B is For Bullshit

by Judith Lucy

Mum was a genius when it came to fabrication. If she was speaking there was a very good
chance she was lying. The more ludicrous the story, the more sincerity with which it was told,
and all the while she looked straight into your eyes.
Some of it was fairly prosaic and predictable if you were part of the family: ‘I’m full.
I’m full. I couldn’t eat another thing. I’ve been eating all day,’ actually meant, ‘I’ve had ten
laxative, some bark and I’m starving. There is every chance I will get up and eat a two-litre tub
of ice-cream in the middle of the night’. ‘I’m exhausted. I’ve been flat out all day,’ meant, ‘I’ve
done the crossword and watched The Mike Walsh Show along with The Young and the
Restless, Another World and Days of our Lives’. ‘I’ve spent hours cooking,’ meant, ‘I’ve
defrosted a Sara Lee apple pie.’
She could be extremely creative. As a child, when I would be sent to bed before the
end of the Sunday night movie, I’d ask Mum the next day what had happened. She would
often have dozed off and missed the end herself, so she would make it up. I didn’t work this
out until I saw Judgment at Nuremberg years later and realised that Mum’s ending was
preposterous – Marlene Dietrich’s character wasn’t an Eskimo with a flair for ventriloquism.
Her most blatant and consistent lie was about her age. When my brother Niall was
seventeen, she claimed to be twenty-nine, which would have made her twelve when she gave
birth to him. She told Niall and me that she was seventeen when she married Dad and we
worked out, after they were both dead, that she was twenty-four. At one stage, she even
implied that she was pregnant with my brother when she wed, preferring her children to think
she was ‘loose’ rather than old.
Ann Lucy continued to lie about her age when her appearance had so degenerated
that she barely looked human. Once, during the final years of her life, when she was ill and in
hospital, she told people she was six years younger than she was even though she looked like
a ninety-year old Muppet. An Irish secretary from hospital administration used to visit her
occasionally and one day Mum gripped her hand and said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t ever tell
them how old you are.’ WHY? Who are ‘they’ and what were ‘they’ going to do? It wasn’t like
she worked for a television network. If Ann Lucy thought she had a short at reading the news,
she was really kidding herself.
Mum was always at her most impressive when you saw her lie on her feet. When I was
seven, she took me to see a production of Peter Rabbit at a local hall. When we arrived she
discovered that not only were we not sitting together, but we were up the back (if memory
serves, given the standard of the production, this might have been a blessing), and so my
mother turned to the usher and said, ‘This is impossible. We’re going to have to sit together
in the front row because my daughter is virtually blind.’ If there had been any trouble I have
no doubt she would have added, ‘because of a brain tumour.’ It’s a pity Mum wasn’t into
bands because she could have talked her way backstage at any gig in the world (‘But I’m Elton
John’s mother, you idiot!’).
Her most fantastic deceit came in a letter. Three years before I found out I was
adopted, Mum, who went down several surprising avenues in her search for fulfilment,
attended a rebirthing session and dropped me a line, telling me what she had ‘remembered’.
Well, the event she remembered most clearly was GIVING BIRTH TO ME. She went into
graphic detail that I three the correspondence out as too disturbing – imagine how disturbed
I was later. Had she been tripping? When I think about her letter I wonder if it was the product
of a very bored woman with a vivid imagination. Guilt would have been in there somewhere
and yes, in her own way, love.
I, by contrast, am a terrible liar. I don’t know how I ever thought I was going to make
it as an actor. In auditions, I never fared well when performing Nina’s speech from Chekhov’s
The Seagull: the monologue contains the line, ‘You’ve got no idea what it’s like to know that
you’re acting badly,’ and, every time, I had to fight the compulsion to add, ‘I sure do.’
This is not something I say with pride. I think lying would be a very hand skill to have.
The few times in my life I’ve had to lie have landed me in more trouble than the truth would
have because I may as well be wearing a sign that says, ‘You know I’m lying. I know you know
that I’m lying but try not to lose all respect for me as a human being.’ There have also been
occasions when I have told the truth and a fib would have let everyone off the hook in a much
simpler way.
Once I picked up a boy in a club after – a record for me – speaking to him for five
minutes. Back at my place, with other friends, we had no alcohol and as we started to sober
up, I realised that this guy was a jerk. At that moment he pulled from his ear what I first
thought was a small piece of Lego. In fact it was a hearing aid and you could almost hear six
people inwardly say to themselves, ‘Oh… he’s deaf,’ before one of our number started talking
to him like he was a non-English-speaking imbecile. But this wasn’t the problem. The problem
was that he was an arrogant tool. It was way too late to tell him to go home so I said that he
was more than welcome to sleep in my bed, but that sleeping was all that would be
happening. The next morning it was clear that he was hoping I’d change my mind, so I
announced that I needed to go to the toilet and left the room. Minutes later, he joined me in
the garden in his red jocks (he walked around in those underpants like he was Superman
except even that absurd super hero had the decency to wear tights). He said, ‘You’ve got a
boyfriend haven’t you?’ There it was on a plate, problem solved, but I said, ‘No.’ I got another
chance, ‘Are you a lesbian?’ Once again I said that I wasn’t and then went into some
convoluted but true-ish story about how I’d been seeing a boy in Perth and wasn’t over it. A
deaf man who is confident enough to stride around in snug underwear is equally sure that
he’ll eventually be able to score with a chick whose ex is on the other side of the country, so
he hung around and around. Finally my house mate told him that I had an audition. I shut the
bathroom door, ran the shower and sat on the toilet wondering what my problem was. Even
when I was a dishwasher in need of a sickie I struggled with ringing up and giving a convincing
excuse. What a pity I couldn’t have had Ann Lucy make the call: ‘I’m sorry Judith can’t come
in today, she’s been attacked by a bear… well imagine how I feel. I gave birth to her when I
was eight.’