Birthright #2
For days afterwards, old memories and feelings I’d long pushed down began to emerge, and I caught myself thinking of Dad’s final act the way one thinks about an unresolved riddle.
He’d left no note, and Mom always said she never knew the reason either.
No final explanation. No apology. Nothing beyond the gun itself and the mess he’d left behind for everyone else to clear up.
And I’d never really dealt with it – not healthily anyway.
Dark humour was all I had. If anyone ever asked what my future plans were, I’d tell them I’d do the same thing as my dad before making a gun-cocking motion against my temple with my hand.
I was always met with gasps or uneasy laughs.
People never knew whether they were supposed to join in or tell me not to joke about things like that.
Most settled somewhere awkwardly in the middle.
The truth was, I enjoyed making people uncomfortable.
Or maybe enjoyed wasn’t the right word. It felt better to force the horror out into the open myself before somebody else accidentally stepped on it.
Better to turn it into a punchline than let it sit there silently between us like something rotting under the floorboards.
If I laughed first, it meant I was in control of it.
At least that was the lie I told myself.
Again, the jokes were there to hide the hard lump of something I couldn’t quite name.
Grief. Anger. Shame, maybe. Or the fear that my life would end up curving along the same lines, no matter how hard I tried to walk a different direction.
Sometimes I’d catch myself wondering whether Dad had made jokes like that too before things finally gave way inside him.
Whether anyone had laughed. Whether anyone had noticed.
Chapter Three
That night, sleep refused me. Mom went to bed early, leaving me alone in my room with my laptop and the gun on the bookshelf where I’d placed it among paperbacks and old CDs.
It looked strangely ordinary there, half-hidden between old Stephen King novels and a cracked copy of The Smiths: Singles.
Just another possession. Just another object.
I tried to watch television, but the glare made my eyes ache, and my mind was too busy.
Every time I looked away from the screen, my eyes drifted back towards the shelf.
The pistol seemed to distort the room around it somehow, pulling attention even when I actively tried not to look at it.
Eventually, I muted the television entirely, leaving only the faint electronic hiss from the speakers and the distant sound of rain tapping against the window.
I opened a blank document and began typing whatever came into my head in the hope that writing it down might pin something to the page and thereby drain it of its power.
The idea sounded ridiculous even to me, like something out of a self-help article, but I didn’t know what else to do with the thoughts circling my head.
And, unfortunately, at the centre of all of them was the gun.
It sat in the corner of my vision while I typed, dark and motionless against the shelf.
Every so often, I’d hear the soft clack of the keys and think of the sound the gun must have made in the seconds before Dad pulled the trigger.
Had there been a click? Had his hands shaken?
Had he hesitated? I found myself wondering about details I never wanted to know and couldn’t stop imagining.
You see, the morbid history of the gun didn’t start with my dad.
It had been my granddad’s first, a man I’d never met and who’d been dead long before I was born.
In my mind, he existed only in fragments – yellowing photographs, stories told after too many drinks at Christmas, and the uncomfortable silence that usually followed whenever his death came up.
He’d come home from the war with three things – a limp, night terrors, and that pistol.
Before he enlisted, according to my nana, he’d been the sort of man who could fix anything and sang along with the radio while he worked.
There were photographs of him smiling in rolled-up shirtsleeves beside motorbikes and allotments and half-finished garden walls.
In every picture, he looked solid somehow.
Present. Like a man rooted properly in his own life.
Afterwards, he sat in the dark kitchen long after everyone else had gone to bed, smoking and staring into nothing.
He drank until his words slurred and sometimes until he cried, though he would deny it the next morning with the sort of furious embarrassment men of his generation reserved for emotion.
Nana said he used to wake up shouting names she didn’t recognise.
Sometimes he’d hit the floor before he was fully awake, convinced somebody was shelling the street outside.
Other nights, he’d just wander the house sleeplessly, unable to settle anywhere for long.
Men like him were said to come back changed, as if the transformation were natural.
Expected. An acceptable toll for what they had to do.
People spoke about it the same way they spoke about old injuries or missing teeth – unfortunate, but inevitable.
Nobody asked how you were supposed to carry that sort of thing for the rest of your life afterwards.
Nobody asked what happened when the war ended for everyone except the men who’d fought in it.
He kept the pistol in a wooden box he’d made himself in the shed, sanded smooth and lined with green felt.
Nana once said he handled the thing more gently than he handled most people.
He cleaned it with a reverence bordering on worship, sitting silently at the kitchen table with strips of cloth and little bottles of oil laid out beside him while the radio muttered quietly in the background.
Dad used to watch him do it from the doorway as a child, fascinated by the ritual of it.
The slow disassembly. The smell of solvent and cigarette smoke. The care in his hands.
Then, one evening, he went into the front parlour and put the barrel in his mouth and painted the walls the same colour and brand that my dad later did in the shed.
Nana said there was blood on the wallpaper for months, no matter how hard they scrubbed.
She said the smell lingered too. Not just the blood – the burnt-metal smell underneath it.
For years afterwards, she claimed certain warm evenings would bring it back suddenly, faint but unmistakable, until she’d have to open every window in the house just to breathe properly again.
My Uncle Tony – my dad’s older brother and another member of the family I never met – found him.
What stayed with the family almost as much as the death itself was the way Tony stopped laughing after that.
Everyone mentioned it eventually when talking about him.
Not the body. Not the blood. The silence that came afterwards.
As if something essential had been switched off inside him the moment he opened that parlour door.
As the oldest, the pistol passed to him without ceremony. Nobody sat him down and declared it his responsibility. It simply became his because that was what happened in families like ours. Objects moved down bloodlines. So did damage.
Tony had apparently been everything Granddad wasn’t.
Loud, cheeky, always with a cigarette on the go and some half-shit joke ready before anyone else in the room had even realised there was a punchline coming.
There were photographs of him in flared trousers and a paisley shirt, one arm thrown round Dad’s shoulders while both of them grin at the camera with the easy confidence of men who still believed life would mostly work out.
Dad idolised him when they were young. Followed him everywhere. Then Vietnam happened.
When Tony eventually made it home, he didn’t leave his room for weeks.
Nana said he barely spoke beyond asking for cigarettes and water.
After that, he became restless in the same way Granddad had been restless.
He had nightmares like Granddad had nightmares.
He kept the lights on. He started arguments over nothing and apologised the next morning with bloodshot eyes and trembling hands.
Sometimes he disappeared for days at a time without explanation, only to turn back up exhausted and drunk and pretending everything was fine.
Dad once told Mom that Tony could never sit with his back to a door after the war.
Even in bars, he’d position himself facing the entrance like he expected somebody to come through it shooting.
And then the pistol started appearing around him more and more often.
At first, it stayed locked away in the box Granddad had made.
Then it would be sitting out on the kitchen table while Tony cleaned it.
Then beside his bed. Then tucked into the waistband of his jeans when he drank.
Nana hated the sight of it. Dad hated it too, though he apparently never admitted that aloud.
In our family, men didn’t talk about fear directly.
They circled around it through anger and silence instead.
Tony took the gun to the derelict mill on the edge of town and did what his father had done.
Dad found him. He never described the body in detail, not even to Mom, but she once told me he refused to enter abandoned buildings for the rest of his life afterwards.
The smell of damp brick and stagnant water was enough to make him physically ill.
Dad inherited the gun after that. Except, the inheritance wasn’t simply the gun; it was the act of witnessing.
***