by Owen Booth
And then we notice the giant wet footprint, too big to be human, in the middle of the bedroom floor.
Violence
We’re teaching our sons about violence.
The uses of it. The consequences of it. The meaning of it.
We’re taking our sons to unlicensed boxing matches and wedding party punch-ups and Friday night pub car-park fights. We’re getting trapped in the middle of ridiculous showdowns between rival football firms, and caught up in pointless turf wars among small-scale local drug gangs. We’re watching out-of-shape men assault each other on buses and in supermarkets and on trains and in morning rush hour traffic queues, for no other reason than that they don’t know what else to do.
Somewhere along the way, we realise, there’s been a terrible mistake. Possibly a sequence of terrible mistakes, stretching right back to the Stone Age.
Under the rain-dazzled street lights our sons stare, wide eyed, at the magnificent horror of it all.
And all those men being punched and kicked to the ground, we think, all those men punching and kicking each other to the ground must have fathers too, somewhere.
We wonder how their fathers feel about all this.
We’ve thought about teaching our sons how to fight. How to box, to wrestle, to do karate. We’ve considered raising an army of miniature ninjas.
If you could see them, all in their black pyjamas, up before dawn every morning to train in the courtyard, the puffs of their icy breath against the watery purple sky, the endless repetition of the same five or six moves, the perfect choreography, their potential careers as professional wrestlers or cage fighters or international assassins …
We decided against it.
Our fathers never taught us how to fight. We learned how to understand violence all the same. How to walk into any room and know, within seconds, exactly when and how it was going to kick off, and who was going to do the kicking. How to sense that tiniest shift in volume, or temperature, or body language that comes in advance of the first blow.
We’re trying not to teach our sons this skill. We don’t want them walking around with this knowledge in their heads. This level of paranoia, suspicion, general distrust of half of humanity.
It’s never done us any good.
Even when we saw the blow coming there was never anywhere for us to hide.
Rites of Passage
We’re teaching our sons about rites of passage.
We’re teaching them about the various ways that young men around the world make the transition to manhood and maturity from their callow youth, about the literal and metaphorical tests that they have to pass.
We’re taking our sons to see cow jumping ceremonies and bar mitzvahs, to take part in Jugendweihe and Shinbyu celebrations. We’re watching adolescent boys throw themselves off the top of hundred-foot-high poles with vines tied to their ankles, or go out onto the savannah armed only with spears to kill their first lion. We’re learning about walkabouts and vision quests and the taking of the Athenian Ephebic oath, about Rumspringa and Keshanta. We’re witnessing thirteen- and fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds being slapped with stinging nettles for hours on end, or having poison dripped into their eyes, or wearing gloves stitched with stinging bullet ants, or being ritually cut, pierced, scarred and otherwise damaged.
We’re disturbed by how many of the ceremonies involve pain and the possibility of death, by what that still says about us as a gender. We’re more comfortable with the ceremonies involving extreme drunkenness and altered states of consciousness – but we wonder what that says about us, as individuals.
We all like the idea of a quest.
The trans fathers and sons, having already navigated more challenges on the way to manhood than most of us can imagine, deliver a lecture about the stages of The Hero’s Journey. Everyone loves the stuff about The Call to Adventure, about the hero’s descent into The Belly of the Beast, about The Road of Trials. There’s general agreement that the whole Woman-As-Goddess/Woman-As-Temptress thing is a bit problematic these days. We all have something in our eye when it gets to the part about The Atonement with The Father. By the time we reach The Magic Flight and The Return to the World everyone is on their feet cheering.
So we draw up maps and collect supplies, pack our sons’ rucksacks and fashion weapons for them from cardboard and foam and gaffer tape. We write lists of enchanted objects to collect on their journey, of magical beings who might help or hinder them on the way. We give them bus timetables and pre-paid mobile phones, just in case they need to call us.
We wait until our sons’ mothers have left for work so we can ring school and tell them our sons are having the day off sick. And then we drive them all to the other side of town, to the other side of the river, to the other side of the forest, to the other side of the mountain, and tell them to get started.
Vikings
We’re teaching our sons about Vikings.
The Vikings who have intermittently been raiding our towns and villages, bringing death and destruction and theft of our valuables and livestock and women, ever since the eighth century AD. The Vikings who, although they last tried to invade almost a thousand years ago, back in 1066 (just before the more famous invasion by William the Conqueror’s Norman army), could potentially return any day.
We’re teaching our sons how to spot the shapes of Viking ships on the horizon, how to work out when to flee and where to go, how to bury their valuables and take to the hills and forests and prepare to fight a low-intensity war in the event of the re-establishment of Danelaw.
‘What is it with all these effing Vikings?’ the younger sons shout, exasperated, throwing up their arms.
And they’ve got a point.
We have been accused of being over-cautious, of worrying unduly about things that are unlikely to happen. There are more important things to focus on, we’re told, than the likelihood of invasion by a culture that largely died out at the end of the eleventh century.
