by Owen Booth
‘You see?’ our sons shout, in triumph. ‘You see?’
Hotels
We’re teaching our sons about hotels.
We’re taking them on business trips and showing them how to get free upgrades and how to tip room service and what to steal on your way out, how not to look like you shouldn’t be there.
We don’t know if we’ve ever managed to successfully not look like we shouldn’t be there. We’ve certainly never managed to successfully not feel like we shouldn’t be there.
Our sons like the breakfasts best. They can’t believe that all the food is free, or that you can have cake for breakfast.
‘Well, technically it’s not free,’ we say. ‘Somebody’s paying. Someone is always paying, somewhere.’
In the hotel bars in the evenings everyone tries to line up extramarital affairs and one-night stands. Everyone except us and our sons.
We consider the possibilities of being unfaithful to the mothers of our sons, try to work out if having some sort of fling is right for us. We go over the potential benefits, the logistics involved, the consequences.
We identify a number of issues, including:
We have no idea who to be unfaithful to the mothers of our sons with.
We already have enough things to worry about.
We’re not sure what the problem we’re trying to solve actually is.
There’s the danger of getting caught to take into account, too – the chance of losing everything. Not to mention our general love and respect for the mothers of our sons. We don’t want to hurt them unnecessarily or put them in uncomfortable situations.
‘These sorts of things are not to be entered into lightly,’ the divorced and separated fathers agree. The divorced and separated fathers are trying especially hard to line up one-night stands in the hotel bar. We’re not judging them.
We think about the kinds of people who we might like to have some sort of clandestine relationship with, try to work out if they’re the same kind of people who might be interested in having a clandestine relationship with us.
We realise that we hardly know anyone these days.
We wonder if the mothers of our sons are having secret love affairs, or have already had them, or are planning to at some point in the future. We’re not taking anything for granted. We’ve seen the way the divorced and separated fathers look at the mothers of our sons. We know how it goes. The divorced and separated fathers assure us that the mothers of our sons are not having secret love affairs with them. But then, we’d say the same thing, in their position.
Do we even want to have affairs, we wonder, or do we just want to be someone else for a while? To be seen through someone else’s eyes?
‘What are you all talking about?’ our sons ask. They’ve finished the complimentary bar snacks, are getting bored. We realise that hotel bars are no places for children. Or for fathers.
So we take our sons upstairs to watch cartoons in our rooms and raid the mini bars, while we work out what else we can get away with stealing.
The Aftermath of Disasters
We’re teaching our sons about the aftermath of disasters.
We’re helping them understand the moments when the dust has started to settle and the debris has been cleared away and everyone comes together to try to work out what just happened, what it means to them. We’re helping them negotiate the public outpourings of grief, the candlelit vigils, the blood donations, the fundraising memorial concerts, the announcement of the parliamentary inquiry.
We’ve agreed in advance with the mothers of our sons how we’ll talk about these things, how we’ll deal with any questions our sons have. It’s becoming a habit. But we have no real answers to why people keep dying in fires and train crashes and terrorist atrocities, why they keep dying in earthquakes and floods and industrial accidents. None that help, anyway.
We want our sons to feel empathy, to be involved in humanity, but this is too much.
We take our sons to attend the vigils, observe the two-minute silences with them. They’re experts at this, by now. At their schools they’re already collecting stuff and trying to raise money to help. Every day they go to school wearing clothes in a different colour for a different cause.
‘The thing about disasters,’ we tell our sons, because this is what we’ve been told to say, ‘is that you should focus on the way everyone helps each other afterwards. Doctors and nurses and firefighters and members of the public and so on.’
Our sons nod, having heard this countless times before. They’re much better adjusted to the experience than we are. They have a fine sense of slapstick, of the absurd. They understand the world perfectly well in terms of buildings collapsing around people’s ears, of people getting hit with frying pans and falling objects, of people falling down flights of stairs, of cars that fall apart when you put the key in the ignition, of things falling out of the sky.
And we still have to keep letting them go out in the world. We have to keep pretending that we aren’t terrified – like cartoon characters who’ve run off a cliff, their legs still going, convincing themselves not to look down.
We try to remember how we got through the aftermath of each of our catastrophes, each of our shared disasters, and we can’t recall ever even discussing them with anyone.
Because what was there that anyone could say?
All we remember is being unable to understand how everyone was still getting on with their lives, still walking around in the world, while we stood frozen to the spot, waiting for the arrival of the falling grand piano that would finally make sense of everything.
Drinking
We’re teaching our sons about drinking.
We’re teaching them about vintage wine and artisanal beer and hand-crafted spirits. We’re taking them with us to wine tastings and on whisky tours. We’re looking forward to the days when we’ll get drunk with our sons, when we’ll have competitions to see who can drink who under the table.
Their mothers, of course, don’t approve. Their wonderful mothers, who, for the purposes of this part of the story, we’re casting in the role of the bad cop, the sensible parent, the straight man. Their wonderful mothers who deserve better than this.
