I continue my snore, knowing already that it’s pointless. He begins pulling at my cheek, stretching it like pizza dough as far as it will go. It hurts. I open my eyes and murmur. He smiles and whispers, “Hi, Daddy.”
He knows not to speak too loudly in the morning. He doesn’t want to risk waking Lisa. She’s not really what you’d call a morning person. I smile back, and he kneels down by the edge of the bed and hugs my head.
“Come on then,” I whisper, getting out of bed as quietly as possible. I pull the cover over Lisa and take Oscar by the hand. He goes out onto the landing and I gently close the door behind me.
We go downstairs and into the kitchen. I notice the clock, which tells me it’s just after six thirty. My heart sinks. I pull open the blind and I am surprised to see that the snow is continuing to fall.
“Look,” Oscar says, pointing excitedly outside. “Wow!” I say.
“Can we go out and play in it, Daddy?” “’Course we can,” I say, “after breakfast.” “Aaaw,” he says. “I want to go out now.”
“It’s too early. You’ll wake the neighbours up.” “I’ll be quiet,” Oscar says, his voice getting louder. I close the kitchen door.
“It’s too early, after breakfast.”
“I promise I won’t be noisy.”
“After breakfast,” I say more firmly.
“I will be quiet. I promise.”
“We’ll eat first, then we’ll go out and play.” “But I want to go out now,” he whines. “No, Oscar, okay? After breakfast.”
He sticks his tongue out and glares at me.
“Enough of that as well,” I say.
The next fifteen minutes are spent in near-silence while I prepare breakfast. Oscar swings on a leather chair at the table. Each time the metal legs collide with the tiled floor it sounds like a crack of thunder.
I try to begin little pockets of conversation by asking Oscar questions I already know the answer to: “Do you want butter?” and “Do you want the eggs runny?” and “Do you want to build a snowman?” I am hoping that my questions may keep him from one of his tantrums. He answers each question with a nod, a look of disgust on his face.
Whilst I wait for the eggs to boil, I realise that a number of emotional states are associated with eggs and cooking in general. I begin to make a mental list. I’m not sure why.
Egg on your face. Boiling over.
Simmer down.
We eat breakfast in the dining room. There is a television in there, and if we have it on quietly Lisa won’t be able to hear it in the room above. Strangely, she doesn’t approve of television at the children’s mealtimes. She says that mealtimes together are a time we should chat and bond.
Oscar dips his toast into his egg and purposefully wipes it around his mouth. His upper lip and chin are covered with sticky yellow yolk dotted with hundreds of tiny crumbs. They remind me of full stops. He smiles smugly at me through partially closed eyes. He is obviously pleased with himself. Right now, he is the last person on earth I want to bond with.
I turn on the television and flick through the channels until I find a show that Oscar likes. It’s about a train driver and his adventures. I stand between Oscar and the television in the corner of the room. He stretches his body, holding on to the back of the chair with one hand, trying to see past me.
“No,” I say, holding up my finger, “not until you’ve eaten.” I resist the temptation to end the sentence with ‘you little jerk’.
Oscar sighs and turns to his plate. I stay where I am. I watch as he rolls his soldiers up like sleeping bags and posts each into his mouth. While he chews he removes shell from his egg with his fingers. He posts the entire egg into his mouth. I can hear bits of shell cracking between his teeth.
When he has finished chewing, he swallows and takes a large drink of his milk. Then he smiles at me, a self-satisfied smile that has all the hallmarks of a ‘fuck you’. His feet are already on the floor by the time he asks if he can leave the table. I nod, and he curls up in one of the two high-backed chairs that face the television. I get a blanket from the blanket box and place it over him.
I return to the table and sit down to eat my egg. I find the school newsletter in a small pile of papers in the centre of the table, but it’s slightly too dark to be able to read it. I consider, but quickly discount, opening the blinds in the bay window. I don’t want Oscar to be reminded of the snow again.
I sit at the end of table, stare at the closed blinds and think about the monotony of the life I have chosen.
