by Tim Dowling
‘You know Ringo was not their original drummer,’ Carmela says with unbearable false cheer. ‘That was Pete Best.’
‘Is this what’s called common ground?’ says Anthony Jr, rolling his eyes.
‘Just trying to have a civilized conversation,’ Carmela says. An awkward silence blooms on both sides of the screen. I feel I should say something lighthearted about the obvious parallels, but I don’t think my wife is in a mood to find things amusing.
‘Can I go to my room?’ AJ says. ‘I’m full.’
‘Am I so horrible?’ Carmela says. I glance at my wife, who is watching the screen intently.
‘Get over yourself,’ AJ says. I wince a little at his callousness.
‘Over myself?’ Carmela shouts. ‘What is that supposed to—’ The screen suddenly freezes. My wife is holding the remote at arm’s length.
‘Did you see that?’ she says.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I can see how—’
‘Just watch,’ she says, rewinding.
‘Get over yourself,’ AJ says again.
‘Look at his salad,’ my wife says. ‘It’s green, right?’
‘Over myself?’ Carmela shouts.
‘Now look,’ my wife says, pausing the screen again. ‘It’s mostly red.’
‘Are you suggesting,’ I say, ‘that there is more radicchio in this shot, as opposed to the reverse shot?’
‘Yes!’ shouts my wife. ‘Look.’ The screen unfreezes.
‘Just go,’ Carmela says bitterly. ‘Do me a big favour.’
‘Green!’ my wife says.
‘If you’re gonna be a martyr,’ AJ says, ‘obviously I’ll sit here.’
‘Red!’ my wife says.
‘No!’ Carmela says. ‘Go! Put your plate in the sink.’
‘Green!’ my wife says.
At the beginning of the New Year, after a long pause, my wife recommences her haunting of various online student forums, trying to gain insight into university places on behalf of the oldest one. It is not a form of torture in which the boy has shown much interest. I find my wife in her office, scrolling through one thread after another.
‘Any news?’ I say.
‘People are beginning to hear,’ she says.
‘Really?’ I say.
‘Yes, but for other subjects,’ she says. ‘Don’t try and jump on the bandwagon now.’
‘I won’t,’ I say. ‘I still think it’s weird that you’re pretending to be your own son.’
‘I’m not pretending to be him. I have my own persona.’
The next day she is still there. She doesn’t look up from the screen when I come in.
‘Anything?’ I ask.
‘A couple of rejections,’ she says. ‘Nothing major.’
‘Perhaps if you found a thread specifically to do with his subject …’
‘I have.’
‘Then you might be able to find out when the letters go out.’
‘I know when the letters go out,’ she says. ‘Next week.’
‘So what are you doing now?’ I ask. She turns to glare at me.
‘These people,’ she says, ‘are my friends.’
Over the course of the next few days, my wife’s obsessive monitoring begins to affect me.
I have trouble concentrating. At odd moments my guts twist for no reason, until I remember the reason.
On the morning of the day the letters are meant to arrive, my wife gets up at 5.45 a.m. to check her computer. Fifteen minutes later, she comes back in and throws herself on the bed.
‘What’s happening?’ I ask.
‘Nothing is happening!’ she hisses. ‘It’s six o’clock in the fucking morning! Christ, I’m hysterical.’
Before he leaves for school, my wife secures the oldest one’s permission to monitor his emails all day, even though, according to the latest information, we are not expecting an email. By 10 a.m. we are both in a state of advanced panic.
‘Oh my god!’ I hear my wife shriek.
I find her at her computer. ‘People are getting offers,’ she says. ‘Apparently you can tell from the weight of the envelope.’
‘You need to breathe,’ I say.
‘What time does the post actually come?’ she says. For the first time in many months, my wife looks at me as if I might be in possession of useful information; I have been working from home for fifteen years.
‘Midday?’
‘Are you guessing?’
‘I think it varies.’
