The Boys Are Back

by Simon Carr

  Hands up if you like sheep muck!

  Hands up if you like cow pee!

  Hands up if you like dog fart!

  as he steered the family car at forty miles an hour down our three-mile gravel track in the brilliant winter sunshine. Hands up if you like sheep muck, cow pee and dog fart! Surely that’s everybody!

  ‘Everybody farts Faturday Fight!’ He danced through the kitchen. And then:

  Matilda Matilda,

  Who the hell killed her

  She’s lying in the grass with a dagger in her arse

  Along came her granny and cut off her fanny!

  This is the endless delight of being five. Here are more photos from the family album. Here he is on the big lawn, being towed at ten miles an hour behind a four-wheel motorbike – he’s on a plastic abdomediser, swinging out on the curves like a water-skier. On his face, fear competes with fascination as he loops out on the turns. Here he is on the lawn, racing with Regan. As they start they both shout: ‘On your markies, get your car keys, gooooo!’ Here he is on a gruesome computer game; his running commentary goes: ‘Ha ha, Sucker bird! Spank me! No! Cheater bird! Aye caramba! Love you lots but bye! I shot him up, yuk yuk! OH! That was SO beast close!’ (‘Beast’ is a good thing. They don’t know how Billy Bunterish it is. Beastly, like awfully.)

  And so, ordinary life shone as best it could through the gathering abnormality.

  The naming of parts

  What do we call the equipment? Penis is very widespread, but in a curious way that sounds like a euphemism. It’s not a penis to a five-year-old. Calling it a penis is like dressing a small boy in cufflinks and giving him a briefcase. No, boys have a pecker, or a johnson – or even a goggy until they’re three. We don’t like to think what girls call theirs, but South Park came up with something useful: cha-cha. A male puts his hu-hu into a female’s cha-cha, so the sex educator tells the cartoon tots. Alexander came up with the word doodle. Doodle! ‘To wander around apparently aimlessly, but shaped by powerful subconscious forces’ as a dictionary might say. You couldn’t do better than doodle.

  But then where did that game of the clenched hands come from? He said, ‘Here we are with old man’s pants. Turn them inside out and …’ here he’d turn his wrists and we’d see one finger waving absurdly, ‘Doodle!’

  There were things about Alexander that were slipping by unnoticed. Sal came by one day to say what a sense of humour he had. It wasn’t something that we’d seen. It had got swamped in our daily dramas. ‘He constantly has us in fits,’ she said (she’s English). And she was right: he’d do some comic little thing, some small routine, and then glance up to see if we’d noticed. The odd thing was that until then we hadn’t. But when we started to recognise his games he in turn started to make more varied effects.

  As the cleaner was leaving one day she said: ‘He’s told me that he’ll give me a ring when he’s made a mess.’

  He came back from town with a story about their day at the amusement park: ‘Annabel’s friend doesn’t want to play on Thomas the Tank Engine because her friend pushed her off the trampoline and cracked her head open.’

  ‘Wow!’ I said. ‘Was she bleeding?’

  ‘Oh yes! She had blood all coming down, and she had no head. No head! And she had to go to the doctor’s with no head to get another one!’

  And he’d be capable of a very fast one-off. ‘What are you going to call the kitten, Alexander?’ his mother asked him.

  ‘Puppy!’ he cried, like a punchline.

  And when he wasn’t allowed to call it Puppy (I can’t remember why) he wanted to call it Chippy. ‘But you already have a dog called Chippy.’

  ‘Then I’ll call it Lippy! And when we get another one I’ll call it Dippy!’

  And when he was talking to me and could see I was only pretending to pay attention to his babble he’d go, ‘Ding dong! Wakey wakey!’

  We were playing I Spy in the car. The familiar words started to come out as ‘Eye-zee spy-zee with my lizzie eye-zee …’ But then he suddenly went, ‘I spy with my little butso!’ and shrieked. As did we all.

  The mystery of what frightens them

  It’s always hard to know what children are frightened of, they have such intense secret lives. When young I’d get out of the bath before pulling the plug – crocodiles that lived in the drains could sense the water turbulence and would get up through the vortex into the bath. For the same reason you had to get out of the loo before the flush.

