Not My Father's Son by Alan Cumming Page A

lasted for so many years was due to the kindness and self-sacrifice of my abuser?! Great.
    My whole body felt on the brink of explosion or collapse or combustion. I had one last question.
    “So my real father, where is he living now?” I asked.
    It was as though I had pressed an ignition button. My father was suddenly years younger, and snarled with the power and fury of the man that haunted me:
    “Don’t you go bothering him!”
    I was jolted back in my seat. I knew I had to keep calm, that the man who was shouting at me was not rational, and his default method of communication was shouting. I mustn’t give him the excuse to feel I’d attacked him.
    “I’m not going to bother him. But I’ve only discovered three days ago that he is my father, so I think I have the right to ask a few questions about him, don’t you?”
    Silence.
    “Don’t you, Dad ?”
    He ignored my question but told me a few details about where this man now lived. My father thought he ran a pub or a garage. I wondered if I’d ever meet him, or my half siblings. I wondered what they’d be like.
    I told my father I was going ahead with the DNA test.
    “I’m not sending a swab to America!” came the retort. He was angry now.
    “Well, you don’t need to.” I explained how Tom and I would do the test ourselves. I would be in touch when I had the results. I could tell the wind had been blown out of his sails. Withholding his DNA was his last trump card. Now he was the one who would have to wait.
    I put the phone down next to my pad and pen, then clasped my hands together and allowed my body to shake. My teeth began to chatter, my watch battered against the table’s surface, my knees jerked involuntarily. Sunny England sped by. I pulled myself together and walked back the few carriages to join the BBC crew.

THEN
    I t was between Christmas and New Year, and everything was quiet and everything was white. We’d had an unusually large snowfall, which made me happy. The snow meant that everything calmed down. My father’s attention was diverted away from the ordinary, from me, to the effects of the snow and the conditions of local roads. The estate workers were given days off until the snow cleared, and the normal schedule of jobs I had to do was postponed, aside from shoveling and bringing in logs. It was actually permissible to do a bit of lolling.

    I loved the sound of the snow. It was calm and echoey at the same time, and the world felt a safer place being insulated by it.
    My mum and I were watching TV. Suddenly the front door was thrown open and my father’s voice began roaring for my mother. Mum and I both leapt up, terrified. It sounded like he was injured or being chased. She reached the living room door before me, but I managed to catch a glimpse of my father, staggering slightly as he made for the front room, the posh one we never used except for when visitors came, or on Christmas. Behind him I saw Mr. Shaw, the head gamekeeper, with whom my dad had obviously been drinking.
    My father wasn’t a drunk by any means. Like most Scotsmen, he liked a drink, but I rarely saw him in a state beyond what would be called “a bit merry,” so seeing him like this now was quite shocking. I blamed Mr. Shaw, and the snow. The former was known to like a drink a little too much, and the latter allowed a situation where boredom and close proximity to a drinks cabinet might lead to the current situation.
    “We want whisky, woman!” my father roared as he sped by.
    My mother closed the door, leaving me in the living room wondering what the outcome of their muffled, yet heated tones would be. A few minutes later my mother rushed back into the room and made for the kitchen.
    “The cheek of the man,” she said over her shoulder, and then reemerged with a jug of water, presumably destined to be mixed with whisky in the front room.
    “Coming in here and shouting at me like that.”
    Just then Tom arrived home. He asked me what had happened, and I