We’re taking our sons to all the places we’ve ever been drunk, to the sites of some of our finest hours. We’re taking them to pubs and cocktail bars and airport lounges and squats and friends’ bedrooms and sublet council flats belonging to friends of our parents and multi-storey car parks with fantastic views and a seaside town in Mexico where we once spent a week holed up with a case of Kahlua.
Kahlua, for goodness’ sake.
We take them to the pub where we once spent an entire day drinking, eleven in the morning through to eleven at night, just to see if we could. It was years ago. Nobody there remembers us now. We’re not even sure if it was the same pub.
We take them to the bridge over the ring road where, as much younger men, we once had a spectacular kiss against a washed-out dawn sky with a beautiful woman who we were trying to convince to run away with us.
‘That was the booze talking,’ we explain.
Our sons don’t get it.
‘But what was the point of it all?’ they ask.
We don’t take our sons to the place under another bridge where we used to drink bottles of cider with aspirins crumbled into them when we were thirteen. There are limits.
The divorced and separated and widowed dads take us all to the bars and nightclubs where they still go, against desperate odds, in the hope of meeting eligible women. The divorced and separated and widowed dads line up along the bar, trying to look nonchalant and thin. Trying to look five or ten or fifteen years younger.
Our sons try not to cramp their style.
‘Most of the time,’ we say, ‘it was just an excuse to stay up all night.’
Our sons get that. They hate going to bed.
These days we fall asleep before they do.
And then we get up before dawn, check all
the doors and windows, and sit at the kitchen table for hours, waiting quietly in the half-light for the arrival of one more bright and possible day.
The Pointlessness of Guilt
We’re teaching our sons about the pointlessness of guilt.
That is, we’ve been trying to teach our sons about the pointlessness of guilt, but we’re at a soft play centre for a birthday party, so no one’s paying much attention.
The soft play centre is terrifying. The children have all had about three kilograms of sugar and they’re playing on thirty-foot-high scaffolding with some foam taped to it. Sooner or later, everyone inside the soft play centre knows, there’s going to be a horrible accident.
We try to take our minds off the impending horror by flirting with the other children’s mothers. It’s no good. We don’t know how to flirt, and the mothers have better things to worry about. Flirting with middle-aged fathers is the last thing they need. What they need is more coffee.
The children are jumping onto each other from the summit of the thirty-foot-high scaffolding now. Each one of them looks like a potential murderer. Each one of them except our beautiful sons.
‘Do you think someone should –’ we start to say, but the mothers have already wandered off to find coffee, leaving us to wrestle with our terror and our pointless guilt.
We feel guilty about falling down the stairs while carrying our sons when they were six months old, causing them to break their left legs. They were only in plaster for two weeks, but when they didn’t walk until they were fifteen months old we were convinced that we’d damaged them permanently. We still wonder if they’ll curse our names on cold, damp winter days long after we’re gone.
We feel guilty about our fear of everything, and about not having a sunnier outlook on life, and about not having enough time to spend with our sons, and about not always wanting to have enough time to spend with our sons.
We feel guilty about the lousy genetic legacies we’ve handed on to our sons, which may predispose them to – among other things – high blood pressure, or colour blindness, or sickle cell anaemia, or short-sightedness, or depression and other mental illnesses, or heart disease, or alcoholism, or drug addiction, or diabetes, or Tay-Sachs disease, or autistic spectrum disorders, or obesity, or suicide, or certain types of cancer, or arthritis, or worse.
We feel guilty about the environment that our sons are growing up in (chiefly: being our sons), which may also predispose them to many of the above.
We feel guilty about flirting (about attempting to flirt) with the distracted mothers at the soft play centre who have far better things to worry about.
And, of course, we feel guilty knowing that our guilt about all these things doesn’t help. And neither does feeling guilty about our guilt, and so on, and so on, and so on.
When one of our sons finally falls from the scaffolding and cuts his head open and we’re called upon to make everything better it’s actually a relief.
War
We’re teaching our sons about war.
We’re taking them on coach trips to visit famous First World War battlefields, on visits to museums full of tanks and cannons, on days out to look at the remains of Second World War defences along the English and French coasts.
We gaze in wonder at the crumbling giant bunkers and concrete listening dishes that face each other across the Channel, eat our sandwiches while watching middle-aged men perform reconstructions of scenes from the Wars of the Roses.
Now there’s a thing to do for a living, we think.
Our sons, of course, love the idea of war. The chaos. The weapons. The disruption of the everyday order of things. The abandoned tea time and bath time and bed time rules.
Not to mention all the technological and social developments that war inspires.
‘War,’ our younger sons remind us, ‘is the locomotive of history, after all.’
Then they stare, pointedly, at their older brothers, just long enough to make them start getting nervous again.
