Free Not My Father's Son by Alan Cumming

that for the first time ever, I held all the cards.
    But soon that glow evaporated and I began to worry that they might not return, or worse, he would return alone and she would not be there to supply the buffer to my father’s wrath that I was counting on. I felt lonely and yet liberated. Euphoric, and afraid.
    At that time my brother Tom and his fiancée were busy creating their “bottom drawer,” a collection of household items for their life together that would be accrued throughout their engagement. Each time they bought or were given something to add to it filled me with panic, for it meant that the day Tom would leave me alone in our house was coming closer. And also I felt jealous, for each pot or bedspread was a sign of a future, other life, and a symbol of hope that I, as yet, could not imagine.
    But now, alone in a showground with people positively bursting to sell me things, and with my wages just waiting to be spent, I did something that filled my heart with joy, and surely held a deeper symbolic meaning. I bought myself a dinner service!
    I didn’t mean to. I was thirteen, after all, and not likely to be throwing any dinner parties for quite a while hence. But I needed to feel comfort, I needed to know there was a future for me that did not involve my father and a woman who was not my mother running around like schoolchildren trying to hide from me, dashing off to the back of a van carefully parked in a quiet side street. I needed to imagine a home where I would not be tormented, where I would be in control, where I would be the one inviting others into my space, and I would be providing for them. I needed to jump-start the process that my brother was embarking on, for myself.
    It took me ages to gin up the courage to bid. The stallholder said he had a half dozen of the sets to sell off at this never-to-be-repeated price, but I waited till the very end of his rant, when he’d said it was his absolute lowest offer at least ten times, and then I gingerly raised my hand. A box was almost thrown towards me. I felt people looking at me sideways, wondering why an unaccompanied child was bidding for tableware in the rain. I walked away from the crowds towards the animals’ section where I sat on a bale of hay and peered into the cardboard box of treasure, of future, that I had just acquired. Beige and bland with seventies-style flowers printed on every plate, bowl, and cup, I thought they were the most sophisticated things I had ever seen. They were my ticket out. I would be eating off them in a place where there were buses and taxis and where I would never have to wait in a public place for hours, cold and damp, wondering if my father had concluded his liaison, and if or when he would come for me.
    He did, of course. Both of them did. It was dark and the field was nearly empty and they actually had the audacity to pretend they had genuinely lost me. But I knew they were lying. The very fact that he did not explode when he saw me was immediate and total proof. And though it doesn’t give me much pleasure to say it, he wasn’t a very good actor.

NOW
    U p until very recently I still had one of the saucers from that dinner service. The rest of the set had gradually been broken or given away to charity shops during my many moves through student flats in Glasgow and marital homes there and in London. But I always hung on to that one saucer because it was a talisman of my escape to adulthood from my dark years as a child, and reminded me of the actual day when I had the first inkling that I might actually get away.
    Sadly the saucer did not survive my move to America, but I can still see it in my mind. It still glows in my heart.

SATURDAY 22 ND MAY 2010
    I woke up in the white attic and Tom was gone. I lay awake for some time, too exhausted to move.
    The day was a blur. I had lunch with Elizabeth, the director of Who Do You Think You Are?, and the only moment I acknowledged anything was wrong came at the same time