by Simon Carr
‘If you want to play soccer, can’t I get you a soccer ball?’
‘Don’t change the subject. Look: if you’re really clever you’ll scatter these proximity detonators.’
‘If I were really clever I’d be reading Proust.’ Yes, if I were really clever I’d be curled up in front of the fire with Hawkin Dawking and Proust; I’d be reading poetry to the boys and making them practise their cellos, and teaching them Latin grammar in their spare time.
But Hugo moves his man through a doorway, blazing with rockets, spray cans, and suddenly he’s on me, jabbing me in the eye with a voodoo doll’s pin. My facetious remarks are ignored. Hugo will be thinking ‘It’s not funny, it’s not clever, it’s just juvenile’, just as our masters used to say to us in those days when they were called masters.
‘If you don’t concentrate!’ he says, ‘you’ll never improve.’
He is talented in lot of ways, Hugo, but this does seem one of the more useless talents to cultivate. The old space invader games were said to be linked up to the Pentagon and if you got a particularly high score you’d be contacted by a secret recruiting agency and turned into fighter pilots; that was something, wasn’t it? Even if it wasn’t true. But I can’t imagine Blood qualifying us even for virtual warfare. Not even with the amount of time they devote to training. It is an awfully long time spent up here in the half-light letting off digital ammunition at your friends.
But then again, we all waste our adolescence one way or another; I stayed in bed most of mine and in the evening watched Cliff Michelmore in his car coat doing regional news round-ups. Exactly in what way, I am forced to wonder, was that better?
As the game ends, the machine suddenly growls in the hoarse, bass whisper I last heard issuing from that girl’s mouth in The Exorcist. ‘Are you just going to stand there and bleed?’ it asks. I’m really not sure what to say.
The evolution of the home
This was odd. Something strange and disturbing was starting to happen as the three of us settled down together: hog heaven came to pall. It may be that the conventional tidy home really is the high point of domestic evolution, because we were beginning to yearn, furtively, towards it. We started –I started – edging towards the unmentionable thing. Not … a routine?
The mess. The laundry. The cats who refused to be house-broken, so many of them. And winter coming on made cleaning all the more difficult because of the wet coming in, and the cats not staying out, and the laundry that could no longer be stored on the washing line. What do you do, without a dryer in the house, when it rains solidly, obsessively, for six weeks?
We tried to be tidy but the effort-to-reward ratio wasn’t at all favourable and we were shocked when we found out how quickly the place reverted. The sitting room had a cycle of as little as three hours from perfection to squalor.
When you’re by yourself, keeping an eye open for the outer markers and there’s no one to do the gardening, as it were, the family situation decays. Instead of the steady pressure of daily nudging and nagging, the family members withdraw into long periods of inattention punctuated by convulsions of temper.
On the third day of a holiday both boys annoyed me in a bowling alley. One didn’t want to clear a table and the other didn’t want to put his shoes on the check-in desk. These flicks on the nose angered me more than body blows. I drove them straight to the station, with a ten-minute stopover to pack their bags, and bussed them off to their female relatives for the rest of the holidays. That was a painless solution, very male, in its way. It was decisive and effective, and shunted the problem away for someone else to sort out. But there were other occasions where the damage just kept on coming.
In those first three months, feelings would gather like a meteorological depression – the dark calm before the storm. Then some trivial position that Hugo might take would trigger it. One particular example of this I remember – we were driving along on the return school run when I said: ‘Hey guys! Here’s an idea! Let’s take one of those airline offers for a weekend in Sydney.’
‘I’d rather do that at Christmas,’ Hugo said quickly, ‘to fit in with the school year.’
This sort of exchange had happened before; I should have been better at handling it. His objection, his contradiction, his perverse reaction to my happy plan caused a spasm of irritation in my well-being and this opened up a fissure, which in turn grew into a black hole from which issued a sort of malevolent ectoplasm. This thick, dark silence could fill the room in seven seconds and suffocate everyone in it. It was a powerful parental weapon but, like chemical warfare, banned from all ethical exchanges.
