Nonfiction | Lies, Laughs, Shame and Shit

I was a Father Christmas fundamentalist until I was nearly twelve years old. I had two solid reasons for this. Firstly, there was a phone call to the house when I was six.

I picked up the thick white receiver to hear the gravelly tones of Fred Kahn, my mum’s friend’s second husband, pretending to be Father Christmas, long distance from Lapland. He said he had my letter and my requests shouldn’t be a problem, he just needed to sort out a few things – he had queries about the colour or size of whatever I wanted. My immediate reaction to the excitement was (as it is now when I am overwhelmed) to become incredibly serious. My parents saw my eyes dip, a frown appear, and a quietening spread across me. Father Christmas and I discussed all the particulars. I calmly put down the phone. There was no exhibition of surprise or delight. I had no interest in gushing over the details when my parents pressed for the results of their wizardry.

After that phone call, I didn’t just believe in Father Christmas, I knew him. Jimmy, my brother, who was a year older than me, received a similar call the following day. We cemented our faith in this flying present-giver with the facts and details of those phone calls. They never happened again.

Around three years later the BBC ran a story on the children’s news, alerting us to an enormous and expanding pile of letters addressed to Lapland putting incredible strain on Royal Mail. It was slotted into the short, well structured bulletins on politics and showbiz, slipped in between stories that were easing me into an awareness of the texture of the world outside my home in Birmingham.

I remember the newsreader was a beautiful woman with a serious face. She warned that children who had not sent their letters (I imagined them in hospital beds or with unsupportive parents) may well become victims of a system at breaking point. In the bulletin there were clips of middle-aged postal workers sorting through mail and thousands of letters addressed to Father Christmas or Santa being thrown onto a sprawling pile.

‘Did you hear that?’ I said to Jimmy. We were both in the Children’s Room waiting to be called in for dinner. ‘Jim, it’s the news, they aren’t going to lie on the news.’ My heart was pounding.

Neither of us admitted that it wasn’t the thought of empty-handed children that had moved us. It was the clear evidence we had been craving. Three years after Fred Khan’s call, I had become hungry for another piece of unequivocal proof as to Santa’s existence. In the BBC story Father Christmas was reported just like war and the movements of the Royal family.

That evening I went out on my bike and met Ollie, my neighbour, who was the same age as me. I told him about the news. He was standing with his elbows resting on the handle bars of his bike.

‘Santa isn’t real,’ he said. I don’t remember telling anyone else about the news story, but I can see Ollie’s ginger head tilted to the side, devoid of his usual wise-cracks, trying to work out how this story had made the news if Santa wasn’t real.

Two years later, on a dark evening approaching Christmas, the spell was broken by my granny as she ironed. She was over from Ireland, where my uncles had sent us out looking for leprechauns that summer while they sat in a pub in Spidal having an early evening pint. They had given us a little hat and said we were to place it somewhere, hide, and wait for the little fella to come back and get it. We did exactly that and waited until we were called in. I would like to say now that I had a faint sense I’d been had, waiting in the grasses, silently, with Jimmy and my little sisters, Sinead and Caitriona, waiting for a leprechaun that never came, but my memory holds an irritation that we were pulled away too soon, that we missed the little man who was undoubtedly there. We had no notion of the trick.

The evening granny stood ironing in the Children’s Room, Jimmy and I were feeling rattled about the practicalities of present delivery.

‘How will Father Christmas get a hockey stick and stick bag down the chimney without getting it dirty?’ I asked. Granny didn’t look up.

‘Cop on.’

‘What?’ said Jimmy.

‘Cop on, you ejits, do you really think the hockey stick is being delivered by air and will be stuffed down the chimney?’ We were speechless. It was only ever other kids who challenged us. But I was also flummoxed as to how an Olympian style hockey stick bag would fit down the chimney.

‘So he’s not real?’ I asked. Granny must not have answered. She seemed annoyed.We went out, sure that we had been stupid but utterly confused as to who was behind the mistake. We simply did not feel like it was our fault.

After the ordeal with Santa, the door was thrown open to all my niggling suspicions about the authenticity of anything magical, anything for which the workings were not apparent in the clear light of day. It ushered in a watershed moment in belief in God. Only a year and a half before granny swept the iron across the board and told me to cop on, I had been, briefly, very interested in God. I was ten and it was around the time I stole a plastic penis from the class model and lied about my name to the school photographer.

