Stronger Than Skin

by Stephen May

  I can’t hear the actual words, they are lost in the wind, but I can imagine them. Get rid. If in doubt, put it out. All that.

  It’s advice they sorely need too. Barton Street are all over the place. Even watching the game through binoculars from four hundred yards away I can see this. Barton Street aren’t really playing football at all. They are simply chasing the ball the way puppies would, and not athletic puppies either. No greyhound pups these. They look like a breathless pack of mongrel terriers. Up for it but incapable of keeping any kind of shape.

  Jack is having a particularly bad game. He’s covering a lot of ground, yes, but he’s doing it running alongside the opposition players when they have the ball. He’s not challenging the beefy forwards so much as pacemaking for them. Keeping them company as they make an uncontested journey towards the goal he’s meant to be defending.

  It’s like he’s suffering from a sudden and inappropriate excess of politeness. After you, he seems to be saying – do go ahead old man. I watch as a burly lad from St James’s trundles past my son, unhindered, the ball at his feet. It’s weird because Jack is not like this at the Saturday morning judo. He gets stuck right in there, often felling much bigger boys in seconds.

  I wish I was down there, wish I could shout with the other dads. Not that it would do much good. The shouts from the other parents don’t seem to be working after all. It’s painful to watch. But at least I am here. It’s the first I’ve seen of my kids for five days. It’s the longest I’ve ever gone without seeing them.

  I move my binoculars across now to take another look at Katy. She’s just chatting with the other parents and she looks completely comfortable and at ease. And very pregnant. She looks as if she could pop any minute.

  She looks well too, though it’s hard to tell things like skin tone from all the way up here, even with these ex-army field glasses that Jake found for me. They were his dad’s apparently, he was a corporal in the Royal Artillery and they still have real live Gulf War desert dust on the lenses.

  As I watch, I see a chunky lad thump a ball from midway in the Barton Street half. Jack jumps out of the way, the unsighted goalie fumbles it and the boys from St James’s have scored again. I make that five with three minutes of the first-half remaining. It is even possible I missed a goal or two. Depressing.

  I am watching the game from a car park that conveniently overlooks the football field, well beyond the boundary of the school. I’m hidden by a screen of mature trees.

  I am taking a risk I know, but it had all seemed worth it when I’d seen little Jack run out with his teammates. They’d looked good too. In what now seems like astonishing hubris Barton Street Academy are wearing the golden shirts, sky blue shorts and white socks of Brazil.

  From here I can see Claude, gesticulating madly. Even from this distance I can see he is incandescent. Katy’s dad is a retired PE teacher, and in his day school football meant an introduction into an adult world, no concessions made to the delicate bones of children. No taking care of their fragile hearts. If they’re playing rubbish they come off. No messing. Didn’t do him any harm, that’s what he’d say.

  There’s at least one police officer here watching the game too, with a panda car parked close to the touchline, and at first I’m irritated. Can’t you even let my boy play soccer without spying on him? Then it makes me think.

  Anyway, I have seen enough, time to go. I move out from under my cover and cycle off towards Haverstock Road. Where, just as I’d hoped, there is, for once, no police issue Astra outside my house. No resources to watch two places at once. Not these days.

  26

  When I am as sure as I can be that the coast really is clear, I wheel the bike briskly to the back door, keeping my head down. I am so nervous and in so much of a hurry that as soon as I retrieve the spare keys from under the pot, I drop them again. I take a slow, deliberate breath. Steady myself. Remind myself how I’m going to play this. It’s just going to be in then out. Do the thing, then go. A surgical strike. No more than two minutes.

  I’ve psyched myself up for this, but still I’m unprepared for how the house spooks me, how much it hurts to be back after five days away. The dishwasher full of plates and bowls inefficiently stacked, the washing machine full of clothes. I get a cramp in my stomach. A sudden pain in my chest. I move through the house, touching cushions and prints. I go to look at the kids’ rooms.

