by Holly Black
For the love of god.
Eventually we got clear of the bathroom and processed in state to Ethan’s bedroom—him leading the way, regal in pint-sized dressing gown, chattering about this and that. He resisted getting into bed for a while, but without any real purpose, and in a pro forma manner, as if he knew this part was merely part of a ritual, and he was doing it for my sake more than for himself.
Eventually he yawned massively and headed toward the bed.
He was tired. He always is on Mondays and Wednesdays, because of after-school club. The trick with tired children is to resist in a passive, judo-style fashion, putting up no specific barriers for them to kick against, instead letting them use their own strength against themselves. This, at least, I have learned.
When he was finally tucked up under the covers I asked him how his day had been. I’d meant to do it earlier, but forgot, which meant the enquiry was doomed to failure. Ethan appears to blank the working day within minutes of leaving the school gates, as if what happens within has no more reality than a dream, and melts like ice under the fierce sun of the Outside World. Or perhaps the opposite is true: a fundamental reality about the universe of the school that is impossible to convey to us shades who live in the unconvincing hinterland outside.
Either way, he appeared as usual to have zero recollection of what had occurred between nine a.m. and four p.m. that day. When pushed for a definitive account, however, he issued a brief statement saying that it had been “fine.”
“And how was after-school club?”
Many of the kids who go to the Reynolds School have parents who both work. This means the school runs a slick and profitable range of activities to tide tots over from the end of actual school to the point where their stressed-out handlers can pick them up. Ethan’s after-school diversion on Mondays is swimming. This is a bit pointless, I can’t help thinking. Partly because Monday happens also to be when his class does swimming anyway—and so all his piscine endeavors are concentrated on the same day; and mainly because said classes seem to boil down to the children spending most of the half hour shivering on the edge of the pool, waiting for their brief turn to splash about. Ethan’s already pretty confident in the water—courtesy of a vacation in Florida last year—but untutored in terms of strokes, beyond a hectic doggy-paddle that is full of sound and fury but conveys little in the way of forward motion. We hoped the after-school club would help refine this. So far, he seems to be going backwards.
“Terrible,” Ethan said.
“Terrible?” This is strong for him. He usually confines pronouncements of quality to “fine” or “okay,” occasionally peaking in a devil-may-care “good.” I suspect the deployment of “great” would require the school suddenly deciding to hand out free chocolate. I’d never heard “terrible” before, either. “Why?”
“Arthur Milford was mean to me again.”
I snorted. “Arthur Milford? What the hell kind of name is that?”
Ethan turned his head in bed to look at me. “What?”
“How old is this kid?”
“Six,” Ethan said, with gentle care, as if I was crazy. “He’s six. Like me.”
“Sorry, yes,” I said. I tend to talk to my son as if he’s a miniature adult for much of the time—too much of it, perhaps—but there was no way of explaining to him that the name “Arthur Milford,” while theoretically acceptable, seemed more appropriate to a music hall comedian of the 1930s than a six year old in 2011. “What do you mean, he was mean to you again?”
“He’s always mean to me.”
“Really? In what way?”
“Telling me I’m stupid.”
“You’re not stupid,” I said, crossly. “He’s stupid, if he goes around calling people names. Just ignore him.”
“I can’t ignore him.” Ethan’s voice was quiet. “He’s always doing it. He pushes me in the corridor, too. Today he said he was going to throw me out of a window.”
“What? He actually said that?”
Ethan looked up at me solemnly. After a moment he looked away. “He didn’t actually say it. But he meant it.”
“I see,” I said, suddenly unsure how much of the entire account was true. “Well, look. If he says mean things to you, just ignore him. Mean boys say mean things. That’s just the way it is. But if he pushes you, tell a teacher about it. Immediately.”
“I do. They don’t do anything about it.”
“Well, if it happens again, then tell them again. And tell me, too, okay?”
“Okay, Daddy.”
And then, as so often in such conversations, the matter was dismissed as if it had never been of import—instead, something I’d been rather tediously insisting on discussing—and my son asked me a series of apparently random questions about the world, which I did my best to answer, and I read him a story and filled up his water cup and read more story, and eventually he went to sleep.
We tend to alternate in picking Ethan up (as with most parenting duties), and so Tuesday was Kathy’s turn. I had a deadline to chase and so—bar him dashing into my study to say hello when they got back—I barely saw Ethan before I kissed him on the head and said goodnight as Kathy led him up toward bath and bedtime.
Fifty minutes later, by which time I’d made a start on cooking, my wife appeared in the kitchen with the cautiously relieved demeanor of someone who believes they’ve wrangled an unpredictable child into bed.
“Is he down?”
“I’m not enumerating any domesticated, egg-producing fowl,” she said, reaching into the fridge for the open bottle of wine, “but he might be. God willing.”
She poured herself a glass and took a long sip before turning to me. “God, I’m tired.”
“Me too,” I said, without a lot of sympathy.
