‘You’ve got no empathy for the guy at all,’ Chris said. ‘His parents died and they put him in a boys’ home atsix years old. Do you know what used to happen to little kids in those homes back in the day?’
I didn’t answer.
‘What about if you, like, thought about Pop as a guy. As just some guy. You’d see his story is actually really sad, Dad. His wife killed herself and left him with two young sons to raise all alone,’ Chris went on. ‘Can’t you have any forgiveness?’
‘I can’t believe I’m listening to this,’ I murmured.
‘You ought to go on TikTok and look up “intergenerational trauma”, and, like, see what you think about him after ten fucking minutes of self-education.’ Chris shook his head. ‘Check out “covert narcissism” while you’re at it.’
Empathy. Intergenerational trauma. Covert narcissism. I was biting the inside of my cheek without knowing it, only realised when I tasted the blood. I spotted the ancestry DNA kit box on the edge of the desk, by a pile of tissues and an empty bowl lined with furry mould and old lumps of puffed rice. My pulse quickened as I reached over and plucked it up. ‘I’m sitting here wondering if this isn’t all connected, Chris. If maybe you went to Redbelly because you were meeting my father there. The Redbelly pub is a weird place for a kid to hang out. It’s usually locals and older people there. But it’s halfway between Mangrove Mountain and Maroota, and here you are, suddenly a little spokesperson for Arthur Powder.’
‘I’m disengaging from this conversation.’ Chris sighed.
‘You know you’re not supposed to be alone with your grandfather.’
‘Why?’ He looked at me, his eyes big and wild and defiant. ‘What happened at the farm was my fault.’
I put the ancestry kit box in my lap so I could hold my head. I had known, deep down inside, that Chris felt that way about an incident that had occurred between him and my father a couple of years earlier. But I’d never actually heard him say it.
It had been the anniversary of Russell’s coming out. November. Heading into Christmas. A touchy time for any toxic family. Arthur had been calling me drunk every few nights, ranting about Russell, wanting to know if I’d known, if I’d ever had any hint. Wanting to explain to me that it was our mother’s suicide when Russell was eight and I was four that had caused all of this. Because she’d known that shooting herself in one of the back sheds on that particular day, at that particular time, would mean that Russell would be the one to get home from school early and find her, and not Dad. The suicide had warped Russell’s mind, caused him to be unable to tolerate having a beautiful, loving, nuclear family. ‘He had to find a way to fuck it up,’ Dad had rambled. ‘This whole gay thing is just the biggest way he could think of to drop the bomb and blow up his family.’
‘Dad, I’m pretty sure that’s not how homosexuality works,’ I’d said dryly. ‘At all.’
I couldn’t tell, during these calls, whether Arthur was crying or not. His voice sounded husky and thin and worryingly old. When he’d begun asking about Chris, I’d relented and suggested Chris go out there for a day to help him with some mowing. My thinking had been that Arthur was learning something. That he was seeing the error of his ways. That maybe he was feeling some actual human emotions, like remorse, and regret, and sadness, and aching through the great empty silence that Rus had left in his life, the same way I was. It was far too late for Arthur to be a decent father to Russell and me. But maybe there was some way he could heal—and through that, I could heal—by his forming a healthy relationship with Chris.
I’d sent Chris, defying Delle, who had misgivings about the whole thing. A mother’s instinct. Chris had lasted at my father’s farm for about an hour before calling me, near hysterical, to come pick him up. In a series of breathless confessions, Chris told us thatArthur had taken him straight to the back sheds almost as soon as I departed after dropping him off. The old man told the boy the lawns could wait, because he wanted help to cull his entire coop full of chickens so he could pluck and gut and freeze them. The old man had just bought a new deep freezer second hand, and he was sick of caring for the birds. As my thirteen-year-old son stood and watched, my father started grabbing and beheading chickens with an axe on an old sawn-down slab of tree stump, tossing the dead birds aside, working through them swiftly. All the while he encouraged Chris to participate, getting steadily angrier and angrier when he wouldn’t. Chris’s reaction to the scene had sent Arthur into a flaming, spitting rage, and he’d brandished the axe at my kid, bloody and manic. Delle and I sat numbly and listened to the tale in the car on the side of the road not far from my father’s house. My biggest concern in sending Chris to his grandfather’s to mow the lawn had been the possibility of snakes.
I spent that whole night shifting between Chris’s bedroom and mine and Delle’s. Delle was in a fury, and I was trying to convince her that hunting and killing animals on farms was a perfectly natural activity, something we’d done an awful lot as kids, and that my father had been well-meaning but deeply mistaken about Chris’s ability to witness something like that. In Chris’s room, I just held the boy, who shook and cried from sundown to sun-up.
‘What happened was not your fault,’ I said now. ‘But it was a lesson, Chris. That there’s nothing for you to gain from looking backwards into our family. Okay? I’d really like it if you didn’t do this ancestry kit thing.’
‘Nope.’
‘I am very happy to replace this gift with something else, Chris.’ I told myself not to plead. To hint at the importance of it all. Like showing fear to a dog. ‘I’ll get you a PS5.’
‘Get me a PS5 anyway.’ Chris snorted.
‘You’re opening a door on something very dark.’ My voice trembled. ‘Okay? This would be very, very dark for me. I don’t want to go on a nice long journey into my family’s history. I don’t want you to do it either. I would consider it a real gift, a realfavour,Chrissy, if you just put this away somewhere.’ I shook the box. ‘Just for a few years, even.’
‘Why areyouthe one getting gifts onmybirthday?’
I had to bite back the rage. Sat, trembling, trying to contain it. ‘Okay. Look, if I haven’t convinced you, then let’s open it.’
‘No way.’ Chris shook his head. ‘I want to do it at Naomi’s. She wants to watch, because she’s thinking of—’
‘I really want to open it now, Chris.’ I was right on the edge. My pulse thumping in my jugular. ‘I want to read the pamphlet and see what’s involved.’
‘So go to the website.’
‘Open the box.’
‘Come on, Dad.’
‘Open the fucking box, Chris.’
The boy gave me a look. Reached over, snatched the box out of my hand. Picked weakly at the sticker with a painted fingernail, drawing out the process. I snatched the box back and took my car keys out of my pocket, slashed the sticker, fumbled to open the box. Right under the pamphlet that was resting on the box’s contents, I spotted them. Two plastic vials, sitting in vacuum-sealed baggies. I waved the pamphlet at the kid. ‘I’m just going to have a little read.’
‘Knock yourself out.’ Chrissy hammered some words into the chat. Reduced the font size so it was unreadable from where I was sitting. ‘I hope it’s very informative.’
