by Owen Booth
Somehow, we’ve come on a stag do to Amsterdam with our sons in tow.
It’s not going well.
It’s late in the year and Amsterdam is spectacularly beautiful. Along the Herengracht the low afternoon light paints the tall houses in colours that take our breath away. In the Rijksmuseum, the Vermeers and Rembrandts seem to glow from within. On Keizersgracht the most beautiful women in the world ride past us on vintage bicycles.
But whatever way you look at it, this is no place for fathers to bring their sons.
The older sons want to sneak off and look in the windows of the brothels and hang around outside the sex shows, and the younger ones keep being nearly run over by all the beautiful cyclists.
‘How was the world made?’ the younger sons ask us. ‘How did this all be true? Even before the olden days?’
We try to explain about false vacuums and the weak anthropic principle, about Higgs fields and the arrow of time, but it’s no good. Half the dads have already been out to a coffee shop ‘for a coffee’, and the other half are waiting for their turn.
‘But what about even before then?’ the younger sons ask us. ‘What was there before the bang?’
‘Well, before then … there wasn’t really a then for things to be before.’
Nobody is convinced by that. We don’t blame them. This whole trip was a terrible idea.
A group of the dads has got lost. The combination of all the weed and the conversation about primordial nucleosynthesis in the first seconds of the universe has tipped them over the edge. We send out a search party, roam the beautiful Golden Age streets. We keep getting invited into sex shows, decline politely.
After a couple of hours, we find the missing dads standing in a row outside the windows of a brothel, stoned, staring, confused, at the women in the windows.
We gently guide them away, apologise to everyone.
We haven’t even started on the drinking competitions.
Ex-Girlfriends
We’re teaching our sons about our ex-girlfriends.
How many of them there have been. What they meant to us. Where it all went wrong, again and again.
We turn up at the doors of our ex-girlfriends with our sons in tow, ask if we can come in and state our cases.
Our sons sit on the sofa, accept offers of juice and biscuits and say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, are generally a credit to us. Our ex-girlfriends entertain the thought, just for a couple of seconds, that we have borrowed or stolen these children in order to impress them. That we are up to our old ways.
We are not up to our old ways.
We are aware of the remarkableness of our ex-girlfriends. We know we are lucky men to have loved and lost such spectacular and interesting women, to be in a position now to try to make amends for all our terrible behaviour.
Our ex-girlfriends are not so easily convinced.
‘What are you doing here?’ they ask. ‘What is this about?’
‘We’re trying to make amends,’ we say, ‘having undertaken a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. We want to make up for all the bad things we did back when we were drinking/gambling/on drugs/addicted to sex. For the lies, the betrayals, the constant unreliability, etc.’
Our ex-girlfriends are surprised.
‘You were addicted to sex?’ they ask.
‘Well, no,’ we say. ‘It’s just an example.’
‘Right. Because we probably would have noticed.’
‘Yes.’
Our ex-girlfriends think about it, remembering. Maybe for a bit longer than we’re comfortable with.
‘Now, Steve,’ they say, ‘he was definitely addicted to sex.’
Everyone is quiet for a bit then. Our sons shift their gaze from us to our ex-girlfriends and back again. We had expected this to go differently, if we’re honest. Outside the windows the late October light slowly fails.
‘Well, anyway,’ our ex-girlfriends say, eventually, ‘it was all such a long time ago.’
They see us to the door, thank us for coming, tell our sons what fine young men they are, wish us all the best for the future.
Our sons look at us, about to say what we’re all thinking.
‘Who’s Steve?’ they ask.
The Loneliness of Billionaires
We’re teaching our sons about the loneliness of billionaires.
We’re explaining to our sons that the billionaires all live in exclusive penthouse apartments or isolated mansions or on their own private islands. On the beaches of their own private islands, we tell our sons, the billionaires weep. Because they don’t have to worry about money, we explain, the billionaires worry about everything else.
They worry about the future, about population growth and disease, about how to save the world from climate change or the possibility that computers might one day become sentient and enslave mankind.
The billionaires are crushed by this terrible responsibility.
‘Who would want to be a billionaire?’ we ask our sons.
‘Not us!’ our sons all shout.
The billionaires spend their days inventing rockets and self-driving cars and supersonic trains. They hold competitions to find the best solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. Our sons enter the competitions and win all-expenses-paid trips to meet the billionaires on their private islands.
As our seaplanes come in low over the island, the sun breaks through the clouds. The billionaires stand on the beaches in white linen trousers, waving to us. The sea is the deepest blue that any of us have ever seen, the beaches are the whitest white.
‘Who would want to be a billionaire?’ we ask.
Our sons nod, not really listening to us, thinking about it.
The billionaires put us up in grass-roofed lodges that face onto the white beaches, and we listen to the surf as we fall asleep. In the mornings when we wake up our sons are already walking along the beach, deep in conversation with the lonely billionaires.
