by Simon Carr
But whatever the world thought of us, it seemed to me that we lived in an idyllic, Lost Boys world with a house fall of children. There was one Saturday in winter when first we were three. We had simultaneous games in the hall – soccer at one end and corridor cricket at the other. There in the sitting room a babysitter and her boyfriend were playing Twister, and on the polished floor of the kitchen Hugo was perfecting graceful arcs of his rollerblade turns. The pride I felt in this regime can’t be exaggerated. These were days of two sons, three cats, six kittens and streams of friends moving through the house in both directions.
But there, in Hugo’s first week with us in Seaview Road, Juliana looked round the house and gave me her appraisal. She said, ‘What chores does Hugo do? You should give him chores. I give mine chores. They have to learn that washing up doesn’t do itself.’
This seemed sensible, practical, true. Washing up didn’t do itself. No, it was me who did the washing up and why weren’t people helping? Yes, and why shouldn’t a twelve-year-old boy do chores? Of course he should – to develop an appreciation of others, create a work ethic and build character. It was the single most impractical piece of advice we ever incorporated into our family structure. The outer markers were suddenly brought in close, far too close. My family talents didn’t include the ability to make a twelve-year-old boy keep surfaces wiped down. It was a hopeless, fruitless chore for both of us. We’d happily lived with crumby surfaces, we’d worked hard to accommodate ourselves to this way of life and we’d succeeded (and as we know, achieving this condition of enlightened squalor is not as easy as it sounds).
Chores were so alien to the culture that they almost destroyed it. Every time Hugo failed to clean up after himself in the kitchen, it would represent a deliberate, insulting flick on the end of my nose. These fragments of cornflakes were an insult to me, a provocation, and every crumb built cumulatively on previous crumbs that had been left there for me to clean up. ‘I’m only twelve!’ he protested ‘I’m just learning to look after myself!’
No – not good enough. You rarely get set tasks in this house but when you are, you have to perform. If you don’t, you cross the boundaries. You breach the outer markers. You go out into the darkness and even I didn’t know what happened then. That’s how powerful cornflake crumbs were. They were stronger than either of us.
The atmosphere got edgy for other reasons. Hugo looked at the way Alexander and I got along, and realised how different his own background had been. He must have wondered how he fitted into this tight little unit. Especially when the spoiled little creature, his brother (half-brother) was able to drive him mad with one, little, exclusive smirk.
Add to all that the talk I had with him after a bottle of wine, of how I would never get back together with his mother. Whatever he might think, there was going to be no rapprochement. We were no longer semi-detached. We could be friendly but distant. She and I were through. That must have lowered his spirits, divided his loyalties, left him in a limbo. Because she and her new husband were going into a fresh phase of their relationship, heading down the demolition yard. And Hugo might have been listening to an echo of that old conversation we had in the car, playing Whose Is This?: ‘If I got on my bike and rode away, would you and Mummy and Geoffy all follow me?’
None of us knew enough to predict what was going to happen or even to explain what had happened. One evening the three of us were laughing and playing, and fooling around. Hugo went down to bed and found Alexander had taken his teddy bear. Something changed in his head, a switch was thrown and current started flowing the other way. He retreated into silence – an awesome silence that lasted two days. In retrospect it was clear that silence was part of an exit strategy. Some strange, psychic call had gone out; his mother was preparing to leave her second husband and Hugo was to be part of the escape committee. On the third day of silence Hugo packed his bag and said he was going back to his mother. And he did.
So there we were, alone again, Alexander and I, alone again, rattling around in the big colonial house. One and a half floors, a long, dark hall and the wrong shaped sitting room. It had been decorated by a lady in her later middle age and I couldn’t do anything with it. There were these voluptuous, double-lined purple curtains. They were marvellously expensive, but they were purple and there was nothing you could do about that.
‘You’re not going to sell it, are you? Don’t sell it. It’s the perfect house. It’s on a lovely street. It’s so pretty!’
