After Sundown

by Mark Morris

  I tried to hammer out a further deal in which Tim got dressed in his school uniform before I pressed play, but couldn’t get any traction on even the broad outlines of such a proposal. Instead I settled for a good faith verbal agreement that as soon as the show finished – approximately 07:49 – we would jointly tackle the donning of clothes in a spirit of co-operation and cheerfulness.

  He watched the show. Helena tromped downstairs and made herself some tea and a piece of toast. I hovered in the background, still pyjama-clad, waiting for the TV programme to finish, like a poorly-dressed junior member of the servant classes held in limbo until the ruling classes were ready to get onto the next thing.

  The show finished. “Okay,” I said, brightly, in the tone parents use when there’s a mountain to scale but they’re determined to believe they have a chance of achieving it without heavy casualties. “Let’s get dressed! Let’s see if we can break our record!”

  And that’s where it all unravelled.

  * * *

  Tim’s school attire is simple. It involves pants, a vest, a pair of grey trousers, a greyish shirt, a tie (fastened with a piece of elastic; you don’t have to actually tie the damned thing, thank god), a sweater. And socks, of course, and shoes – but I’ll come back to those. It’s not a complicated outfit. It can be donned (as I know from the handful of times when the process has unfolded without incident), in three minutes flat.

  It can also take the whole of your life.

  Eventually, after following him around the living room, cheerleading with increasingly leaden politeness, I had him dressed (despite Tim feeling that the collar of the shirt felt “scratchy”, and taking it off again, twice). I had his teeth brushed (I wound up doing it for him, which I know I shouldn’t, but sometimes you just have to get the sodding thing done). And while my tone had become clipped, things were more or less proceeding according to plan or at least along lines of quotidian shittiness. All that remained was the socks and shoes. Or, as it’s known privately between Helena and I...

  Footwear Vietnam.

  I don’t know what the problem is. I’ve investigated every possibility I can think of, including suggesting we have Tim checked out by a doctor to ensure that he genuinely doesn’t have some kind of skin disorder or a bizarre neuralgia affecting the skin on his feet.

  The bottom line is that socks... are a problem.

  For three months Tim has complained that they have ‘lumps’ in them. These ‘lumps’ were originally only discernible once shoes had been put on over the top. He’d claim the socks felt uncomfortable, ‘lumpy’ – and would kick off, full bore: shouting, crying, yanking off his shoes and throwing them away. Over time the flashpoint slipped earlier and earlier, until the lumps began to present before the shoes went on, and eventually as soon as the socks were in place. He can now look at a pair of socks before they’re even on his feet and tell that they will have lumps when they’ve been put on.

  We can’t see or feel any lumps, naturally.

  We are inclined, if I’m absolutely honest, to believe they don’t exist. We have nonetheless bought three extra pairs of shoes, and god knows how many socks, from every outlet we can find. Some, for a time, seemed to have made a difference. There were a couple of sets from Gap which were golden, for a while, lumpless and magical.

  But then, just as you’re starting to relax and think the problem is fading, one morning those socks just don’t work anymore.

  “It doesn’t feel right,” he’ll say, kicking his legs out with sudden, spastic force. “It doesn’t feel right.”

  Full-blown hysteria is only seconds away by that point, accompanied by crying of such violence that I find it impossible to dismiss the whole thing as bad behaviour or difficulty in transitioning or merely proof of what lousy parents we are. We’ve tried coaxing. We’ve tried shouting. We’ve tried being icily polite. We’ve tried ignoring bad behaviour and rewarding good. We’ve tried massaging his feet and warming the socks on the radiator and telling him that every sock on the planet has stitching in it and that’s just the way it is and you have to get used to it. We’ve threatened to tell his teachers why he’s late every morning. We’ve actually told them. We’ve done everything we can think of, basically, and still the mornings work like this: one out of five, not too bad; two out of five, pretty bad; the other two, Total Sock Armageddon, and Footwear Vietnam.

  This morning was one of the latter kind.

  Screaming, shouting. Socks being pulled back off and thrown down the stairs, four times. In the end the two of us had to hold him down and stuff the socks back on (I don’t know if you’ve tried getting socks on a strong and semi-hysterical five-year-old, but it’s really, really hard, and can be painful, and it is a depressing and deeply crap way to start the day – especially when you love the little fucker very much and hate to see him upset, no matter how firmly you have come to suspect that the whole affair is a way of asserting power and has nothing to do with socks at all).

  Eventually I wound up carrying a shouting child out to the car without his shoes on (with me still in my pyjamas, of course, hair sticking up as crazy as you like, a real treat for the neighbours, and not for the first time) and shoving him bad-temperedly into his car seat. He banged his head very slightly on the way in, which made me feel terrible. I put on his seat belt and made sure it was secure, Helena strapped herself in, and they drove away. I stomped furiously back into the house, the time still only 8:32, and went to have a shower.

  Parenthood – it’s not for everyone.

