The old man doesn’t always use his dragonstick. Some days he walks straight and tall and swings his long arms and draws breath into his lungs and puts his shoulders back. Those are the days when he talks about what life was like when he was young, how his father made him work hard for every penny he paid him, dammit. How there was no such thing as running to parents for help, asking, begging, crying like a baby, always needing a little more. Just this once, please, Father.
I warned him, didn’t I?
He waits until Mum nods her head, and then he goes on.
When I say last time, I mean last time. You’d better remember that, boy. Enough is ebloodynough, that’s what I said to him. I’m not pouring more good money after bad. And look at me now, wasting more of my hard-earned savings on his little buggers.
And now he’s pushing his chair away from the table, walking out of the room, leaving the dragonstick behind him.
Some days he’s bent, his hand gripping the dragonhead, knuckles white with effort. He snarls more, snaps more. Gabriel looks forward to those days, feeling a small spurt of happiness when he sees that even a man as hard and strong as this one is can feel pain.
Some days, Gabriel thinks, he simply likes the fear he sees in Gabriel’s eyes when the stick hisses close to his leg, likes to see him wince as it nicks the skin of his calf, catches him between his ankles. That’s the only time Gabriel ever hears him laughing.
And some nights, the old man tap-drags his way to their room. He cracks the stick across the headboard of Mum’s bed, or whacks it into her pillow and Mum startles out of bed to scrub a floor that’s already clean, to wipe down picture frames that have gathered dust that only his old-man eyes can see.
Gabriel has learnt to keep his eyes closed as the old man shouts, Out of bed, woman. He lies quiet in the dark, waiting for Mum to come back. He waits for her to lean over his bed and say, It’s all right, I’m all right. You go back to sleep now.
Some nights Gabriel hears the old man tap-dragging after Mum, hears his voice cracking out more orders, more instructions to Do it right, otherwise we’ll just have to go back to square one.
Some nights he leaves the dragonstick behind him, and Gabriel stares into the dragon’s eyes. They burn red in the night, but nothing can burn as fiercely as the hatred raging inside Gabriel as he listens to the sound of his mother trying so hard to do it all right.