls and many other things. Every choice the daughter made was the wrong choice, and every opinion she expressed was the wrong opinion.

The boy found his father’s tirades distressing to listen to. They made him shake. Sometimes he would press himself against the far wall of his bedroom, beneath the window. Sometimes, though he was always terrified to open his door while an episode was in progress, he would force himself to do it so that he could escape downstairs. His father’s shouting and his sister’s crying could still be heard clearly from downstairs, but it wasn’t quite as deafening. However, downstairs there was other crying to contend with: the boy’s mother’s crying, which usually took place in the kitchen.

The boy couldn’t understand why his mother always stayed as far away from the trouble as possible. Surely as a grown-up she could do something to make the noise stop? Yet she never did. As soon as the shouting started, she behaved as if her husband and daughter were members of a different family. She wouldn’t even go upstairs if she needed something from her bedroom, not until the yelling had stopped and her husband had finally accepted her daughter’s ninety-seventh apology. Then and only then would she wash her face at the kitchen sink, dry it with a tea towel, put on a bright smile and wade back into family life as if nothing had happened.

The boy tried not to blame his mother because he could see that she was weak like him, and scared like him. He didn’t blame his father either, because his father, as he kept telling the rest of the family, was a man of high principle who couldn’t help it if lies made him angry. The boy learned that lying was the worst thing ever. It made sense to blame his sister, who couldn’t possibly have failed to notice that she rarely got away with her attempted deceptions. Why did she bother? Why didn’t she admit defeat and start telling the truth?

One day, the boy plucked up the courage to ask her. He was beginning to wonder if she secretly enjoyed the fights with her father. She smiled and said, ‘Of course I don’t enjoy them. Would you enjoy being screamed at for three hours a day about what a terrible person you are?’ The boy said he wouldn’t, and that therefore he would resolve never to lie again. ‘Often you lie when there’s no need,’ he told his sister. ‘Mum and Dad would have let you go to that concert if you’d asked them. You didn’t need to pretend it was a school trip.’ His sister laughed. ‘“Let” me?’ she said. ‘Maybe they would have. I lie to them because they deserve to be lied to. They don’t deserve to have power over me. They’ve persecuted me since the day I was born.’

‘No, they haven’t,’ said the boy, because, like most people, he didn’t recognise persecution that wore a mask of loving parental concern.

The fights continued. The boy grew more anxious and withdrawn. His sister stopped crying during her father’s tirades, and instead turned herself to stone. She taught the boy how to make earplugs out of tissue paper, so that he wouldn’t have to listen if he didn’t want to when the trouble started.

Sometimes a glimmer of hope was offered by a visiting relative from a different part of the country. Whenever this happened, the boy prayed that there would be a terrible eruption while the relative was in the house and that the relative would leap up and declare, ‘This is intolerable! Something must be done! No one can be expected to live like this!’ Instead what happened was that extended family members turned into versions of the little boy’s mother, perching tensely on the edges of chairs, waiting in silence for the trouble to subside. Sometimes bright, false conversations were had, as the boy’s mother and the visiting relatives conspired to cover up the noise.

What made life even more confusing for the boy was that his mum and dad were always scrupulously kind and fair to him, because he was always honest and obedient. That’s how he knew they were good parents. He wondered why they never acknowledged that it must be difficult for him, growing up in a war zone. Why didn’t it cross his father’s mind, or his mother’s, that all the shouting was as frightening and unpleasant for him, the blameless child, as it was for his sister?

One weekend morning, his mother shook him awake while it was still dark outside. She was fully dressed and crying. ‘Get up,’ she whispered. ‘We have to go out. You can’t stay here on your own.’ The boy asked where they were going, but his mother didn’t answer. ‘Just get dressed,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter what you wear: no one’s going to see you. Go and sit in the car, as quickly as you can.’ The little boy understood that he was to have no breakfast, and that to ask would be a mistake. His mother didn’t care about feeding him this morning, or about making sure he brushed his teeth. Something awful was about to happen, if it wasn’t happening already – something worse than what the boy was used to.

He dressed and went downstairs. His mother was waiting for him by the front door. She opened it when she saw him coming, and gestured for him to go outside. He stepped out onto the drive and saw that his father and sister were already in the car: his father at the wheel and his sister behind him, in the back. He climbed in and sat beside his sister. His mother got in too, and his father started the engine. They set off. No one spoke, and the little boy’s sister didn’t look at him, not even when he started to cry. She kept staring straight ahead, at the back of the driver’s seat. This frightened the boy more than anything else. His sister had always been kind to him – always. Most people in her situation would detest a brother like him – the favoured good child who never put a foot wrong as far as his parents were concerned – but not his sister; she had never allowed herself to fall into that trap. So why wasn’t she comforting him now, as they drove along in silence, in the only-just-dawning daylight, with him crying? Why was she staring straight ahead as if she were in a coma?

The boy eventually asked where they were going, because the dread that was welling up inside him had grown too large and needed to escape. His father replied, ‘We’re going to a lunatic asylum, where your sister will be staying for a while.’

The boy’s sister didn’t flinch; the news hadn’t come as a shock to her as it had to him. Evidently she had been told where she was going before setting off.

