by Owen Booth
Consequently, we tell our sons, all our relationships tended to end the same way: in heartbreak and despair and things getting set on fire.
Our sons, elbows deep in their Happy Meals, nod knowingly.
Now things are different, we tell them. Now we understand that what relationships actually do is provide you with a whole new set of problems to deal with, so you don’t have time to worry about all the stupid, self-indulgent stuff you used to worry about before.
In this way, we say, relationships are not unlike children.
‘Relationships, above all, are work,’ we tell our sons, as we all leave McDonald’s and head towards the park.
‘But nobody gets paid,’ our sons remind us.
‘No.’
The divorced and separated and widowed fathers are simultaneously a lot more optimistic and a lot more cynical than the rest of us in their view of relationships. They’ve been around the block, they remind us all, dragging on their cigarettes – the cigarettes that they only started smoking again when they got divorced or separated or their partners died. They’ve built relationships only to watch them crumble or blow apart or collapse like dying stars, on account of one or both parties having sex with other people, or wanting to have sex with other people, or growing up, or not growing up, or getting bored, or dying tragically young.
Nevertheless, the divorced and separated and widowed fathers tell us, they’re still willing to get back on the horse.
Because what else is there?
We go with the divorced and separated and widowed fathers to watch them get haircuts and makeovers and body waxes. They take us for rides in their sports cars and introduce us to their new girlfriends and prospective girlfriends, who are all as lovely as you would expect. The older prospective girlfriends, who have been down this road before and have children of their own, are reserved with us but great with our sons.
Somewhere across town, we imagine, their ex-husbands are likely sitting in other, similar branches of McDonald’s, having much the same conversations as the rest of us.
Mountains
We’re teaching our sons about mountains.
We’re teaching them how to approach mountains, how to understand mountains, how to classify mountains, how to climb mountains. We’re trying to get our sons to understand what mountains mean to us, in exactly the same way that our fathers failed to get us to understand what mountains meant to them.
Together with our sons we’re planning to climb the ten highest mountains on the planet. We’re going to sit on the summits of the ten highest mountains on the planet and smoke cigarettes and watch the sun come up and ponder the sublime.
We’ll have to take our oxygen masks off to smoke our cigarettes, root around inside our gigantic down jumpsuits for some matches or a lighter. Our starved red blood cells will wither in protest. Our lungs will howl.
From up there we’ll be able to see the curvature of the earth, the thin orange line of the troposphere on the horizon, the stratosphere and mesosphere shading white into blue into the blackness of space.
‘This is what you trained for,’ we’ll tell our sons. ‘This is the reward for your sacrifice. Smoke your cigarette.’
So far our sons are unconvinced. They don’t see the use of mountains, see even less point in climbing them. They want to watch TV or play with their friends.
We don’t blame them. We felt exactly the same.
We tell ourselves that they’ll thank us one day, as we drag them out of their beds before dawn every morning, make them eat their porridge, check their ropes and gear. We remind ourselves that even Beethoven had to be forced to practise the piano every day as a child, weeping at the pain in his bruised fingers, the cuts that never healed.
Was it Beethoven or was it Mozart?
One day, we tell ourselves, it will all be worth it.
Drugs
We’re teaching our sons about drugs.
What they do, why people take them, where to find them.
For the last six weeks we’ve been travelling up the Amazon river in search of mind-expanding experiences. Under the expert teaching of local shamans we’ve been ingesting potions made from magical tree bark and smoking the leaves of incredibly rare vines and drinking the venom of critically endangered spiders and snakes.
We’re looking for answers to the questions we’ve been asking ourselves all of our lives.
Our sons are being remarkably patient. In the evenings they swim with pink river dolphins and eat fish for dinner. Then they have their bedtime stories, scoot down under their mosquito nets, sleep soundly under skies filled with giant wheeling stars.
While we journey the vast and terrifying reaches of the universe, guided only by unreliable spirit animals.
In the afternoons it rains in the jungle, and the rain sounds like the end of days. Our sons draw cartoons in the long house, play with the local kids, catch scorpions and bullet ants. We ask the local shamans if enlightenment is always this long coming, if it has to involve so much throwing up.
‘Direct your question to the jaguar,’ the shamans tell us. ‘Direct your question to the monkey.’
To be honest, we’re getting sick of directing our questions to the jaguar and the monkey. And the cayman and the piracu and the mighty anaconda and the giant centipede and the vampire bat.
None of them ever gives us a straight answer.
Our sons send emails home to their mothers and their schoolmates, tell stories of tarantulas as big as dinner plates, and the family of wild pigs that they’ve adopted, and the smell of the trees after the rain. They have their faces painted with ink made with ashes from the fire, learn how to make bows and arrows and blow pipes, go on hunting trips for monkeys and birds.
And every day they travel a little bit further into the jungle without us, come back a little bit nearer dark.
The shamans, who have likely had enough of us now, tell us about another village, further up the river, beyond the falls, where the locals chew the hallucinogenic leaves of a tree so rare it grows nowhere else on earth. There, they tell us, we might find what we’re looking for.