  Jack’s curtains are closed and in the watery light that filters through, it takes a few moments to make out all the figures on the floor. Legolas and Aragorn, Gandalf and the Goblin King, various Doctor Whos. A couple of Luke Skywalkers, a moodily youthful five-inch-high Indiana Jones. Knights, wizards, dragons, wolves, but also, incongruously, some innocuous farm animals. A jersey cow, a sheep, a goat. Some 00 scale chickens.

  Jack’s games are always epic, a never-ending story of quests and battles and magic. Warriors striding clear-eyed into forests and fires. Heroes battling ancient curses, fighting fate, creating myths. Going to their doom fearlessly with swords drawn. Dungeons. Dragons. Blood.

  A peep into Ella’s room which is as ordered as Jack’s is chaotic. A place for everything and everything in its place. A good girl. Nothing on the floor. No clutter. Nothing to put away. No dolls here. Ella has never been one for dolls.

  Here’s her guitar in its case in the corner. Here are all her books in the bookcase. Jacqueline Wilson, Malorie Blackman. Noughts and Crosses. Her mother’s old Judy Blumes. Eve’s Pippi Longstockings. Her Moomin books.

  No sorcerers for Ella. She likes her miracles to be the everyday kind. Ella’s heroes – usually heroines actually – win out with wisecracks not wizardry. They have backbone and they have gumption and they don’t really do quests.

  She has a bookcase full of Eve’s old Ladybird books too. Everyone loves Ladybird books and here are thirty-six including all the ones about the kings and queens of England, as well as other classics such as the People at Work series and the Peter and Jane books.

  Everyone gets wistful when they see these books. Even if you never had any Ladybird books as a kid – even if you never had any books at all – you can feel a pang for the kind of childhood they represent. Dad back from the office and putting his feet up with a pipe. Mum placing a home-baked Victoria sponge on the table. Cheery postmen, smiling policemen on bicycles. Men fixing things with spanners and wrenches. Look and Learn arriving on a Saturday. Peter doesn’t surf the internet for porn. Jane doesn’t get arseholed on WKD.

  Eve was obsessive about collecting these books. Right up to her last year she was bringing them back from boot sales and thrift shops, even if she already had them. In that bookshelf now there are at least three copies of the Ladybird Book of Pirates in various stages of disintegration. The picture of Ann Bonney and Mary Read fighting the Royal Navy on the deck of a burning ship was practically a manifesto for her life. How her life should have been.

  There is dust on the guitar case and I worry about Ella not doing her practice. Has Katy been strict enough with it this week? Once you’ve started kids on music lessons you can’t ever stop. The world is full of adults who resent their parents for not forcing them to keep going with an instrument.

  Even with the traffic and then the sitting outside and now this painful nostalgic tour through my old dead life, I have still only been away from the match for maybe twenty-five minutes. Half an hour tops. Ages before they’re all due back. Time to empty the dishwasher, to put everything away. Time to unload the washing machine and hang all the clothes around the radiators.

  The relief in stacking plates in their proper places, of putting away cutlery. The potency of holding the children’s damp clothes, of smoothing and untangling them so they’ll dry properly. The complicated sorrow involved in finding a place for Katy’s knickers and bras to dry. Her socks. All her t-shirts and leggings.

  I do these simple tasks in a daze. It reminds me of another clean up in another time. I shudder. I can’t help it.

  And, after that
, I take five minutes to put some basics into a carrier bag. My clothes are still in the drawers, my work suits still in the wardrobe, and my toiletries still in the bathroom, all of which is a relief, even though they seem like relics from the distant past. A life impossible to imagine anyone living any more.

  I put one of my Cash Converters phones on each of the kid’s beds, a yellow post-it note on each one.

  Just for you love Daddy. Will call you later xxx.

  Katy’s phone I leave on the bed and spend ages thinking of what to write on her post-it, but can’t think of anything. Everything seems trite, sentimental, inauthentic somehow.

  These will be the first ever phones for Ella and Jack. Because we are one of those families: the kind where the children are protected from electronic devices. It goes with not letting them have fizzy drinks or eat processed food. It goes with trying, however ineffectually, to stop their grandmother buying them sweets.