Cracking up.
There’s another emotional egg reference.
CHAPTER_NINE
The pendulum smashes through the side of the clock and embeds itself into the wall.
The dining room door flies open with such force that I’m surprised the glass doesn’t shatter on impact. I imagine a slight pause, and then the glass breaking from top to bottom and falling neatly onto the carpet. Instead, the hinges groan and the door vibrates violently.
Hannah walks into the room. Her pyjama top is rolled up and I can see her tummy button. She is holding something wrapped inside her top. Her face is bright red, her eyes puffy.
“Where is he?” she demands.
“Shh,” I say, pointing to the ceiling. “Mum’s in bed.”
She lowers her voice and through her sobs she repeats the question. I get up out of my chair and push the door to. I press the light switch and the mock chandelier bursts into life. Two of the five bulbs illuminate. Another one of Lisa’s unfinished tasks.
“Come and sit down,” I say to Hannah. “What’s the matter?” Hannah comes over and climbs onto the chair next to me. She stands up and lets her pyjama top unfurl. One by one, they drop from her top onto the table – my plate is suddenly covered in crumbs, shell and semi-naked dolls. It’s an unusual sight. “What’s the matter?” I say.
“Look at them,” she sobs. I notice that the neck of her pyjama top is wet with tears.
The dolls are jumbled in a pile and I pick the one on top and hold it up. Hannah’s problem is instantly recognisable. Where the flowing hair once was are thirty or more holes. The top of the doll’s head looks like a colander. With patches of weeds growing through. Even without the hair, I can tell I picked Martha. She has a hardness in her eyes that says she selected something far more exciting in the “choose your life” store. I empathise.
I look up at Hannah, then down at the dolls. Martha is not an isolated incident.
“What happened?” I say, already knowing the answer. “Well,” spits Hannah, “I didn’t cut their hair.”
I imagine Oscar pulling himself into a tight ball under the blanket. From where we are sitting he is out of view, on the other side of the high-backed chair.
“So who did?” I say.
I’m simply delaying the inevitable. Hannah’s expression turns from distress to anger in less than a second as somehow she learns he is in the room. Perhaps she can smell blood. And then she’s down, off the chair and across the room. For a moment she disappears entirely as she launches herself over the back of the chair on which Oscar is sitting. I hear him scream, and then all I can see are legs and arms and blanket from above the chair, sticking out from each side and then disappearing again. And then I see Martha, bald and stripped of her dignity, being repeatedly whipped backwards through the air before being brought down on Oscar’s head.
I get up from my chair and rush across the room. I manage to separate them, and lift Hannah onto the rug near the fire. Oscar is spread-eagled on the chair, screaming.
“You, stay there,” I say to Hannah firmly. Her chest pumps in and out in time with her shoulders rising and falling. She is gripping Martha incredibly tightly.
I collect Oscar from the chair and try to settle him. I hold him in my arms, face to my chest to mute his screaming. I don’t want to wake Lisa up at this time. I suddenly realise that I don’t actually know what time it is. I look at the television and note the time in the bottom corner of the screen
.
It’s 7.50 a.m.
Jesus.
I wish someone was holding me and calming my tears.
CHAPTER_TEN
The crack in the wall seems to be getting bigger.
It takes me ten minutes to finally get Oscar’s breathing back to an acceptable level. Once I am sure that he won’t let out a random loud scream, I carry him through to the kitchen. Hannah trails behind.
I place him on the table and get a flannel to wipe his face. On it is a combination of snot, tears, undefined slime (not sure), crumbs, egg and milk. The colour reminds me of the delights sold in the new smoothie shop that has opened near where I work. It just needs the addition of nettle leaves.
He winces as I wipe his face, and once he is clean I survey the damage. Such was the ferocity of the attack, a lump is quickly developing on his forehead and I can be sure that at least one of his eyes will bruise and eventually blacken. There is little chance of keeping the battle from Lisa, as I had hoped. “Aren’t you brave?” I ask him. (I know from experience ‘Are you okay?’ would have brought about more tears.)
