Us

by Nicholls, David

  130. the caring professions

  When Albie was sturdy enough, we drove below the speed limit to the small flat my father had moved to after my mother’s death, pleasant enough when he’d arrived but now dark and rather bleak, with an ashtray smell and nothing in the fridge. Boxes remained unpacked, pictures were not yet hung, and it felt like a storeroom for a former life rather than a home for the future. Having retired early from his surgery, my father spent his days reading thrillers or watching old black-and-white movies in the afternoon, subsisting on instant coffee and cigarettes and occasional plates of baby-ish food – scrambled eggs, baked beans, packet soups; as a GP, he had always led by instruction rather than example.

  He had never been a particularly vigorous man, but as soon as he opened the door it was clear he was not thriving alone. His teeth were furred and his skin pale and unevenly shaved with wiry hair sprouting on his cheeks, from his ears and the tip of his nose. For the first time in my life I was aware of being taller than him. Of course he smiled at his grandchild, cooed and remarked on the size of Albie’s fingernails, his hair and eyes. ‘He looks like you, Connie, thank God!’ he said and laughed, but he was not at ease. He held his grandson as if assessing his weight, then passed him back and there it was again; the wariness, the discomfort.

  But then he was never a natural candidate for the caring professions. As a GP, he tended to view all but the most serious of ailments as signs of carelessness or neglect, and I think he frightened many of his patients into good health. I remember once, on a family holiday to Anglesey, scraping my shin against a piece of corrugated iron, looking down and seeing the skin hanging there, perfectly white, like waxy paper in the moment before the blood began to flow, and I remember my father sighing at the sight, as if I’d taken the paintwork off the family car. The fact that it had been an accident was irrelevant. If I hadn’t been playing, it wouldn’t have happened. He issued sympathy with the same reluctance that he prescribed antibiotics.

  I did not feel hard done by. My father was exactly as I expected dads to be: a professional man, able and confident and somewhat withdrawn, but serious about his obligations to provide materially for his family. Dads had favourite armchairs in which they sat like starship captains, issuing orders and receiving cups of tea and shouting at the news without fear of contradiction. Dads controlled the television, the telephone and thermostat, they decided mealtimes, bedtimes, holidays. Raised in an anarcho-socialist republic, Connie and her family were always bellowing and bawling at each other about music and politics, sex and digestion, but my own father and I never had anything that you might call an intimate conversation and I’m not entirely sure I ever wanted one. He taught me how to use a slide-rule and how to change a bicycle inner tube, but he was no more likely to embrace me than to break into a tap-dance.

  That was a long, uncomfortable afternoon we spent with my father. I had such strutting pride in the new family we had made. Look, I wanted to say, look, I have found this wonderful woman, or she has found me. We have experienced things, terrible things, but here we are holding hands, right here on your sofa. Look at the way I carry my son, the way I change nappies with confidence and ease! No offence, I am profoundly grateful, but I am not like you.

  Oh, the smugness and complacency of the new parent! See how good we are! Let us show you how it should be done! I’m sure my parents had wanted to teach their own parents similar lessons, and so on back into history and forward, too; I’m sure that some day Albie will be keen to settle some scores and give me some pointers as to where we – I – went wrong. But perhaps it’s a delusion for each generation to think that they know better than their parents. If this were true, then parental wisdom would increase with time like the processing power of computer chips, refining over generations, and we’d now be living in some utopia of openness and understanding.

  ‘Well, we’d best be going,’ I told my dad that evening, refusing his offer of a night in the spare room, which was crammed with cardboard boxes, a single bulb overhead. ‘I’ll turn the radiator on,’ he offered as an incentive. ‘No, it’s a long drive back,’ I said, though we all knew that it wasn’t. Perhaps I imagined this to ease my conscience, but he seemed relieved and turned the news back on before we left. Goodbye, Dad! Goodbye! Albie, give Granddad a wave! Goodbye, we’ll see you soon!