‘The only reason I bought it was because you’d like it.’
‘Did you?’
‘Even though I couldn’t afford it. You taught me that. You were brilliant like that. You always felt money would happen somehow.’
‘And that’s true so far?’
‘It’s tight.’
‘It’s always tight.’
‘Alexander says he doesn’t like it here. He’s always saying so.’
‘Alexander will love it in time. He should grow up in the same house. You’ve already left Hawke’s Bay. You can’t keep chopping and changing.’
‘But it’s too big for us. There’s only two of us now.’
‘Rent out the bottom flat.’
‘But we’d have to be careful every time we walked in the kitchen. And I can’t make the rooms work.’
‘You’ll never get a nicer house. The veranda’s so pretty and you could do the sitting room differently. It needs areas. You can do that with furniture.’
‘The property market will never be higher. And there’s no garden. At least, Alexander never goes outside, there might as well not be a garden.’
‘It’s such a mistake selling this house.’
‘I know. I know. I know.’
‘If I were alive, you wouldn’t be selling.’
‘Oh, that’s true. That’s certainly true.’
But I was in the grip of another of those estate agents and she wouldn’t let me take the house off the market. At the end, I didn’t want to sell and the man who was buying didn’t want to buy, but she made both of us do the deal. We signed; and I had three months to move out.
In retrospect, the investment opportunity was obvious – to quit that high property market and take the strong dollars on a house-hunting trip through Hammersmith on the other side of the world. In London the property depression was just coming to an end and sterling was about to strengthen by fifty per cent.
But that would have devastated us. We couldn’t leave New Zealand without Hugo. Alexander and I were only half a family. However, with hindsight, it was entirely the right decision – if decision isn’t too strong a word for the mysterious process of family life.
After three months of looking on the wrong side of the hills, on the wrong side of the road, on the wrong side of town, I finally saw a suitable sunlit property advertised. It was just a hundred and fifty yards from where we were, up the hill and down a long drive into the gulley.
I was walking down the precipitous drive to the cottage in the glen, surrounded by trees, with the afternoon light winking through the leaves and bell-birds calling their musical notes across the hillsides. ‘Get out the sale documents, I’ll have it,’ I called out to the agent as she appeared at the back door. I didn’t know why she looked so relieved, suddenly.
We didn’t bother with a survey. There were some other people interested, apparently, so we had to move fast: in a manly sort of way; in a decisive, don’t-look-back sort of way.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to come and look at it again, before you sign the contract?’ the estate agent enquired.
‘What for, has it changed?’ I asked. I was all man. And I don’t mean that in a good way.
We moved in three months later, on the shortest day of the year. It had been raining for a week. They couldn’t get the truck along the drive without cutting down a protected tree, so we had to carry in every piece of heavy furniture. It was cold. There was no central heating. It was suddenly clear that you’d have to haul the enormous wheely
bin up the driveway every week. I discovered there was no bath – had they taken it with them? Surely there had been a bath? You wouldn’t buy a house without a bath, would you? At this time of year there was no sun to speak of. It was gloomy and draughty, there were holes in the roof and the cats killed all the bell-birds.
‘I had a nice house and now I’ve got a nasty one.’ I felt like a woman; I nearly sat on the stairs and cried.
I remembered Hugo’s mother moving into a new flat in Earls Court; she sat on the stairs and cried. Alexander’s mother moved into our house in Hammersmith. She sat on the stairs and cried. Yes, I could see why women did that now; that was an increasingly attractive option.
In any event, it was too late. I couldn’t go back to England because I couldn’t sell until next spring, when the house would look as it did when I bought it. The market was weakening for a moment, the dollar had dipped and Hugo was with his mother, a hundred and fifty miles away, back in Taupo on the edge of their lake. And the bills were coming in. The bills came inexorably in.