At 12.30 p.m. the letterbox snaps. We both race to the front door in time to fight over an estate agent’s leaflet. As we retreat back up the stairs panting, my wife turns to me.
‘We should probably start preparing for both outcomes,’ she says.
‘Like, get some champagne if it’s good news,’ I say.
‘What if it’s bad news?’ she says.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Gin?’
I spend twenty minutes looking out of the window in the direction I’ve always assumed the postman originates from. As far up as I can see, the street is deserted. Finally I go to my office to compose an overdue email. When I hit send, I find the screen has frozen. I am holding down several keys at once in an attempt to remedy the problem when the post hits the mat downstairs.
I bolt from the room, but I can already hear my wife’s heels striking the hall tiles hard; she must have jumped from the landing. By the time I’ve turned the corner between flights, I can hear an envelope being rent in strips. And then, from directly below me, my wife lets out a bloodcurdling scream.
By the time I reach the ground floor all is quiet. My wife is in the kitchen, scrutinizing a letter. The envelope lies in shreds at her feet.
‘He got in?’ I say.
‘Of course he got in,’ she says. ‘Didn’t you hear me screaming?’
We stand side by side reading the letter in silence.
‘It’s actually quite boring,’ I say, ‘once you get past the first two lines.’
‘Oh my God,’ my wife gasps. ‘It’s like someone is telling me I’m pretty!’ With her free hand she is texting the oldest one over and over. We are struggling to make sense of page two when her phone finally pings. It’s a text from the boy.
‘i’m in a lesson,’ it says.
‘GET OUT OF THE LESSON,’ my wife writes.
Much later, when the champagne has been bought, opened and consumed, and when I have been sent to get some wine to chase it with, and when the boy has gone out with friends, I return from the shop to find my wife at the kitchen table with the letter, her phone and an open address book.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask.
‘I’m just ringing people to tell them about my brilliant achievement,’ she says.
‘Remember that you still need to get an A in Further Maths,’ I say.
‘I know it’s nothing to do with me,’ she says. ‘But he’s mine, I raised him, so I think I deserve a bit of—’ Her phone rings. She consults the screen, then puts it to her ear. ‘I got in!’ she shouts. ‘I know! Me, me, me!’
The week of celebration that follows is, for my wife, also a kind of letting go. She resigns from the student forums she has been haunting for months, and consigns to a drawer fat files of material on the subject of higher education. As far as the oldest is concerned, there isn’t much more to be done.
The following Sunday, after a long nap on the sofa, my wife wakes up in a mood to parent. Over supper, the younger two find themselves on the receiving end of her critical attention for the first time in weeks, and they’re not happy about it. One is berated for writing an insufficiently gripping thank you letter. The other is given a lecture about his homework and attitude. The meal ends, not atypically, with everyone storming off, except me.
When I finish, I join my wife, who is watching television. ‘They’re just upset,’ I say, ‘because it hasn’t snowed enough to close the schools.’
‘I should go and talk to them,’ she says.
‘I’d leave
it, actually.’
‘That’s your answer to everything,’ she says. ‘To do nothing.’
‘The benefits of my light-touch regulation will reveal themselves over time,’ I say.
‘I’m going up there,’ she says. She grabs the remote, hits pause and leaves the room.
I stare at a single frame, frozen in time, of a woman holding a newborn baby. I try to remember the oldest being that small, but I can’t. From upstairs I can hear my wife’s knuckles rapping insistently at a door.
‘Let me in,’ she says.
‘You can’t just leave me here in front of a paused programme!’ I shout.
‘Well, you come out, then,’ my wife says. I cannot hear the boy’s reply; just a long, freighted silence.
‘I don’t even like Call the Midwife!’ I shout.
‘Unlock this door right now,’ my wife says.
‘I’m going to change the channel!’ I shout. ‘And then you’ll lose the whole show!’
‘Don’t you dare!’ she shouts. ‘Bring me up a screwdriver!’
