Poems and Other Shit

A Liar Like Me - Short Story

There is no accurate diagnosis for pathological liars, nor is there a cure. My own diagnosis came from my mother, at ends with me one afternoon when I came home from school. I had told my teacher, in an outburst of tears, that I was being abused at home. She had done exactly what I had predicted she would do, and let the issue of my tardiness and incomplete assignments go.

"Sam," my mother now said, as if she were about to yell but too tired, her shoulders tense and her mouth in a firm line. "You're a compulsive liar! I just don't know what to do with you anymore!" 

It wasn't about attention or even making excuses. It ran deeper, so much so I could feel it prickling the hairs on the back of my neck when I spoke deceit, people buying it with sympathetic nods and immediate friendship, admiration – whatever emotion I desired, I could have them produce.

I couldn't tell her any of this without pushing her too far. But she was already over the edge.

"I'm sending you to your father's place."

---

My father lived on a remote farm in rural Victoria, the land cracked and dry, cows with rib cages jutting out like outdated washing boards, peering at me through big brown eyes as they walked around Mum's car. They were being ushered down the road by two men on quad bikes. The land was in a drought, the men almost as weathered and dry as the soil. Only the gumtrees were green anymore.

She talked to me as we drove, the car tires leaving a cloud of reddish tinged dust behind us.

"I expect that you will help your father whenever he wants your help, and you will behave. He's not easily fooled and he won't take your bullshit."

She didn't know it, but she had just given me a challenge.

---

I suppose she thought I would return, a life changing epiphany riveting me and drawing out any truthfulness left within. I was starting to blur the lines myself, between what was realistic and fanciful.

I had almost entirely forgotten my father was a humble farmer, exchanged instead for ideas of high cheek bones, designer glasses and martinis. He had neither of those things. He was an indifferent sort of man that I saw maybe once a year, exchanging emotionless conversations on the phone monthly otherwise. A man with tanned skin and the lines of hard work etched across his face, who never told me I was pretty or smart or sweet.

He looked at me curiously when I got out of Mum's car, then nodded. It was a nod that said yes, I can work with that.

---

He woke me up at four am every morning, the sun not yet even risen, the cows in their distant paddocks beginning to grow uncomfortable with full udders.

The first morning I told him about my low blood pressure, and how the exertion could make me faint.

He listened, and then he pulled back my bed covers. "Come on now, Sam. You're not playing games with me."

"But," I protested, "my blood pressure-"

"Get up," he snapped.

I had been planning to stage a dramatic faint, but he gave me no opportunity. As soon as we were outside in the cool morning air, a dramatic contrast to what would be later, he sat me on top of my own quad bike.

"Keep up," he was saying, his overly eager farm dog leaping onto the back of his own bike. Then he was gone in a cloud of dust, and I was expected to manage the bike myself.

I had fanciful ideas of running the bike into a fence or getting myself hopelessly lost. But I couldn't bring myself to do the first, and the second seemed almost impossible, the environment a flat and dry barren wasteland.

It was very unglamorous. The cows had to be taken from their paddock to the milking shed, where I trailed my father from a sunken concrete platform between two rows of lined up cows, their shoulders and hips bumping, fastening suction caps to each teat and dodging piles of manure. His dog was lying beside the quiet bikes, dozy and lazy.

I accidentally fell of the quad bike I had ridden when we reached the farm house. The sun was starting to beat down on us relentlessly, a little glimmer of what the day would become. I landed on my elbow, shooting unwanted pains up my arm, and conveniently landing almost on the farm dog, who yelped and dodged away.

"Did you see that? Your dog just tripped me."

"Oh Sam," replied my father, his firm resolve hardly bothered. "Let Red trip you tomorrow too, if you like. And the day after that."

---

You could breathe the land right in, any moisture evaporated, just a fine dust which clung to everything. You could become the land, and dry up like the cows and the people, who sold their lifeless livestock and their farms for half as much as they were worth, if that. Then they would get in their beat up utes and head for the city, for the promise of office jobs and regular pay and never having to look into the harrowing eyes of a starving cow again.

One cow was giving birth near the house. I looked at the struggling cow, its hips already bone thin, its flank now damp with sweat. There was blood and afterbirth which it proceeded to lick from its tiny calf.

"Isn't it beautiful?" he asked.

"Yes," I lied. Maybe a new life was beautiful, fresh with potential and promise. But he of all people should know it was only an illusion. The calf would grow to produce milk for hungry humans, and when it couldn't do that, it would be exiled to factories in which it would exit in a can, fed to the farm dogs which had so unmercifully bitten at its heels.

I could almost see myself in this man, the way he held his hands and rarely smiled, patting his dog on the head but not allowing it to come inside. I noticed the way he hummed as he poured himself cereal, and how he thought he could see right through me, a fanciful subterfuge he had created and wanted to believe because I was his only child, and he wanted me to know that he was my only father.

I smiled very carefully down on him, sitting atop a fence post which he leant against, the air tangy with the smell of dew-damp soil. I wanted to pry a little more, understand him better. "Dad, I love you," I said all at once.