We spend our days learning how to windsurf and going spearfishing while our sons work on top secret important projects. In the evenings the staff serve us baked sea bass at long tables on the beach, and we watch the sun go down and wait for our sons to join us. The clouds along the horizon are lit up like the end of the world, and our sons are always late for dinner. We start smoking again because we have nothing better to do, consider our stalled careers, think about the compromises we’ve made.
We wonder what we might have done with all the opportunities that our sons have been handed.
On the last night of our stay a fire breaks out in the big house at the end of the island. The big house is where the billionaires sleep, where they come up with their paradigm-shifting inventions, where they hold their transatlantic business meetings. We’ve never been allowed to visit the big house. Whenever we try to get a glimpse of what goes on in there we’re run off by armed guards in dune buggies.
As the flames chew their way through the tropical hardwood of the big house, the billionaires stagger from the burning porch. Flames roll along the roof, climb the walls. The sky is dancing with glowing embers and ash.
The billionaires sink to their knees on the beaches. In their hands they hold the burned, sodden blueprints and plans. All those inventions. All those rockets and cars and trains.
‘It’s all ruined!’ they shout, sobbing. ‘Everything is ruined!’
In the dark, staring at the weeping billionaires, we pull our traumatised sons closer to us, hold their heads to our chests.
‘Now do you see?’ we whisper to them.
In the back pockets of our new white linen trousers, we can feel the slight weight of the cigarette lighter.
We decide we can live with the guilt.
Crying
We’re teaching our sons about crying.
We’re teaching them that it’s okay to cry, that everyone cries, that men, by all accounts, should cry more. The consensus, we tell them, is that crying is mostly good.
Nevertheless, o
ur sons complain that they’ve never seen us cry.
‘Well, no …’ we admit.
They’ve got us there. We’ve never cried in front of our sons.
We’re not sure how we feel about this. We’ve only seen our own fathers cry once. We don’t know whether or not it did us any good. At the time, we weren’t sure how we were supposed to react. We don’t know how we’d react now.
‘We cried when you were born,’ we tell our sons. ‘We sobbed. We howled. There was no stopping us. For weeks afterwards we kept bursting into tears roughly every two hours.’
‘Where did you cry?’ our sons ask.
‘We cried everywhere,’ we tell them.
It’s true. In the weeks after our sons were born we wept uncontrollably. We cried in supermarkets, on trains and buses, while brushing our teeth. We cried in car parks and lifts and corridors. We cried at the controls of cranes and armoured personnel carriers and nuclear power stations. We cried while holding our wives and partners, while performing surgery, while taking part in high-speed car chases, while playing in Premier League football matches. We cried while selling advertising space over the phone and while juggling knives in variety acts. We cried while delivering the mail, while working in Vietnamese restaurants, while plastering ceilings, while reading the ten o’clock news. We cried while trying to persuade people to help us liberate thousands of pounds from failed African states, while changing tractor tyres, while listening to motivational speeches. We cried at conferences, and at boxing matches, and at meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and Gamblers Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. We cried in government and on the international space station and at the South Pole and in submarines at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. We cried during charity parachute jumps and driving tests and court cases. We cried while performing in pornographic films and while lecturing in particle physics. We cried in job centres and on cross-Channel ferries and while taking out the bins.
Partly, we suppose, it was the lack of sleep. Everything was raw. We felt like we’d been torn open to the world, and there was nothing we could do to stop it all from getting in.
‘So what happened?’ our sons ask.
‘Eventually we had to get on with our lives,’ we say. ‘We couldn’t just spend all day sitting around crying. Can you imagine what the world would be like?’
Our sons think about this, imagine us weeping from morning until night.
And we think about what we’d give, God, what we’d give to be able to feel that way again.
Europe
We’re teaching our sons about Europe.
The size of it. The shape of it. How much of it is theirs.
We’re driving around Europe marvelling at examples of the continent’s rich history and magnificent infrastructure, its museums and art galleries and national parks. We’re gazing in wonder at roads and airports and railways and bridges.
We drive across the breathtaking Ponte Vasco da Gama bridge in Portugal and think about the future of the European project. We drive across the breathtaking Viaduc de Millau bridge and the breathtaking Pont de Normandie bridge in France. We drive across the breathtaking Øresundsbroen bridge between Denmark and Sweden, across the breathtaking Sunnibergbrücke bridge in Switzerland.
‘You can tell a lot about a country from its bridges,’ we explain to our sons.
In the back of the car our sons are alternately well behaved and irritable. There are fights, travel sickness. We’re asking a lot of them, we know. We’ve been travelling for a long time.
We tell our sons the story of Europe, all the way from the ice age up until the present day. Our sons are impressed by the scale of the bloodshed, the logistics of it all. They want to hear about the Thirty Years’ War and the Eighty Years’ War and the Hundred Years’ War. They ask to visit castles and look at replica trebuchets and torture chambers. They refuse to be excited by coastal land reclamation or the single currency.