There, by ourselves, halfway down the hill, work came to absorb me. Without my realising it, home became a boring, lonely place for a six-year-old, little by little, step by step. There was the television, there were videos, but there was also my big back hunched over a screen hour after hour, struggling with the Optimal Rate of Tax in a Western Economy.
God knows he gave me clues enough. He asked me to come and watch the video of Spielberg’s Hook with him every night (it’s about a neglectful father rediscovering his inner child). At bedtime, five nights out of six, he asked for ‘Hannah and the Gorilla’ – a story about a busy father and his little girl piteously watching television on the bare floorboards in a corner by herself. I’d say, ‘I bet you’re glad it’s not like that in this house, aren’t you, Beedle Bop? Aren’t you glad you’ve got me who’s so much fun and takes you places all the time?’ He must have been amazed at my remark because he never contradicted me.
The comparisons with other houses had suddenly started to work against me. My solo-mother friends ran their households along Mrs Darling lines: you walked in and, depending on the time of day, you were embraced by the aroma of toast, casseroles, or coffee. The children drank hot chocolate at night, got into their pyjamas and brushed their teeth; they got up early enough to have a big breakfast together. My Lost Boys theory had fallen apart and hadn’t been repaired or replaced. There wasn’t any intrusive care in the house but neither was there any fun. You can be so busy making a living that life grinds to a stop.
We got up, he went to school, I worked, he came home, I worked, we had dinner, I worked, he watched TV.
One day, driving back from a visit to our friends, he said casually, ‘Can I go and live at Belinda’s?’ In the microsecond of silence that followed he must have sensed how hurtful this might be because he added, ‘I can come back and visit you so you wouldn’t be lonely, but live with Belinda and Luke and Lucy.’
I froze inside. Everything seized up. Above all else I wanted to say the one thing that would make him want to stay living with me, the thing that would make it obvious we belonged together, that our relationship was the most important, enduring and sustaining thing in the world. So I said icily, ‘You want to go and live there, do you? Yes, go on then. But if you want to go you’ll have to go tonight.’
After which I slumped deep into myself and refused to say anything else. ‘Are you all right, Daddy?’ he asked. ‘Are you?’
With a deeply morbid satisfaction I found that I could make everything inside the car slow down by pushing more of my mood into it. It’s a parent thing. It was appallingly effective and quite soon he stopped trying to say anything. Then he stopped daring to move.
When we got out of the car, he went upstairs to sob in his bedroom and I stayed downstairs in my study. I could neither believe nor understand what I had done. But what was I to do next? He was reaching out to me. He was rejecting me. He knew he made me less lonely and he was wanting to go and live somewhere else. His low crying reached me and eventually I found myself sobbing too – not exactly because I was unhappy, but to make him hear me up three flight of stairs, to show him he wasn’t alone. It was the only way we apes had of communicating, each hooting to the other. But tears have a life of their own once you let them go and soon I went up to his room.
He was sitting on his bed, looking at his hands. When I could, I asked him what he wanted to do and he wailed, ‘Whatever you want me to do.’
I was so grateful I couldn’t believe my ears. ‘What?’ I said.
‘Whatever you want me to do!’ he wailed again.
‘Then stay with me, Beedle Bop, I want you to stay with me.’
‘Okay! Okay!’
‘And I’ll change everything so you have what you need.’
After a tender period of sitting on the bed in silence, gathering our shattered emotions, he sniffed and asked: ‘Can I have a Playstation game?’
I wasn’t going to spoil him so I said, ‘Yes, of course. And a Nintendo machine too, if you like.’
‘And will you learn to play?’
‘Oh yes, definitely. And I’ll destroy you!’
‘Oh, that’s really likely!’