  Alexander was terrified of the word ‘chops’. The question ‘Would you like chops for dinner?’ used to make him cover his ears. Three years later he revealed why he used to be so scared. He believed that the chops we were going to have would come from his own body. Whenever it was chops, he thought we were going to eat him for dinner.

  We’ll come to a fuller consideration of the erotic world of five-year-olds, but here’s a contemporary record of some more rarified fear. He said to me one morning: ‘Can I tell you something that isn’t true?’

  ‘What’s that, Beedle Bop?’

  ‘I was in a dream and there were these girls chasing after us.’

  ‘Why were they?’

  ‘To kill us. I had a big sharp axe and I cut their heads off. Then I cut their legs off. Then they went past the river and they went on to the moon. And when they came back they zoomed past and I cut their heads off. Then their noses off. Then their lips off. Then I pulled their hair really hard and it all came out and they ran away. This really sharp thing got stuck in their bum and I pulled it out really hard. That’s the end. Is that quite funny?’

  Well, it was quite funny. But what it said about the relations between the sexes at that age we’ll leave for his therapist to discover when he’s forty.

  There was also a moment before he was five when Alexander refuted a famous atheist’s complaint to God. ‘What would you say’, Bertrand Russell was asked, ‘if, when you died, you were confronted with God whose existence you have denied ever since you were ten years old?’

  The obstinate philosopher considered his position. ‘I would say: it was your fault, God. You didn’t give me enough evidence.’

  Alexander’s refutation took place at pre-school. He was playing on the floor, waiting to be picked up. The reliable mothers had come and gone, and he made a pathetic sight on the floor by himself in the empty room. Wearing rubber soles, I walked quietly towards him and stopped, waiting for him to see me. He looked up, looked round; I was twenty-five feet away in an otherwise empty room. He went back to his game. I stood there in front of him for a minute. Again he looked round the room, straight at me, straight past me and back to his toys. And that’s what it might be like to be God (except, obviously, for the God-like qualities). To be the biggest thing in the room. To be so big as to be invisible. To be right there, massively powerful, enormously present but entirely unnoticed.

  When I called his name he suddenly saw me and gave me one of those looks that become part of you, part of your character. And that’s when you know how much you have to look after them.

  Over the ranges, by the lake, Suzannah – our age, mother of girls – also had cancer, although she didn’t know it at the time. But in sympathy with our predicament, she gave me a scroll with one of those parables that you see on Christian fridges. It told the story of a man looking over the course of his life; it’s represented by footsteps on a beach. There are two sets of prints – his and the Lord’s. The sky darkens at one point in this journey and storm clouds gather. Suddenly there is only one set of footprints. And the man asks plaintively: ‘Look there! Why did you desert me, Lord, just when I needed you most?’

  ‘I didn’t desert you,’ the Lord says, ‘I was carrying you.’

  She had faith, Suzannah, and I think she was carried through some of her own ordeal.

  Here’s Alexander again, packed up in my arms as we rolled sideways fifty yards down one of our steepest hills, shrieking through the dense tall grass. When we got to the bottom I said to him, ‘Al
ways remember this, Alexander, I want you always to remember this.’

  When you look back into your childhood you see memories that have a halo round them. Doesn’t every boy remember being pushed around the garden in a wheelbarrow by his father? There is a magic to memory, perhaps that’s one reason we love our children as we do, they are like a mirror that lets us look at ourselves from the most intimate angle. So when I asked him that night, ‘You remember when I said to always remember this, earlier today?’ he said, surprised, ‘No. What?’ Six years later I asked him whether he remembered the summer I rolled down a hill with him in my arms. He said, ‘No. Why?’

  Arthur Koestler described a mental condition he called ‘reverie’ – a twilight zone associated with creativity, high suggestibility and flashes of inspiration. It’s a state when theta waves are most active and you are aware of fleeting, semi-hallucinatory images. It’s a sort of free-form thinking that puts you in touch with your subconscious. From what I’ve seen, the under-fives live in that world all the time, that’s what life is like for them. And in its blissful, deeply validating effects, reverie may be the psychological origin of our idea of heaven.