He nods. I smile and turn to Hannah. “That wasn’t very nice, Hannah,” I say. “I didn’t even hit him,” she says.
For a moment, I am stunned. Hannah stands before me, still holding the weapon, and is denying an incident that I have just witnessed. And then I realise that as a race we are preconditioned to lie. To save ourselves. Look after number one.
We quickly recognise and store the incidents and outcomes. The cause and effect. And then we categorically lie to change the outcome-to-be in our favour. What we don’t consider is that everybody is doing this, and therefore storing the same incidents and outcomes. Just like I do here.
“Yes, you did,” I say. “I didn’t,” she says.
“I saw you. I stood and watched you do it.”
“You did,” snarls Oscar.
Hannah turns to him. “No, I didn’t, Oscar.”
“I saw you, Hannah. Why are you lying?” I say.
She begins to cry and tosses Martha to the floor. Martha skittles under the kitchen table to where Cliff is lying. He wakes, sniffs her and then closes his eyes again. He obviously doesn’t approve of her new look.
“Answer me.” Hannah shrugs. “Say sorry to Oscar.”
Tears roll over her cheeks. “Sorry.”
I take them both into the lounge and tell them where to sit. Oscar gets to sit on top of the atlas in my chair. Hannah sits at the far end of the sofa near the window. I sit centrally on the sofa, equidistant between the two. Keeping them apart like a circus lion tamer.
It takes the best part of the next hour for us to get to the stage where I feel comfortable having Hannah and Oscar in the same room. There have been a few false alarms; swift movements that I, rightly in my opinion, took as impending attacks. As it happened it was simply Hannah was reaching for a different coloured pencil from her pencil case. You can never be too vigilant when the lounge is in a state of high alert.
I’ve kept Hannah within reach of me, just in case she makes a frenzied dash across the room to pummel Oscar again. She holds Martha in her left hand, a pencil in her right. The television provides the entertainment for Oscar. It’s showing a programme about a boy who turns into ten different aliens. Admittedly, I’ve not been an avid viewer since the first season, but it strikes me as odd that none of his friends at school seem to bat an eyelid when the boy suddenly transforms into a seven-foot lizard. I bet that takes some explaining at parents’ evening.
Before I became a father, I had the very best of intentions with regard to my children’s upbringing. I wasn’t going to be like the other war-weary parents who had already gone through the toddler years. I used to listen to them speak and, inside at least, mock them for their lack of parenting skills. I wasn’t going to plonk my kids down in front of the television for my own respite. No, this would be selfish in the extreme. This would be like admitting that I couldn’t parent. Of course, I wouldn’t do that. Instead, we’d fill every minute of every day we had together with good, wholesome activities. We’d bake and go on nature walks and study the solar system and visit castles and draw and trace and colour and build with Lego and camp out in the woods and catch fish and…well, you get the picture.
I had every confidence that for me and my children, it would be different. But what I hadn’t realised was that there is one common thread that weaves the patchwork quilt of memories together. And without that thread everything falls apart. Naively, in my expectation of how the future would be I had made one terrible assumption. The assumption that the children would be vaguely interested in doing any of those wholesome activities.
I spent weekends struggling to force Hannah into the car to walk around the ruins of a castle or an RSPB nature reserve. You should have witnessed the horror on her face at even the mention of another trip to the National Coal Mining Museum. And so, by the time Oscar arrived I had all but given up on wholesome. It was so much easier to turn on the television, and on a good day you could replace an hour and half of moaning and crying with a movie accompanied by contented silence. Seriously, which would you choose?
I suddenly feel extremely guilty for my lack of parental perseverance, and leap up from the sofa and open the curtains. I am overtly trying to inject wholesome back into the room. As the room brightens both Hannah and Oscar look up.
“It’s still snowing, Daddy,” Oscar remembers.