  My father died six weeks later. Of course I have no belief in an afterlife, least of all the one depicted in newspaper cartoons, but if he was looking down from some cloud on to the Siena train, he might, I suppose, be allowed one of his old favourite remarks:

  You see? You see? Not so bloody clever now!

  131. tartaric acid

  I fell into something of a low.

  It was not merely the loss of my belongings – they were, after all, perfectly safe and retrievable – but my increasing loss of control. It had been some time since I’d spoken to Connie. I missed hearing her voice but did not quite trust my own. I was sure Siena would mark some kind of turning point, and I would speak to her when there was good news. But if there was no good news, how could I go home?

  At Empoli, I was joined at my table by a little boy in a striped vest, three years old, perhaps, travelling with his grandparents who were large and jovial, full of proud smiles as they watched the boy lay out the contents of a small bag of sweets, twelve artificially coloured jellies, four red, eight blue, sprinkled with the tartaric acid that causes them to fizz on the tongue. He counted them, then counted them again. He divided them into rows and columns, three by four, two by six, showing that instinctive pleasure in play that seems to disappear as soon as we call it mathematics. He licked the tip of his finger and dabbed at the sweet-sharp sugar that had become detached, making a great show of choosing which sweet to eat first. I watched him quite openly, perhaps a little too openly for this day and age. He was aware of giving a performance and when he finally settled on a red sweet, popped it into his mouth and puckered his lips at the tartness of it, I laughed and we both laughed together, his grandparents too, nodding, smiling.

  He said something to me in burbling Italian. ‘Inglese,’ I replied, ‘no parlo Italiano,’ and he nodded as if this made sense and slid a blue sweet towards me, arm fully extended, and the gesture seemed so generous and so familiar that I thought, Oh God, it’s Albie. It’s exactly how Albie used to be.

  132. the ‘record’ button

  Because he really was a charming little boy, like a kid from a comic, full of benign mischief. There were difficult days, of course, particularly in the early months. Croup! He caught croup, a disease designed by nature specifically to terrify parents, and there were further panics to come, over mysterious rashes or inexplicable tears, our nerves perpetually jangled from lack of sleep. But we bore all of this gladly and with only the occasional loss of composure, because hadn’t we yearned for this disruption in our lives? I returned to work, half regretful, half grateful for some respite, then came home and did my bit to bathe and feed him, and the days and weeks and months went by.

  At some point around this time, he must have begun acquiring first memories. I hope so, anyway, because it’s hard to imagine a child who was more adored and cared for by parents who, for the most part, got on incredibly well. The inability to control a child’s recollections is a frustrating one. I know my own parents did their best to provide sun-dappled days of picnics and paddling pools, but mainly I remember advertising jingles, wet socks on radiators, inane TV theme tunes, arguments about wasted food. With my own son, there were times when I definitely thought ‘remember this’ – Albie toppling through the high grass of a summer meadow, the three of us lolling in bed on a winter Sunday or dancing around the kitchen to some silly song – wishing there was some way to press ‘record’, because the three of us were, for the most part, pretty good together, a family at last.

  133. the scientific basis for unconditional love

  We were sharing a bath one night, at a time when we did such things, Albie lying between his mother�
�s legs, head resting on her belly, and I made an observation that, while all of us might sometimes covet other people’s lives, their careers, their spouses (I coveted no one’s spouse, but knew from experience that others coveted mine), it was extremely rare – unheard of, even, and certainly taboo – to prefer someone else’s children to your own. Everyone thinks their own child is delightful, yet not all children are delightful, so why are parents unaffected by that? What is the reason for this fixed and unshakeable bond: neurological, sociological, genetic? Perhaps, I suggested, we’re hard-wired to love our own children over others as a kind of survival mechanism, for the propagation of the species.

  Connie frowned. ‘You mean the love you feel for your child is not real, it’s just science.’

  ‘Not at all. It’s real because it’s science! The way you feel about friends or lovers or even siblings is dependent and conditional on their behaviour. With your children, that’s irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what they do. People with bratty kids don’t love them less, do they?’