For a month in spring I went to the Convent on our road for Mass every morning before school, on my own. My parents let me walk up to the Convent. They were puzzled and delighted at this interest which, even today, I fail to find a provenance. I slipped in between the nuns and I would feel a big old palm on my head. I loved them absolutely for the short time I sought them out. I don’t know why I stopped going.

Eighteen months later, with Santa dead and buried, I purposefully lied in Confession. I was suspicious about heaven and highly doubtful, even if it was a place, that the power of prayer would get me in there if I’d done something terrible. It was Christmas Eve and I was eleven.

‘Forgive me father, for I have sinned, it has been twelve months since my last Confession.’

The Confession box was all light and shadows. This was the last time I would go inside it. I can’t remember deciding I would lie, but I knelt down and began to tell the priest things I had heard people do; I told him stories from other people’s lives. The stories became wilder and crueller as I went on. I felt on fire.

I said I had lied about my age at a theme park to get on the rides, that I’d lied about who my parents were to the Customer Service Desk in the supermarket when I got lost, I said I’d cheated on tests and stolen pens from other people’s desks, I said I’d told a teacher my granddad was dead but he was still alive, I said I’d pushed my brother into a swimming pool and hit my sister on the back of the head so she smashed her forehead into the wall. Not one of these stories were my own. I had heard them, or wished them, but they became mine.

Then, exhilarated, I admitted I had kissed my boyfriend, Graham Joyce, under the table at school and told him I loved him. This is the only true thing I told the priest. I told this to the priest to make him jealous of all the kisses he had never had. That is what I remember now. I said I was in love with Graham Joyce as the final bullet, the most thrilling sin, in case he was unmoved by what was revealed so far. He said my penance was the Hail Mary, which we would say together.

This was fabulous. I came out of Confession to see my dad and brother waiting for me to kneel reverentially at a pew, awash with prayers, ready to mumble into my clasped hands. ‘I’ve done it,’ I said. ‘I can go.’

Of course they thought I was lying skip my penance, but I wasn’t. I began to lie more after that. I felt like I had been in battle and I had won.

I was younger when it came to shame. I remember the very first shudder of it on a Sunday afternoon when I was six. Two sets of cousins were fed and sent outside by my grandmother, Nona, who lived in Birmingham.

My cousin Leo, who was seven like Jimmy, rallied us through the big glass door in the living room and down to the very back of the long, Victorian garden. The grown-ups sat inside, eating. Myself, the two boys and Leo’s sister, Olivia, who was a quiet chubby four-year-old at the time, would, Leo said, play a game of Follow My Leader.

On most Sundays like these, it was just me and the two boys and I was treated as an honorary boy. I was a fellow explorer and participant, not least because of my willingness to do whatever they said. My hair was cut short, and I could beat Jimmy at some competitions even though, at times, it meant cheating. But on this occasion, I had Olivia in tow, and as such, I was aware I might be less welcome. Perhaps that made me determined to prove myself – that is the reflection I see in the moment as I remember it now.

We launched into the game with Leo as the leader, and Jimmy, myself and Olivia following in single file behind him. Leo had tied something around his forehead and was holding a stick, marching with this knees high. We began to circle a tree in the middle of the back of the lawn as he barked orders rhythmically into the air.

He began, ‘Everyone, take your top off!’ that was that, the tops were gone, ‘Everyone, lick the grass!’ and down we went quick to our knees, ‘Everyone eat a leaf!’ pick and eat and carry on! I was thrilled at all the things I was willing to do. Olivia might have already been crying, probably stuck in her top, I took no notice. ‘Everyone do a poo under the tree!’ Our bare-chested leader yelled the order from the other side of our pine totem which had wide, low sprawling branches, perfect for shuffling underneath.

I did. I crouched and strained, unconcerned with how the others were getting on, delighted, perhaps to find I had one ready to go exactly when I needed it. I scrunched my eyes shut and as I opened them, Leo, Jimmy and Olivia were all peering in at my little station by the trunk, under the branches.

They let out yelps of disgust and excitement. Leo and Jimmy then shot off, stuffing their heads and arms into t-shirts as they ran. Olivia trotted behind them down the lawn towards the glass door.