“I know. I’m just saying. By the way—has Ethan mentioned some kid called Arthur to you?”
“Arthur Milford?”
“So he has?”
“Once. Last night. Why—did he come up again?”
“Mmm. And it’s not the first time, either.”
“Really?”
“Ethan mentioned him last week, and I think the week before, too. They’re in after-school swimming together.”
“I know. Last night he said this Arthur kid had been mean to him. In fact, he said he’d been mean ‘again.’”
“Mean in what way?”
“Pushed him in the corridor. Called him stupid.” I thought about mentioning the threat to throw Ethan through a window, but decided not to. I didn’t think Kathy needed to hear that part, especially as the telling had subsequently made it unclear whether that had taken place in what Ethan called “real life.”
“Pushed him in the corridor? That means it’s not just happening during swimming class.”
“I guess. If it’s happening at all.”
“You don’t believe him?”
“No, no, I do. But you know what he’s like, Kath. He’s all about the baddies and the goodies. It just sounds to me a bit like this Arthur Milford kid is in the script as Ethan’s dread Nemesis. And that maybe not all of his exploits are directly related to events in what we’d think of as reality.”
“Doesn’t mean there isn’t a real problem there.”
“I know,” I said, a little irritated that Kathy seemed to be claiming ownership of the issue, or implying that I wasn’t taking it seriously enough. “I told him to talk to the teachers if this kid is mean to him again. And to tell me about it, too.”
“Okay.”
“But ultimately, that’s just the way children are. Boys especially. They give each other grief. They shove. Little girls form cliques and get bitchy and tell other girls they’re not their friends. Boys call each other names and thump each other. It has been thus since we lived in caves. It will be so until the sun explodes.”
“I know. It’s just … Ethan’s such a cute kid. He can be a total pain, of course, but he’s … so sweet, really, underneath. He doesn’t know about all the crap i
n life yet. I want to protect him from it. I don’t want him being hit, just because that’s what happens. I don’t want him being hurt in any way. I just want … everything to be nice.”
“I know,” I said, relenting. “Me too.”
I rubbed her shoulder on the way over to supervise the closing stages of cooking, and privately raised my State of Awareness of the Arthur Milford situation from DefCon 4 to DefCon 3. Despite what everyone seems to think, the readiness-for-conflict index increases in severity from five to one, with one being the highest level (the highest level ever officially recorded is DefCon 2, which obtained for a while during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I knew all this from some half-hearted research for an article I was drafting on Homeland Security).
Be all which as it may, and despite my pompous such-is-life declaration, Kathy was right. I didn’t want anyone hassling my kid. Much more of it, and words would need to be spoken.
I picked Ethan up the next day, and remembered to ask him about his day as soon as we got into the car. Ethan proved surprisingly well-informed on his own doings, and filled me in on a variety of Montessori-structured activities he’d undertaken (neither Kathy nor I truly understand what Montessori is about, but we believe/hope that it’s generally agreed to be A Good Thing, like lower CO2 levels and being kind to dogs). There was no mention of Arthur Milford. I thought about asking a direct question, but decided that if Ethan hadn’t deemed him worth mentioning, there was probably nothing to say.
Ethan went to bed easily that night, in the unpredictable way he sometimes did. We had a laugh during bath-time, he brushed his own teeth without being asked, and then—after quite a short reading—he drifted off to sleep before I was even ready for it. I sat there for five minutes afterwards, enjoying the peace of quietly being in the same space as someone you love very much.
There’s usually a hidden edge to the observation that nothing’s as beautiful as a sleeping child (the point being it’s all too often nicer than them being awake), but the fact is … there really isn’t. To watch your son, asleep in his comfortable bed, with a tummy full of food that you made him, and a head full of story, arm gripping a furry polar bear you bought him on a whim but to which he’d taken as if they’d been separated at birth … that’s why we’re born. That’s why everything else is worth it.
Yet sometimes I get so angry with him that I don’t know what to do with myself. And he knows it. He must do.
About six hours later I woke slowly in my own bed, dimly aware I could hear a noise that shouldn’t exist in a house in the middle of the night. By the time I’d opened my eyes, it was quiet. But as I started to relax back into oblivion, I heard it again.
A quiet sob.
I hauled myself quickly upright, staggered out of bed. Kathy lay dead to the world, which was unusual. She generally sleeps on far more of a hair trigger than me. She evidently was really tired, and I blearily regretted my snipe before dinner the evening before.
I went into the hallway to stand outside Ethan’s room and listen. Nothing for a minute, but then I heard the sound again. I opened the door. Before I even got to the side of his bed, I could tell how hot he was. Children beam their heat out in the night, like little suns. I squatted down and put my hand on his head.
“Ethan,” I said. “It’s okay. It’s just a dream.”
He sobbed once more, very quietly.
“Ethan, it’s okay.”
He opened his eyes suddenly. He looked scared.
Scared of me.
