Not My Father's Son (5 page)

“But don’t you worry, pet,” she said reassuringly. “I just said I couldn’t help them, had no comment, and smiled and shut the door.”

My flight to London was called. I took a last sip of my Bloody Mary and thought to myself,
“Tomorrow’s chip paper!”
And it was true: by Monday lunchtime the
Sunday Mail
would be used for wrapping up greasy bags of fries in chip shops all over Scotland.

But by then, the damage would have been done. So much more damage than I could ever have countenanced.

We ascended into a cloudless Mediterranean sky and, as I always tend to do when airborne, I smelled the roses. Maybe it’s the fact that I hurtle through the sky in a metal-fatigued box so regularly and therefore the odds of said box careering to a watery grave must be quite scarily higher than for the average traveler that makes me count my blessings in this way. Or maybe it’s the copious amounts of free booze. Whatever, it’s another inexorable ritual.

But I smell the roses not just to remind myself of how lucky I am, but also to wonder how on earth it all happened. I smell the roses to try and figure out how I came to be in the garden at all.

N
obody disliked the rain more than my father. All of a sudden nature would not bend to his will, time would not mold to his form. His meticulous plans would have to be altered. Men would have to be redirected to new, hastily created tasks. The rain brought chaos to his carefully constructed realm. And on this particular day, I would become the unwilling, and as usual ill-informed, brunt of his frustration.

This day was the first time I truly believed I was going to die. I looked into my father’s eyes and I could see that in the next few moments, I might leave the planet. I was used to rage, I was used to volatility and violence, but here was something that transcended all that I had encountered from him before. This was a man who had nothing to lose. The very elements were raging against him, and what was one puny little son’s worth in the grand scheme of things? I felt like I was my father’s sacrifice to the gods, a wide-eyed, bleating lamb that he was doing a favor in putting out of its misery.

It was during my summer holidays from high school. I was old enough to be working for him full time by then, but not yet fully grown enough to be sent to aid the men with their tasks. So not only was I feeble and weak and inept, I also, in this current downpour, demanded more time and planning and attention due to my inadequacies. It was always like this with the rain. I longed for it as respite from the backbreaking labor, but as soon as it came, I knew I was doomed.

We had been working outside in the nursery, separating the one- and two-year-old spruce saplings that were strong enough to be taken to the forests and planted from the runts of the litter. These, much like me, needed to be cast aside. The rain had necessitated that this work be postponed, and instead all the saplings were transported into the old tractor shed in the sawmill yard, where they could be graded and selected in a dry place. This, I was told, was to be my job. I was sent to the shed to await further instructions.

There was a single bare lightbulb hanging above me. I stood beneath it, surrounded by mounds and mounds of spruce saplings, hearing my father’s voice come wafting through the gale as he ordered his men around.

Finally the shed door opened and a gust of wind and a clap of thunder heralded his entrance. In the lightbulb’s dim hue, his lumbering frame cast a shadow over me and much of the piles of baby trees. I remember the smell of them, so sweet, fresh, and moist.

“You go through these,” he said, picking up a handful of saplings, “and you throw away the ones like this . . .”

He thrust out a hand to me, but it was full of saplings of various lengths and thicknesses. With his shadow looming over me I could barely discern the differences between any of them.

“And you put the good ones into a pile over here.” He gestured to his right.

I looked up at him, blinking and windswept.

“How do I know if they’re good or not?” I asked.

“Use your common fucking sense,” he said from the shadows. A second later a shaft of eerie gray-blue light filled the shed, thunder vibrated beneath my feet, and he was gone.

For the next few hours I sifted through the trees like a mole, blinking and wincing in the semidarkness. After a while the saplings began to blur into a prickly procession, spilling through my fingers. I would check myself and go back through the discarded pile at my feet and wonder if I had been too harsh in my judgment. The pile of rejected saplings seemed to be bigger than the successful ones, and I questioned if my criteria was too harsh. Then pragmatism would win over and I’d tell myself I needed to be ruthless, that this pile had to be shifted and it never would be by prevaricating or becoming sentimental.