We’re troubled by the possibility that the world we’re preparing our sons for has already passed us by.
We stand on the edge of the North Sea and look out across the greenish-grey waves, listen to the screaming of the seagulls. We can’t see the appeal of any of it. Why couldn’t they just stay at home?
‘Fortune and glory,’ our sons say. ‘The thrill of battle. The promise of an eternity in the halls of Valhalla.’
We tell our sons about the giant underwater landslide that took place off the coast of Norway eight thousand years ago, about the tsunami that sent eighty-foot-high waves across the North Sea and halfway up Scotland. We tell them how the waves drowned a collection of low-lying North Sea islands that were all that remained of the former ice-age land bridge – now known as ‘Doggerland’ – that connected Britain and mainland Europe.
‘It was a Palaeolithic Garden of Eden,’ we tell our sons. ‘Fishermen have been dragging up spear points and stone tools from there for hundreds of years.’
In truth the happy hunting grounds of Doggerland had been doomed since the end of the last ice age, when rising sea levels started to cut the British mainland off from continental Europe. By the time the giant wave came rushing up the beach, we tell our sons, the island chain that had once been the Doggerland hills was probably largely uninhabited.
We visit the historic forts along the Thames Estuary with our sons. Low cloud sits over the entrance to the English Channel and the North Sea, over the power stations and the closed-down oil refineries and the new Thames Gateway deep-water container port.
Our sons man the decommissioned Second World War artillery pieces that sit atop the walls of one of the forts, facing down the grey estuary and out to sea, and keep a look out for Viking sails on the horizon. They aim the sights of the guns at the giant container ships making their way up the Thames from ports all over the world, from Shanghai and Shenzen and Singapore, on the short run over from Rotterdam.
We wonder how it must have felt to be the last men on that last Do
ggerland island, watching the tide suddenly go out for the very last time.
The Particular Smell of Hospitals at Three in the Morning
We’re teaching our sons about the particular smell of hospitals at three in the morning.
The smell of hospitals at three in the morning, we explain to our sons, is mainly the smell of phenols – and in particular meta-cresol (also known as m-Cresol, or 3-methylphenol). Meta-cresol is an organic compound, with the chemical formula CH3C6H4(OH). It’s traditionally extracted from coal tar, and has anti-bacterial properties. You’ll recognise it as the smell of hospital floor cleaner, the smell of fresh bandages.
At some point in their lives, we tell our sons, everyone ends up getting to know that smell, ends up associating all sorts of memories with it. Like they end up getting to know the pattern of tiles on the floor of at least one particular hospital corridor from walking it, again and again, waiting for news.
Phenols are also present in peat smoke, which is used to dry the malted barley in the production of certain Scotch whiskies. This is why whiskies from the island of Islay remind many people of the smell of hospitals.
Traditionally, men are supposed to drink whisky to celebrate the birth of a child.
We tell our sons about the nights they were born – how their mothers had laboured for hours, working to some deep, seismic rhythm we knew nothing about; how everything felt huge and elemental and far beyond our control.
‘It was like spending a night on a mountain in a thunderstorm,’ we tell them. ‘It was like being lost at sea.’
‘And what was it like the first time you saw us?’ our sons ask. ‘What did we look like?’
‘You looked like shaved monkeys,’ we tell our sons. ‘You looked like wrinkly little old men. You looked like outraged tortoises. It was horrifying.’
We don’t tell them about the other nights, about listening to the noise of machines and watching their mothers’ shallow breathing as they slept. About the vast and holy silence that fills a hospital at three in the morning.
We don’t tell them about going home alone in the early hours of the morning, again and again, to houses and flats that would not be filled with life and noise. About trying to pick things up and put things back together over the next days and weeks and months.
These are not things we talk about, not even to each other. Especially not to each other.
We’re terrified that if we started we wouldn’t know how to stop.
The War Against the Potato Beetle
We’re teaching our sons about the war against the potato beetle.
Because it’s important to know your history. Because it’s important to be prepared.
‘In East Germany, in the nineteen-fifties,’ we explain, ‘the national potato crop of the GDR was severely threatened by the spread of Colorado beetles. Because the larvae of the beetle fed exclusively on the leaves of the potato plant and had few natural predators, the beetle had the potential to wipe out up to one hundred per cent of one of the country’s staple foods.
‘To counter this threat to the Deutsche Demokratische Republik,’ we continue, ‘East German school children were tasked with collecting as many Colorado beetle larvae as they could find. They were told that the beetles had been dropped from imperialist American planes in an attempt to destabilise the East German economy. Children who collected particularly large numbers of beetle larvae were celebrated as national heroes.’
‘How big were the beetles?’ our sons ask.
‘You know, beetle-sized,’ we say.
Our sons are disappointed. They’d imagined it as a war against giant beetles. Maybe just one single beetle that was bigger than a row of houses, bigger than a tractor factory. A beetle that could have singlehandedly (multi-footedly?) destroyed the fledgling East German people’s republic, had it not been stopped by brave school kids armed with flamethrowers and bazookas.
