The Boys Are Back

by Simon Carr

  These days we are nudists in comparison; modern life has changed in that direction. We wander around negligently after baths. Women lie in the sun casually topless. But the new regime is not without its own anxieties. ‘If Social Welfare investigators ever get hold of my kids,’ my lawyer friend said, ‘they’d have them in care. They’d say, “Have you ever touched Daddy’s penis?” and all of them would say, “We’ve done a hell of a lot more than touch Daddy’s penis!” When I used to shower with them, at one point they’ve all put their hand up and yanked the old feller like pulling a lavatory chain. It gives you quite a jolt, I mean that.’

  Tom says the same. There’ve been Sunday mornings when his whole family – that is himself, wife, three boys – have been all naked, all together, in the parents’ bed, as close as a family of chimpanzees.

  And in our case, when Alexander said, ‘Will you have a bath with me?’ I always agreed.

  It generates physical intimacy for him. Generally, he doesn’t care to be cuddled so much, he likes his freedom of movement. But like all apes he needs to be touched. He wants to be cherished without being constricted. It’s like that sit-com line: ‘Men want to be terribly, terribly close to someone who’ll leave them alone.’ And that must be why he so much likes rolling around in the bath with one of the larger naked apes.

  As I sit there he gets behind me and drapes his arms over my shoulders and lies on me, cheek to cheek. I get caught in this uncomfortable position, not wanting to move. He’s absorbing my bio-energy through his pores. It’s what happens in kissing. It’s what mothers must get, breastfeeding. I find myself hoping Social Welfare hasn’t got cameras in here.

  But there is always the problem of the maleness, the member. I do keep the equipment out of sight, between my legs, presenting a sort of female look. Or else I just hold my hands in the Eve position. I hope this won’t confuse or damage him. It looks like I’m embarrassed by the thing, or ashamed of it, which I’m not, in fact. It’s some strange sense of decency, to cover this gnarled old gypsy-coloured thing that alternative comedians talk about so much.

  One afternoon my work was disturbed by the excited shrieking of boys playing. I went into the sitting room and Alexander had taken off his clothes and was racing round the sofa leaping from the arm flat on to the cushions. His friend Charles had done the same, leaping and shrieking in the ecstasy of seven-year-olds. ‘Ahhhh!’ I thought sentimentally, ‘I must get a photo of this’ and picked up the camera. And then, when another thought occurred to me, I put the camera down again and returned to my work. ‘Put your clothes on, boys,’ I said with a dull finality that made them obey without asking why.

  The newspaper report had come to mind of that English newsreader who took photographs of her children in the bath and the chemist had sent the film to the police. You have to be careful these days; too careful, in my view, but there it is.

  How we end up like our parents

  In an Alex cartoon, the authors had drawn two situations with one speech bubble applying to both. In the first the mother is taking tiny, crying Clive to prep school. In the second Clive is taking his sobbing, aged mother into an old folks’ home. Both older Clive and the younger mother are saying: ‘Now, don’t cry, it’ll be strange for a few days but you’ll soon get used to it. You’ll be well looked after and you’ll be among people your own age. I’m sure you’ll be much happier here and please don’t cry, it makes things harder for the rest of us.’

  There’s an awful lesson in there about the practical level on which karma works.

  My father was standing on the landing when I was seven and my mother asked him whether he’d performed one of his domestic duties. There was a pause. It was clear he had left undone what he ought to have done. I was mentally urging him to say that he had indeed done it – ‘Say you’ve done it, and then secretly go and do it,’ I was beaming into him. He’d easily get away with it, the job was small and my mother was painting in the attic. But he told the truth. There was no advantage in it for him, quite the reverse, but he told the truth. Now I’m his age I look into my emotional possessions and I come across that. An example. A role model. I saw what he did and now it’s something I do.

  Similarly, when I was young, my mother urged me to work hard at school – but her words had far less effect than her example. She worked hard. She was a worker.

  In the same way, I feel my boys observing me. They watch me closely, out of the corner of their eyes. They see everything I do and, whether they note it or not at the time, it becomes part of their character. And the loss – tragic loss, actually – is that without a woman in the house they will never really know how husbands treat their wives. Because the way I treat women will be their lesson in how women are treated. For all that you demand they do all that courtesy, respect, manners, they’ll do what they’ve seen you do. They won’t pull out a chair for a woman or open a car door because you’ve told them to. But if they’ve seen you do so they’ll try it out themselves to see if it works.

  And it must be true, too, that mothers have a harder time providing role models for their boys. In the normal course of things, in their early years, their effect is undoubtedly larger. Her tenderness, her gentleness, her ease with toilet training, her appetite for breastfeeding … these things condition them to be able to accept warmth and affection in later life. It prepares a ground for them, how confident and secure they might be; how much love they can give or receive.

  And then, even though they aren’t talking to their children, mothers can say amazingly powerful things: ‘Dutty, dutty little dog! Urgh!’ for instance. That’s a voice that can terrify more than the dog. ‘Oo, wow,’ the child might think. ‘Does that include me? If I bring in mud, or leave marks on the inside of my underwear, will I be a dutty, dutty little boy? Urgh!’