We take our sons to visit the Lascaux caves in south-western France, to see the Palaeolithic cave paintings. The paintings were created by some of the first Europeans, almost twenty thousand years ago. There are paintings of bulls, bison, lions, horses, rhinoceros, stags. Everybody is impressed with the craftsmanship; with the way the artists have managed to capture the essence of their animal subjects.
Nobody knows why the paintings were created, we tell our sons – whether it was to help guarantee successful hunts, or to celebrate them, or as an aid for ice-age fathers to teach their sons about their place in the world.
Our sons consider all this, quietly, think about their own places in the world, ask themselves what Europe means. We put our hands on their shoulders, proudly.
We don’t have the heart to tell them that the whole thing is a fibreglass fake, that the real Lascaux caves have been closed since 1963 to preserve the fragile paintings from being damaged by the breath of the millions of people who visit every year.
We don’t think they would appreciate the irony.
Empathy
We’re teaching our sons about empathy.
We’re teaching them how to share, how to consider other people’s feelings, how to appreciate someone else’s point of view. We’re having mixed success. Sometimes it feels like we’re raising hyenas.
The younger sons have been waging a guerrilla war against their older brothers for the last few months. They want their own rooms, want their older brothers to move out – although there’s nowhere for them to go. Their methods of asymmetrical warfare include sabotage, the use of booby traps, midnight ambushes, and pre-dawn hit-and-run raids.
The older brothers are starting to show signs of battle fatigue. They’re becoming jumpy and hollow-eyed. They refuse to go to the bathroom without checking for tripwires first, sleep with their nerf guns loaded and ready by their sides.
‘Why do you have to fight with your brothers all the time?’ we ask the younger sons.
‘The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe,’ they tell us. ‘You have to make it fall.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘They started it.’
We try to bring both sides to the negotiating table for peace talks. The peace talks are held over breakfast. The younger sons come with a list of demands. They’ve taken to wearing headbands, to holding classes on revolutionary thought in the back garden. We have to ask them to stop referring to their older brothers as ‘The Oppressor’.
‘You see what we have to put up with?’ the older brothers say.
‘They keep punching us!’ our younger sons claim, indignant.
‘Please don’t punch your brothers,’ we say.
We draw up an agreement for the sharing of toys and the rights to any exploitable natural resources between the bunk beds and the wardrobe, get the younger sons to agree to temporarily suspend their Christmas bombing campaign.
‘Remember that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love,’ we tell them. ‘It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.’
Our sons nod, stand their forces down. Both sides withdraw to consider their positions. For two days an uneasy peace reigns.
Until the morning we wake up to hear them whispering to each other through the wall, and spot the pillow barricades by their door, the toy guns aimed at our bedroom, and feel too late the sharp twang of the wire as we step onto the landing.
Haunted Houses
We’re teaching our sons about haunted houses.
We’re taking them on explorations of abandoned lunatic asylums and ruined stately homes and spooky hotels where the corridors go on for miles. We’re spending the night in deserted mansions, armed only with torches and sleeping bags.
‘What was that?’ our sons ask, sitting up in the dark, in their Paw Patrol- and Pokemon-themed sleeping bags.
We tell them it was only the wind, the sound of the old house settling, mice under the floorboards.
‘Go back to sleep,’ we say.
We�
�re fairly certain it wasn’t mice under the floorboards. Not just mice, anyway.
‘Tell us a story,’ our sons ask, ‘to help take our minds off all the terrifying things that could potentially be hiding in the dark.’
So we tell our sons how we used to play in the garden of the local deserted mansion when we were children, how we would climb over the wall of the overgrown orchard, throw stones at the broken windows, dare each other to climb the stone steps and knock on the front door.
We tell them about the time when we stayed too late one evening and saw the girl’s pale face at the window as the sky filled with swooping bats. How she haunted our dreams for years afterwards.
‘Who was she?’ our sons whisper. ‘Did she live there?’
‘Nobody lived there,’ we say, and we realise we haven’t thought about any of this since we were twelve years old. ‘Nobody had lived there since before we were born.’
We all sit there listening to the creaking of the trees outside the window, the rise and fall of our breath.
Eventually our sons yawn.
‘Great story, Dad,’ they say, and roll over and shut their eyes.
Our sons go to sleep and we stay awake until the sun comes up, watching the corners of the room, waiting for the impossible return of everything we’ve ever lost.
Relationships
We’re teaching our sons about relationships.
We’re teaching them how to have relationships, and what relationships are for, and what to do and what to avoid doing in them.
We’re all in McDonald’s on a Saturday morning, mainly on account of the divorced and separated and widowed dads. It’s practically their second home.
When we were younger, we explain to our sons, we thought that relationships were supposed to solve all your problems. We thought that all you had to do was to get someone to fall in love with you and you’d suddenly be handed the life you’d always wanted. That you would suddenly, somehow, become the person you’d always wanted to be.