‘No, it wasn’t like that,’ we say.
A single, giant beetle, parachuting down over Potsdam from an American B-25 bomber. A giant, radioactive beetle which had been accidentally – or maybe not so accidentally – created as a result of atomic testing in the Nevada desert.
The ultimate weapon.
‘No.’
‘Did any of this even actually happen?’ our sons ask, disappointed.
And we wonder: did it?
We have memories of the Colorado beetle threat being discussed by our parents when we were children – but this was in the UK in the nineteen-eighties, not East Germany in the fifties. We remember a summer spent keeping our eyes open for the tiny, striped invaders, remember running to our parents to show them whenever we spotted something likely, but the memory is mixed up with that of an invasion of biting ladybirds that surely happened at another time.
‘Ladybirds can bite you?’ our sons ask, horrified.
‘It’s just a nip, really, you wouldn’t –’
‘Are they as poisonous as Brazilian wandering spiders? Would you die?’
‘No, you wouldn’t die.’
They narrow their eyes, unconvinced.
We don’t blame them.
We remember the afternoon the swarm descended on the playground, and the children cowering under desks or running screaming from the school gates, the muffled screams of children staggering from classrooms covered in millions of red and black biting insects.
The eyes.
They eat your eyes first.
Relativity
We’re teaching our sons about relativity.
We’re teaching them about velocity and distance and time, about how the speed of light in a vacuum is the same everywhere in the universe, about how clocks run at different rates on earth and on the International Space Station. We’re setting up demonstrations of the fundamental principles with tennis balls and moving vehicles and observations of the transit of the planet Venus across the sun during solar eclipses.
‘Imagine you are a photon, travelling close to the event horizon of a black hole,’ we say to our sons. ‘Imagine you were on a spaceship, moving almost at the speed of light.’
We scrawl the equations on giant blackboards and all over the walls and windows of our sons’ bedrooms, just like we’ve seen scientists do on television.
‘Imagine coming back to earth after five years in space and discovering that your younger brothers are now older than you,’ we say.
The younger sons are delighted by this. They consider the reign of terror they could embark upon; the horrible revenge they could visit on their older brothers for the years of unfairness they’ve had to endure.
‘What would happen if you were on a bus going at fifty miles an hour and you shot a gun at someone on another bus that was driving towards you at a hundred miles an hour?’ the younger sons ask. ‘Would it still kill them?’
‘Nobody is killing anyone,’ say the mothers of our sons, ‘we’ve discussed this.’
And, of course, they’re right.
We try, ourselves and the mothers of our sons, to present a united front as much as is possible. We know how quickly things could go wrong if our sons were able to exploit any differences between us. Sensible bedtimes and a healthy diet would go out of the window within hours. The house would be destroyed before the end of the week.
And yet we can feel ourselves moving apart, like wandering moons being pulled into eccentric new orbits around the gigantic fact of our children – sometimes in opposition to each other, occasionally passing close enough to wave and shout a hello, always hoping that our relative trajectories don’t end up intersecting catastrophically.
Pirates
We’re teaching our sons about pirates.
Our sons, of course, love the idea of pirates, want to know everything about them. Because pirates get to wear great outfits and have cutlass fights, they tell us. Because pirates get to do whatever they want.
We try to explain the reality of the international shipping business, about standardised intermodal containerisation, a
nd deep-water ports, and the just-in-time global economy. About speedboats full of desperate, unemployed Somalian fishermen armed with RPGs. About the realities of the ransom business and maritime law and marine insurance.
‘But real pirates aren’t … they’re not –’
Our sons don’t want to listen. They want romance and adventure and life on the high seas. Just like everybody else.
We rent rowing boats and take our sons on a canal trip. It’s early in the morning and mist drifts across the surface of the water. The canals are full of shopping trolleys and dead foxes and ferocious, non-native terrapins. The terrapins glide through the weeds and snap at our fingers, occasionally drag ducks and geese under the water. Our sons, dressed in orange life jackets, are unimpressed.
We keep expecting to come across a dead body, bloated and white, picked apart by terrapins and invasive North American crayfish.
We tie up the boats alongside an abandoned factory and distribute the packed lunches. There are chocolate coins wrapped in gold and silver foil, but nobody is fooled. Railway bridges and the unloved backs of warehouses loom over us. We don’t even recognise where we are any more.
Somewhere in the distance we can hear the sounds of an all-night rave still going on.
It’s starting to look like rain.
And then, from under the railway bridge, suddenly bearing down on us, the ship appears out of the mist.
The figurehead at the bow is a shop-window dummy sprayed silver and wearing a gas mask. It holds aloft an anarchist flag. The hull is painted with rainbows and skulls and leaping dolphins, and a couple of mangy dogs lean over the side, barking in our direction. From the wheelhouse a giant skull and crossbones flag snaps in the wind. And on the deck the ragged crew of young men and women are dancing, oblivious, to the booming music.
We all watch, stunned, as the ghostly ship cruises past. Our tiny boats lift and bump on the swell.