Not My Father's Son

by Alan Cumming

It wasn’t just a haircut, it was now my physical shortcomings as a laborer, my inability to perform the tasks he gave me every weekend and many evenings, tasks I was unable to perform because I was twelve, but mostly because he wanted me to fail at them so he could hit me.

He was sitting at his desk in the window and he looked up when he saw me. Immediately I straightened, tried to remember all the things he’d told me were wrong about me recently. I prayed my hair was combed the way he liked it, my school bag was hanging on my shoulder at the right angle, and my shoes were shiny enough.

Without acknowledging her or me he lifted his cutlery and began to eat. He ate like an animal, not because he was messy or noisy, but because he tore at his food, with strength and stealth and efficiency. It was terrifying to watch.

I got up from the table and moved towards the sink. I picked up a glass off the draining board and began to fill it. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he said, not quite shouting yet, but still too loud, as though he had been waiting to say it, eager to make the next move, and now here it was. “Eh? Did you hear me?” “I need to drink some water,” I gasped. “Put that glass down!” Now he was shouting. My mother said very quietly, “Ali, leave him.” My father rose from his chair and everything went red. At the same time as he began shouting at me he grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and I was being dragged across the kitchen, through the living room, through the hallway, out through the porch and the front door and across the yard to the shed where we kept our bikes. He threw me up on top of a workbench. He was baying now, not just shouting. You couldn’t understand what he was saying but I know it had to do with my hair and my water drinking and how fucking useless and insolent and pathetic I was, but it wasn’t coherent. It was just pure violent rage, and it was directed at me.

These kinds of events, though seemingly glamorous and sophisticated from the outside, are often organized with the finesse of a kindergarten nativity play, and one whose teachers are all lapsed members of Narcotics Anonymous.

Film festivals are really just business conventions, you see. It could be photocopiers, it could be shower curtains, Cannes just happens to be movies. And I think any business convention, even such a glamorous one as the Cannes Film Festival, can only be interesting for so long because too many people are talking too much about the same thing: their jobs or product—as not just photocopiers and shower curtains but also films are referred to nowadays.

I dreamed I was back onstage in the tent and Harvey was auctioning off a kiss with me starting at thirty thousand dollars, and nobody was bidding! The fact that this had actually happened to Ryan Gosling earlier that evening only further fueled the nightmare.

2010 had to be the last time that could happen.

You see, the very next day, I was to fly to London to prepare for the filming of an episode of the BBC TV show Who Do You Think You Are?, a very popular program in which celebrities have their genealogy investigated, and studious, balding men in tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows help the celebs pore over ancient parchments wherein family secrets are hidden. But not for long of course, as a hitherto unpredictable secret is revealed, and then the celeb cries.

Tom was rubbing tears away with his thumb. I suddenly felt so sorry for him. He was still the big brother, my protector. And here we were once again, weeping and scared and clinging to each other. I thought our father had no power over us anymore. I was wrong.

At Granny’s funeral, just five years prior, my main preoccupation had been to make sure my mum was doing okay. My other preoccupation, sadly, had been to keep away from my father’s partner who, earlier, in an act that redefined inappropriateness, had blurted out that she needed to get my autograph for her granddaughter as she shook my hand in the crematorium receiving line mere minutes after we had sent my granny’s coffin into the flames.

Some of the details of my family’s dystopian past were much more in step with the plotlines of a histrionic television show than an everyday tale of country folk. For example, the husband of the woman who was chasing me around my grandmother’s wake for an autograph had taken his own life when she told him she was leaving him for my father. Oh yes. And his son was in my father’s employ at the time. And the doctor who was called to identify the body and sign the death certificate became, a few years later, my brother-in-law, when he married my ex-wife’s sister. Thank you, cut to commercial break.

Oh boy, here we go, the old “We stayed together for you kids” routine. So, not only was I, through my newfound half-breed status, responsible for my own abuse, but the fact that this abuse lasted for so many years was due to the kindness and self-sacrifice of my abuser?! Great.

I stood waiting for the crew to set up and make a plan of how to shoot the forthcoming revelation. I was asked to do endless walking shots, necessary for the potential voice-overs. All I wanted was to know what had made Tommy Darling such a hero, and I was standing next to a little historian who was itching to tell me, but of course nothing could be said until we were in the optimum position for the revelation to be revealed and my reaction properly captured.

I hoped my grandfather had someone in his life like Grant. The recklessness he displayed on that road in France was amazing, and rewarded with the highest accolade, but ultimately it was for naught: he couldn’t save his friends. I worried that Tommy Darling was left with a distorted view of what was worth risking his life for.

It was an easy spiral to observe from the future, but to a little boy it seemed justified. My father loathed me, so it was only natural I should loathe myself.

For yes, being a woman, even one with a penis and for the purposes of drama, really made me feel that women have been coerced into a way of presenting themselves that is basically a form of bondage. Their shoes, their skirts, even their nails seem designed to stop them from being able to escape whilst at the same time drawing attention to their sexual and secondary sexual characteristics. And I think that has happened so that men feel they can ogle them and protect them in equal measure.

We were going to give back to our father that which was not ours, and what we never should have been given in the first place.

I had thought he was actually going to hit me once, when I’d said that if he thought that his abusive behavior was not connected to unhappiness or events in his own life, then he was basically admitting that he was psychotic. It was a big word, I knew. But seriously.