I learned two important things about lying when I was a child. The first part of which was how to tell a lie well, and perhaps a little on how to spot a lie when it’s told to you. The day this happened was a rare day. It was spring, the air cool but the sun bright, and for some reason - and this is what made it rare - I was alone in the house.
I wasn’t just alone in the building, with everyone else outside in the garden, which was not that unusual. On this day I was completely alone, and as far as I remember, this only happened twice in the whole time I lived there. Once on the day in question, and one more time for a whole week some years later. One day I might talk about that painful and eventful week, but for today I want to talk about that spring day when I met the old man.
Though I had my own TV in my room – as well as the essential VHS recorder – I was in the living room watching movies on this day. It had been a movie I had seen many times before, and I was only half watching, so this was why I saw the man standing with his hand on the wrought iron gate that led to the property.
At the time I thought he was old, but it unsettles me now to realise as I write this that he was probably no older than I am today. He was greying around the temples and had a broad belly that did not make me think of slovenliness, but rather of a man who once had muscle that he no longer needed. The term that comes to mind is “barrel chested”, and he looked over to the house in which I lived with an intensity that I initially found quite concerning.
I know now that I should have listened to that feeling, but I was young then, and had the confidence of youth. I the unfounded certainty that nothing bad could happen on this lovely day where not even a cloud deemed to mar the sky.
I switched off the movie and went to the door where I saw his shadow in the frosted glass that took up half its length. I opened the door before he knocked, and he stood in surprise with his fist half raised to the thick blue paint of the door.
We stood in tableau for a moment, me with an entirely fake smile on my face, while he stood a little like that famous still from Citizen Smith. He realised he held a perfectly useless fist in the air, lowered it, and asked to speak to my grandfather. He was not home, I replied and told him he should return soon. It was just then that I made what could have been a grave error in judgement. Though I knew nothing about the barrel-chested man I asked if he wanted to wait a while, and he agreed.
Discomfort was the keyword for the better part of the next hour. I offered tea and then made him some and we sat and made small talk. This was much harder than it might appear. I was in my early teens at this point, and he was fifty if he were a day. My usual topics of conversation being Star Wars and comic books were not suitable, so the conversation moved in curious circles around the uncharacteristically bright sunshine we had been having, with occasional musings on the possibility of a hosepipe ban so early in the year.
Scintillating conversation, it was not.
We spent half an hour exhausting ways to describe a sky devoid of clouds and I had begun to deeply regret my unusual sociability, but I was nothing if not a polite boy, so I determined not to leave my unusual guest with a poor impression of my grandfathers’ family. After all, by his own admission the man had come a great distance to visit – though he did not disclose from where or for why.
Eventually the man said he had to leave and thanked me for my hospitality. I smiled, this time with sincerity – as the man was finally leaving – and I led him to the door. The man paused and asked me to tell my grandfather of his visit, leaving a name that – to my irritation – I have long since forgotten. I watched him walk through the gate and down the hill in the direction of the City Centre, and the train that would take him home, wherever that might be.
The house was not empty for long, I suppose it’s a natural law of some kind that someone you have awaited will arrive only moments after you have left, and there was the usual warzone of activity before people settled into their accustomed places. My grandfather is in his chair in the corner of the living room. Within moments the lights on his beloved CB radio lit up and his mic – a candlestick style beauty made of polished chrome – glistened in his broad fist.
This is when I told him he had missed a visitor and told him the man’s name.
This all happened a long time ago, and memory is a strange beast. Sometimes I wonder how much I remember is not a memory at all. Perhaps they are dreams I had confused with reality. Or tales I had read and incorporated into my own unsatisfying life.
I would like to think that this moment was one of those moments, a lie told by a fragmented imagination that I have confused with truth, but I don’t think any of that is true.
I think I saw my grandfather’s face drain of colour as he said words that made my own blood run cold.
“You didn’t let him in did you?”
And this is when I learned my first lesson on lying. Lie fast. Lie so fast that you aren’t even aware of the lie on your lips. Lie with such speed that any indication your face betrays is so swift that it escapes the person you are lying to.
“Of course not!” I replied, and my mind immediately went to the two cups, washed but still wet on the counter next to the sink.
My grandfather stood rigid for a moment, and then let out a long breath.
“Who was he, Grandad?”
“Nobody, but if you see him again just walk away.”
As he answered me, I realised the second rule that day concerning the art of lying.
Some people did not know the first rule.
I never learned who that old man was, and I never asked. I understood that some things are best left unknown, and some people are best left in the distant… distant past. When I think of that day, I still feel a shiver run the length of my spine, and I am not sure if that shiver is inspired by the man I met, or the knowledge that my grandfather had secrets that he was desperate to bury in his own murky past.