  ‘No, they teach them not to be bratty.’

  ‘And that’s the difference – they stick with them and even if they don’t succeed, even if they stay brats, they’d still give their life for them.’

  ‘Albie’s not bratty.’

  ‘No, he’s lovely. But everybody thinks their own children are lovely, even when they’re not.’

  ‘And they shouldn’t?’

  ‘Of course they should! But that’s what people mean by “unconditional love”.’

  ‘Which apparently you think is a bad thing?’

  ‘No—’

  ‘Or an illusion, a “behavioural instinct”.’

  ‘No, I’m just … thinking aloud.’

  We both went silent for a while. The bath was cooling now but getting out would have felt like conceding a point.

  ‘What a stupid thing to say in front of Albie!’

  I laughed. ‘He’s eighteen months old! He doesn’t understand.’

  ‘And I suppose you know that, too.’

  ‘I was thinking aloud, that’s all.’

  ‘The eminent child psychologist,’ she said, rising suddenly from the bath, Albie in her arms.

  ‘I was thinking out loud! It was just a theory.’

  ‘Well I don’t need a theory, Douglas,’ she said, wrapping him in a towel and bundling him away. My wife has always had a gift for effective exit lines. I lay alone in the bath for some time, feeling the water grow more tepid around me. She’s tired, I thought, it’s nothing, and sure enough the debate was forgotten almost instantly by everyone except me.

  At least I presume she has forgotten it.

  134. lego incident

  But from the beginning there was never any doubt that she was better at it all, so much more competent, kind and patient, never bored in that dull old playground, never reaching for a newspaper, happy to watch the twentieth, twenty-first, twenty-second trip down the slide. Is there anything duller than pushing a swing? Yet she never seemed resentful – or only occasionally – of the hours and days and weeks that he consumed, the attention he demanded, the irrational tears, the trail of destruction and spilt paint and mashed carrot that he left behind, never repulsed or angered by the vomit that stained our new sofa, the poo that found its way into the cracks between the floorboards and is still there now, I expect, at some molecular level. As Albie got older, his devotion to his mother became more and more blatant and extreme. In early years this circumstance is so commonplace as to be barely worth acknowledging. Strain as he might, even the most fervent father lacks the ability to breast-feed, and the paternal bonding would come later, wouldn’t it, over chemistry sets and model planes, camping trips and driving lessons? He would beat me at badminton and in return I’d show him how to make a battery out of a lemon. In the meantime, there seemed little to do, except wait patiently for the day we became close.

  But increasingly I seemed to have a particular gift for upsetting him, standing awkwardly while he wriggled and writhed in my arms, waiting for Connie to relieve me. Without her there, we were both on edge. The journey from baby to toddler will involve a certain number of mishaps, but something about her absence made him tumble and trip so that even now there are scars and dents that Connie can point to and attribute to me. There, that’s the coffee-table incident; that’s the fall from the tree; that’s the ceiling-fan affair. And always, always, his arms would stretch towards his mother on her return because he knew he would be safe.

  All my best intentions seemed to backfire, and even my loving nicknames didn’t stick. Connie invented Egg, as in Albie/albumen/egg white/Egg, a pleasing name that seemed to fit. Noting the somewhat simian way he clung to his mother’s hip, I made a play for ‘Monkey’ but it didn’t take, and I abandoned it after a week or two. Then there was the incident with the Lego, an episode that has since passed into Petersen folklore as an illustration of … I don’t quite know what, because my behaviour always seemed entirely reasonable to me. Needless to say I was raised on Lego, which was a rather more rigorous and austere toy in my day but nevertheless something of a secret vice for me; that satisfying click, the symmetry, the neat tessellations. Maths, engineering, design – they were all there disguised as play, and so I looked forward to the day when Albie and I could sit shoulder to shoulder in front of a tea-tray, open the cellophane bag, turn to page one and build!