I shuffled away from what had been, a moment earlier, an act of pure courage and loyalty. Pulling my top on, I looked around at the edges of the garden for a place to escape. There was a wasps’ nest in one of the hedges – I couldn’t remember which - but it scared me and I hesitated. I crawled back under the tree and tried to cover the thing with sticks and pine needles. As I came out, my aunt Deidre, Leo’s mum, was walking slowly up the lawn, her long blue skirt folding around her like waves on a dark ocean.

I felt sick. I knew I had done something terrible but I had wanted to do it desperately, to prove myself to the boys.

‘Emerkins,’ she arrived and I could see dad coming up the lawn behind her. She knelt so her head was at my height. ‘What did Leo make you do?’ Oh this was all wrong. It would separate me again from the boys.

‘I wanted to do it,’ I said, very confused. Dad was there. I ran over to him and cried. He lifted me up into his arms.

‘If Leo tells you to do something Beamish, you don’t have to do it,’ he said. Beamish was my nickname and I knew he wasn’t angry. Deidre was probably looking for the evidence. Jimmy, Leo and Olivia were watching the drama, but they had been told off. There was a quiet uncertainty between us all for the rest of the day. I cried about it for weeks afterwards. I cried with shame and I was six.

If none of the details of that story are exactly correct, the image of my aunt approaching on the lawn, her eyes fixed on me, her skirt flapping heavily as she moves closer, is how I experience the stalk of my conscience these days. When I stood alone after crouching, waiting for my reckoning, a new place was revealed to me. It was not the lonely doghouse I already knew from breaking rules, but somewhere far more remote. My brother helped to ease my experience of it when he came into my room a few days later and cried too because he felt bad that Leo had ordered me to do a poo under a tree and then went to tell the adults and I kept crying about it.

The second time I felt shame was when I was nine and in primary school. Mrs Munroe, the class teacher, was doing a lesson on the human body. A plastic model of the insides of a human torso was set up outside class and as we were working on some exercise or other, we went out in pairs to fit all the various bits of the body into their correct places.

Mrs Munroe often wore a pink jumper dress, nude tights and heels, and she was wearing that outfit on this day. Her legs were sort of spindly. She walked with the slight lilting kick of a Teddy Boy sashaying into a bar in a movie, as if she was always about to click her fingers and expel some personal rhythm into the air.

I went outside with my best friend Rosalyn. The unbelievable sight of all the body parts strewn on the blue lino corridor floor set us both to work. It was a shock to see the liver and the heart in a jumbled mess and Rosalyn and I didn’t talk – I had become serious - as we reordered the human which had the option, lying in front of us in thick life-size plastic shapes, of being male or female.

We left this decision until last, and as Rosalyn slipped the uterus and vagina between the two stumpy plastic thighs, I slipped the penis into the pocket of my pale blue and white checked summer dress.

I went back to my desk gripping the penis as Mrs Munroe went out to check on our reassembling, jumble the torso up again and return to call the next pair out. Suddenly aware that I might only have a short window of time before she came back, I passed it forward to Sasha Burke, who I thought, would like to hold it because she was the only girl in the class with her period.

As Mrs Munroe strutted back in, Sasha thrust it back and I slipped it into my pocket again.

‘Emer,’ she was sitting back at her desk now. ‘Can you come and see me please.’ I approached her and stood still. My aunt might have appeared then, stalking her way through my head. ‘Is there something you need to give to me?’ She was a teacher who disciplined quietly. I froze. ‘There is something missing from the body outside and you and Rosalyn were the last people out there.’ Rosalyn was generally viewed as my quiet and willing sidekick.

I had the plastic penis in my pocket. I gripped it tightly, hoping it might give me some secret power to disappear. Mrs Munroe was silent, she raised her eyebrows, pursed her lips and crossed her legs. I took it out, placed it on her desk beside the hole punch, ran back to my seat and burst into tears.

Rosalyn whispered that it wasn’t my fault. She often said that when I did something beyond the pale and got caught. Some of the boys were laughing. I took a piece of paper from my desk and began to make a card, with a picture of Mrs Munroe and me on the front holding hands. I drew her in the pink jumper dress. Ten minutes later, I approached her desk again and handed over my apology, which I imagine, said something like this: ‘Dear Mrs Munroe, I am sorry I stole the penis from the body. Please do not tell my mum and dad or any of the other teachers. I am so embarrassed. Sorry again, Emer.’

