The Boys Are Back

by Simon Carr

‘And wasn’t there something about another man?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ And he laughed harder still. ‘This guy was having his blowjob! That was cool!’

  ‘What did it make you feel?’

  ‘What did it make you feel?’ he parodies South Park’s ridiculous counsellor. ‘What did it make me feel? Well, you don’t see that every day, people lying in the street getting their blowjobs!’

  While the language is perilously close to swearing and while I’m not in favour of them seeing these sorts of things, I don’t think it’s at all a disaster. In my view the comic element overrides the sexual element, particularly before puberty. It’s not something you’d want to become a habit, but it isn’t something you’d need to agonise over. It’s important not to blow up these things out of proportion. It’s entirely possible that the image won’t root and he’ll forget about it.

  This idea, interestingly enough, came from my experience of being sexually assaulted as an eight-year-old. Is this the right moment to go into this?

  For various reasons we’d made friends in Cyprus with a young Greek fisherman from Kyrenia. He came round to the house one evening and, while his fishing boat colleague talked to my parents in the sitting room, Andreas came into the study where I was reading. There he put me on his knee and spent ten minutes tenderly kissing me. I sat with my hands in my lap watching his closed eyes and open mouth descending on mine and thinking how peculiar adults were getting. When it was possible to get down without offending him I did so, wiping his saliva off the bottom half of my face. He couldn’t speak (that is, he was a mute), so he made a series of signs and a croaking noise signifying it would be better if this weren’t discussed with my parents. Without particularly knowing why, it seemed the right approach, so I went out of the room and forgot about the whole thing for seven years. At the age of fifteen, in the middle of a school conversation, I suddenly went, in the slang of the day: ‘Gosh! That man was queering me!’

  But back then, in the firelight of the study, even with Andreas’s lowering face and open mouth, and tongue coming like some sort of sea creature out of its hole, I had no real sense of having been abused, only that adults were getting odder all the time. The memory wasn’t repressed, it was discarded.

  But had my parents walked in on this it would have been a very different matter. The experience of justice being done would have been more damaging than the crime I was too young to understand. I certainly wouldn’t have forgotten about it for eight years. Doing nothing was the best course of action…

  At least this may stop me wringing the neck of anyone trying to do the same with Alexander.

  Happy ending

  England reveals itself slowly. It takes time for roots to go down, for the capillary action to start.

  As the end of our first year renting in Southmoor Road approached, it suddenly seemed that the world stock markets weren’t going to crash just yet, as we’d been promised. Interest rates were so low that it seemed silly not to buy somewhere to live. For the rent I was paying you could borrow more money than any prudent person would think of doing.

  And when I strolled into an estate agency – really by chance – they told me about a property that was coming on to the market the following morning. No sign had been erected yet and the sales sheet hadn’t been prepared (these agents wouldn’t last a moment on the Pacific Rim). The house was three hundred yards north of Southmoor Road, round the corner from Jose. It had four bedrooms and a west-facing garden. They said that the garden – and here I had to hold on to the top of my head – went down to the green, vole-filled, swan-swum water of the Oxford canal.

  It was one of the properties up from Southmoor Road, but much sunnier than their wretched overshadowed gardens. Up in the new territories the loathed Waterside receded – we had a playground opposite, a football field, trees, a side street and a funny little two-hundred-year-old bridge that led across to Port Meadow. We had afternoon sun all the way down, almost to the horizon.

  At 8.30 the next morning I was the first person to view the property and looked over the bathroom (where my new experienced eye identified the fact almost at once that there wasn’t a bath). The rooms were painted in artistic shades of blue and green. The fourth bedroom was being used as a walk-in wardrobe – and was about the right size for that. There were no lights in the sitting room; electric cabling was tacked to the walls of the kitchen. It needed really quite a lot of money spent on it. So I offered the asking price on the spot and was immediately accepted. But this wasn’t as eccentric as it might have been because a couple came half an hour later and also offered the asking price. A third couple came on the second couple’s heels and offered ten thousand more.

  Had it not been for the theory of outer markers, someone else would have got the house. But the higher bidder wanted the owner to move out more or less at once – I assured her that she could move out whenever the dickens she wanted. This month, next month, this summer, next summer. Within the offer she could operate exactly as she pleased.

  So that is why I now sit at my kitchen table looking down my pathway, over the cherry blossoms, past the flowering dogwoods to the little landing stage at the bottom of the garden where we have two boats – a sailing dinghy with smaller oars for Alexander and Georgia, and a larger dark green launch with an electric motor for picnics. Through the enveloping trees we watch narrow boats gliding past and on clear days, if you look closely, you can see a gratifying flash of envy in the eyes of the day sailors.

  Jose and I sit in deckchairs when it’s sunny; she marks papers, I write. She teaches or runs her school, I type at my kitchen table. On warm evenings we row the little boat up the canal and watch the trees coming into bud. The boys grow discreetly; every month that passes they show some new, subtle sign of maturity.

  And I wonder, sometimes, how our situation could actually be improved. Lenka cooks and cleans, and keeps house for forty-five pounds a week (she got a rise). Jose presents the best of both worlds – the experience of a woman her age with the vitality of a twenty-five-year-old. Why don’t we marry? People remarry. She is everything you could want in a woman and more than you could expect in a wife. But how does a solo father do that? It’s hard to imagine how two family cultures could interpenetrate without one being lost.