  * * *

  Tim is a lovely child most of the time. Sweet, funny, bright and sometimes even helpful. There are these flashpoints, however, and living with them hanging over you the whole time is like playing an especially ill-advised style of Russian Roulette where instead of a single bullet, there’s only one empty chamber, and thus a very, very high chance of the whole thing kicking off.

  That sounds ludicrous, possibly, but it feels that way sometimes, because there’s just such a difference in quality of experience between a child deciding to be sweet and tractable and him or her electing to go to the Dark Side. A five-year-old on the warpath – with their total lack of care for (or absence of understanding of) punishment or incentive – can make you understand all too well why our prisons are full. The scariest thing is when incentives don’t work, the promise of sweets when they get home or a seven-hour Ben 10 marathon if they’ll just consent to you putting on their fucking shoes. Our lives are based on incentives, often hypothetical, long in coming, frankly hard to put your faith in. If incentives are not going to make you behave then you’re going to have terrible problems forging a pleasant life.

  The biggest challenge for me is nothing else seems to help. No amount of talking or shoe-buying or sock stretching/warming makes any difference – which you can’t help feeling means the whole thing must be at best psychosomatic, and possibly completely made up, a line drawn in the sand over which inter-generational strife has been pre-established and can be returned to at the drop of a hat. I have many faults but I am a fundamentally reasonable man, and a rational one. I can roll with the punches and suck it up, so long as the problems make sense. It is the forces of unreason, and irrational acts, that bring me to my knees.

  And these fucking socks.

  * * *

  Thankfully the whole episode ended on an upswing. After I’d had my shower and stomped back downstairs, I made a cup of tea and took it onto the front step for my ritual first cigarette, the time then being about 8:45. I stopped smoking in the house long before Tim was born, and now try hard not to do it anywhere near him, for any number of reasons (including having recently been sternly informed by Tim, as he observed a stranger with a cigarette in the park, that smoking was bad for the environment). As I stood on the step watching the street, I saw a few parents walking by with their own children, en route to local schools. Some of these little groups were chattin
g nicely, others passed in affable silence; some wore uniform, others smartish casual clothes.

  Then I heard the sound of childish dudgeon from the left, the source initially hidden by the next house.

  A small boy, perhaps three and a half, was first to enter the frame – cruising along on a scooter, casting an occasional glance back, as if rubber-necking a traffic accident in which no one had been hurt.

  Then his mother appeared, pulling another child reasonably gently along the pavement. This little girl – who looked to my not-very-expert eye to be around five years old, the same age as Tim – was wailing at medium volume and intensity, and hopping along.

  “I can’t do anything about it now,” the children’s mother said, a well-dressed but harried-looking blonde in her mid-thirties. “We’re late. I’ll look when we get to school.”

  The child wailed afresh, hopping with exaggerated discomfort, as though the world were a harsh and insupportable place and her mother a graceless harridan who wanted nothing but for her to suffer.

  The group slowly proceeded to the right, disappearing from view a couple of minutes later. Thank Christ, I thought. At least it’s not just us.

  The sad truth of it is that many of the better moments you have as a parent boil down to that: the promise or hope that at least it’s not just you who is making a total pig’s ear of the whole business.

  Significantly buoyed by this reassurance, I went back indoors and started my day’s work.

  At the end of which Tim came home, bursting into my study to tell me about something he’d seen out of the window on the journey home, and I picked him up and we went downstairs and watched a Ben 10 together. I remembered that a threat/promise he’d never watch the show ever again had been a core part of my attempt to get him dressed that very morning, but while sitting on the sofa, the two of us comfortable and content, I didn’t care, and there was nowhere else I wanted to be.

  At one point he looked up at me and said, as he sometimes does, “I love you, Daddy.”

  And that’s the point where you know that there’s nothing better in the world, and nothing you would not do to protect them, and how very lucky you are.

  * * *

  The next morning – Wednesday – followed about the same course. Part of the problem is that once you’ve had a bad morning you brace yourself for the run to continue, and I’m convinced that this anxiety is audible on some psychic wavelength to which children are finely tuned. They can smell your fear, basically.

  On Wednesday it didn’t even start well.

  The boiled egg went largely uneaten. My attempts to get Tim into his clothes – the six articles of which are graven in my mind, like dispiritingly tough levels of a video game that’s too hard to be any fun – were immediate failures. My son informed me that school was boring, that he didn’t care what his teachers thought if I told them about how he was behaving, and nur-nur-ne-nur-nur.

  Then he glanced up at me, with the smug look that says ‘I know that cultural mores stand against you giving me the sharp cuff around the head I so richly deserve, so let’s not even pretend you’ve got anything in your armoury, dickhead’ (or at least, that’s what the look says to me) and went running out of the room.

  So then it became:

  Chase him around the house.

  Put each item of clothing on him two or three times.

  Eventually have to carry him downstairs under my arm, screaming.

  Child deposited in the car without shoes or socks this time, strapped into seat, wailing.

  Wife drives off with stormy expression.

  Stomp back indoors.