  No, our children don’t have mobiles. Like they don’t have tablets, PCs or TVs. Like neither of them has a DS. Like they don’t have an Xbox or a PlayStation. If they need a computer for homework, then they borrow my laptop. When they’ve done it – plus their piano and guitar practice – then they can watch a TV programme on the iPlayer. But we monitor what they watch or what they play and we never let them do it for more than an hour at a time, unless it’s a good documentary or a classic movie.

  Everyone we know thinks we’re unbelievably puritanical, but then everyone we know also compliments us on how nice our children are, how imaginative, how polite, how resourceful – how they seem to be able to entertain themselves, how astonishing their vocabulary and their general knowledge.

  We are aware of the risk that when our kids are older and running their own households, well, maybe they’ll gorge on gadgetry to make up for their childhood deprivation. Maybe they’ll become the earliest of adopters, live in houses where the TV never ever goes off, where there’s one in every room, where they sit, morbidly obese, curtains drawn, stuffing down Snack Pots, their only ambitions being to add to their Minecraft worlds. They might do that, but somehow I doubt it.

  We had decided originally that Jack and Ella would each get a cheap phone on starting secondary school, just so they could tell us if they were going to be late home because of an over-running drama club or whatever. You could argue that I am just bringing things forward a bit, and these are, after all, emphatically entry-level phones, designed for six-year-olds really. Absolutely minimum spec.

  I am taking a last look round the living room, when I hear the car pull into the driveway. For a panicky second I make a move towards the kitchen and the French doors that lead to the garden. But I stop. I am not a burglar here. This is my home. This is where I should be.

  27

  ‘Daddy!’

  Ella throws herself into me, knocking me back into the armchair. I gather her into me, wrap her up in my arms. She smells of fresh rain. Jack hovers by the door, looking up at Katy. I see her tiny nod and Jack moves over towards me, slowly, almost reluctantly.

  ‘Hey there, big man,’ I say and suddenly my son is squirming into me too. He also smells of rain but of other things too. Mud and sweat. Both my children smell delicious. ‘How did the football go?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jack says. I throw a questioning glance towards Katy, who comes and lowers herself carefully on the sofa across from me. She winces. She may have looked fine through the binoculars, but close-up she looks knackered. In all three of her pregnancies her back has given her trouble more or less from day one.

  She says, ‘It was eight-nil when we left. Jack got himself subbed.’

  ‘I asked to come off. We were rubbish,’ he says. ‘It was embarrassing.’

  ‘Yeah, I saw some of the first-half. Did look a bit one-sided.’

  ‘We had no tactics at all. Mr Hopkins is useless. He doesn’t know anything about football.’

  Mr Hopkins is the teaching assistant who also runs the football team, a man whose distinguishing feature is that he is always smiling. Not a typical attribute of the successful football manager I guess.

  Katy says, ‘Only a game you know. It’s meant to be fun, Jack.’

  ‘Losing is never fun,’ he says.

  Sensing that he is properly upset, I try and keep things light. ‘You know what Samuel Beckett says – Fail. Fail again. Fail better.’

  Jack is annoyed. ‘What does that even mean?’

  ‘Well, I guess it’s about the importance of learning from defeat. About persevering.’

  Jack sighs. ‘Yeah well, who does this Beckett guy play for anyway? Accrington Stanley?’

  Ella chimes in, ‘Are you back properly now, Daddy? Forever?’

  She’s always the good student, always looking straight to the heart of the question. What should I say?

  But I don’t have to say anything because Katy says it for me.

  ‘I’m afraid Daddy will have to go away again, sweetheart. For a bit anyway. He can’t stay long.’

  Ella doesn’t say anything, just frowns.

  Jack says, ‘I’m going to go and play in my room.’

  ‘You need to run the bath,’ Katy says, ‘have a quick dip before tea.’

  After Jack has gone, Ella seizes her chance to have my undivided attention and tells me about school, about her friends – some complicated story about someone who did something to someone else and no one was talking to the first someone but it turned out that they hadn’t really done it and it was another someone who was just causing trouble and that she, Ella, has only tried to sort everything out but now some of her friends are angry with her and people are sitting next to different people in class and some people are not talking to some other people at playtimes and it is all generally terrible and what does Daddy think?