As a one-off exchange, this sort of thing happened once a week. But there was a more specific underlying problem, a structural problem that was constantly breaking down relations.
We had a deal and it was a serious undertaking. He had been allowed to leave the crash-hot private school he hated and go to a liberal arts state school where the culture was kinder but academic standards were lower. It was a school where fifth-form study of Shakespeare’s Macbeth included building a castle out of cardboard. The deal was that he could stay there – on the condition that he did two full hours’ homework a night.
This, however, meant he’d miss the nightly double bill of The Simpsons. He’d have to sit upstairs in his little study listening to his brother squealing happily in front of the TV. Obviously that wasn’t practical but it was the deal we had struck. Homework was important, but the deal was even more important. It was a solid, rigid, unyielding, stainless-steel deal. This was bigger than chores. And the fact that he wouldn’t keep solidly, rigidly, unyieldingly to his side of it created a terrible darkness between us.
He came to me one morning saying: ‘Daddy, can’t this stop? I feel just awful. When I woke up this morning I felt sick. I feel sick all day.’ And I was unyielding because I felt just as ill. Neither of us would give in.
Once, driving round a corner I saw him walking to the bus, bowed rather, under his school bag, alone in the world. It filled me with the most tender sense of compassion – he looked so vulnerable and borne down on by the world, so alone where he should be most comforted and consoled. He needed only one thing – for his parent, his father, to enclose him in big arms and make everything all right. But still the terrible and impenetrable mood continued.
It’s certain, isn’t it, that a mother wouldn’t have let such a situation develop like this? I like to ignore things in the hope of them getting better; but this got exponentially worse. Finally it got so bad that I sent him away, to go back and live with his mother. It is an awful thing fathers do, particularly on my mother’s side of the family. My great-grandfather threw my grandfather out of their home in the Scottish lowlands at the beginning of the last century because he married unsuitably. Sixteen years later my grandfather was offended by his son, so he threw him out of the house as well. It was a bad time to do this because of the one big thing runaway sixteen-year-olds were doing that year.
‘How old are you, son?’ the recruiting sergeant asked. When he heard the answer he said, ‘Take a walk round the square and when you come back, be seventeen.’ As a result he never saw eighteen, my Uncle John.
And there – I’d done very much the same sort of thing. Instead of talking it through, or whatever you’re supposed to do, I’d broken off contact and sent him away to live with his mother.
After ten days I was still angry – so angry that I couldn’t see him through the suffocating darkness. He came back once to see if I was feeling better but he only stayed a moment, just time enough to hear the timbre of my voice as I asked when he was coming back. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t feel safe here.’ And I sank lower between my sheets, darkly pulling them up to my chin.
Why it all got better I never found out. Suddenly, for no observable reason, the sky cleared. The depression disappeared. The anger evaporated. And what was left then was the hole where Hugo lived. ‘I miss Hugo,’ Alexander said (and goodness knows what effect a
ll this was having on him). ‘When’s he coming home?’ So then I had to ring up, begging and pleading with him to return because we couldn’t do without him. I could hear the relief and excitement in his voice as he agreed to come.
It was essential that this terrifying saga didn’t repeat itself. Let us get our priorities right, I thought. ‘Do I want my son, or do I want my son doing homework?’ I chose the former and promised him I’d take no further interest in his education. He could abandon the homework programme; he could do what work he thought necessary (and it’s interesting, isn’t it, his grades immediately started improving). The outer markers went back to their distant boundaries and he prospered in his freedom.
But most important, eventually and rather desperately I found a way of controlling the moods. If they were caught in the first three or four seconds you could stop up the hole and cut off the darkness. You had to breathe deeply. You felt this attack of breathlessness in the solar plexus, as though you’d been punched. You thought about something else. In computer terms, you closed down your system and rebooted. You engaged in a pure act of repression. Whatever therapists have said, the best way of coping with these feelings was to exterminate them.