  Yet Albie’s technique just wasn’t there. He seemed incapable of following the simplest instructions, happy instead to jam different-coloured pieces together at random, to chew the pieces so that they became unusable, gum them up with Plasticine, drop them behind the radiator, throw them at the wall. If I constructed something on his behalf – a police station say, or an elaborate spaceship – he would smash the toy to pieces within minutes and make instead some nameless, formless thing to shove down the back of the sofa. Set after set expired this way, a perfectly good toy turned into detritus for the vacuum cleaner.

  One night, motivated entirely by a desire to give my son something lasting and permanent to play with, I waited until he and Connie were in bed, poured myself a large Scotch, mixed together some Araldite adhesive in a jam-jar lid, laid the instructions before me and carefully glued together a pirate ship, a troll castle and an ambulance. Now, instead of a box of expensive shingle, here were three terrific, long-lasting toys. I displayed them on the kitchen table and went to bed, anticipating much acclaim.

  The tears and wailing that woke me the next morning were therefore something of a disappointment, and certainly quite out of proportion to my crimes. But look, I told Albie, now they’ll last forever! Now they won’t smash! But he doesn’t want them to last forever, said Connie, consoling tearful Albie, he wants to smash them, that’s the point! That’s what’s creative about them. That destruction could be creative seemed like one of those things artists say, but I let the point go and went off to the lab, sour and frustrated, the pleasures of Lego quite lost to us now. The offending articles were stashed away in a high cupboard, the story materialising years later as an anecdote at dinner, signifying … what, exactly? A lack of imagination on my part, a lack of creativity, I suppose. Lack of fun. Oh yes, they remembered that.

  Anyway, the anecdote always seemed to get a big laugh, and as a father I have learnt to develop a thick skin and appreciate jokes at my expense. Nobody would ever have dared to laugh at my own father and this is progress, I suppose, of a sort.

  135. siena

  Certainly the boy on the Siena train found me engaging enough and by the time we arrived at my destination we were firm friends, nodding away at each other, nodding, nodding. I was grateful for the sweet he offered me and would gladly have gorged on all of them, because who knew when I would eat again? But we were pulling into Siena. Ciao, ciao! Say goodbye to the nice crazy man. I shook the sticky fingers of the boy’s hand and stepped out into the brutal heat of a Tuscan noon.

  The bus that shuttled into the old town was packed and I was aware of how smugly u
nencumbered I felt amidst the backpacks and suitcases, as free and light as a recently escaped lunatic. Now we were passing through a mediaeval gate, now disembarking, the suitcases rumbling behind me as I hurried ahead, through another gate and then, without any expectation, out into the bright light of an immense piazza, a fan divided into nine slim wedges like a peacock’s tail or a tin of Scottish shortbread, radiating from an immense Gothic palace, the whole scene baked a terracotta red. Quite, quite overwhelming, and heartening too, because Siena was a walled town, compact and self-contained, and if Venice was a maze, this was a shoebox. The Piazza del Campo was inescapable, with a clear focal point at its base. Like ants beneath a magnifying glass, it would be impossible for Kat and Albie to avoid passing before me. Optimistic, alert, I chose a spot on the herringboned bricks about halfway down the slope, pulled my baseball cap down over my eyes and promptly fell asleep.

  136. the reunion

  I woke a little after three and swore so extravagantly that the tourists turned to stare. How could I have been so stupid? Struggling to my feet, I found that I could barely stand. In my exhaustion, my head had lolled to one side and the right side of my face and neck had the familiar tightness that precedes sunburn. I stumbled, then sat once again on the hot bricks. Three hours! Three hours in which I felt almost certain they had passed me by. I had a perfect image of Albie stepping over me, collapsed here like some drunk. My mouth was dry while my clothes dripped with perspiration – I had left a damp patch on the ground where the bricks had drawn the remaining moisture from my body – and my head throbbed with what surely must be sunstroke. Water, I must have water. I tried to stand again, resting on my toes a moment then staggering up the sides of the sun-baked terracotta bowl, like Lawrence of Arabia clambering up a dune.