‘I’ll take the blame if you like,’ says Lawrence.
‘Will you really?’
‘Yeah. It’ll cost you a quid.’
Peter looks haunted, like a desperate prisoner who only wanted a pillow and is now in hock to the biggest hard man on the wing.
It isn’t just the price he sets for taking the rap that bothers me, it’s the speed of the response, as if he’s used to making deals in dark parking lots in a hurry, before the Feds arrive. Despite our efforts to seal the perimeter while we’ve been watching all eighty-two episodes of The Sopranos, I fear some of the ethics may have seeped up through the ceiling into our son’s room. Last summer he sold me a pebble for 50p – a really nice round one to add to my collection, but he knows I have an addiction. And it was unsettling. Are we breeding a creative entrepreneur who’ll survive whatever hellish challenges the future has in store, or a proto Alan Sugar?
After Lawrence sold the PSP, we agreed he would perform useful household tasks in return for cash to put towards a – considerably more expensive – Wii. Because the way to put a bad game console experience behind you is obviously to get another one.
Precisely what these tasks would be led to negotiations which rumbled on through the summer like one of those industrial disputes which lasted most of the 1970s.
Finally we agreed that he would start by cleaning the car for £10: £5 for the outside and £5 for the interior.
But he takes a strangely long time to get started.
‘I’m a bit hungry,’ he says on the first morning.
Then, after breakfast he can’t start because he has to ‘help Lydia find Pinky the Bear’, which would be sweet if it weren’t for the fact that Lydia loses things quite a bit, and devoting any time to helping her find them basically means saying goodbye to your week. Also, though she doesn’t know it yet, when we took Pinky on holiday to Italy, he fell for the sun-drenched, early-retirement-on-full-pension lifestyle and decided not to come back.
That takes Lawrence till lunch, after which he disappears with his sketchbook:
‘You know how you like me to draw.’
After that, he says helpfully:
‘I should probably watch that DVD so you can send it back.’
We get three films a week in the post from LoveFilm, enabling us to claim – quite truthfully – that we now watch very little television.
‘DVD after car cleaning,’ I say.
‘Can I watch it?’ says Lydia.
‘No.’
At 10 a.m. the next day I say,
‘All ready to clean the car?’
‘I’ve got hypoglycaemia,’ he says. ‘I need to eat first.’
He has recently had breakfast of bacon, eggs and beans.
‘You know it’s real, Mummy: you get it too.’
This is true. I could ignore it, but when he does indeed get low blood sugar he behaves like me with PMT, only worse. It provoked the most terrifying outbursts of temper in my father before almost every meal, so I am quite keen to get him managing it early in life. I shove a piece of shortbread in his hand and point him towards the sink.
In comes Peter, features screwed up with concern.
‘Have you got any moisturizer?’ he says. ‘It’s all this housework I’m doing. I’ve got “dishpan hands”.’
The children have never seen the old Lux ads, so don’t react, and I have seen them, but ignore him.
He spots the bucket on the draining board, waiting to be filled: the extent of Lawrence’s progress so far.
‘Excellent work! Well done.’
‘He hasn’t even started yet, for God’s sake,’ I mutter.
‘I’m just being encouraging: you should try it.’
‘Fuck off, why don’t you? Jesus.’
Lawrence bends halfway to the cupboard where we keep the washing-up liquid, and stops.
‘Did you know,’ he says, ‘that statistically, you’re more likely to be eaten by leopards than win the lottery?’
‘And did you know,’ I say, ‘that by the time you’ve washed the car and saved up the money to buy it, the Wii will be obsolete. You’ll have to go and look at it in a museum.’
We open the cupboard and spend quite a while sifting through the extensive collection of used and semi-used cloths, scraps of old T-shirt for dusting and two tins of saddle soap that someone lent us in 2001 to clean the seats of a car we no longer have.
Eventually, I manage to shove him outside with the bucket and the cloths, and he finally cleans the car.
‘Nice job,’ I say. ‘Here’s your money.’
Then it rains.
‘I think it’s really good for them to learn to do this stuff,’ says Peter. ‘I used to wash my father’s Rover. And I didn’t even get paid.’
As he muses smugly on his Ladybird book past, Lydia comes in.
‘Anyone know what happened to my Toblerone?’
Silence.
‘Daddy, I’m looking at you.’
Hah!
I’ve had to put up with being the flawed parent all these years; it’s about time he was exposed as non-perfect Peter so they can be disappointed in him too. Then – yes! – Lydia shakes her head and actually says it.
‘I’m just really disappointed in you.’
Me: 1, Peter: 0, Child Development: 2. He looks crushed. She doesn’t look too thrilled either.
Of course, she wouldn’t have reacted like this if I’d done it, because I’ve planned ahead by disappointing them from the very start.
Lost and Found
I am walking Lawrence up to his friend Milo’s, a few minutes away. When we arrive, Milo’s dad tells the boys they can go to the park together – without him.
