My father didn’t die the night he left my mother and me alone in our house on the outskirts of town. No, he did not die then. Instead, he left my mother for a woman he’d met in the office where he worked. It was his job to watch over the hours kept by construction workers; it was not his job to reluctantly dole out their wages as though they came from his own pocket, but it’s said that that’s how he did it. Like my father, the woman — the daughter of the man who owned the construction business — was married at the time. But maybe she was more inclined to leave her own marriage because it was without children and the pleasure they are supposed to bring.

What happened — all that really happened — was that after he left I lay in the darkness of my room, wondering if it was not something between my father and the other woman, or between my father and my mother but, instead, something between my father and me. He may have left that night but he did not die, not then.

He died a week later, the day of my tenth birthday. At the urging of my mother — ‘Whatever you want!’ — I had made my birthday wish and I imagined that she’d be as pleased as I was if my wish — the return of my father — was granted.

But that morning, I crept down the hall and found my mother alone and weeping in her bed. I knew that the day I faced at school was one of awkwardness, and that the awkwardness would follow me after school and into a party with friends who would already know — just a week later — that I was from a ‘broken’ home and — even at the ages of nine and ten themselves — know that it meant something. Something big and insufferable.

Rather than suffer the likely day ahead, I feigned illness: stomach cramps, intense but widespread; something hard to pin down, and less pointed than the hint of appendicitis. My mother had to work that day, and I knew that there was no one on whom she could call to care for me. The greatest suffering, for both of us, was those few seconds she hovered beside my bed, that awful expression on her face as she weighed up what she would lose — or if she would even gain something — by not going to work. And my greatest joy was when she drove away; I’d never felt better. She left me with more space and silence and solitude than I had ever known. I wandered around the house, entering rooms as though for the first time. The newness of things was fixed in those moments and in those same moments disappearing, because as I left each room I felt that I would never return.

In the bathroom, the prints of my father’s fingers were smeared across the mirror from when he’d last lost himself there amid the steam. In the lounge room, the indentations of his shoes were still in the carpet, emerging from the kitchen linoleum and disappearing out onto the concrete verandah. I walked backwards through the room, reversing over his prints with long clumsy strides, until I was in the kitchen. There I saw the scuff of his shoes on the linoleum and followed it through the room to the laundry and, from the laundry, around to where his dull markings morphed into prints blurred in the hallway carpet. I continued backwards in his footsteps until I reached my parents’ — my mother’s — bedroom.

The impression of my mother’s head was still on her pillow, and on the far side of the bed, the side on which he had slept, there was no trace of my father. I had always known that to be his side of the bed and I remembered, then, what had always been under that side. I crossed the room and kneeled beside the bed and grinned foolishly, so surprised I was — no, relieved — to find that it was still there.

On my tenth birthday, I slid my father’s rifle out from under my parents’ bed, opened the drawer of the bedside table and took out a thin cardboard box, the bullets tinkling like loose change as I tipped them out onto the covers. Still dressed in my pyjamas, I stood in my parents’ bedroom and briefly thought about what had happened in my own small life, and in that moment it made perfect sense that leaving was sometimes the best thing to do. So, I loaded the rifle and went out into the backyard.

I stood there struggling under the rifle’s weight, my cheek against the stock like my father had taught me, and I sighted every window in that empty house. I sighted each window and I watched. I waited for him to show his goddamn face — I wanted him to; if he was ever to return then that was surely his moment, but he was not there for me.

My shoulder burned. The rifle became too much and the tip of the barrel fell forward, digging into the ground. I inverted the rifle and placed the butt of the stock between my bare feet and picked long blades of grass from the barrel. It reminded me of toy rifles I’d seen on television, on shows I’d watched with my father, back when he got home from work on time — the trigger was pulled and, after a puff of harmless smoke, a little flag would unfurl: Bang! Ha, ha. You’re dead. Joke’s on you. And everyone would laugh — my dad and me together.

Alone in the backyard, with the tip of the barrel right there in front of my face, I slid my hand down onto the trigger and I stared into that dark hole and fired. Ha, ha, Dad. Joke’s on you.

My father died much later, after days, weeks, months of suffering. By then his new girlfriend had left him — and not for anyone else either: she’d just left him.

He drank and smoked more than ever, and he did nothing to look after himself. He got cancer and ended up in hospital. He called my mother, desperate to have someone with him, and I heard her tell him that he’d made his own bed and it was time that he lay in it — even if he was going to have to lie in it alone.

But my mother did go and see him over his final weeks. ‘Only because he’s dying,’ she told me. His cancer was what the doctors called fungating. My mother said to think of it as a cancer that comes out of you, and at night I would lie in my bed with my hand inside my pyjama top, knuckles pushing out between the buttons, my fist like an alien bursting out of my stomach. The thought of him dying like that used to make me laugh. Ha, ha. You’re dead.

No, my father didn’t die then. My father died years later, during the Gulf War. He’d gone there as a reporter, and a convoy in which he travelled came under fire and my father was the only one to survive. He was captured, held for months and for much of that time we knew nothing — my mother was only told that he was missing. And then, one night as I sat mulling over some geography homework, there he was: barely recognisable because of the beard he’d grown or, rather, had been unable to shave off. He was saying that the war was wrong and that he would rather die for his mistake than come home to his own family. And then a man stepped into the frame and the footage froze as a pistol was held to my father’s head. I waited for a flag to unfurl from the barrel; I really thought it would, but it didn’t. No matter how many times that scene was replayed, there was no flag, no Bang!, no Ha, ha. My father died a victim of his circumstances. He died a joke that had lost its punchline.

No, my father didn’t die like that. He died much more simply. He died on my first day at high school as I walked through the maze of corridors and lockers and hormones. He died when my first girlfriend’s friend told me that she — my girlfriend — didn’t want to be my girlfriend anymore and that she — my girlfriend (but maybe her friend too) — wasn’t sure if she ever really did want to be my girlfriend. He died when I first turned the key in the ignition of the car in which he himself had learned to drive. He died the first time I ever drove that car alone, and every time I drove some girl — usually an ex-girlfriend’s friend — someplace to be alone with her, knowing that she would make me feel that if I died that night I’d at least die happy.

My father died more times than I can remember: he died the night he left my mother and me alone in our house. He died each and every time I was injured or afraid or for some reason felt that life was not worth living. He died each time I was ever a failure at anything, and he still died any time I was ever a success at something. And he died one last time the night my own son was born. That night, as I cradled my son against my chest, in awe of how he could be so small and fragile and so in need, I knew in the space of one tiny breath that I could lay down my own life for him: I knew then that a father could die for his son and, if he could, he would do it more than once.

My father still lives in the town where we were both born, the town where he has spent his whole life and where I spent all the years of my childhood — all of what I jokingly call my deformative years. Ha, ha. I haven’t been home for so long, and I can’t imagine a time when I’ll ever return.

In the end my father will surely die, and when he does he will die not knowing how I wished he’d lived.

About Patrick Cullen’s short story ‘How My Father Dies in the End’

This story was first published in New Australian Stories 2 (Scribe, 2010) and was broadcast on ABC Radio National (27/11/11).

Read more short stories by Patrick Cullen