by Tim Dowling
Then again, it’s hard to tell what’s going on in his mind, because he’s dressed as a vampire. Is he cross, or just undead? I look out at the car, sensing my wife’s impatience. She will be wanting her Quavers.
It is not until I am face to face with the vampire that I decide not to allude to his condition in any way. It’s none of my business. I put my purchases down on the counter.
‘Just these and the petrol, please,’ I say. His eyes, shining out from their heavily blackened sockets, are both unfathomably sad and coldly evil. They seem to bore into mine.
‘Which pump is it?’ he says.
‘Number four,’ I say, concentrating on sliding my card into the machine. When I look back up at the vampire, I am again transfixed. His face, pale as parchment, betrays no emotion – it’s actually a little terrifying. His dark lips part, revealing blood-stained fangs.
‘Do you need a VAT receipt?’ he asks.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m fine.’
On my way out another man walks into the shop. As he approaches the counter, I pause at the door to listen.
‘You’re looking well,’ he says.
‘I had a late one last night,’ the vampire says.
If going on holiday with young children is stressful, going on holiday without older children is profoundly unsettling. Only when they’ve reached the age when they’re old enough to stay home alone do you realize it would have been safer to leave toddlers in charge of your house.
This is exactly what I’m thinking as the middle one describes some sort of new YouTube challenge, something to do with ingesting a Cornetto as quickly as possible.
‘So what do you do?’ I say. ‘Poke it down your throat, point first?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘That would kill you.’
‘Perhaps I’ve misunderstood the challenge,’ I say.
I’m distracted because my wife and I are about to go away on a second honeymoon, to Italy. Up until now we’ve never left our children alone for more than a single night. Even when we do that, we don’t tell them we’re leaving until the car is running, to prevent them making plans.
Having raised three children to the age of criminal responsibility, I’m reluctant to consign the house to their care for four days running. I’ve seen the damage they can do while I’m here watching.
My wife has produced two pages of typed instructions that she has taped next to the fridge. Under the heading ‘SHOW SOME SELF-RESPECT’, it enjoins the children to maintain basic standards of hygiene. It lists edible foodstuffs and their locations, and expressly forbids gatherings of any kind. I check the document for loopholes. It’s no good just telling teenage boys not to do anything stupid; you have to think of all the stupid things they could do, and ban them in writing. Then again, I think, you don’t want to put ideas in their heads, because they can be tried as adults.
Our flight time obliges us to leave in the middle of the night. I bid the oldest one goodbye as Newsnight begins and head for bed, but when my alarm goes off four hours later, he’s still up. ‘Don’t burn the house down,’ I say, dragging our bags over the threshold.
‘I won’t,’ he says.
‘And tell the others not to as well,’ I say.
The airport, barely open, is sparsely populated by zombified parents with tiny, temporarily zombified children. Once we’re airside, my wife, who is a nervous flyer, insists on a large glass of wine.
‘It’s four-thirty a.m.,’ I say.
‘If I don’t get a glass of wine,’ she says, ‘I’m not getting on the plane.’
In contrast to the rest of the airport, the pub at the far end is heaving. Nobody else is having their first drink of the day at 4.30 a.m.; most people seem to be enjoying the last of many. A few appear too far gone to board an aeroplane successfully. The atmosphere is infectious: I order a beer with the large glass of white.
‘This is weird,’ my wife says, looking around. ‘It’s too easy.’
‘It’s because we have no children,’ I say.
‘No one is fighting, or crying, or begging to be bought something,’ she says.
‘It’s like going on a plane twenty years ago,’ I say.
‘What now?’ my wife says, consulting her watch. ‘We’ve got another forty minutes to kill.’
‘It’s your round,’ I say.
Two days later, my wife is on the balcony of our hotel with her phone. The children have rebuffed all contact, even through social media, but she has ways round this.
‘Uh-oh,’ she says.
‘What?’ I say.
She turns the phone round and shows me a shaky video of the middle one attempting the Cornetto challenge against the backdrop of our kitchen cupboards. It’s something I forgot to ban, but at least he isn’t using my suggested point-first technique. Clearly struggling, he takes one final bite, prompting huge cheers from a large, off-camera crowd.
* I don’t normally respond to comments – I don’t really want people to know I read them – but the accusation of falsehood angered me. I did a lot of research before I replied: ‘The socket in question was a grounded universal “schuko” type, which appears to be designed to accept common C- and F-type European plugs, as well as the weird and lesser known Italian L-type, with the extra prong in the middle. And while it’s true that you can stick any Italian plug in it either way round, there does seem to be a definite right and wrong way to insert a British-to-European adaptor. I hope this explains why the incident was funny.’
CHAPTER TEN
Every adolescent cohort – organize them however you want: by region; generation; school building; social standing – will have a particular expression to denote generic incredulity. Teenagers fear credulousness; incredulity is their default reaction to everything. At that age you treat every uncorroborated statement that comes your way as if it were mind-blowingly unlikely. When people ask you things, you make it clear you can’t even believe they’re asking.