So far we’ve been theoretically supporting the children’s progress to independence by discussing it without doing too much about it, a strategy of Peter’s. They’ve both been down to the shop a few times to spend their pocket money, but as there are no roads to cross, it’s hardly a major challenge. Yet in the current climate there are parents who won’t let their ten-year-olds do even that. And the less they do, the less they’re able to do.
But – every time I visualize them in the outside world without us, my imagination conjures up a long wait followed by a visit from the police, their hats respectfully removed to denote Very Bad News.
So I’m relieved that the park decision has been taken out of my hands. And if they do come to any harm it’ll be on the other guy’s watch. This thought is most reassuring.
Also, I am fairly certain that Lawrence has absorbed my instructions on what to do if approached by a creepy stranger. But obviously, I must make sure.
‘They’ll sound very plausible,’ I tell him. ‘They’ll say something like, “Your mum sent me to get you,” but they’ll be lying.’
‘I know. You told me a million times.’
‘You scream, shout, hurt them as much as possible, then run to a shop or the park cafe and get them to phone the police.’
‘Scream, kick, phone. I know. Can I go now?’
With Lydia I’m not so sure. The same instructions produce this response:
‘But what if it’s Jessica?’
Jessica is Peter’s sister.
‘No, obviously not. Someone you don’t know.’
‘What if it’s Katarina?’
Katarina used to be their nanny. She lives nearby and still babysits.
‘No! Someone you DON’T KNOW! For God’s sake, Lydia!’
Because of her ability to turn a simple brief into a Socratic dialogue, I have to keep reiterating it to see how much – if any – has sunk in. I test her on it after school, at bedtime, before and after homework, and still I have no idea whether she’s heard. It all comes of having too much imagination. When I first tried to teach her the road-crossing drill, she said:
‘I wouldn’t mind being run over, if it was by an ice-cream van.’
So you can see what we’re up against.
All goes well and Lawrence returns from hi
s unsupervised park visit unscathed.
‘You see?’ says Peter. ‘I told you he’d be fine.’
A few days later, he and Lydia are at the park, and I’m working at home, when I get a text:
Lyd lost. If not back in 20 mins will call u.
This provokes a cocktail of emotions: fear, anxiety and the smidgen of relief that whatever happens, it’ll be her father’s fault.
Ten minutes later she has appeared.
‘She was very good actually,’ he says, when they get back. ‘She went to the cafe to ask if she could borrow a phone to ring me, but there was a queue, and then I turned up anyway.’
‘Very good, Lydia!’ I say. ‘That was exactly the right thing to do.’
Though I do rather wish she’d jumped the queue on the grounds that it was an emergency.
Of course, she was facing an additional challenge, on which she has not been briefed. Peter often isn’t where he says he’s going to be, so it’s easy to ‘get lost’ without going anywhere. She and I once spent half a boiling hot afternoon waiting for him in the basement of the Science Museum – with no phone signal – while he ‘went upstairs for a minute’ and was gone for two hours.
When he eventually did reappear I wanted to drown him in the water play table, but it was all witnessed by those nice young staff they have called Explainers, who can decode any phenomenon in the known universe except why my husband always says, ‘I’ll meet you back here in twenty minutes,’ and then disappears for two hours. But let’s deal with one thing at a time.
Handily, an opportunity to learn a bit of self-reliance has arisen in the form of the Year Five canoeing trip. This time, Lawrence will be paddling and cooking in twos and threes, like The Apprentice meets Bridge Over the River Kwai, though if he loses his paddle he won’t be hauled in front of the teacher and ritually drowned. Mind you, I haven’t been through the small print.
He’s been told to bring a small, light bag with ‘just the essentials’, then I turn over the page to find a kit list that makes Shackleton’s attempt on the Antarctic look like a weekend in Paris. I borrow alien items like bivvy bags – huge waterproof sachets – from families who do this sort of thing willingly in their free time, and we lay it all out on his bed. It’s impressive, though to me more for gazing at in wonder than actually using, like a double-page spread from a Dorling Kindersley book.
And this is only the small stuff; the canoes, tents, Trangias – not an East European car, I discover, but a portable stove – are being provided by the school. Lawrence is alight with anticipation. He can’t wait to hear the rush of the current, feel the Welsh breeze on his face and go four days without touching a bar of soap. Also, they’re invited to bring matches and a knife. And if that isn’t thrilling enough, he’ll be consorting with boys from Year Seven and even Eight.
‘This is a big leap forward,’ says Peter.
‘I know: they’ll be expected to wash up their own plates.’
The day before he leaves, it finally sinks in that my precious ten-year-old is about to get into a very small floating container with two other boys – who could be sensible, but on the other hand might well muck about and capsize it – on a large body of moving water, 180 miles from home. I can feel the pull of the outside world, like a powerful force, clutching at my baby! I shouldn’t have watched so many films where spaceships get pulled into magnetic fields and don’t come back.
To ward off anxiety I distract myself with the fine detail: for instance, the fact that the word ‘cagoule’ is spookily similar to Gagool, the name of the evil toothless crone in King Solomon’s Mines. This is more effective than you might think.
Then he’s gone.