Together with our sons we stand on the edge of the continent watching the evening skies roll in. We try to imagine the ranks of aircraft taking off behind us on their way to flatten half of Europe, the ranks of aircraft coming the other way to rain high-explosive history down on our sons. We explain to our sons why there are fifteen houses missing from our street, why there’s a school built in the middle of a terrace. We tell them about Anderson shelters and Morrison shelters and V1s and V2s. About evacuees.
We try to ask ourselves what we would do, what we would have done, given the choice. Whether we could send our sons away or keep them with us to take their chances, if it came to that.
There’s no good answer.
But that night we lie down next to our sons while they sleep, wrap our arms around their thin chests, put our faces into their hair. And we know, selfishly, that we would have chosen to go like this, holding on to our sons, rather than risk letting them slip away to face the world alone, and never getting to say goodbye.
And we are not proud of that.
The Fifteen Foolproof Approaches to Making Someone Fall in Love with You
We’re teaching our sons about the fifteen foolproof approaches to making someone fall in love with you.
We’re teaching our sons this for free, even though there are, apparently, men who make money teaching this kind of thing to other men, and entire conferences and online courses and businesses built on the back of it.
We don’t know if there are any women who make money teaching this kind of thing to men, although that would surely make more sense in a lot of cases.
We walk our sons through each of the fifteen foolproof approaches to making someone fall in love with you. The approaches include handsomeness, charm, decency, kindness to animals, humour, being passionate about things, romance, and sexual magnetism.
We explain that sexual magnetism is not the same as actual magnetism, which is what our sons have been learning about at school. We’ve spent most of the weekend testing every object and every surface in the house for their magnetic properties. The weekend before it was designing shields for Roman soldiers.
We tell our sons about the early days of our relationships with their mothers, explain which of the fifteen foolproof approaches worked on roughly thirty-seven per cent of them, which were unsuccessful sixty-five per cent of the time, and so on. According to the numbers, sexual magnetism actually turns out to have been a successful opener for almost twenty per cent of our sons’ mothers.
‘Ha!’ say our sons’ mothers.
‘What?’ we ask.
‘Nothing,’ say our sons’ mothers. ‘Please, carry on. Pretend we’re not here.’
‘The most important thing to remember,’ we tell our sons, ‘is that love is a verb, not a noun. Love isn’t a thing. Love is something you do.’
We’re not sure where we got that from, although it sounds true.
We look across at our sons’ mothers, are filled all over again with respect and admiration for them, are simultaneously irritated by things like the way they leave letters and keys and lip salve in a pile in front of the drawer where all the takeaway menus are, so that we have to shift everything out of the way every time we want to open the drawer.
We don’t share this with our sons.
The divorced and separated and widowed fathers, with their own perspective on things, look out of the window at the gigantic spring skies and plan their next moves.
Life
We’re teaching our sons about life.
What it’s all about, how it works, the origins of it.
We’re in what looks suspiciously like a mad scientist’s laboratory from a nineteen-thirties horror film. There are banks of dials and switches everywhere, and electricity arcs and leaps between huge metal coils. In the centre of the room a giant, sheet-covered body on a table is being winched up towards the open roof, where lightning forks across the sky.
Our sons are all wearing goggles and miniature lab coats. They
look adorable. They pull levers and throw switches while the divorced and separated and widowed fathers take it in turns to chat up the local peasant girls who are moonlighting as our glamorous assistants.
‘Life on earth evolved around four and a half billion years ago,’ we explain. ‘Initially, life was –’
‘What about rocks?’ our sons ask.
‘What?’
‘Are rocks alive?’
‘No,’ we say, ‘rocks aren’t alive. Pull that lever. No, the one on the left. No, the other left.’
Our sons do as we ask. The crashing of thunder fills the laboratory. On the table, high above us now, the creature’s dead hand slips from under the sheet, twitching.
‘What about lava?’ our sons ask.
‘Lava is just melted rock.’
‘Can anything destroy lava?’
‘No, it –’
‘When lava hits water it cools down and turns back into rock,’ the older sons say.
‘Yes, that’s exactly what happens.’
‘But lava was around before rocks were?’
‘Well, it would be a combination of – can you wind those handles now? – a combination of rocks and lava.’
‘Where did water come from?’
‘Comets,’ we say, ‘the water probably came from comets. But, look, this was all long before –’
‘How can electricity make things come back to life anyway?’ our sons ask, as the table reaches the top of the winch with a jolt.
It’s taken us six months to find the creature, frozen in the ice in the collapsed catacombs under the burnt-down windmill. Another two months to get it out. The locals were suspicious – there were bribes and permits to take care of, daughters to be declared off-limits to the attentions of the divorced and separated and widowed fathers.
But now we’re moments away from the culmination of a lifetime’s work.
High on the table the creature’s body arches as the lightning flows through it. We think about our Nobel prize speech, what we’ll do with all the money and the fame.