My wife has called to say she’s on her way back from a business trip to Scotland – she’ll be home in a matter of hours. It seems a good time to take stock.
I find the middle one sitting at my wife’s computer, typing furiously into one window while watching TV in another. The youngest one is sitting on the floor, killing people on his Xbox while barking orders into a headset. They both look about two years older than they were the last time I saw them, about twenty minutes earlier. It could be their school uniforms – with their jackets off and ties pulled loose, they look like harried office workers on a deadline.
‘Is that homework?’ I ask the middle one.
‘Haven’t got any,’ he says.
‘Hang on,’ the youngest one says. ‘I got this guy.’
‘Are you lying?’ I say to the middle one.
‘Nooooo!’ he sings.
‘Go left, go left, go left!’ the youngest one says. Something, or someone, explodes on his screen.
‘Supper will be ready in half an hour,’ I say, turning towards the door.
‘See you later, shitlord,’ the youngest says. It takes me a second to realize he isn’t talking to me.
Downstairs in the kitchen, I pour myself a glass of wine and sit down next to the oldest one. Since he turned eighteen three days previously, I have been in a rush to reframe all my dealings with him: I can no longer issue commands based on my legal right to control his destiny. I must treat him as an adult, and converse with him on a man-to-man basis. This leaves me at a temporary loss for words.
‘So,’ I say finally, ‘have you started gambling yet?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘I hadn’t even thought of that. I should, though, shouldn’t I?’
‘No comment,’ I say.
An hour later, we’re eating in front of the TV, watching the football. The children are also watching other screens simultaneously.
‘Why are we watching this match if Chelsea are playing on the other side?’ I ask.
‘Because I have a bet on this match,’ the oldest one says.
‘So do I,’ the middle one says.
My wife chooses this inopportune moment to walk in the door. ‘I’m so tired,’ she says. ‘This house is disgusting.’
‘Goal!’ the middle one shouts. I’m going to miss these times, I think. I begin to suspect that the youngest one may have been referring to me when he said ‘shitlord’ after all.
Lessons in primatology 4
From time to time, I receive letters from readers suggesting that my wife is either a work of fiction or secretly nice to me. Obviously she finds both allegations upsetting, and for that reason I have taken steps to disguise the identities of the people I write about. This basic safeguard will not, I hope, compromise the truth of what follows.
So anyway, my life partner Sean and I have been invited to a weekend party in the country. We’d planned to take our three adopted ex-research chimps – everyone else is bringing theirs – but there’s a problem. Using a series of whimpers and pant-grunts, our oldest chimp, Heinz, has made it clear he doesn’t wish to come.
‘There will be lots of other chimps there,’ Sean says. Heinz makes the sign for ‘I’m good, thanks’. We agree to let him stay behind, because he’s reached that stage where he needs to assert his independence, and he can lift a chest freezer over his head.
We pack the car full of camping equipment and bananas, and set off. When we hit traffic on the M3, Sean becomes testy. In all the years we’ve been gay-married, Sean has hated camping. This year, he has been made to camp twice already, in highly challenging weather conditions.
‘It’s going to be lovely,’ I say. ‘I promise.’ In the rear-view mirror, I can see our youngest chimp, Kurt, repeatedly making the sign for ‘Are we there yet?’
When we finally arrive, I find a flat spot to pitch our tent. I was not around to pack the tent last time, and Sean, using some form of positive-reinforcement strategy, persuaded the chimps to do it for him. As a result, the guy ropes are knotted, pegs are missing and there is chewing gum stuck to the flysheet.
‘You pay peanuts, you get monkeys,’ I say, to no one.
I make up the air mattress with a duvet and two pillows, hoping Sean will find the experience less of a deprivation this time. He arrives as I finish, opens the tent and snatches up the duvet. ‘I’ve bagged us a bed in the house,’ he says.
‘But I’ve only just …’ I gesture to indicate our surroundings.