  And that’s the pity of it, the mortal pity, that it doesn’t last; heaven can’t wait.

  In October, when Alexander was five and a half, the hospice varied his mother’s medication with a Valium-type drug to control her breathing attacks. She went into a soporific condition, confused, absent. It was like a pre-coma. Her body had been taken by her illness, her face had collapsed around her now enormous eyes, her arms had gone, her glorious flame was guttering; she was present in spirit but only just. Her mother said: ‘She can’t eat in this state. She didn’t eat breakfast, she’ll have no lunch. In two or three days it’ll all be over.’ When she told the hospice nurse that her daughter couldn’t eat, the reply came, with characteristic medical tact: ‘Does that really matter at this stage?’

  Val concluded, quite wrongly as the records show, that the hospice was practising a covert form of euthanasia: ‘Susie trusts me to help her, not to harm her. I can’t let them do this.’

  So we made representation and they reduced the Valium. Susie’s confusion abated slightly. Her doctor said to me, ‘People often want to blame the drug, but the disease is taking its natural course. It is inevitable.’

  The strategy Val and I agreed on was to keep Susie out of pain. But sooner or later, I saw, the pain relief would contribute to the conclusion of all this. When the tumours grew suddenly and pushed out the liver capsule the effects were astonishing, overwhelming. There was so much pain to quell. I’d read of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting dying of liver tumours, screaming.

  In the end, it isn’t death that causes havoc, but the fear and denial that precedes it.

  Now, in my study I reach for the black book where this part is written down, in fragments. It’s not a book I look at these days and after this I probably won’t again.

  On her last Sunday I tell her that I’m not going back to work that day, as usual. She looks at me in a particular way: ‘Are you worried I’m going to die?’

  Evasively I say, ‘I’ve been worried about that for four years, darling.’

  But she knows, now, at a deeper level more than she wants to recognise. She knows what’s happening. Getting up in the middle of that night she says: ‘The pamphlet. Where’s the pamphlet? Where’s the pamphlet?’ Or again, ‘Let’s go down for breakfast. What? What time is it?’

  ‘It’s the middle of the night.’

  ‘Oh no. I’m in trouble.’

  Or later that night: ‘Where are the kids?’

  ‘What kids?’

  ‘Isn’t it Alexander’s birthday? Oh no. I’m in trouble.’ It’s true. This is what trouble is.

  She has a new, faint voice. She reaches for an oxygen mask sometimes for air and she looks over the transparent plastic with sorrowing eyes. She is displaying symptoms of senility. But there are flashes of astuteness.

  ‘Do you want your legs on the floor?’ I ask, wondering how she was to get out of bed.

  ‘Ultimately, yes,’ she says. ‘But first I want this leg here!’

  On Thursday we are gathered around her bed when she opens her eyes. She musters what she can of her little voice and says quite indignantly, ‘I’m not going!’

  ‘We were worried about your temperature. You were so cold.’

  ‘Has anyone been rung?’ she demands in her new voice; the strongest thing in it is a note of accusation.

  The notes get sketchy. Tuesday night: 9.30, loo. 12.30, turn over. ‘Oh darling …’ 2.50, loo. ‘You’re going to hate me in the morning.’ 4.55, turning. 5.55, turning. ‘I’ll get up. The train.’ ‘The train’s a dream.’ And then she says, ‘Soon be over.’ And I can’t help her with that. I say, ‘Yes, soon, soon, you have a sleep and we’ll have breakfast soon when the night’s over.’

  Wednesday night. Two pills at 9 p.m. 10.15, turned. ‘Take the mask off me. Oh, you needn’t have got up. Sorry, darling.’ 4.55, loo. ‘The little boys have to go to Mr Tingle at one o’clock.’

  Later I help her struggle up and lead her on the three-step journey to her wheelchair. She stops halfway there and says, ‘Give me a cuddle.’ These are the last words I remember her saying to me. That and ‘Fucking doctors’. We stood there together, holding each other, on the edge of the world. Shortly afterwards she went to bed. Lay down with her arms beside her, over the blankets, her head slightly to the right. And her lights went gently down.