  We live in separate houses, a hundred yards apart, and we’re happy like that, although, in truth, I’m probably happier about it than she is. Alexander’s plots against us are running out of confidence. The periods where he relents and relapses into his old affections are getting longer.

  He’s in a difficult position. He needs women, needs their company, their example, their conversation, needs the way they have of loving, which is different from mine. And yet he needs – equally and oppositely – to keep them away from me. He mustn’t lose his position. He has seen how he loses out and he doesn’t like it. ‘You used to sit on the sofa watching TV with us and it was all cosy. You never do that any more.’

  Do I spoil him by trying to oblige him in this? It’s a question that has no answer. I wrestle with him; I think he’s coming round to some sort of acceptance of the situation. Sometimes his anxiety recedes and his old affections spill over their banks. Then he sits on the sofa with Jose, with his arms round her neck.

  You rarely know quite what is happening in a family, especially when things are going well. Alexander relies on me more than many children do on a parent. It’s not hard to understand why. And when you take his world seriously you find his life as dense and well-considered as anything that comes later.

  But contact in my family is like some running game – Tag crossed with Hide-and-Seek and Sardines. Our idea of an intimate evening together is squeezing up on the sofa with The Matrix, Men in Black, Eraser and Terminator Two. We don’t do the close, caressing, mutual grooming of girls together, we enjoy a jarring mixture of fantasy, extremity, nonsense, catch-phrases, vulgarity, ideas, knowledge, insights, comic violence. Maybe the most communicative parts of our relationship are more l
ike King of the Bed than any conventional relationship in a pair-bonded family. Perhaps we wouldn’t be able to communicate at all with a woman’s love in the house. We’d all be doing something very different, holding back the stuff we like doing so that a woman could do the things that she likes doing.

  We can tell a lot about people from the way they were in primary school, boys, girls. I remember Alexander singing a ditty he’d learned from his five-year-old friends: ‘If you want to kiss the ladies, you’ve got to make a deal’. That rings true. Yes. Shorn of the ideology and the correctness of the politics, that’s probably still the case. But what is the deal when it comes home? What are we signing up to? Is it the same as the one overheard on the floor of Te Mata Primary? TU get it for him, miss!’ the little girl said, so she could boss him about. Is that the deal? I’ve signed up to that before, but these days – no, that’s not going to work any more. I’ve been spoiled by the space the boys have allowed for me. I’m inside their outer markers and I can’t breach the bounds.

  So we’ve grown into each other and it’s such a peculiar shape, such an irregular and difficult shape it has been hard to imagine how a woman would fit into the daily domestic order.

  But I know these things are possible and not just because I’m an optimist. Hydrocephaloids are born with a brain problem – they haven’t really got one. Water pressure inside their heads prevents the cortex from forming – brain matter is reduced to a smear on the inside of the skulls. And yet these brains – these summaries of brains – have been shown to work just as well and just as powerfully as normal ones. The human functions compress themselves into the form that happens to be available.

  Life finds its way and there lies our chance of happiness.

  Epilogue

  ‘I told you to get married again if anything awful happened to me, didn’t I?’

  ‘You said it would be all right if I did. Which isn’t quite the same thing.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He’s growing up. He wants to make lots of money so he’s planning to be a pilot and a lawyer. He’s heard that pilots spend a lot of time flying on autopilot, so he feels he can manage court appearances from the cockpit.’

  ‘Is he happy?’

  ‘I’d say he was, usually, yes. As happy as you can be in England. He misses things. Your country. His gang of friends. And you, of course. He misses you.’

  ‘He still remembers me?’

  ‘God, yes. He keeps the picture of you by his bed. The one where he’s dressed for his first day of school and he’s scowling by the flowerbeds, and you’re smiling like a movie star mum. And sometimes we watch your video and he’s very proud of you.’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘He looks more like you as he gets older. He’s very funny; he shows off, maybe he’ll be a broadcaster like you wanted to be. He’s got your brains – and he’s got your beauty too, so he’ll do well. And I’ll look after him for as long as he needs.’

  ‘I don’t think he brushes his teeth enough.’

  ‘I agree with you about that.’

  ‘Can’t you get him to do it twice a day?’

  ‘Once a week would be an advance. I can’t understand why they’re so white, though. Is he brushing them in secret? I doubt it.’

  ‘What about his hair? When did you last wash his hair?’

  ‘I’ll have to ask him … It was two years ago.’

  ‘You haven’t washed his hair for two years?’

  ‘Not personally. But they wash it when he gets it cut. And I’m rigid about that: he has his hair cut twice a year. Whether he needs it or not. But, but, but – it looks great. It’s your hair. It’s thick. It’s lustrous. It’s auburn.’

  ‘Oh Lord. One other thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Will you do one other thing for me?’

  ‘Anything that can be done. Is this about washing?’

  ‘Not as such.’

  ‘Anything. What would you like?’

  ‘Buy a convertible?’

  ‘A convertible? Buy a convertible? Yes, I’ll buy a convertible and if anyone asks I’ll tell them why.’