  That’s where a certain amount of neglect helps, rather. You can’t expect overt support (spouses have to support each other, as we know) but you can project some helpful indifference into your child in some important matters like hygiene.

  And then we were three

  One day we left Hawke’s Bay and went to live in Auckland. We sold the house, packed the car, drove down our winding road. We left behind us all our furniture to be put in boxes by the shippers and packers; we lit out, like in a rock’n’roll song, down a country road, leaving a haze of dust over the promised land.

  Six hours later we arrived in the commercial centre of the country. City of dead volcanoes. City of sails, with more boats per head of population than anywhere else in the world. ‘If good manners cost money,’ the saying went, ‘Aucklanders would have them.’

  While we were looking around for a house we rented something well out of our league – a banker’s house, fully furnished with bankers’ accessories (stereo speakers in every room and a child’s bed in the shape of a Ferrari).

  Alexander’s nanny had a laughing New World temperament. She was in the shower when he sneaked in on her and said, ‘I can see your doodle.’ Far from hiding in the soap suds, she laughingly pressed the whole front of herself against the shower door and said, ‘I bet you can see it better now!’ – a response that couldn’t have been better scripted on Friends.

  Auckland is a new city on the Pacific Rim. Within a short drive we could get to two Olympic-sized swimming pools, a canoe-hire shop, an underwater aquarium, two twenty-four-lane bowling alleys, a multiplex, an amusement park with a log flume and a roller-coaster with a corkscrew turn. And two oceans. Or at least, one ocean and the Tasman Sea.

  Among the local wildlife were some of the most ferocious estate agents I’d ever come across – more powerful, more predatory, better armed than anything in property-boom London. One of them had been trying to sell me a house in Portland Road and to that end rang me at the office. She had heard that I was about to be unfaithful to her, to deceive her, to betray her with a wisteria-clad colonial villa in Seaview Road. ‘I must see you,’ she said. ‘No, this morning. What are you doing right now?’ I was too busy to
see her and didn’t want to see her.

  So when I did see her ten minutes later she knew she was winning already. ‘I’m only forcing my way in because I think you’re going to make a terrible mistake. Seaview Road is not the right house for you. It’s incoherent. It’s all over the place. It’s a mess. It’s not you at all.’ As a matter of fact that sounded exactly like me, but she must have been talking about somewhere else. Seaview Road was a dream house, Susie’s dream house. But the agent was unstoppable. ‘I know you want the house in Portland Road,’ she declared. ‘As soon as you walked in there I know you fell in love with it. I saw you falling in love with it. I can see you there with your boys. Your boys! Oh! Your boys will love that house. Why are you saying you want to buy somewhere else?’

  My back was against the wall. She was very good at this. She sensed I was weak. But I’d been working for a political party for three months and had been taught commando tactics. I leaned in, caught her eye and said in a low, rather terrible voice, ‘Susan. You are all woman. And I don’t mean that in a good way.’

  In the end I managed to buy in Seaview Road and one spring morning we moved in. Below, the deep blue of the finest natural harbour in the world stretched out, with its low grassy islands rising slowly out of the water. Vast white clouds sailed in from the west. Down on the bay, a boulevard carried rollerbladers, cyclists, ball players along the foreshore past the inner-city beaches. There were people in pants, in touch-rugby gear, in summer dresses. It was like California but a third of the price.

  ‘Look out behind you!’ Alexander would cry in the middle of a game of corridor soccer. ‘There’s a big fat snorting rhinoceros behind you!’ And I’d turn to say ‘Where?’ and he’d shoot and score: ‘Ten – three! I win!’

  One night, when I had to work and couldn’t oblige him in his normal sleeping arrangements, he came into the study with one of his poignant six-year-old remarks – ‘I’ve put Teddy on your togs so you know where your togs are’ – and curled up under the table with his duvet. The fire was glowing in the grate. Baroque music on the Concert programme. It was its own kind of heaven.

  And then, to crown it all, Hugo came to live with us; then we were three.

  Why he came we never found out. In the thick, hot fog of family life things happen by touch rather than forethought; we rarely know what’s happening, or why.

  My therapist – I had a therapist for a moment – came up with an interesting gloss on it, which also neatly explained the mystery of my first marriage: ‘When two people have a deep connection,’ he said, ‘one can act as the other’s agent and do things that the other person can’t or won’t do for themselves.’ At the time, we’d been talking about my first mother-in-law and what her feelings for me had been. The therapist was floating the idea that she’d been in love with me, but because she was already married she made her daughter marry me instead.

  Was that true or not? It sounded like a practical solution to my mother-in-law’s problem but the answer will never be known. It’s true there were many tender reasons, but we never wanted to explore the possibility that Hugo was acting as his mother’s agent, attempting to reconcile his separated parents. Some things are too scary to look at squarely. Especially the thought that both of us were in the grip of a higher, absent power.

  But he came to live with us and did so more than once, left his mother and her new family on the other side of town, and came to live with us. It’s strange how things work out. Eight years before, I’d travelled to the other side of the world to be reunited with him. Now, nearly a decade later, after the disasters of divorce and then death, we were together. We were three, a family, suddenly. We weren’t just a stray widower and a lost little son. Suddenly the boys were back in town.