Hannah lets out an excitable little scream. Her pencils and colouring book slide off her knee onto the floor as she jumps up and pushes her face to the patio doors. I notice she has relinquished Martha and I push the doll deep down between the sofa cushions. Out of sight, out of mind. Oscar leaps from his chair and runs over to the patio doors. Hannah puts an arm around him and asks him if he wants to help her build a snowman. He does. All is well.
We sit and watch the snow coming down outside. The back garden is entirely covered in white and I devise a game whereby each of them points to a white shape and tries to guess what is underneath the thick pile of snow. The game continues for a good half an hour until I can tell Hannah is beginning to get fed up with Oscar’s admittedly unusual answers. The final straw comes when he incorrectly identifies the bird table as a robot (he has already guessed that the shape of the wheelbarrow is a peanut). I can just sense the atmosphere changing: it is time for another shift in activity.
The clock on the mantelpiece tells me that it’s now ten past nine, and I realise that I have exhausted all my excuses about making our way outside. The children jump around excitedly and I have to quieten them down before we tiptoe through the hall. It’s still only early and Lisa will appreciate a little more sleep yet.
There is a small lean-to extension that adjoins the external kitchen door. The extension is no more than a metre and a half wide and three metres long, and a further external door leads into the garden. The extension was already built when we moved into this house just under two years ago. I am told that the previous occupant used it as a little nursery to seed his bedding plants and the like. We use it to store everything we cannot bear to look at on a daily basis.
Along the walls are numerous pegs covered with what Lisa calls the non-everyday clothes. Coats, bags (not strictly clothes, I know), cardigans and hoodies bulge out from the wall, narrowing the walkable space by half. Beneath the coats are three metres of wellies, shoes, boots, trainers, flip-flops and one pair of flippers (I kid you not). The rest of the floor space is filled with children’s bikes and outdoor toys, a barbeque, a couple of small paint-splattered stools and some undefined black sacks. As you might expect, space is at a premium. Especially when three of us are trying to get our all-weather hiking trousers on along with our hats and scarves and gloves and coats and wellies.
I am surprised that we don’t get further tears from Oscar, when, unsurprisingly, he gets the sleeve of his coat caught in a bicycle brake cable, causing him to fall headlong into a half-opened bag of charcoal briquettes. I pick him u
p and nervously spin him around, hoping that the face I am greeted with is happy. It is difficult to see but there appear to be no tears beneath the thick layer of coal dust that covers one side of his face. Our tempers rise in direct correlation with our body heat. It’s too hot in here, especially in four layers of arctic-proof clothing.
Hannah tries to push her way past Oscar in a vain attempt to make it to the door, but manages to wedge her welly in an orange bucket. I unzip the top of my coat and loosen my scarf. I squeeze past Oscar and kneel to remove the bucket. After a little struggling, I finally manage to loosen Hannah’s foot and get the back door unlocked. I pull the handle down and we are greeted with a refreshing icy blast from outside. I let the children race into the snow and I lie on the floor for a moment to catch my breath. The toe of one of Lisa’s Doc Martens sticks into the small of my back, so I roll over and pull myself to my feet.
I close the door behind me and watch the kids for a moment as they race down the length of the garden. I am surprised that Oscar has made as much progress as he has; the snow must be at least a foot deep and comes up to his waist. Hannah has climbed to the top of the slide and calls for me to watch her. I nod and wave. The thick snowflakes have already begun to stick to my gloves.
The morning air is crisp, and aside from the distant hum of the motorway, the world is quiet. This is what I subscribed to. This is the wholesome dream. Suddenly, the beauty of the world surrounds me. It feels like the planet has returned to its original state, when time began. A blank white canvas. The sky and the earth are the same colour. It’s almost as if you could start from here and design everything afresh. The children’s faces are already lit in bright crimson by the cold. They run and slide and play, and I stand and watch.
They shout for me to play with them, and although I can hear them they sound muffled. I just stand and stare. Content at that moment with everything. It’s not until Hannah is right alongside me, pulling at my glove, that I return to the here and now.
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