Our sons, carefully coating the tips of their arrows with poison, volunteer to stay behind until our return.
The Bradford Goliath
We’re teaching our sons about the Bradford Goliath.
Who he was. What he represented. Why we’ll never forget him.
When we were growing up, we explain to our sons, our next door neighbour Gary’s dad was a bodybuilder. He was huge. Three children could hang off each of his arms. He ate six raw eggs for breakfast every morning and did two hundred press-ups in the middle of the street before 8 a.m. He spent all day lifting weights in a caravan that he’d parked in front of the house.
He was in training to become The World’s Strongest Man.
‘How did he get so strong?’ our sons ask. ‘What was his job?’
‘He didn’t have a job,’ we tell our sons. ‘He’d been on the sick from the electricity board ever since being electrocuted while servicing a sub-station. He’d been clinically dead for ten minutes. When he regained consciousness he discovered he was permanently deaf in one ear and had the strength of ten men. It was a miracle.’
To supplement his sick pay, we explain, Gary’s dad started performing feats of strength at outdoor exhibitions. Wearing a wrestling mask and a leotard he would rip planks of wood in half and pull tractors with his teeth and blow up hot water bottles like balloons until they burst. He became famous across West Yorkshire as ‘The Bradford Goliath’.
And he was ours.
‘By the month of the World’s Strongest Man televised final,’ we tell our sons, ‘Gary’s dad was pumping iron round the clock and getting through six steaks and three roast chickens a day. After a near-riot by the other customers he was banned from the local butcher’s. It was the hottest summer since 1976, and tempers were short.
‘And then, one day during the holidays, when we were all playing out in the street, we
heard that horrible noise from the caravan.’
He’d never really had a chance, of course. The same accident that had given him superpowers had made him ineligible for the competition. Heart attack. Clinically dead for ten minutes. There was no way they would risk him in front of a worldwide audience.
It should have been obvious, if he’d ever stopped to think about it. Nobody wants to see The World’s Strongest Man drop dead on television.
They could have sent the rejection letter earlier though.
‘He tore through the aluminium walls of the caravan like they were paper,’ we tell our sons, ‘bigger than any of us could have imagined a man to be. He was Godzilla. He was King Kong. He blocked out the sun and could not be stopped. He kicked down the front door of his house and the TV came flying out through the window, then the settee, the kitchen table, the bath. By the time he emerged from the wreckage a crowd had gathered. When he strode into the middle of the road and roared, the shockwave broke kitchen windows all down the street.’
In the end it took a police marksman with a sniper rifle and a magazine full of tranquilliser darts to stop him. Apparently the bill for the damage to the street nearly bankrupted the council. They had to haul him onto the back of a lorry with a crane.
‘And as they drove him away past the overturned cars and the uprooted lamp posts,’ we continue, ‘all the men took off their hats and all the women bowed their heads in respect.’
Our sons digest this, trying to work out a moral, a message from it.
And all this time later, we realise, we’re still trying to do the same.
Gambling
We’re teaching our sons about gambling.
It’s four in the morning and we’re on the terrace of the Monte Carlo Casino, drinking cocktails and looking wistfully out across the dark blue Mediterranean Sea.
We’re waiting for the sun to come up.
Our sons have had enough; they want to go to bed. They wanted to go to bed hours ago. They’re slumped against the magnificent wrought-iron railings of the terrace of the Monte Carlo Casino, wishing they were at home.
No one is exactly sure how we all got in here – where we got all the tuxedos from, who gave us our stake. Aren’t there supposed to be rules about/against this sort of thing?
‘Who’s actually paying for all of this?’ we ask.
The divorced and separated fathers look sheepish. This is exactly the sort of caper that led to them getting divorced and separated in the first place. This is why we don’t go out drinking with the divorced and separated fathers that much any more.
‘Just one more bet,’ they say. ‘Just one more spin of the wheel. Just one more roll of the dice. There’s still a chance to turn everything around.’
We decide we need to get the divorced and separated fathers out of there, take them down to the beach to sober up. We end up walking along a busy road with our half-asleep sons in tow, stretched out behind us like ducklings as the sky starts to colour, trying to avoid getting run over by all the Ferraris and Bugattis and Porsches heading back home from the nightclubs.
On the beach our sons fall asleep under our coats in the shadow of the multi-storey apartment blocks and hotels. Every few minutes the police drive past to check we’re not up to anything. The first of the day’s joggers have already started up along the sea front.
‘Don’t they realise it isn’t tomorrow yet?’ say the divorced and separated fathers, swigging from the bottles of Krug that they’ve liberated from the bar of the casino. ‘Don’t they know it’s still last night?’
‘How much did you lose?’ we ask.
‘Everything!’ the divorced and separated fathers laugh. ‘We lost everything.’
‘No, we meant –’
‘We know what you meant.’
Out on the dark blue Mediterranean Sea breakfast is being served on the super yachts. Their champagne finished, the divorced and separated fathers lie down next to their sons, try to snuggle up under their coats with them.
We hope somebody knows what time the flights are.
It’s already tomorrow.
Food
We’re teaching our sons about food.