I cried as I handed the letter over. Mrs Munroe took it and nodded.

For as long as I was in the school, I couldn’t look at Mrs Munroe when she was standing with other teachers. I would hold my bag up against my face as I filed past them from the playground, like the lion who closes his eyes and thinks he can’t be seen. Eyes ahead, bag at the side of my face. Job done.

Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t given a position of responsibility in the final year of primary school. Jimmy, who was in the year ahead of me, had been one of four House Captains, the top accolade - as was my sister four years later. The House Captains were followed by Prefects, two in each of the three classes and then finally, Librarians. They all got little metal badges.

I had become quietly anarchic by then. I shot my chance of being considered for even the lower ranks of the badge-holders when I lied about my name to the school photographer. The day the photographer came, the class queued up in the little square reading area, lined with books. He was a bendy, grey-skinned man with long arms. He set up his big white umbrella and blue screen.

I remember thinking that he seemed to be pretending to be happy. He was saying the same thing to us all, asking us about our favourite subjects and then laughing until he whipped a little notebook and pencil out and wrote down our names. That was the important bit. So it came to me and we were laughing about something that wasn’t funny and then I said, quietly, ‘Susan, Susan Martin.’ After he had taken the picture, I went up to him again and said clearly, ‘Susan.’ It was like magic to see his fingers wrapped around the pencil writing my name by a number, and my name was Susan Martin.

Weeks later when Mrs Munroe gave me my photo, she said my name on the list was Susan, which was strange. I told her that I’d said my name was Susan because I thought it was funny. I thought she might find it funny too.

‘Lying isn’t funny Emer.’ Sashay, sashay, off she went along with my chance to spend lunchtime in the library.

There is one more story which links with these. It was August, I was twenty-four and had been in London, squatting on a canal boat commandeered by Leo and his then bandmates who were on their way, we were all sure, to fame and fortune. The boat was moored by The Rutland pub by Hammersmith Bridge, and had no functioning toilet. Jimmy and Olivia were also there. Jimmy answered his phone that morning and was told by dad that Nona had died in her sleep.

The evening before, a girl who lived on the canal boat next Leo’s skipped down the little metal gangway, the sun glittering off the river, her brown satchel swinging from her bony shoulder and pulled out a brand new dress, its £80 price tag flapping in the wind.

‘Thank you Karen Millen, for your donation!’ she yelled, holding it up like a victorious warrior with a severed head, and the boys from the band thought she was just gorgeous. I remember feeling rattled by my admiration of this girl, who stole a dress and made the process look so valiant.

After the call, we took our bags and hangovers on a Virgin train to Birmingham.

Someone had tied a huge red ribbon around Nona’s head to keep her jaw closed. Us four, up from London, took our seats around the bed, alongside my two sisters and a few of the other cousins in their late teens and early twenties.

I was at the foot of the bed. Weeks of spirits and spliffs and this sudden gathering of the family had me feeling strangely buoyant and unconnected to the moment.

My uncle, who is married to a very Catholic Spanish woman, and works for the Catholic Press, appeared at my shoulder.

‘Emer, please can you begin the Rosary,’ he said.

I had to look at him to check I had heard right. I had never said the Rosary. Catholic ritual was something my parents had gone along with in public. At home it disappeared. My mouth went dry.

‘Beginning with the Hail Mary,’ he said. There was a ripple of emotion through the semi circle of chairs, a relief in the order in which the room had been entered, landing me in the shit at the foot of the bed beginning the Rosary.

‘Yes,’ I said, and then to buy a few more seconds, ‘Yes, of course.’ The rhythm of the prayer was in my head, but not the words. They’ll come, they’ll come as I speak them, I willed. And off I went. ‘Hail Mary… beautiful woman… hallowed be thy name -’ A hand shot from the air behind me and gripped my wrist.

‘Full of Grace! Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord is-’ Ah! That was it! We continued together, ‘-with thee, blessed art though amongst women...’

I got there in the end, just as I did with the priest at my last Confession, but there was a great amount of talk and smirking among the cousins afterwards. I felt terrible. As if everything was connected; as if admiring the girl who stole a dress, having a hangover and not knowing the prayers of my childhood all meant something when they were added together. What had I become? When had it happened? That was the moment that I realised my childhood was gone, I just couldn’t pinpoint when exactly I had lost it.