‘I must have been awful to live with sometimes,’ I said one evening in a phantom dialogue.
‘Awful!’
‘There’s no need to agree so enthusiastically.’
‘Someone would say something you didn’t like and you’d disappear suddenly. Everything would be cantering along nicely and then you’d disappear. You were gone. And nobody knew why.’
‘Yes, yes, yes, all right. It’s too hard for one person to do all this. Have I told you my dog metaphor for two-parent families?’
‘No. Please go on. It sounds most interesting.’
‘It’s like your eye-dogs and your huntaways up at the farm. One parent runs around at the back, driving the children forward. The other parent, up ahead, guides them in the right direction.’
‘And which was which between us?’
‘Well, I was going to say you’d be the clever one, the guiding one at the front. But you were just as good running round the back and barking at them. You could do both. You always had a bigger spread than I did.’
‘I don’t much like your idea of “exterminating” these feelings. Why do you always sound so violent?’
‘Well, what else can you do?’
‘You could apply the General Theory of Videotape, or whatever you call it.’
‘No, no, no, you haven’t been paying attention – that’s not about me.’
‘I think you’d be surprised.’
‘Look. Darling. The videotape idea, if you remember, relates to five-year-olds.’
‘That time in the car and the trip to Sydney? You were running on ahead of the boys too quickly. You’d decided you’d got a great treat for them and you were already there, all excited, and you’re expecting them to be there with you. That makes Hugie nervous. He wants to decide in his own time whether he wants to come or not.’
That was embarrassing. It really was the videotape principle. Caught out: snap! Damn! I was ten seconds in the future imagining them both happily clapping their hands at my proposal. I was the egomaniacal treat-meister, the patriarch using favours to control his offspring. Hugo’s deftly timed objection (‘Let’s do it at Christmas’) brought my whole fantasy tumbling down. The world collapsed. For Alexander it was a positive strategy – indeed, he couldn’t get enough of it. The treats overrode everything. But Hugo was very different. He sensed that to accept things from me was to put himself in my power. How humiliating. I was doing something for him so I could boss him about. That was a wholly unsuitable strategy; that wasn’t just for five-year-olds but for five-year-old girls.
The theory also explained why I couldn’t help Alexander with his schoolwork. In simple terms it drove me nuts. When I asked him, aged seven, what two divided by two was I immediately started beaming the answer into his mind: ‘One. One. One. It’s one. The answer’s one, two divided by two: one. Waaaaa-un. Un. Un. One. WAAAAHHHN!’ And when he confidently said, ‘Oo … Nine?’ the whole structure I’d prepared for him came tumbling down. And then I’d turn angrily on myself and you can’t do that without frightening your little Beedle Bop.
At any rate, we suddenly enjoyed some clarity in what was going on and we lived happily ever after. Well, at least for months.
Nearly killed by a cat
As spring wore on the kittens became cats in a real and unwelcome way. Those night-time noises outside in the garden weren’t innocent at all. Suddenly we had nine cats in the house, nine of them. And the reason we had nine cats in the house was the delay in getting Chippy fixed before she had two kittens, then a delay in getting Lippy and Dippy fixed before they had three kittens each. So I had to get the six kittens into the box and take them to the vet before they each had three kittens and we ran out of names.
But there was no way they were going gracefully. After a three-person chase through the garden and some damaging scratches, I forced the first one into the box and hurriedly folded the tops down. There was an inch-and-a-half-square gap left at the intersection. When I stood up, sighing with satisfaction, Lippy – or possibly Dippy? – came out of that hole so fast I could only just grab her round that narrow part above her hips. I pinned her to the ground, shouting and growling. She bent back double – her spine must have looked like a piece of skipping rope – and bit me. When she shifted position to get a better angle, she sank her teeth into me, up to her gums, and looked at me enquiringly.
It’s not that I’m a tough guy but I am lazy. I wasn’t going to let her go, though, after the trouble we’d been to in catching her, so I held on and admired the strength of her will as she twisted my knuckle around in her jaws.