Of course my father had not given me much to go on to make my choices. He was usually vague and generalized in his instructions, but incredibly specific when it came time to inspect my work. But today was different. Perhaps because he was so preoccupied with the challenges the weather had created for him and his workers, he had doled out fewer instructions than usual about how I was to proceed. For instance he gave no indication of what ratio of plants should be kept to those that should be rejected. He gave no clues as to the criteria I should use in filtering them, aside from that shadowy fist he had thrust in my face. I was standing in a freezing, damp, dark room surrounded by thousands of baby trees. I began to panic.

I did what I could. When my hands began to get numb I pushed them between my thighs and held my legs close together to bring some life back into them. At times I felt I was on a roll, but then the panic would set in. I would glance down at a mound of discarded trees and realize I had been too hasty in my judgment. They seemed too healthy, too thick, too tall. But I couldn’t save them all, could I?

Every moment of doubt was compounded by the knowledge that I was wasting precious time and before long my father would return. And of course, he did.

I heard him saying good night to some of his men, and my heart sank. With none of them around, he would have less motivation to rein in his fury. After a while I heard his footsteps and the door opened slowly. He stood for a second, silhouetted, dripping and silent, as though this was how he wanted me to remember him.

I stood up from the bundles of plants and tried to ease back into the shadows.

My father bent down to one of the piles I had made and without looking up at me asked, “What are these?”

“Rejects,” I said, questioningly.

He sifted through them for a moment and then, without warning, he backhanded me across the face. I flew through the air and landed in a heap against the stone wall of the shed. I was breathless and dizzy, the wind knocked out of me. I knew I had to get away. I began to run for the door, but my father grabbed on to my collar with one hand and smashed my mouth with his other. I fell to the ground and instinct told me to stay there. I could tell he had only started.

“What the fuck do you call this?” he railed.

The storm raged outside and it was as though my father was determined to belittle nature with his own wrath.

I could only whimper, “I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what I was sorry for. I didn’t know what he wanted, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. All I knew was that a line had been crossed. My face was throbbing and the back of my head hurt from where it had landed against the stone wall.

I was on my knees before him and he was throwing plants on me, kicking me and screaming at me. I had apparently rejected perfectly good saplings and at the same time retained puny ones that should have been destroyed. There was no rhyme or reason. All I could do was hope it would be over soon, but he continued to spew insult and bile and his body at me while the crash of the storm covered the sound.

Suddenly there were spikes in my eye and I realized he had kicked me into a pile of saplings, and then I felt the dull thud of his boot against my tailbone and my mouth was full of them too. I wanted to stay there, facedown, curled into a fetal position, and let him finish me off. But the overpowering survival instinct took over, and before he could strike again I turned round and fell to my knees before him, sobbing and beseeching.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t know! You didn’t tell me!”

I felt pathetic but it stopped him in his tracks.

“I didn’t do it on purpose. I wanted to get it right, but you didn’t tell me. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. I’m so sorry. Please!”

I was done. Nobody was coming to save me, and nobody cared.

My body began to shudder and heave with such black grief that it surprised even me.

The sound of the shed door banging shut opened my eyes. He was gone. After a while I stopped crying. There were little trees stuck to my hair and in my mouth. My face was throbbing from his blows and my bum hurt from his boot.

In the eaves of the attic room of the shed was a wooden hutch my father had built to house a pair of doves we had once been given years before. For some reason I wanted to go up there. I climbed the stairs and dropped to my knees, staring plaintively into the dark recesses of the empty coop. Time passed. The storm finally subsided. The numbness in my cheek ebbed into a swelling. Darkness fell. Still I sat in a heap in front of the empty birdcage, tears flowing.

I had thought earlier I might die. Now, once again, I wanted to.

I
n no time at all I was in my London flat, having a laugh with friends.

I was to be based there for the first week of shooting of
Who Do You Think You Are?
aside from the mystery trips I would be taking elsewhere. My old friends Sue and Dom were there to greet me and I looked forward to catching up and having a laugh about the insanity of the night before in Cannes, each anecdote more sweet in its telling because it was now just that, an anecdote, and not real life.