How to cook and eat it. The importance of it. What it has meant to people through the ages.
We’re putting our sons to work as pot-washers and kitchen porters and trainee commis chefs in restaurant kitchens and hospital kitchens and the kitchens of cruise ships and prisons. It’s clearly ridiculous – our sons are far too young for this sort of thing. And there are obvious legal issues to consider.
Nevertheless.
‘It’s important to have a trade,’ we say cheerfully, as we wave our sons off for the summer.
On the rolling seas or in the back streets of the world’s capital cities or during prison riots our sons learn how to handle knives and bain-maries and Hobart-brand industrial dishwashers, how to survive serious burns and the loss of fingertips, how to manage having their hearts broken by beautiful and doomed waitresses/waiters.
It never did us any harm. Just look at us, for God’s sake.
When they come back home at the end of the summer our sons are taciturn and reserved. They don’t want to talk about their experiences, don’t want to share with us what they’ve learned. To be fair, they’re like this when they come home from school, too.
To make up for what we’ve put them through, we try to take our sons to visit The Greatest Restaurant in the World.
The Greatest Restaurant in the World is high in the Pyrenees. It’s a two-hour bus ride from the airport. The view is spectacular but there’s a ten-year waiting list for a table. There’s no way we’re getting in.
We point out the famous singers and politicians and businessmen and businesswomen eating octopus sashimi and pressed duck on the terrace, the millionaires and billionaires drinking fifty-year-old wine and one-hundred-year-old brandy. Then we sneak round to the back door, where the kitchen staff smuggle free samples from the taster menu out to us.
‘Never forget you are the finest of men,’ the kitchen staff tell our sons, raising their fists in solidarity.
Our sons return the salute, look at the heroic kitchen staff the way they used to look at us, and we recognise too late the terrible mistake that we’ve made.
The Life-Saving Properties of Books
We’re teaching our sons about the life-saving properties of books.
We tell our sons about the books that saved our lives when we were fourteen, and about the books that saved our lives again when we were sixteen, and about the books that saved our lives again when we were eighteen, and about the books that saved our lives again when we were twenty-one and thirty-five.
We’ve prepared lists for our sons of books that might help them in any number of different, life-threatening situations.
‘What were you doing that your lives needed saving so often?’ our sons ask, taking the lists and folding them up and putting them in their back pockets.
It’s a fair question.
All the libraries in the country are being shut down because there’s no money left. We take our sons to the protests at their local library and listen to poetry readings and speeches. There are fun, creative things for the children to do, things to cut apart and things to stick back together again. There are professional children’s entertainers who are giving up their time for free and who teach our sons how to make balloon animals.
‘When we were your age,’ we whisper to our sons, ‘your grandmothers were librarians. They used to let us play in the library after closing time. In the dark, the shelves seemed to go on for miles. It was like being lost in a forest of books.’
We go to visit the grandmothers and they tell our sons about their adventures in the library trade. They tell stories of mobile libraries, and of floating libraries on canal barges, and of libraries on cruise ships and trans-continental trains, and of flying libraries in the Australian outback, and of caravans of libraries in the Sahara desert, and of old-fashioned h
orse-drawn libraries bringing the gift of education to the masses in the days before the war, and of ice libraries dug out of glaciers in the French Alps, and of isolated mountaintop libraries in China tended by Buddhist monks, and of futuristic underwater libraries, and of libraries in space, and of guerrilla libraries in the tunnels beneath occupied cities, their books coated with the dust that falls from the ceilings every time a bomb hits, and of cursed libraries in caves, and of fabulous lost libraries deep in the Amazon jungle, and of evil libraries constructed in the craters of extinct volcanoes, and of lovers’ libraries full of the most romantic books ever written, and of magical libraries that only appear at certain times of the year, and of the libraries at the South Pole, and of illegal libraries containing nothing but banned books, and of legendary, metaphorical libraries that go on for ever.
‘No books were ever out of bounds to you,’ the grandmothers remind us, as our sons browse their dusty bookshelves.
And it’s true. We were allowed to read whatever we wanted. Even the books that terrified us so much we didn’t sleep for weeks afterwards.
We decide it’s time to get going, quickly remove all those potentially terrifying books from our sons’ hands. Because there are more protests to go to. Because those libraries aren’t going to save themselves.
Actually, most of the time it’s our sons’ mothers who take them to the library protests, but the point we’re trying to make still stands.
Crime
We’re teaching our sons about crime.
We’re teaching them that crime doesn’t pay, or that mostly it doesn’t pay, or that, in fact, it can sometimes pay quite handsomely.
It’s all a matter of perspective, we explain. It all depends on who you ask.
Statistically, with this many dads, it’s inevitable that some of us will be criminals. We likely include forgers and fraudsters, con men, bank robbers, jewel thieves, sellers of stolen goods, loan sharks, burglars, muggers, importers of contraband cigarettes, football hooligans, people smugglers, arms dealers, owners of pyramid and Ponzi schemes, hit men, drunk drivers, dog-fight organisers, corrupt council officials, money launderers, and medium-to-high-level drug dealers.