Not My Father's Son Read Online Free Page A

to ride without the training wheels soon, I am bent over his knee, feel the blast of freezing air around my genitals, and then severe, painful slaps to my behind.
    I don’t remember how it ended. What I do remember is my mum washing me and getting me ready for bed in front of the living room fire later that night, and her gasping as she saw the ring of blue, black, and purple bruises that had appeared. My father came in to say good-bye before he went out for the night, and my mother admonished him for his handiwork.
    “He’s all right,” he said, running a comb through his hair as he looked in the mirror.
    “You’ve gone too far, Ali,” my mum replied as he disappeared out the door.
    Aside from visits to family, our holidays together were mostly to caravan (or RV) parks in seaside towns in other parts of Scotland. I remember when I was about seven we went to Dunbar on the southeast coast and I got to play on the go-carts.

    This is a photo of me, beaming in my shorts and crew cut, looking towards my mother and my father, who most likely took the picture. So it’s not that every second of my childhood was filled with doom. But every second was filled with the possibility that in an instant my father’s mood would plunge into irrationality, rage, and ultimately violence. This very feeling, this possibility, is what darkens the part of my mind where my childhood stories live.
    It’s hard to explain how much that feeling of the bottom potentially falling out at any moment takes its toll. It makes you anxious, of course, and constant anxiety is impossible for the body to handle. So you develop a coping mechanism, and for us that meant shutting down.
    Everything we liked or wanted or felt joy in had to be hidden or suppressed. I’m sad to say that this method works. If you don’t give as much credence or value to whatever it is that you love, it hurts less when it is inevitably taken from you.
    I had to pretend I had no joy. It will come as a shock to people who know me now, but being able to express joy was something it took me a long time to be confident enough to do. I’ve certainly made up for it since, and for this, I am proud and grateful.
    Like any tyrant, my father was an expert at knowing how to hurt you most effectively and quickly. If Tom or I became too keen on any hobby or person, our father would ensure that they were removed from our lives instantly. Tom was a great soccer player, and played for a local boys’ club. Eventually he began to receive interest from a professional team’s scouts. Immediately our father banned him from attending the soccer club altogether. I had a friend from school who lived in a local village, an arty girl who played the harp and whose parents were doctors. My father became convinced, based upon nothing more than a look in her eyes, that she was a drug addict, and I was never allowed to see her again. Both instances, I realize now, screamed of my father’s insecurities—of me mixing with educated people whom he felt he could not relate to, and of Tom succeeding in a field in which our father himself once had aspirations.
    His actual violence towards us rarely lasted beyond one or two really hard whacks, the odd kick. I actually think the prolonged period of tension before landing his blows, as we were systematically inspected, chided, and humiliated, had a far worse effect than the actual hits. This certainly contributed more to our need to shut down, as we all learned early that the best way to cope in that time when his ire was building and his cruelty unfurling was to give nothing away, to try and become nothing, the nothing he both thought of us and wanted us to remain.
    But looking back from the vantage point of adulthood, I see that there was a definite sea change in my father’s behavior.
    I think I was about eight or nine. Something transformed in him. He had always been prone to outbursts of rage, but now a darkness descended upon him that meant the glimmers of