“It’s Daddy,” I said, disconcerted. “Just Daddy, okay?”
His eyes seemed to swim into focus. “Daddy?”
“Yes. It’s okay. Everything’s okay.”
Ethan’s eyes swiveled. “Is he still here?”
“Who?”
“Arthur Milford.”
The back of my neck tickled. “No. Of course not.”
“He was here. He came up the stairs and stood outside my room saying things. Then he came in. He stood by my bed and said he was going to … ”
“No, he didn’t,” I said, firmly.
“He did.”
“Ethan, it was just a dream. No-one’s in the house apart from you and me and Mummy. Nobody can get in. The doors are locked. The alarm system’s on.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “I did it myself. I promise you. It’s just the three of us, and everything’s okay.”
Ethan’s eyelids were already starting to drift downward. “Okay.” He was asleep five minutes later. I went back to bed, and lay there for an hour before I could get under again. Once I’ve been woken, I find it hard to get back to sleep.
The next morning I was irritable, and snapped pretty badly at Ethan when he made a laboriously annoying job of putting on his school shoes. I shouldn’t have, but I was tired, and for fuck’s sake—he should be able to put on his own shoes.
But as I watched him and Kathy walk down the path toward the car, the wailing over and a new détente being hammered out between them, I realized that at some point after coming back to my bed in the night, I’d raised the Arthur Milford Awareness Level to DefCon 2.
On Thursday evening Kathy has yoga, and so the Ethan-Going-to-Bed Show featured daddy in a co-starring role (or supporting actor, more likely, my name below the title and in a notably smaller typeface) for the second night in a row. Bedtime did not, of course follow the same course as the night before. That’s not how the shorties roll. Like some snappy young boxer on the way up, they’ll pull you in, fake like they’re running out of steam, and then unleash a brutal combination that will leave you glancing desperately back at your corner, as you take a standing eight count. I’m getting better at rolling with the punches, shifting the conflict to safer ground and letting the passion defuse, but that night I went back at Ethan like some broken-down old scrapper who knew this was his last chance in the ring, and wanted to go out with a bare knuckles slugfest.
He wouldn’t eat his pasta, instead deliberately distributing it over the floor—meanwhile looking me steadily in the eye. He wouldn’t come upstairs. He wouldn’t get into the bath, and then wouldn’t get out, and broke a soap dish. I had to brush his teeth for him, and did it none too gently. He wouldn’t get into his pajamas because they “always itched”—the very same pair that he’d cheerfully gone to sleep in the previous night.
He wouldn’t get into bed, instead breaking out of the room and stomping downstairs, wailing dismally for Kathy, though he knew damned well she was out.
By the time I’d recaptured him, harsh words had been spoken on both sides. I had been designated an “idiot” and a “doofus,” and been informed that I was no longer loved. I had likened his behavior to that of a significantly younger child, and had threatened to inform the world at large of this maturity shortfall: his friends, grandparents, and Father Christmas had all been invoked as potential recipients of the information. I’d said he was being childish and stupid, and had even called him the very worst word I (or you) know, though thankfully I’d managed to throttle my voice down into inaudibility at the last moment. So he hadn’t caught the word. The anger had sure as hell made it through, though. The anger, and probably the pitiful level of powerlessness, too.
I did however finally manage to get him into bed. He lay there, silently. I sat equally silently in the chair, both of us breathing hard, wild-eyed with silent fury and sour adrenaline.
“Arthur Milford was mean to me today, too,” Ethan muttered, suddenly.
I was still pretty close to the edge, and the “too” at the end of his pronouncement nearly pushed me over it into somewhere dark and bad.
I took a breath, and bit my tongue. “Mean in what way?” I managed, eventually.
“In the upstairs corridor. On the third floor.”
“Okay—so now I know where the alleged event occurred. But how was he mean? In what actual way?”
“Why are you being so mean to me tonight?”
“I’m … Just tell me, ok
ay? What did he do?”
“He pushed me again. Really hard. Into the wall. And then … against the window.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell a teacher? Like I told you?”
“No.”
“Why? That’s what you’ve got to do. You have to tell a teacher.”
“He said … he said that if anyone told a teacher about what he was doing, he’d throw me out of the window for sure.”
“Really? He actually said it this time?”
“Yes.”
“But you’ve just told me about it—so why not a teacher?”
“Arthur said telling you didn’t matter. You can’t do anything. Only the teachers can.”
“I see. How interesting.”
I decided then and there that I’d had quite enough of Arthur sodding Milford. I’d like to think this was solely because of the evident discomfort he was causing Ethan, during both waking and sleeping hours, but I know some of it was due to pathetic outrage at hearing myself thus dismissed. As a parent, you often encounter moments when you feel impotent, and may often be genuinely unable to affect events. I had to take crap from my own child, evidently: that didn’t hold true for someone else’s. It was time for Arthur, and his parents, if necessary, to learn that the world did not stop at the school gates.