But that was just the start. Everything he needed meant live-in help, probably. And attention, really, lots of it. This meant yet another new world. This meant stopping that obsessive, endless, workaholic behaviour at 4 p.m. precisely and going into the television room. It meant Saturday morning movies, videos, boys round to play. It meant the swing and laser guns running round the garden. Looking through the photo album it’s clear what it meant. It meant midwinter beach cricket in his blue acrylic dressing gown (he didn’t take it off for days). It meant hot pools and water slides. It meant ten-pin bowling on Sundays with his half-brother’s half-brother. (This was Angela’s second son from her second marriage – an interesting extension to the extended family.)
And when it rained heavily in the winter our new life meant jumping in the car and looking for blocked drains. You can get a wall of water twelve feet high if you hit the puddles at the right speed. It meant the park after dark with Luke, Lucy and whoever we could get to come and play hide and seek with us. There is nothing better than being young, in the dark, hiding in bushes while someone searches for you hungrily.
‘Come here, little boys!’ I’d call, cooing like a child molester, a kidnapper, a wheedling, flattering evildoer. ‘I’ve got presents for you! Sweeties for you children because I love you. I wouldn’t harm you, no, because I love to play with you and give you lovely presents … Come here, you ‘orrible goblins or I’ll pull off yer ‘eads! Oh, bad boys! Look what you’ve made me do, I’ve shouted at you, I didn’t mean that at all, little boys, come here, come on, lovely little boys …’
The fact that some mothers were reluctant to allow their children out with us to the park always baffled me.
And then Hugo came back to live with us. The phone went one day and it was Angela. Things had been going fairly well, but for the fact that the school was one of those down-country schools where learning wasn’t really the point so much as learning to get by. So he wanted to come back to live with us. As long as he didn’t have to go to the private school, he wanted to come back and live with us in the gingerbread house in the woods down the gulley.
So he did. And we all lived happily ever after. (You know that’s not true, do you?)
A tutorial in blood
You are expected to do things with your children, to take an interest in their hobbies, their activities, their pastimes. Being modern children, a good deal of Alexander’s and Hugo’s spare time was taken up with cannibalism, slaughter, flying body parts. My tired advice for a higher form of culture was ignored. I was nagging them to watch costume dramas on television in the same way my mother nagged me to read Dickens.
So, one day, I sat at the feet of the master to take a tutorial in the game called Blood. ‘For a default weapon, the pitchfork is actually quite good. It
will kill people eventually,’ Hugo told me, languidly leaning back in his swivel chair in front of the monstrous Apple screen (my monstrous Apple screen, incidentally, which I used for work). ‘But these are your missiles. If you use rockets, all the barrels will explode and kill lots. That’s cool.’
Action men are stalking around a stone labyrinth directing visual effects at each other in a way that makes you nauseous; not from moral distress but motion sickness. It’s like watching a film of people on a roller-coaster and you get queasy and dizzy, and the only real pleasure is that you aren’t actually doing it yourself. ‘I can see it looks cool, but what about the fact that they’re suffering intensely?’
‘If you’re saying how good the graphics are, I agree. Now pay attention. When you get a voodoo doll, you use this button to jab the pin into your opponent’s eye and it blinds them so you can blast them at your leisure. Or you can stick them in the arm and they drop their weapon and then you blast them again.’
‘Has that voodoo doll got any clothes on?’
‘Concentrate. Okay, this button is for the Life Leech. It’s totally cool because it sets people on fire and leeches their life away. The spray can is also interesting; you light the spray and it turns into a flame-thrower and the enemies stumble around going: “Ah! Ah! It burns!” ‘
We see images that would be disturbing to a significant section of the grown-up population: mothers, right-wing intellectuals, conservative intellectuals, left-wing intellectuals, pacifists, priests, progressives, educationalists, censors, feminists and columnists whose living is made by having opinions about these things. ‘Hugo, just checking, but are you sure the lack of compassion in this isn’t brutalising you?’
‘They’re digital. Now: the dynamite.’
‘Ah, our reliable friend.’
‘You light it, you throw it quickly. Or you put them in trenches where people hide and if they go anywhere near them they explode. Sometimes their heads fall off and you can play soccer with them.’