‘Someone who keeps lying in the way that your sister lies must be sick in the head,’ said the boy’s father. ‘Your mum and I have tried as hard as we can to make her see the error of her ways, but we’re not experts when it comes to mental illness. And that’s what a compulsion to deceive is – it’s a mental illness. So we’ve decided to let the doctors at the lunatic asylum deal with it. They have all kinds of techniques and special methods that are meant to be very effective. Like electric shock treatment – where they strap you to a table, tie you down and give you electric shocks that make your whole body light up. It’s very painful, but it works, apparently, when it comes to curing sick minds. That’s if the patient strapped to the table doesn’t catch fire – that happens sometimes, if the electricity current isn’t carefully monitored. I’m assured it’s never happened at this asylum, though, so we don’t need to worry about that.’

The boy was crying hysterically by this point. ‘Can you see what you’re doing to your brother?’ his father said to his sister.

‘I can see what
you’re
doing to him,’ she replied.

‘Can you see that you’re ruining his life? That’s why we have to put you in the asylum.’

The boy’s sister rolled her eyes and said, ‘I’ll escape. I’ll fuck whoever’s in charge and persuade them to let me out.’ She was seventeen and had been sexually active for a year or so. Her brother knew this because it had been the subject of many of the closed-door rows in his father’s games room recently. His sister had been caught with boyfriends – sometimes in her bedroom, after she’d snuck them in when her parents were asleep; once at a friend’s house.

‘Be facetious if you want to,’ her father told her, ‘but you’ll soon see. No one escapes from places like the one we’re taking you to. You’ll be handcuffed for most of the time. Your legs will be chained together so you won’t be able to walk.’

The boy whimpered at the thought of this happening to his sister. She turned to him then and put her hand on his arm. He looked at her and she shook her head. ‘It’s not true,’ she mouthed at him. ‘It’s a lie. Don’t worry.’

Their mother, watching her daughter in the rear-view mirror, said, ‘She’s telling him it’s not true, it’s a lie.’ She sounded terrified. The boy understood why she felt compelled to inform on her daughter so quickly and efficiently; he understood that he would have done the same in her position.

‘Oh, I promise you it’s true,’ his father said, sounding gleeful about the prospect of incarcerating his only daughter in a lunatic asylum.

After an amount of time that the boy couldn’t measure, the car turned off the main road and onto a lane that was straight and wide at first, but soon started to narrow and bend. There were thick hedges on both sides. From this point onwards, the boy saw no cars apart from the one that contained his unhappy family. The lane straightened out again. Daylight had dawned by now, and the boy could see that there was a large house with shuttered windows coming up on the left, behind a stone wall. The shutters were a sickly shade of green.

‘Here we are,’ said his father, stopping the car in front of two large stone gateposts. Carved into one of them was the name ‘Bardolph House’. The boy felt ill. He couldn’t bear the idea of leaving his sister in this place.

His father got out of the car. As he did so, two men appeared from between the gateposts. One was bald and older, the other young and very dark, with a low forehead and wire-rimmed glasses. They were both wearing long white overalls. One was carrying a clipboard. The boy heard a strange noise come from his sister. When he looked at her, he saw that she’d turned pale. She hadn’t believed what her father had told her until she saw these two men, but now she believed it.

The father opened the car’s back door and ordered his daughter to get out. He was carrying a suitcase that he’d retrieved from the boot. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘There’s no point putting it off. It has to be done. Hopefully, if the treatment works, you’ll be able to come home – perhaps in a few weeks if you’re lucky. On average they say it takes about six months for a complete cure.’

‘No. Please,’ said the boy’s sister. ‘I’ll never lie again. I swear.’

‘You always say that,’ said her father, ‘but you always let me down, don’t you?’

The two men in overalls were standing on either side of the boy’s sister, holding one of her arms each as she struggled and begged to be released. Her father had taken the clipboard from one of them and seemed to be filling in a form that was attached to it. Her mother sat silently in the front passenger seat, saying and doing nothing, though the boy knew, even though he couldn’t see her face, that she was crying.

The two men in white overalls started to drag the boy’s sister towards the house. She continued to howl for a while. Then she went limp and quiet, as if she’d died, and allowed herself to be dragged. Perhaps she fainted. The boy hoped she was still alive. He opened his mouth to say something to his mother – he wasn’t sure what – but found that bile came out, thick and sour, instead of words. Still, his mother did and said nothing. The boy imagined climbing behind the wheel and driving away. It was too late to rescue his sister, but he could rescue his mother.

Except he couldn’t. He was a twelve-year-old boy who couldn’t really do anything.

After a few miserable empty minutes, he saw something that he didn’t understand. The two men in overalls were heading back towards the car, carrying his sobbing sister between them. His father was walking alongside them, holding the clipboard in one hand and the suitcase in the other. As they got closer, the boy’s father hurried ahead. The boy heard the sound of the car boot opening and something heavy being thrown into it. Then he heard a thud as the boot was slammed shut, and his father appeared by the open back door of the car, minus the suitcase and the clipboard. This made no sense to the boy; the clipboard belonged to the lunatic asylum – why would his father think he could make off with it as if it were his own? Stealing was as wrong as lying, the boy and his sister had always been taught. Had their father changed his mind about that?