  Hugo had come from a very different household – the opposite from mine. Essentially he had been brought up by women – and not just women but tiger women. His mother. His grandmother. His aunt. Magnificent, rather carnivorous creatures. His grandmother Mary smoked and drank to Olympic standards all her life. In her seventies she sank under a cancer entirely unrelated to her habits. She didn’t complain about dying but when her husband did something to annoy her, she said, ‘It just makes me feel I can’t wait to go, just to be rid of him.’

  Her daughter inherited something of this spirit. Angela was (and increasingly is) an extraordinarily beautiful woman. This has been the most important thing about her – more important even than her cleverness. She was like a model who’d dropped out of university. She was always highly charged and, over the years, her energy and abandoned education allowed her to become capricious. Perhaps for this reason her anxieties increased. During the Carter presidency she felt the Russians were on the point of launching a nuclear assault on New Zealand.

  ‘Where did you read that?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re a perfect target for them,’ she insisted. ‘We’re small, we’re far away, and no one would care if we were blown off the map.’ And when I asked why the Soviets would want to obliterate her small, peaceful, faraway country, she’d play her ace: ‘Just to show that they could!’

  Perhaps if I’d been her third husband rather than her first things might have gone better. But here’s the thing: divorce is a slow-motion disaster and the effects go on for years after the decrees. Your divorced partner is like a psychic twin who withers away for years, sometimes taking you with them.

  And the other consequence is yet more unexpected. The relationship parents have with their son is refracted through the other parent. When Angela left me she took half of me away with her; when Hugo came to live with me, he carried back a large part of her with him.

  The Irish say that if you turn quickly enough you can glimpse the hind foot of the devil disappearing round the corner. We look deeply into our sweet son’s eyes and glimpse our old adversary’s hoof disappearing out of sight. Not the devil’s, of course, no – our ex’s. That’s very rattling. You find you are replaying a struggle you thought you’d got away from – got away from at very great cost.

  ‘I better not touch the phone because my hands are wet,’ Hugo said earnestly as he was handed a receiver by the pool.

  ‘The phone will be fine, Hugie,’ I assured him.

  He said, ‘I don’t want to get electrocuted’ and I had to take several deep breaths. That was true, of course; you wouldn’t want to electrocute yourself, that’s not an unreasonable line to take. You wouldn’t want to be electrocuted by the pool any more than be nuked by the Russians.

  ‘But there isn’t enough current in there to electrocute you,’ I said, breathing carefully.

  ‘But there is some current. I could get a shock.’

  And then I probably asked: ‘Where did you read that?’ I used to say ‘Where did you read that?’ to many things he said and he didn’t like it any more than his mother.

  ‘Scientists are very worried about this belief in extraterrestrials,’ she said. ‘People are looking for answers to their problems from a mysterious superior power. It’s actually very dangerous.’ I’d ask my familiar question and she’d reply, ‘Where’d you read that! Where’d you read that! Can’t I say something for once without you saying “Where’d you read than!’ “

  What Angela needed was a talented husband. That is, a man with a talent for husbanding. But I was the clever first husband – faithful, yes, but irritable, impatient, unyielding. And no match for her abilities in combat. So I’d pull my wagons into a circle and, while she surrounded me whooping, I took potshots when I could. Marriage. You may know how it is. Marriage is a battleground, I thought, and sometimes you might be fighting for your life. Angela was a great warrior, but her victories were pyrrhic, in the end, as circumstances piled up around her.

  As she allowed her anxieties to multiply, her path into a darker world lay more clearly before her. That was a tendency I was keen to inhibit in Hugo. The proliferation of anxiety can rock you off your base, if you allow it to get out of hand. And so, when he saw the flash of irritation in my fa
ce, there by the pool, handing him the phone, how bewildered he must have been.

  That wasn’t our only problem in those first days. I’d weakened and taken advice from a visiting woman friend. ‘Doesn’t Hugo do chores?’ she asked lightly and I fell for it. That was something a man in my position should never do.

  All happy families are happy in their own way. Just as some are ambitious to move on, others want to live in the same street all their lives. Some like attention, others like to be left alone, like hillbillies. Some like to be bossed into doing things, others have to be charmed. Some like a haven from the world, others need the full roar of contemporary pop culture, dancing with Pokemon, sleeping with Beany Babies, yelling along with the latest cult of childish violence.

  There’s a larger example of this cross-cultural uselessness. A group of English philanthropists set a design competition to create a better cart for poor Indians. The winning design had a lower, more user-friendly tray, fixed, pneumatic tyres and was easier to load. The wheels didn’t slop from side to side in that wretched, poverty-stricken way because they fitted properly to the axle. It was an altogether superior cart but a design disaster. Deeply rutted Indian roads needed give in the axle housing so the wheel could flop from side to side without breaking. No one could fix the tyres when they burst and the low tray allowed foraging animals to get at the load. The new cart was an inexpensive way of getting round central London but grotesquely unaffordable for Mahablishwa.

  Family culture is like that on smaller scale. Our rackety cart needed very much more give in the axle than anything else around us.