  A variety of things happened the next day, as she lay there in our bed, in her sleeping-beauty position, breathing faintly. Alexander was told Mummy was still in bed so he was taken down to catch the school bus. And the day went on normally; as normal.

  And finally, at the end of the school day, there we were. A middle-aged man and a five-year-old boy alone in a garden.

  This garden belonged to our neighbours and rambled for ten acres round their house. They had lawns and walls, and a secret rose garden. The sun moved across their tennis court, filtered through the leaves of the woodland walk, which took you down to where the property gave out on to the Hawke’s Bay grasslands. Under a group of trees were a bench and two headstones marking the graves of the owner’s parents who’d died together when an Antarctic sightseeing flight crashed into Mount Erebus.

  Alexander came running along the path through the dappled light, looking for me. He started to say something but he stopped when he saw my expression. He stood very still. I said, ‘You know how Mummy’s been getting more and more tired because she’s been so ill? We think she’s gone into a very deep sleep now and it’s so deep we don’t think she’s going to wake

  up.’

  He was looking at me without saying anything.

  Then I took a deep breath and came out with it: ‘In fact, we think she’s going to die.’ I can still see the valley floor and the river winding away beyond the poplars, and Alexander’s red hair and green eyes, his mother’s vivid colouring.

  He said more brightly than I’d expected, ‘Is Mummy going to die? When?’ It was impossible for me to say, so he produced some alternatives. ‘Will she die by dinner time? Will she die by bedtime? Will she die by breakfast?’

  I thought of her in our bed, propped up among the pillows, and couldn’t say anything while his questions continued. ‘I don’t know, little one, none of us knows.’ Failing to find a time Mummy might die by, he scampered away through the shadows to tell his girlfriend this exciting instalment of the story-so-far.

  The next morning he came into the bedroom where his mother and I had been all night. She was wearing a mysterious smile that had developed in the night. The side of her mouth lifted in a small but significant way. It looked like a smile. It felt like a smile. It was a smile. ‘Did Mummy die last night?’ he asked with a curious sort of dead-eyed brightness.

  I’d done what you see men do in films. I’d put away a bottle of Glenfiddich, quite quickly, and Selby had done the same with another. Neither
of us had got drunk – the prospect of horror produces a painkiller called adrenalin – and in its after-effects I was feeling distant and numb. I said, ‘Yes, little one, I’m sorry to say she did.’

  He said with a febrile excitement, ‘See? See? I told you! I told you Mummy would die last night!’ He went down the corridor to tell his gran that Mummy was dead and then to play animatedly with his toys.

  There is a rush when the waiting is over. There will be action now. The narrative takes on a new rhythm. Arrangements have to be made. There is news to pass on and it’s always the same. ‘I’m so sorry.’ ‘Not entirely unexpected.’ ‘Always a shock when it comes.’ The phone starts ringing. People come up the drive.

  After an hour we were suddenly aware we didn’t know where Alexander was and that he wouldn’t answer when called. In our bedroom Susie was still lying by herself. Her mother had cleaned her and changed her, and dressed her in her best white nightie. Her hands were folded across her chest, the mysterious smile at the side of her mouth. There he suddenly was, on the far side of the bed, on the floor palms up, eyes open, staring at the carpet. I softly called his name; he didn’t respond. I picked him up rather clumsily and rolled with him on to the sofa at the foot of the bed. We lay there quietly together covered with a blanket. I stroked his hair. We didn’t say anything. After three-quarters of an hour he did something odd: very slowly he slid off the sofa on to the floor and worked his way on his belly inch by inch out of the room.

  A year later he said, ‘Do you get nervous when I talk about sad things?’ And then he faltered in a suspicious way in the middle of a thought: ‘I want to make a recording and maybe I’ll be holding it when …’

  ‘When what?’ I asked him.

  ‘When I die. Do you remember that time I was lying on the floor and you picked me up …?’ It was that day, the day his mother died, when he crawled out of the room like a snake, hardly moving his limbs. What awful thing did he have in his mind? He has never been able to tell me, but there was something desperate and inexorable in the way he inched his way across the carpet. It was frightening then and when it surfaces again (as perhaps it never will) it will bring with it the reality of death.