I could relate the palpable drama after the auctioneer told Jennifer Lopez her dress made her look like an ostrich, but not have to see it, or
feel
it. There would be no anxiety that the name of the celebrity I was about to announce would not be the same as the one who walked onstage. There would be no celebrities at all, in fact. Just me and my besties.

Sue and I had met many years ago at the Donmar Warehouse theatre in London. I was there playing Hamlet, immediately followed by my turn as the Emcee in
Cabaret
that later transferred to Broadway, and we had been best friends ever since. When people ask how we met, Sue likes to tell them she washed my undies, and indeed she did, for then she was a member of that most noble of professions, the theatre dresser. She was also, and is, totally gorgeous. Quite literally, actually. Her surname had originally been Gore, but she changed it legally to Gorgeous, after years of it being her unofficial moniker. The actual document she had to sign to complete the name-changing process was hilarious, asking her to solemnly swear to renounce the name Gore and to be, from that day forth, forever Gorgeous. And she has been. When she married Dom, I and our other bestie, Andrew, were male bridesmaids, stifling our giggles as Sue walked down the aisle to Elvis singing “It’s Now or Never.”

As the wine flowed and the laughter rose, I felt the feeling I most enjoyed—home. Then, Sue’s phone rang.

“Hi Tom,” she said. “Oh, he’s here. He arrived about an hour ago.” I wondered why my big brother would call Sue and not me to find out my whereabouts. Sue passed me her phone, and immediately I knew something was wrong.

“How are you doing?” Tom asked, a little shaky. Obviously he hadn’t intended to speak to me.

“I’m good. How are you?” I replied, cautiously.

“When am I going to see you then?”

“Tomorrow night, remember? We’re all having dinner,” I said, referring to the plan for him, his wife, Sonja, a bunch of my London friends, and me to meet up in my favorite Chinese restaurant the next evening.

“I really need to talk to you, Alan.”

There was silence for a moment. I tried to process what this meant.

“Well, why don’t you come up a bit early tomorrow and have a drink with me at the flat before dinner,” I said eventually.

“No, I need to talk to you sooner than that.” Tom was trying to hold it together, but the cracks were beginning to show.

“Tom, what’s wrong?”

“I can’t tell you on the phone, Alan.”

“Is it your health?” My mind immediately raced to the worst possible scenarios. My brother is a rock. If he acted like this, it meant there was really something badly wrong. “Has something happened between you and Sonja?”

“No, no.”

I could hear Tom, even in the midst of whatever painful thing he was dealing with, trying to reassure me. It was what he always had done for me.

“Is something wrong with Mum?” But I’d spoken to Mary Darling several times that week and had listened to a message from her just that day. There was no way she could have hidden anything bad from me.

Suddenly, I remembered what Mary Darling had said about the reporter. “Is it something to do with that
Sunday Mail
guy looking for Dad?”

“It’s all come to a head, Alan,” was Tom’s response. “I need to talk to you tonight.”

It took Tom three hours
to get to me. He lives in Southampton and had to catch a train, and what with travel to and from the stations, I had to endure three whole hours of my mind racing and my heart thumping. Sue and Dom tried to distract me, but I could never wander far from the worry. What could possibly be making my brother so upset that he couldn’t even utter it to me on the phone? I was a mess. My mind went to very dark places. The press being involved was a particularly disturbing element.

If I had had the ability at that moment to be rational, I would have realized that there was nothing particularly scandalous about my life that had not been revealed or touched on before now, and I might have taken solace from this added boon of having become an open book. But I was finding it hard to see solace anywhere. I started to get wheezy. I have asthma and one of the times it comes on is during moments of great stress. Sue is luckily a self-confessed hypochondriac and an expert on all homeopathic remedies, so before too long I had a mouthful of pills to distract me. But still the nagging anxiety persisted, and still Tom hadn’t arrived. He kept texting:
I’m on the train . . . I’m nearly at Waterloo . . . I’m getting in a taxi.