Not My Father's Son

by Alan Cumming

  “You have jet lag,” he said with a smile.

  “Yes,” I replied. “How do you know?”

  “Only jet lag people swim at five thirty!” he responded.

  I laughed.

  “You will have beautiful day,” he said, starting to back away.

  “I hope so,” I replied quietly, and smiled.

  “No need to hope,” he said over his shoulder. “Many happy things will happen to you today.”

  And then he was gone and I was alone again. I shivered and wrapped myself up in the towel and made my way back to my room.

  After breakfast we traveled to Cha’ah and I was taken to an old colonial-style country clubhouse, complete with elephants’ hoof side tables and various stuffed animal heads mounted on the walls. Outside was a pool, glimmering in the baking sun. I wanted to jump in. I wanted to do anything other than do what I was about to do.

  At the other end of the room was an old, English military man, who I had been told had served with my grandfather in the Malayan police force. His name was Roy Samson, and the second I saw him I felt impending doom. Elizabeth was intentionally keeping Roy away until the crew was ready and we were set up on a terrace outside. Then I sat listening to him regale me with tales of killing young Communist guerrillas during jungle patrols. The relish with which Roy remembered these details did not sit easy with me, and I interrupted him impatiently for information about my grandfather.

  Poor Roy, he had the air of a man who no longer got the opportunity to spout forth very often, and now, given the chance, he was doing so with loquaciousness and even glee.

  “When we killed somebody, they were brought back to the police station for display to the public for two reasons. First of all, they had to be identified, and secondly, we wanted the local population to see what happens to terrorists, to give them a deterrent, in fact, from joining them. Now these are a couple of pictures of those decorations to the police station, if I may use the term, and they became the responsibility of Tom.”

  He laid out some pictures on the raffia drinks table between us. They showed the lifeless bodies of young Asian men laid out on the ground, and just behind them, squatting in a semicircle, beaming proudly for the camera as though these young men were antelope or some other big game catch they had just taken in sport, were the British officers and their guides. Roy was amongst them. I was truly disgusted. I paused for a few moments. I wanted to get up and walk away from this man. I knew that his purpose here was to tell me something shocking about the death of my grandfather. But the way he was casually tossing down in front of me photographs of people he had killed made me worry that he would be as cavalier and insensitive about Tommy Darling’s end. My stomach had started to churn. The jet lag was kicking in again. All I wanted to do was jump into that pool that sparkled behind me.

  I gritted my teeth and held up another picture. In the foreground was a young man’s contorted body, his eyes closed, his mouth agape. Poor Tommy Darling, who had been sent to Doolally to recover from the mental damage the horrors of jungle warfare had inflicted on him, was now once more face-to-face with the worst that mankind could inflict: death, and humiliation, and hubris.

  Roy told me that this picture had been taken just outside of the Cha’ah police station. These bodies were literally dumped on my grandfather’s doorstep.

  I sat back in my chair, stunned, my mind swirling.

  I looked over at Elizabeth. She nodded. We’d discussed earlier that I should procure from Roy some general background on what life was like in the village. When I thought I’d heard enough, I would ask the question I was dying to have answered.

  I steeled myself.

  I asked Roy to tell me how my grandfather had died. I hoped the look on my face made it clear to him that I needed him to go easy.

  “Well, realize that I wasn’t there when Tom did die, so I can only tell you what the story was at the time. And that was that he was playing Russian roulette.”

  He kept talking, but my world stopped. My brow furrowed in incomprehension, and then I reeled backwards in my chair, trying to get as far away from Roy Swanson and his horrible news as I could, just as I had reeled back from my brother six weeks before on my roof deck in London.

  Russian roulette? Russian roulette?!

  I put both my hands to my forehead as though to shield my mind from more damage in Roy’s incessant barrage. Then I smiled. The smile of a man who thinks there is nothing worse that he could ever hear.

  I was suddenly very aware of the camera that was mere feet from my face. This was the bargain, of course. I had finally got to the bottom of the mystery of my grandfather’s death, but now the world would get to see me distraught, vulnerable, real. This was truly reality TV. And Roy kept talking.

  “I can tell you now that he certainly had absolutely no reason that we knew of to deliberately kill himself. And the conclusion that I arrive at personally was that he either got careless, or he ran out of luck, or both.”

  My eyes began to fill with tears, but I didn’t have time for that yet. I needed to stop Roy and get some things clear.

  “Russian roulette? People played that?” I managed.

  “You feed a round into one chamber of a revolver—” Roy began.

  “Oh, I know what it is, I know,” I interrupted.

  “And you put it to your head. I’m told that somebody who is accustomed to doing it can tell by the feel of the pistol whether the round’s at the top, opposite the barrel, or whether it’s down at the bottom.”

  I nodded for too long, and too quickly, doing my best to remain calm.

  “But was it a common thing to do, to play Russian roulette here?” I asked.

  “I think it was for Tom. He had a reputation. The story was that he’d been playing it regularly for quite some time. My CO knew about it, he told us about it, and Tom’s own immediate senior would’ve known about it. And the only conclusion I can arrive at is that Tom was so highly thought of as a police officer that they turned a blind eye to it.”