  Helena and I broadly see eye to eye on all this stuff, including the feeling/hope that it’s just a phase, an attempt to establish power in a family where Tim is an only child faced with an army of two adults bent on oppressing him at all times. You can still get on each other’s nerves – especially when you’re tired. One parent tries to do something out of sync with the other, or accidently undermines something said out of his or her hearing, and suddenly you’re being snippy with each other, the child slipping out of your grasp, cunning enough to know that this division in the enemy ranks has given him a chance to escape, to regroup, and to take his fucking socks off for the fifth fucking time.

  I had a furious shower afterwards, then calmed myself down while making the subsequent cup of tea and rolling myself a cigarette. I actually don’t like rollies very much. The swap was intended to help me cut down. In fact, of course, it merely means I’m now incredibly good at rolling cigarettes. The extra tar and the desiccating qualities also mean that I seem to have aged more over the last nine months than in the previous three years, but this could be down to parenthood: to being woken too early every day of every week; to all of the sentences you never get to finish through being interrupted by either child, or wife admonishing child; to the swallowed frustrations and the anger that goes unexpressed; to the abused-parent daily routine of being perpetually on edge, and on your best behaviour, in the hope of prolonging an unexpectedly good burst of good humour from the child who (despite your declared intentions, and best efforts) basically rules the household.

  “Lumps?” I sometimes want to snarl at Tim, “Lumps? You want me to tell you about lumps? Try being a grown-up for a while. Try walking in my socks for a day, sonny, and see how you feel about lumps then.”

  Yes, I should give up smoking. For the sake of my child. I’ll get around to it, probably round about the time the child gets round to giving me a break.

  I took the cigarette and the tea out onto the step. I was there about the same time as I had been the day before and so the view was much the same. I did notice some kind of confrontation taking place between a red-haired mother I’ve seen before, and her boy, on the other side of the road: he stopped walking, shouted something, pointing apparently at the pavement. She kept enviably calm and used everything possible in body language to reassure him that she was on his side in whatever debate or problem he was having with reality.

  He thumped her on the arm, and there was a lot of screaming, but she held firm, and eventually he went limping after her down the street and out of sight.

  A minute later, I heard shouting from the left – and the group of three that I’d seen yesterday appeared, in eerie déjà vu. The younger child, coasting along on his scooter. The mother, looking even more tired than the day before, again dragging the elder child. She was less gentle this morning, and the girl was making a lot more noise, hobbling along in a ludicrous parody of pain.

  “I checked them three times before we left the house,” the mother snarled. “I’m not having you make me late for work again. Let’s just go.”

  The child whacked her on the back, hard, and tried to pull away. She tightened her grip, pulled to a standstill just outside the gate to our path.

  “It doesn’t feel right,” the child wailed, evidently not for the first time. “It doesn’t feel right.”

  The woman opened her mouth. I could feel from fifteen feet away just how much she wanted to shout at her, to tell her daughter to stop making it up, to stop being such a little shit. Then she caught sight of me, standing on my step, and her mouth closed like a trap.

  I shrugged, with a half-smile, trying to load both actions with as much ‘Sister, I’ve been there and I share your pain’ as possible.

  She smiled back, but it was a short, sad expression. It’s quite good when another parent signals that they know the score, but it’s not great. You feel that you should be able to do all this stuff effortlessly. You don’t want sympathy, however well meant – you want admiration for how well it’s going.

  Eventually she dragged her daughter out of sight.

  I went indoors. Worked.

  The day passed.

  * * *

  Thursday was about the same as Wednesday. At one point, having caught him as he tried to dod
ge past me on the main landing, I sat Tim roughly down on the stair and asked him straight out, “Why are you doing this? Do you enjoy the attention, the drama? Do you think you’re winning something?” He shouted back that his socks were lumpy, and it didn’t feel right – nebulous but battle-tested weapons for which he knew I had no defence. He wrenched away and ran into my study, where he threw himself on the ground and writhed, yanking his socks off, again.

  Fifteen minutes later a wild-haired man in a dressing gown – yes, that would be me – carried his kid out to the car once more, stuffed him into his child seat, and made sure his seat belt was secure. Helena had seen me do everything in my power to keep an even temper, and when she caught my eye through the windshield as she started to drive off there was no tetchiness there. Merely tiredness, sadness and a slight look of fear.

  I knew what she was thinking, because the same thought was going through my own head:

  Is it always going to be like this? Is this what our lives are now, perpetual skirmishes, this endless trench warfare leavened with unpredictable moments of ineffable love, the battle lines doubtless changing as he gets older, but with no cease-fire ever in sight?

  I gave her a smile, and tried to make it a big one. She did the same, and off they went.

  We weren’t the only ones having those thoughts that morning, I suspect. Red-haired mother was having more trouble than the day before, too. Her child lay down on the pavement for a while, kicking at her, shouting. It took her ten minutes to get him back upright and tug him along the road.

  The weird thing was that something almost identical happened with another kid, moments later – another boy ranting about his feet, at a brunette woman I’d never seen (or never noticed) before. She managed to get him past, eventually. I’d finished my cigarette and was turning to head back indoors when I heard the sound of a voice I now recognised.