  ‘I think it’s always best to leave well alone, to not try and sort out other people’s problems for them,’ I say.

  ‘Oh Daddy,’ she says. ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ She flounces off towards the door. She pauses when she reaches it. ‘It’s still nice to see you though.’ Then she’s gone and it’s just Katy and me in the room. The silence stretches out between us.

  Eventually, I say, ‘Cup of tea?’

  Katy just sighs. She sounds just like Jack. ‘You know the police will be sitting outside again now. They follow me everywhere.’

  I make some quick plans. So I’ll have to go down our garden, over the fence, through Mrs Oksanen’s vegetable patch and out into the streets that way. Which will be a pain with the bike, but perfectly doable. I’ll just have to wait till it’s dark.

  ‘They’re called Alex and Syima by the way. The police. I’m getting to know the regulars. He’s a Chelsea fan, she’s got a boy the same age as Jack.’ Katy arches her back in her chair.

  Then Ella and Jack are both back in the room holding their phones and throwing themselves back into my arms, telling me that I’m amazing and wonderful and the greatest dad in the world ever ever ever.

  ‘Dad’s got us phones, Mum!’ says Ella. ‘Proper phones.’

  ‘Great,’ says Katy, flatly. ‘Just great.’

  ‘Come on, kids,’ I say. ‘Mummy’s tired. Let’s go and make tea. You two can lay the table.’ I stand up.

  ‘I’ve got to have a bath,’ says Jack.

  ‘I’ve got guitar practice to do,’ says Ella. They scoot out the door, giggling at their own audacity. I look at Katy. But she’s looking at the floor. I keep looking at her. She keeps looking at the floor.

  ‘They’re just cheap ones,’ I say. ‘They don’t do anything flash. No internet or anything. It was quite hard to find phones that limited to be honest.’

  She doesn’t say anything. I go to the kitchen, fill the kettle. Put the oven on. I’m thinking chicken nuggets. I’m thinking chips. Peas.

  We have chicken nuggets a couple of times a week but they are good ones, not mechanically recovered meat scraped from the feet of hens, not squares of random protein and water in a rectangular
box. No, instead we get good pieces of diced free range chicken from Harold Naylor’s butcher shop in Cumberland Street and breadcrumb them at home. I do big batches every couple of weekends and freeze them.

  We defrost them in the microwave, whack them in the oven and hey presto, good, nutritious, easy-to-cook food that kids love and which is also good for them. The chips aren’t home-made obviously but they are chunky and low-fat, and resemble the hand-cut jenga chips you get at the better sort of gastro-pub.

  When I go back in Katy is no longer staring at the floor. Instead, she’s staring out of the window. She doesn’t turn my way as I come over with her tea. Even when I’m just centimetres away, blatantly in her space, she doesn’t look at me. I put the mug carefully on the floor next to her.

  ‘Don’t kick it over,’ I say and I move back to my own chair. Maybe this is it. Maybe we will never say anything meaningful to one another again.

  ‘I’m making the kids some nuggets,’ I say now. She doesn’t reply, but I’m absurdly gratified when she bends forward and takes the tea from the floor, sips at it, settles back in the sofa, wriggles a bit to ease her back.

  I am not giving up. I will have something resembling a conversation with my wife however much she tries to block me.

  ‘I’ve got you another phone too,’ I say. ‘Just couldn’t stand not being able to talk to my family.’

  Katy sips her tea. Her face is all flushed hollows. Shadows and bone. At last, she speaks. Her voice is tap-water thin, but at least we’re talking, that’s the main thing.

  ‘You know the thing I loved most about you was how normal you were. How sensible and kind. How decent and how ordinary. Just goes to show, doesn’t it?’

  What? What, exactly, does it go to show? She’s a smart, well-read, observant woman, surely she knows that there’s no such thing as normal? What about when I rocked up in Italy out of my bloody mind? Did she think I was normal then?