  My heart was pounding. All I could think about was Mary Darling. I have to tell this to Mary Darling.

  “I’m sorry to have to say that to you,” he continued.

  I was taken aback by his sudden kindness.

  “Oh, don’t worry. Don’t worry. I want to know,” I replied. I lied, just a little.

  “And, as I say,” he continued, the brief sliver of tenderness he had shown gone forever, “I wasn’t holding his hand at the time it happened.”

  I didn’t judge Tom Darling for a second. I just tried to put it all together in a logical way. The photos, and the way Roy had talked about killing those men, those decorations, as he’d put it, I couldn’t relate to that kind of chaos. If that was your reality, I think you’d have a completely different attitude about the value of life, including your own.

  Mostly, I was just sad that my grandfather had met his end alone, never knowing the emptiness he would leave behind. His life meant so little to him then that the thought probably never occurred to him.

  We had a somber lunch in the main room of the club. I stayed at the other end of the table from Roy and ate in silence. I had taken Elizabeth to one side before the meal and asked her if there were to be any more shocks or sad news later in the day.

  “To be honest,” I’d said, “I’m feeling really shaky and I don’t know if I can deal with any more revelations.”

  She looked at me kindly. “There will be some revelations,” she began.

  I gasped and dropped my gaze to the ground.

  “But you’ll be very pleased about them. Don’t worry,” she concluded.

  It’s really hard to talk about being famous. We live in a society that is obsessed with it, that ranks it as the best thing you could possibly achieve in your life.

  I believe social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter are an absolute product of this obsession, as they partly manufacture how it feels to be famous for people who are not. You put personal information a
nd images out into the world and the more friends or followers you obtain, the less knowledge you have of who is watching or keeping track. It’s great to feel popular of course, but there is a downside.

  Even so, most people, even friends who are close to you and privy to some of the more invasive aspects of fame, think the positive aspects far outweigh the negative and you shouldn’t grumble but thank your lucky stars when blessed by the fame fairy. And to a certain degree they are right. Being famous is mostly great. I have a really amazing life. I get to do a job I really like and I get paid really well for it and I am loved. Because I am famous I have a voice and I can help effect change. And I get loads of free stuff.

  But.

  I am constantly self-conscious. Every day I spend large amounts of time meeting or talking to people I would rather not engage with. I sometimes fear for my physical safety. Let’s leave it at that.

  In the run-up to filming Who Do You Think You Are? I thought how lucky I was to have at my disposal all these resources and teams of researchers, to be able to give this gift to my mother of solving this family mystery. I said several times that this was in fact the best thing that had ever happened to me about being famous, and I truly meant it.

  But right now, it wasn’t looking like the best thing any more. Quite the reverse, in fact. I thought back to the telegram Granny had received. It was true. Tommy Darling had died in a shooting accident. I thought of the upset I was going to have to cause when I told my mother and my uncles what kind of accident it really was, and I wished at that moment that I’d never started this odyssey.

  I felt so selfish. This was my search, and now they would have to deal with the consequences.

  But then I thought of the other quest I had been on just now. I thought about the lesson I had taken away from my father’s horrible chronicle and realized how important it is to be open, how the truth is all. And my Tommy Darling quest had been to find the truth as well. It was just that the truth was really painful right now.

  After lunch I was driven into the actual village of Cha’ah, now no longer a village but a bustling little town with no indications of the perilous past its denizens once endured. I was to meet two local men who had known Tommy Darling. They were brothers named Datuk Rahman and Haji Ali and had been children at the time my grandfather had been here. Their father had been the head of the Malay community in Cha’ah then and a very good friend of Tommy Darling’s. As I walked up the path to their front door I had a strange awareness that I was walking into a house that Tommy Darling had visited many times.

  I took my shoes off and left them on the porch before knocking on the screen door. Two little, grinning old men approached me, hands outstretched. Immediately I felt safe. We sat in the cool of their living room and they told me of their memories of my grandfather.

  “All the villagers at the time call him, in Malay, ‘Tuan Darling.’ ‘Tuan’ in Malay is ‘Sir,’” said Datuk Rahman, smiling at me through his thick-lensed glasses.

  “Every morning he used to drive at ten o’clock all the way around.” His arm shot up and traced a circle above his head. “And then another in the afternoon, all around.” Again he made the circle. “When he driving around, he see the children. ‘Tuan Darling! Tuan Darling!’ we all cried.”

  I could feel both the men’s empathy for me, and also a sense of hope that indeed they had something to share with me that would soothe my pain.

  “I mean the feeling of the people was they love him very much,” Datuk Rahman continued.

  I wanted to know why the people of this town came to like Tom Darling so much, especially since he was there only a short time before he died.

  “Well, he’s the one who used to mix up all the gangs,” said Datuk Rahman. “The leaders of the community, like my father, and a few others like the Chinese leader and Indian leader, they used to go together and have a good time. You know? They enjoyed drinking.” So, Tuan Darling liked a party and a wee drink. I could relate.

  Then I told the brothers that I had learned today how my grandfather had died. Their smiles quickly faded and their heads bowed in respect.

