Birthright #3
The pistol sat on my shelf while I typed.
The click of my keys seemed unnaturally loud in the quiet flat, each tap seeming to echo off the walls.
Every now and then, I would glance up at it without meaning to, my eyes dragged towards the dull sheen of the metal like a tongue probing a bad tooth.
I imagined Dad’s hands wrapping around it.
I imagined Tony’s. I imagined Granddad’s shaking slightly as he placed his thumb on the hammer.
I pictured oil-dark fingerprints pressed into the wood across decades, the same motions repeated in different rooms by different men who all ended the same way.
The pictures were disturbingly vivid. They arrived without effort, as if someone else had supplied them.
I found myself wondering how many nights each of them had spent exactly where I was – sitting awake long after everyone else had gone to bed, staring at the thing while the rest of the house slept around them.
Had Dad cleaned it in silence while I slept upstairs?
Had Tony turned it over in his hands after another nightmare?
Had Granddad sat in the dark listening to the clock tick while the pistol rested across his knees?
The thought made the room feel crowded by ghosts that weren’t really ghosts at all – just patterns repeating themselves through habit and blood.
Writing it all down felt like trying to map a pattern I didn’t want to acknowledge. Lineage usually conjures family trees and coats of arms. Mine was one of blood, brains, and a pistol.
Chapter Four
Nothing changed, or so I told myself. Life went on.
I moved out and got my own place. I went to work, drank coffee, queued at the supermarket, answered emails.
I made small talk in the break room. I went to a bar with friends.
I smoked half a cigarette on the way home because it made me feel closer to my dad in a weird way – I hated it.
Curiosity became routine. I looked up its make and model in the early hours when I couldn’t sleep.
It was a Webley self-loading pistol, British-made, first produced in 1906 for colonial officers.
There were forums where men posted photographs of their restorations.
I ordered a small cleaning kit from a militaria website because I told myself it would be irresponsible not to maintain a firearm properly, even if I never intended to fire it.
I unscrewed the grips and laid the pieces out on a towel.
I swabbed the barrel, oiled the slide, and polished the wood.
Without meaning to, I began to take it down when I was thinking.
I would set the pieces out and clean them while mulling over emails, my fingers working almost independently.
Once I realised I’d been holding the unloaded frame in my hand for half an hour while watching a repeat of a sitcom. It felt as natural as holding a pen.
I watched an amateur historian on YouTube disassemble the very same model, his hands lingering on each component as he spoke of mechanisms and metallurgy with almost religious awe.
I could describe the recoil spring in detail and, yet, I did not know why I felt compelled to take the gun down from the shelf at one in the morning when the house was silent.
Sometimes I would sit with it across my knees in the dark, not thinking anything in particular, feeling the weight of it as if it might anchor me.
I caught myself wondering if objects remember their history.
Not in a haunted way, but in the way that soil remembers what’s been buried in it.
What if trauma leaves residue? The thought made me laugh aloud at my own pretension.
And, yet, when I looked at the pistol, it was hard not to see it as saturated.
You can clean off blood and oil, but you cannot clean away meaning.
***
“Hey, it’s only me,” Mom called one Saturday after letting herself in without waiting for an answer.
I was sitting at the dining table with the pistol disassembled in front of me, the cleaning rod halfway down the barrel.
She froze in the doorway. The colour drained from her face. For a second, neither of us spoke.
“It’s not loaded,” I said, like that was the point.
“This is how it starts,” she said. “Your dad–”
“It’s not how it starts!” I snapped before I could stop myself. “I’m not going to shoot myself, Mom. I’m cleaning it.”
“Your father cleaned it. Tony cleaned it. Your granddad sat up nights and cleaned it,” she explained.
“It’s a gun! Of course they cleaned it!” I shouted, anger coming from nowhere. I put the barrel down. “So what? I should throw it in the canal? Sell it?”
She shook her head.
“I can’t see it without seeing–” she started before stopping and biting her lip. Then, more to herself than me, she said, “You’re not him.”
“Exactly!” I said, but even to my ears it sounded defensive.
“Just … promise me you’ll lock it away,” she asked, and something in her voice finally cut through my defensiveness. Not fear for herself – fear for me. The sort of exhausted fear that had probably been sitting inside her for years. I softened then and promised I would do exactly that. And I did.
I bought a small gun safe second-hand from a retired security guard on Facebook Marketplace.
Heavy steel thing with chipped grey paint and a keypad that beeped louder than seemed necessary.
I locked the pistol away inside it alongside the spare magazine and the box of old cleaning supplies I’d accumulated.
For a while, it genuinely seemed to help.
Out of sight, out of mind. The flat felt lighter without the thing sitting on a shelf watching me.
Mom relaxed too. She stopped glancing around my living room whenever she visited, stopped going quiet whenever the subject of Dad came up.
The relief in her face made me realise how long she’d been waiting for history to repeat itself.
And I told myself that was the end of it. And it was … for a while.
Chapter Five
Time passes in odd ways when you measure it by someone else’s milestones.
A decade went by. I met someone, fell in love in the mundane way people do when there are no fireworks, and married her.
We bought a semi-detached house with a toddler-sized patch of lawn.
We argued about wallpaper paste. I grew lines around my eyes that looked, in certain light, exactly like the lines around Dad’s eyes in photographs of him at my age. And, like my dad, I had a son.
The gun in the safe came with us, and I put it in the shed at the bottom of the garden, and I forgot about it as it disappeared behind tools and gardening paraphernalia. It was just a part of life, and life goes on.
***