When this period of pain was over (I had to strangle her a bit in the end to get her teeth out of my hand and her body back in the box) I was distracted from examining the punctures by a gender sequence between me and the observers. ‘You’ll have to take that to hospital,’ Anna said, and Belinda agreed. ‘You’ll need a tetanus shot. Cats have dirtier mouths than dogs.’
And Anna added, ‘But not as dirty as humans. The human bite is the most dangerous.’
And Belinda continued, ‘Yes, but cat bite goes bad more quickly than human bite. Septicaemia is extremely dangerous. Blood poisoning can have you in hospital for months.’
Anna went on, ‘Tetanus is much more common than people think. And there’s no cure for it. It’s not just your jaw locking, it’s fatal. A boy stood on a rusty nail and was dead in three weeks.’
They didn’t say: ‘Could it lead to amputation? In the worst case?’ But you could see it was only because they hadn’t thought of it.
Rather childishly, I forced myself into the opposite position. I casually – and ostentatiously – bathed the wound in a bowl of diluted antiseptic. Anna and Belinda weren’t impressed (modern antiseptic doesn’t sting like it used to). But it wasn’t a medical procedure, it was a political one. My male insouciance was being tested against their feminine anxieties. It was very important that the right side won, because the boys were watching it all. You have to set a good example.
Over the next few days the knuckle swelled up – that small kitten’s jaws had extraordinary crushing power. The skin went red and stretched in a suspicious way, and underneath the tautness there was something soft and squashy. Every time Belinda and Anna saw the developing wound they looked at it sorrowfully with a special expression. This really was politics in action and it inflamed my paranoia. It was clear to me that they would prefer the wound to go septic rather than heal on its own. The evidence for this is sketchy, but it’s certainly true that when the wound started to subside they immediately stopped asking how it was. I was deeply relieved when everything was all right. Death by tetanus would have had disastrous political consequences on my theory of hygiene.
Both were and are extremely good friends of mine, with many levels of affect
ion and attraction, but it was still clear that a ruthless feminine instinct from deep within their gender needed me to be punished by Mother Nature for not taking hygiene seriously.
Gender relations in an age of stepmothers
For quite a long period after Susie died we lived in a sort of sexual quarantine, a gender isolation. In this new world the boys took precedence over girlfriends. Priorities changed, old behaviour got purged and a new, more uncomfortable attitude developed. Where I used to fall in head first and create chaos, now I was creating chaos much more carefully – warily, even.
The stories about stepmothers aren’t all fairy stories. We hear it’s the hardest position there is, stepmothering, with the best will in the world. The mother-in-the-middle is usurping a position that the children feel belongs to another. She is trying to keep the balance between her children, her husband’s children and the children that she and her husband have. Resentment piles up mysteriously and bitterly on every side. We have heard of the stepmother as victim; but it must be said the stepmother as victor is deeply frightening.
Before Susie and I were married we broke up for ten days. During the course of this shattering jag we had a crucial conversation. She told me how much she felt for four-year-old Hugo and that one of the great regrets she had in this separation was not just losing me but losing him as well. ‘I love that little guy,’ she said with real tears in her eyes. But after we’d married and she had her own boy, she cut Hugo off quite briskly. Whenever three – and four-year-old Alexander said ‘my brother Hugo’, Susie would quietly but firmly insert the words ‘half-brother’.
Naturally enough, a genetic imperative kicks in. Stepmales, as we read, can assert their genes in more obviously horrible ways. When a lion takes on a widowed lioness the first thing he does is kill her existing cubs. After all, there’s no point in him devoting energy to their selfish little genes. Men probably have the same impulse, muted by civilisation and wider affections – stepfathers cover the spectrum. But they have no genetic imperative to keep their hands off the children. Now that sole-parent families have increased, now that momma’s boyfriends move through the house, maybe sexual abuse of children is actually growing, even beyond the increased reporting of it.