Sean takes in the sylvan scene, the dramatic view, the glorious summer sunshine.
‘Don’t be mad,’ he says.
We’ve known most of the other guests for years, through Sean’s groundbreaking work in primatology, but because we don’t see them that often, it can be hard to remember whose recent paper on ape cognition has appeared in which publication. Instead, we talk about our chimps as we watch them roll about shrieking on the grass.
‘Where’s your oldest?’ one friend asks.
‘We’ve left him behind,’ Sean says.
‘Ooh,’ the friend says, ‘I wouldn’t trust our one on his own, not for a minute.’
Sean does not like having his expertise in adolescent chimp behaviour questioned. ‘Heinz will be fine,’ he says. But later he signs to me: ‘Ring him.’
As the party progresses, some of the older chimps break into the cider, with predictable results. Sean grows anxious. If this is what happens under the supervision of respected primatologists, he thinks, what will be happening at home? We ring again, but it’s no use. Heinz cannot work a phone.
The next morning we pack up our tent quickly. Traffic is light, and we arrive home in the early afternoon, to find Heinz hanging from his tyre, watching the cricket upside down. Sean is furious.
‘Is this all you’ve done?’ he shouts. ‘All weekend?’ Heinz shrugs. Sean leaves the room.
‘You missed a hell of a party,’ I say.
Heinz makes the sign for ‘whatever’.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In May, the oldest one leaves school under a cloud. ‘Under a cloud’ is precisely the phrase the school used on the last day of classes for the upper sixth, when they rang my wife to say he was one of a group of boys who, dressed as a giant Pac-Man and the ghosts who are alternately his pursuers and his quarry, ran through the library and several classrooms, blasting the Pac-Man theme from hidden speakers. She recounts the call in a worried voice.
‘Did you act shocked?’ I ask. ‘Or did you admit you knew about it?’
‘I said I knew about it,’ she says, turning pale. ‘I didn’t tell them I paid for the fucking costumes.’
We hope we are entering the final phase of our parental control-freakery, at least as far as the oldest is concerned. His A-level revision, we explain, must be a matter for him alone; only he can summon up the required commitment, we cannot want it for him. We tell him this between thirty and forty times a day, shaking him awake to deliver the message if necessa
ry.
In the meantime the youngest one is still rehearsing his French oral presentation under duress. I’ve memorized a page and a half of French in the process, just as I once accidentally learned to play ‘Moon River’ on the violin, pursuing the middle one’s grade two certificate.
I shout for the youngest one to come downstairs for his evening drill.
‘You can’t be serious!’ he screams.
‘I am deadly serious,’ I say.
He appears with two crumpled sheets of paper and slumps in a chair. I take the pages from him, even though I don’t really need them any more.
‘How do you keep the form?’ I say, pouring myself a glass of wine.
‘Pour garder la forme, je fais beaucoup de sports,’ he says with hate in his eyes.
‘What is the sport that you detest?’ I say.
‘Le sport je que déteste est …’
‘Le sport que je déteste,’ I say.
‘I’m not doing this with you any more,’ he says.
‘If the words aren’t in the right order, it doesn’t count as French.’
‘Mum!’
On the morning before his first English exam, the oldest one will not rise to receive his lecture on personal responsibility. He cannot speak, or lift his head from the pillow.
‘He has a temperature of a hundred and one,’ my wife says. ‘He’s delirious. What do we do?’
‘You get some paracetamol,’ I say. ‘And I will shout quotations from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into his ear.’
My wife rings the GP, but the woman who answers the phone cannot be induced to share her panic. She doesn’t seem to consider the boy’s inability to absorb quotations from primary sources to be a genuine symptom, and anyway there are no available appointments. She tells my wife to take him to A&E.
My wife ignores the advice, puts the boy in the car, drives him to the surgery and deposits him at the front desk. An hour later she returns with a doctor’s letter and a course of antibiotics. The boy, it transpires, has an upper respiratory infection.