by Alan Cumming
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.
FRIDAY 21ST MAY 2010, 5 P.M.
In 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 t
o 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.
I kept replaying our phone conversation. Had my father died? Was it something to do with my husband, Grant? He was heading home to NYC now, could something have happened to him? But still at the root of it all was the reporter from the Sunday Mail and the fact that, as Tom had said, it had all come to a head. But what did that mean?
By the time he arrived I felt I had aged ten years. He entered the flat looking remarkably normal. No tears, no visible signs of torment. If anything he looked a little sheepish, as if he were embarrassed by all the fuss he must have known he’d caused by losing it on the phone. For a moment my heart leapt and I thought that maybe this revelation, whatever it might be, was not going to be as portentous and damaging as I’d feared. There were a few awkward moments of small talk and then he looked at me.
“Shall we go upstairs?”
THEN
When I was little, I was bullied by an older boy named David, on the school bus. David’s dad was the head joiner (carpenter) on the estate where ours was the head forester. Tom, six years older than me and a year older than David, had graduated to secondary school by then, and we went our separate ways each morning. Tom went to Carnoustie and the swanky new high school, while I went to Monikie and the tiny Victorian stone primary school where there were only six people in my class. The bus I rode looked like something left over from the Second World War, and indeed it was. It was a big, hulking, dark blue military-transport type of thing, with two long benches that faced one another across a vast stretch of floor. The thing about that layout of course was that you could never look away from anyone. Everyone saw everyone else and everything that went on, all the time.
Every afternoon on the way home, and some mornings, I was kicked and pushed and slapped off the seat, my ears twisted back and forth, my books flung around and trodden on, the straps of my schoolbag held so I couldn’t get away, and all the while, through my cries of pain and fear, his taunts that I had no big brother now to protect me were ringing in my (red and sore) ears. Luckily the journey back to the estate gates was a short one, and as soon as the bus stopped I leapt off and made a terrified bolt down the drive, much to the amusement of my tormentor and his little brothers.
It was all very Lord of the Flies, and I was Piggy.
David was a nice enough boy, and I realize now that his bullying of me that summer was just his way of establishing the new world order of the Monikie school bus. My brother had been the undisputed leader till he had ascended to high school, and so by terrorizing me, David was not only defining himself as alpha male, but also as the new Tom Cumming. How better to show that your former leader’s power is naught than by making his little brother cry?
But then I was mad as hell and I was not going to take it anymore. I told Tom. Nothing much was said. Just a tearful confession after he asked me if everything was going okay at school without him. I almost forgot about it until one night we were cycling home from Cub Scouts. David and his siblings were in a gaggle ahead of us. Tom shouted out to David to wait up, and then told me to carry on home.
“What are you going to do?” I asked, suddenly alarmed.
“Just go home, Alan. I’ll be there in a wee while.”
I did as I was told, pedaling fast and whizzing through the estate gates and down the driveway, through the sawmill yard to our house and into the bike shed. My heart was racing; my mind a whirl of what awful torture or bloodshed might be taking place at that very moment on my behalf. My parents didn’t seem to pick up on my nervousness. My mum looked up from her ironing and asked where Tom was when I entered the living room, and my dad kept his gaze on the TV. Minutes later Tom arrived, cool as a cucumber, and gave me a stony look that I knew meant we must never speak of this again.
Five minutes later, the doorbell rang and I raced out to answer it, my heart now in my mouth. I opened the door to find David, weeping and clutching his already bruising eye, being held up by his irate mum.
“Get your father!!” David’s mum yelled.
My father ushered them in. Suddenly out of nowhere our living room was a courtroom, and I was both the smoking gun and the cause of the crime.
“Your son gave my son a black eye,” David’s mum shouted.
“Well, Tommy, is this true?” our father yelled, even though I could tell he was secretly proud.
“Yes, it is!” Tom said, pulling himself up and embracing his sins. “But David’s been bullying Alan on the school bus for months now.”
Everything stopped. David’s teenage shame was now exposed for everyone to see. I felt so sorry for him, this skinny adolescent who had shoved me off my seat and thrown my books around and held me down and whacked me countless times. He had never made me feel as mortified as I knew he now felt.