Adolescent conformity being what it is, a single expression of incredulity usually rises up to crowd out all others. Everybody ends up using the same set of words to indicate everything from mild scepticism to shocked denial and disbelieving outrage. These days, for example, it is not uncommon to hear ‘Shut up!’ deployed in such a fashion by young people. Such an expression, so heavily relied upon for so many years, acquires the force of habit, so that you find yourself using it in adulthood, if only on those occasions when genuine incredulity catches you unawares.
In my adolescence that expression was ‘What are you, high?’
If the person you were conversing with persisted in talking nonsense or continued to overestimate the scope of your generosity, the next step was to say, ‘Now I know you must be high.’ Often, for the sheer sake of escalation, it was permitted to skip straight to step 2:
‘Hey, can I borrow your chemistry notes?’
‘Now I know you must be high.’
That may seem a little discordant, until you understand that in this exchange the ‘Are you high?’ part is implied by the context: in the halls of Senator Brien McMahon High School in 1979, there was a good chance anybody you ran into was either high or extremely high. In this atmosphere the posing of a stupid or presumptuous question could be treated, for rhetorical purposes, as mere confirmation of a standing suspicion.
I should add that while the rejoinder wasn’t really meant to be hostile, it could still make you unbelievably paranoid if someone said it to you when you were, in fact, wasted.
This, then, is the default expression I am saddled with, the one that still occasionally gives rise to such irresponsible exchanges as this:
‘Dad, I’m going to a movie. Can I have ten pounds?’
‘Ten pounds? What are you, high?’
‘Plus a bit more for popcorn.’
‘Now I know you must be high.’
This is not, I accept, a wholly appropriate response, even if I’m not actually accusing the child in question of being marijuana-impaired. While my reaction
does convey the sheer extent of my incredulity (although the implication that the £10 will not be forthcoming is probably misleading), it also hints that I had a past life where I was at home among the perpetually baked. And while this is absolutely true, such an admission should have formed part of a more serious conversation with the child about drugs that I had already earmarked for the later date of never.
This conversation ends up happening well before never, on a night when my wife and I decide to drill it into the oldest one’s head that no matter what moral, medical or legal arguments one might muster in favour of a more enlightened national drug policy, they will still kick you out of school if they catch you smoking pot. Our message is clear: under no circumstances are you to get caught. The boy nods, and then looks at us.
‘What drugs have you done?’ he says.
‘Me?’ my wife says. ‘I’ve done all drugs.’
‘Really?’ he says.
‘Well, not all drugs,’ she says. ‘But it would be much easier for me to list the drugs I haven’t done.’ I stare at her with a pointedly blank expression, as if to say: what are you, high?
‘What about you?’ says the boy, turning to me.
‘I have done some drugs,’ I say. ‘But not that many. I mean, I’ve never taken acid, for example.’
‘You’ve never taken acid?’ says my wife.
‘No,’ I say.
‘Nerd.’
‘So is acid good?’ says the boy.
‘Christ no,’ says my wife. ‘It’s horrible.’
This is not how I imagined this conversation going. I’m keen to be honest with my children about most things, but not necessarily myself. I do not like giving straight answers to questions like, ‘So, are you hungover?’ or ‘Have you ever stolen anything?’ When it comes to my biography – especially the bit from before they were born – I like to restrict the information to stories that are either instructive or amusing. If they want pathos, they can read novels.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Pets are meant to teach young children about empathy, responsibility and stewardship, but actually it’s you as a parent who learns these things, because you’re the one who ends up doing everything.
Mostly, however, you learn about death – more than you’d care to know. When our cat Lupin disappeared for three days and then turned up dead in next door’s garden, stiff as a salt cod with the breeze gently lifting his fur, something inside me gave way with a lurch. From then on I maintained that we should stop getting new pets, or that we should at least stop naming them. I was overruled.
‘I think Pepper is dead,’ the oldest one says, peering into the hamster cage. This is a common anxiety, and not just with Pepper. ‘I’m afraid the snake is probably dead,’ my wife says when the snake disappears, but it always turns up again. ‘I think the tortoise is dead,’ the youngest says, nudging the lifeless creature with his toe, whereupon its lolling head snaps into its shell with a hiss. Pets, I am constantly reminded, are improbable survivors.
Except for Pepper. Pepper is dead. It’s late and I’m not sure what to do about this, so I just close the cage, turn out the lights and go to bed.
‘Pepper is dead,’ I tell my wife the next morning.
She stares at me, nonplussed. I know what she is thinking. She’s thinking: ‘Nonsense. How could such a popular condiment become unfashionable overnight?’ Finally a light goes on behind her eyes.
‘I knew that was going to happen,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll deal with it. You wouldn’t know what to do.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I’ll say I buried him,’ she says, ‘and then I’ll put him in the bin.’
The day after that, my wife is busy killing the moth larvae that regularly migrate across the kitchen ceiling in a southwesterly direction. They’re coming from one of the cupboards, even though we’ve cleaned them all out many times.
‘You have to kill them as soon as you see them,’ she says, hitting the ceiling with a broom and leaving a brown streak behind.
‘I didn’t know they were back,’ I say.
