I said there were lies everywhere and drew her attention to the oxtail soup. I asked her why, if ox tails were so good, had I never knowlingly eaten any other parts of an ox? I said I didn’t see the country infested by docked oxen. The answer, of course, is that ox tails are actually cow tails but cowtail soup sounds a bit too nasty because we’ve all seen cow tails swishing expressively in paddocks, and being, how shall we say, just a little besmeared; so oxtail soup’s a lie. Indeed it’s such a good lie that butchers fool people with it. ‘So you see,’ I said with the merest hint of triumph, ‘lies are everywhere,’ and I called for another bowl of oxtail just to celebrate the great human skill of lying.
Where would we be without lies? There’d be no television news or pop songs or advertisements or any of the things that make life worth living. I went to Czechoslovakia years ago before it became two places that nobody’s heard of, back in the good old days when Moscow’s merry fist slammed down on any Vladimir who even thought of putting a foot out of line, and Czechoslovakia in those days was not only unspellable but it was also seriously grim. It was all grey concrete and grey snow and bad beer and worse sauges, and it took me a while to work out what was wrong and what was wrong was it lacked lies. There wasn’t an ad to be seen, not a single poster telling you that if you used deodorant you’d have to hire a Dobermann to fight the women off, or if you went to Vanuatu everybody would smile at you – not that Czechs could go to Vanuatu because passports were as rare as happiness – and so the poor old downtrodden Czechs just muttered their way around dirty streets eating cabbage, knowing there was no prospect of anything but cabbage tomorrow and so looking truth in the eye and being, in consequence, very sad indeed. What they needed was a springling of lies.
‘And of course, darling,’ I said to her, ‘the irony of the whole thing…’
‘The what?’ she said.
‘The irony, darling, irony,’ but she hadn’t heard of it so I gave up. ‘My simple point is, sweetie,’ I said, ‘that lying is fun and dangerous and human and creative and necessary for the maintenance of sanity. Animals can’t do it and we can and there’s an end to it. And there’s little joy to be got from truth,’ I said. ‘I mean truth’s one of two things: it’s either nasty or it’s boring or it’s false.’
She said that was three things but I swept on.
‘First,’ I said, ‘nasty truth, like we’re all going to die, or begin young ought to be good but we spend most it being miserable, or being old ought to be nasty and is, so we spend it wishing we were young, or time is cruel and all the other stuff of poetry. That’s nasty truth,’ I said, ‘and then there’s boring truth which is the grisly details of reality, all the sordid little worries about money and sex, and unsatisfactory washing machines and watching Coronation Street and fiddling the income tax and yearning for outdoor furniture from the Warehouse. That’s the boring truth,’ I said, ‘and then there’s the false truth.’
‘False truth?’ she said.
‘False truth,’ I said, ‘like American how-to-become-rich books, or opinion polls or I love you.’
‘You do?’ she said.
‘I do,’ I said.
Lies
uit: Fun run and other oxymorons - Joe Bennett
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