  They told me how they had come to find out. It had been an extraordinarily hot day. There was a river at the edge of the village, still within what had been the perimeter fence, and they had gone there to swim and had seen a man they knew to be my grandfather’s assistant at the police station washing a bloody sheet in the water. They asked him what he was doing and he told them it was the sheet that had been wrapped around the head of their precious Tuan Darling as he was rushed to hospital in the vain attempt to save his life.

  I could see that after all these years, the vision of that bloody sheet still haunted these lovely old men. We sat in silence for a moment.

  “Your father was very close with my grandfather,” I continued. “He must’ve been very upset.”

  “Yes,” nodded Haji Ali sadly.

  “Yes,” agreed his brother. “That’s why he himself put up the road name, the ‘Darling.’”

  I was incredulous. They had named a road after my grandfather? I couldn’t quite fathom exactly why I was getting so moved by a road sign, but I was.

  “Yes. Darling Walk,” smiled Datuk Rahman.

  “Darling Walk,” repeated his brother.

  “Darling Walk?” I asked again, as though I couldn’t believe such a beautiful thing could have happened after all I had heard today.

  “The local leaders here respect him, very high respect,” said Datuk Rahman, very seriously.

  “He’d done a good job.”

  I smiled at both the men and thanked them. They could not possibly know how much that last sentence resonated with me. All through my childhood, as I toiled my way through the exhaustive, insurmountable series of tasks my father would set me, I would dream that the conclusion of my work would be not the silent inspection followed by the inexorable spiral into anger and the force of his hand propelling me off balance. I dreamt that one day I would not be hit, and over his shoulder as he walked away from me I would hear my father say the words:

  “You did a good job.”

  I felt connected to Tommy Darling in ways that went beyond our common lineage. We both lacked the same thing in our childhoods—the love of a father. For different reasons, of course, but it was a shared experience nonetheless. We both sought to fill that lack in our adult lives with family and love, as everyone does, but also with thrills and sometimes periods of recklessness. Luckily, I have always come back from my recklessness. Tommy Darling did not. But I also recognized restlessness in his spirit, a need to challenge himself, that I too have experienced throughout my life. I wondered, if I didn’t have the job I have, which provides me with such thrilling, visceral release, would I be seeking those thrills in destructive ways? I know I love the rush of adrenaline pulsing through my veins. I wonder to what lengths I would go to experience it if I didn’t do what I do?

  We left the brothers’ house, and I walked with them into the center of town, where I discovered that there was not only a road named after Tommy Darling, but a park as well. The brothers proudly showed me the sign that said “Darling Walk” and we walked along the little paved road and round the “Darling Walk Recreational Park.” There was a kids’ playground, trees, people strolling happily. It all seemed right.

  The horrifying news of this morning was tempered by these new revelations. To be able to tell my mum that all these years there had been a park and a road on the other side of the world bearing her father’s name would be a sweet antidote to the shock of how he had met his end. It actually seemed so fitting that even at the very end of his life Tommy Darling touched those around him. He was a reckless man, inscrutable, but magnetic too.

  None of us had known that he had gone to Buckingham Palace to receive his Military Medal, but he had. None of us, till now, knew that he was so beautifully memorialized, but he was. He had made a huge impression on these people. He was obviously a very charismatic man.

  Once w
e’d made our little stroll the brothers took me to the exact spot where the shooting had actually happened.

  “This is the place,” said Datuk Rahman soberly.

  “This is it,” said Haji Ali.

  “The coffee shop is there,” the first brother continued, pointing across the street to a little store. “They took the beer, bring to this tent.”

  He drew an imaginary line around the perimeter of the tent that had been set up in the town square fifty-nine years ago. I pictured Tommy Darling and his cohorts finishing their patrol, getting a beer, and walking across the street for some shade in the tent. Then . . . what? I didn’t want to imagine the rest. Not here, not as I stood on the very spot. I looked around me. There was a little girl coming down the slide in the playground, and another clambering into a swing.

  It was lovely to see those children playing in the place where something so horrible had happened.

  “Your grandfather is a hero, you know. We respect him, very highly respect,” said Datuk Rahman, patting my arm gently with his hand.

  I got in the car alone. The crew had to stay behind, and I had a long trip back. I was glad to have the time to myself. I needed some time where nobody spoke to me, and nobody showed me or told me anything monumental or life changing. I was utterly drained. Thinking ahead, Elizabeth had made sure there was a bottle of wine in the backseat of the car. It was just what I needed.

  I said my good-byes to the brothers, vowing to return one day with my mother to show her this memorial to the man they so revered. I opened the bottle and raised a glass to Darling Walk as it passed by me in the dusk. And then my thoughts returned to the man himself, the man who had lived life with the volume cranked way, way up. I felt filled with love and admiration for him.

  “Here’s to you, Tommy Darling,” I said, a little teary. “You did a good job.”

  THURSDAY 1ST JULY 2010

  The next day I found myself in the Malaysian National Archives, a grand series of buildings nestled on a hill above Kuala Lumpur, where amid the hushed corridors I was told I would find documented proof to back up the revelations about my granddad’s death.