Suddenly I was shaken from my sympathetic reverie by the realization that the adults had stopped shouting, David had stopped crying. In fact the whole room had stopped and was now looking at me, waiting for me to bring the whole sorry mess to some sort of conclusion.
“Well, Alan,” my dad said. “Is this true?”
The room fell quiet. I could feel my cheeks burning and everyone’s eyes boring deep, laserlike into mine.
“No,” I said meekly.
Much as I wanted to defend Tom’s tribal quid pro quo, I also felt so sorry for David, sniveling away, the bruise around his eye coloring darker by the second. It was just too much to deal with, and I chose what I thought was the lesser of two evils. As soon as I’d denied he was my tormentor I’d burst into tears, and the adults mercifully realized they were putting a nine-year-old under too much duress, especially when there came no protestation of innocence from David. The Clarks went home, I was comforted, and the matter was never mentioned again. In some way there was an agreement between us all that justice had been served. An eye for an eye. Or more like a black eye for a series of bruises and stingy ears.
I told this story at my brother’s wedding. (His third, incidentally. We Cumming boys love a wedding.) For me it is emblematic of our relationship: Tom always the protective big brother, me in awe of the enormity of his devotion and screwing things up.
FRIDAY 21ST MAY 2010, 8 P.M.
Almost forty years later, Tom is sitting across the table from me on the roof deck of my flat, visibly shaking and seemingly incapable of beginning the speech that he knows is going to blow my world apart. He stammers and makes several false starts. I beg him to just say it. To just tell me. I am going mad with the waiting.
At first he apologizes because he has already told Grant. Again I can’t process what that means. He says he didn’t know how best to tell me and so he called Grant for advice. Everything was whirring—my thoughts, Tom’s voice, the skyline of Soho all around us. He finally manages to get out that our father had called him ten days ago.
“What did he say?” I whispered. I was shaking. I had started to cry. I was in hell. “Please Tom, please . . .”
Tom looked up at me, his blue eyes filled with tears too. He gulped, and finally he said it.
“He told me to tell you that you’re not his son.”
I learned something about myself that night, something I had no idea about. And about a month later, one sweaty afternoon on a terrace in southern Malaysia, I was reminded of it again: when I get really shocking news, my entire body tries to get the hell away as quickly as possible.
Before I had really processed what Tom had said I found myself propelling backwards, knocking over the bench I was sitting on and careening away from my brother. It felt as though I needed to push this incredible information back, giving myself the space necessary to even contemplate contemplating it. Downs
tairs, Sue and Dom thought the sound they were hearing was Tom and me fighting, and that a body had just been flung to the floor.
“What do you mean?” I kept asking.
Tom was holding me now, trying to calm me down. This information was so far from left field it was not even in the field. To say it was the last thing I expected to hear was an understatement of an understatement.
“You’re not his son,” he said again.
Tom was crying too now, but he could see how overwhelmed I was, how much I needed more information, and fast.
“He called me a week ago, weeping . . . ,” he began.
“Dad called you . . . Dad called you weeping?!” I spluttered. Nothing was making sense.
“Yes. He said he was never going to tell you, and was just going to leave you a letter in his will. But he knew you were doing the television show and so he wanted to tell you to stop you being embarrassed in public by finding out that way,” he went on.
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.
“Find out what, Tom?! Please try and tell me quickly. I’m scared. My heart is beating so fast. I think I’m going to have a heart attack.”
Indeed, my heart was pounding so hard I felt the need to clutch both hands to my chest, just to make sure it stayed inside my body.
“You’re in shock,” Tom said. “Take deep breaths.”
He continued. “He called me again this Thursday, and apologized for being so hysterical on the phone the first time. He said he’s on a lot of painkillers for his cancer and he thinks he must have overdone it. But he wanted to assure me, well, to assure you, that it was all true, and he was going to leave you a letter telling you everything in his will, but he wants you to know now and he says if you ask Mum she’ll deny it, but he’s willing to take a DNA test . . .”