‘That’s because you never take any notice of anything,’ she says. I know she’s angry with herself because the previous day she bought a new fish tank to replace the leaking old tank, even though I said I didn’t think it leaked. She said I wouldn’t notice if it broke into a million pieces. Then, just after she transferred a dozen tiny fish into the new tank, it started raining and she saw that all the water on the floor was coming from a leaking skylight above.
At lunchtime she comes into the kitchen and turns off the western I’m watching.
‘You don’t need telly,’ she says. ‘I’m here.’
She pulls out her phone and starts texting someone.
‘Yes, I’m glad we’ve had this chance to talk,’ I say.
‘I’m going to Oxfordshire to look at a puppy next week,’ she says, still texting.
‘We already have a dog,’ I say, pointing to the dog. ‘Look.’
‘It’s one of those Jack Russells that smiles,’ she says.
‘I’m not looking after two dogs.’
‘You barely look after one.’
‘What are you talking about? I’m the only one who does anything with the dog. Ever.’
‘Little smiling Jack Russell!’ she says.
‘We can have a new dog when the old dog dies,’ I say. ‘Like Pepper.’
‘I’m not getting a new hamster,’ she says. ‘They depress me. That rubbish needs to go out, by the way. You-know-who is in there.’
‘We’ll always have the ceiling worms,’ I say.
She scowls and stares at the fish tank. ‘Now one of the fish is swimming funny,’ she says. ‘Christ.’
‘Is it?’ I say.
‘You won’t have noticed because you’re not very observant,’ she says.
‘I just can’t see from here,’ I say, closing one eye. ‘I’m out of left contact lenses.’
We both walk over to the fish tank and peer in. On first inspection, the fish seem fine to me.
‘There, that little one at the back,’ she says. ‘He’s gone a bit banana-shaped, do you see? And he’s all lopsided when he swims.’ He does seem to be veering to the right.
‘It could be some neurological condition,’ I say. ‘How long would you say he’s been like this?’
‘Actually, I think I may have squashed him with the net,’ she says.
Within minutes of arriving back home from a week away, the oldest discovers that one of his own tropical fish has perished in our absence. It’s been a long journey and I’m a little short on sympathy.
‘Oh, well,’ I say, flipping through the post. ‘Fish die.’
He goes upstairs to clean out his tank. A few minutes later I hear shouting and slamming of doors. I go up to investigate. It transpires that while he was cleaning out the tank he accidentally let one of his little fish slip down the plughole of the bathroom sink.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ I say. ‘You really need to be more careful.’ Only after I say this do I realize how unhelpful it sounds, and how harsh.
I go back downstairs. Minutes later I hear more shouting and slamming. It transpires that while he was returning the fish to the tank, he let another one slip down the plughole.
‘You didn’t,’ I say. ‘What in—’ I stop there. I can see he’s consumed with self-reproach. It seems a bad time to tell him that life is like this, that misfortune comes in pairs, in threes, sometimes in gouts; and that it’s usually all your own fault. I can tell he is thinking about the poor little fish stuck somewhere in the pipework. So am I.
‘Get me a bowl,’ I say. I go into the bathroom and reach behind the sink. After a brief, sweaty struggle I manage to undo the connection just beyond the U-bend, and twist the plastic pipe away from the wall.
‘Here,’ says the boy, entering with a bowl.
‘Hold it under there,’ I say. I turn on the cold tap full blast and a few seconds later water jets out of the pipe i
nto the bowl, along with a quantity of limescale and a tiny, swimming fish.
‘Whoa,’ says the boy.
Now that’s my kind of parenting, I think. No shouting, no swearing, no depressing life lessons; just low-level heroics, all day long.
‘I wish I’d thought of that for the first fish,’ I say.
‘Yeah,’ he says.
I can tell my family is keeping something from me. They have conversations that stop when I enter the room. They smile and hum when I ask questions. They’re treating me, as usual, like a moron, only more so.
They think I don’t know what’s going on, but I do. I caught the youngest looking at a picture of a puppy on his phone. It appears to be the same Jack Russell my wife has on her phone, the one she went all the way to Oxfordshire to photograph.
‘We do not want a dog,’ I tell her. ‘We have a dog.’
‘Who said anything about a dog?’ my wife says. ‘Anyway, it’s none of your concern.’
‘What isn’t?’
‘Nothing,’ she says. Then she smiles and hums and leaves the room.
Our home is already overrun with animals. Besides the dog and the cat, we have the snake, Mr Rodgers. Then there’s the other snake, Mrs Hammerstein, which we are only looking after temporarily while the owners are away, although the name they gave it implies they always meant for us to have it. We also maintain a tortoise and some fish. These are just the animals we keep on purpose; I am not including the many tiny parasites we harbour. We are presently down one hamster, but in my opinion this does not create a vacancy the size of a Jack Russell. But my opinion counts for nothing.
‘The absolute last thing we need,’ I tell my wife, ‘is another dog. Why don’t we just keep pigs?’
‘Little black-and-white Jack Russell!’ my wife says.
Later that evening, both snakes escape. I spend half an hour shifting furniture and looking under things with a torch, getting slowly furious.
‘Do you see them?’ my wife asks.
‘I can’t see anything!’ I shout from the wardrobe I am trapped behind.