The four days pass more quickly than I expect, and quite calmly, except for Peter coming in about twice a day and gasping,
‘Just think! Our little Lawrence! On a river!’
It only occurs to me much later that he’s celebrating it as something good.
On the fourth night our explorer returns, triumphant: tanned, grubby and with his toothbrush in exactly the same position as he packed it, the hair I placed, James Bond-style across the handle, still in place. And he sounds different.
‘Blimey, I think his voice has broken,’ says Peter. But no, it’s only the effect of yelling to his mates in the other boats.
‘Look at this, Mummy.’
He shows me the sharp stick he whittled.
‘Wow, what was that for?’
‘We stuck our marshmallows on it.’
‘Wow. What else?’
‘We ate cold pasta.’
‘Gosh.’
‘Halfway through cooking, the stove went out.’
The thrill! Then just before he zooms off to sleep he murmurs,
‘Rapids . . .’
‘What?’
‘We went down them on our backs. It was great!’
In the morning I ask him:
‘Do you feel different?’
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Older. Like I can do more.’
‘Great!’ I say, unpacking the sticky plates. ‘I think you’re now ready to learn the vital life skill of how to wash up.’
This will take another eight years.
Understanding the Facts of Life
After lunch during one of her rare visits to London, my friend Janet announces she has one vital thing to buy before she gets the train.
‘I’ll come with you,’ I say. ‘What do you have to get?’
But of course she’s not shopping for herself.
‘I need to buy a sex education book for the kids.’
She’s told them the ‘nitty-gritty’, as she puts it. But there’s something far trickier to be tackled. Matthew is starting to change.
‘He’s getting into major teenage-style strops,’ she explains. ‘And—’
‘And?’
‘His armpits are starting to smell!’
He’s only nine.
We go into a bookshop, and ask in loud, clear voices:
‘Have you got any books on sex?’
‘For children.’
‘We mean the Facts of Life – you know.’
‘It’s funny,’ says Janet, ‘if we were asking for ourselves we’d whisper.’
Nonetheless, the sales assistants seem confused by our request and it takes three of them to steer us to the right section. I once returned a picture book about making babies by a popular and excellent author because it referred euphemistically to ‘egg-laying’. And, while Daddy had a willy – tiny, but at least visible – poor Mummy had just a blank space: literally nada. Nowadays, do children think there’s something wrong with them if they’re not like the picture? Surely they do look at themselves. Still, I must vet Janet’s choices.
We both like one which takes a sort of Horrible Histories approach, with cartoons of many variations on the human figure – ‘nobody’s perfect’ – but find ourselves distracted by searching for our own shapes.
‘Hmm,’ she says, ‘Trinny and Susannah should do one of these.’
‘It’d be miles better than The Joy of Sex we all read in the seventies, with those awful hairy drawings.’
Pretty much all I can remember about it is the endless beards.
‘Which were obviously a covert strategy to put teenagers off sex.’
‘Well, it worked.’
‘For a while, anyway.’
Eventually we pull ourselves out of our reminiscences as Janet must make a decision or miss her train. She chooses Puberty: Boy; the companion volume Puberty: Girl will later suit her seven-year-old. Being stingier, I get one for Lawrence and Lydia to share: Usborne’s Understanding the Facts of Life, which is informative, friendly and not twee. We went over the basics two years ago during the ad break in Friends, when they came into the room just as Rachel confessed she’d slept with her ex, Barry the Dentist. And as I didn’t want to miss any of the second half I explained it really quickly, and forgot to say you can get pregnant.
‘So it was all over too
soon, just like a first sexual experience!’ said Peter, very pleased with himself.
When I get home, I try to stimulate interest in my new purchase.
‘I’ve got this really great book for you . . .’ I begin.
‘Not again . . .’
‘You’re always forcing us to read books!’
‘But this one’s really interesting. It’s about sex.’
Lawrence sighs.
‘We’ve done sex. We had to watch a video. It went on for twenty minutes.’
I try for a bit longer, then leave it on the kitchen counter and wait till bathtime, when I work the conversation round to Matthew’s armpits. It’s a bit of a swerve from Hadrian’s Wall and the six times table, but using outrageous Radio 4-style links I get there in the end.
‘You’ll change,’ I tell them. ‘You’ll get hair here and here, and’ – looking at Lawrence now – ‘your voice will get deeper.’
‘Awww!’ says Lydia. ‘I like my voice.’
‘Not you: you get the bosoms.’
‘Ha ha!’ says Lawrence.
Somehow I’ve managed to spin it so neither is happy with their lot.
And anyway, Lawrence is only really concerned about his height. I tell him my father was only five foot seven and it never held him back, but since Lawrence never met him it means nothing; I may as well be talking about Napoleon. So I explain that not everyone develops the same way or even at the same rate; there are boys in his year with size nine feet who look as though they’ve grown out of their uniforms since lunch. Even so, he is still the second shortest in the class, a fact that has made us somewhat relaxed about getting him new clothes. We just noticed he’s been having trouble getting his school polo shirt off at night; when he took it off for the last time you could actually see his chest expand. The label said ‘Age 5–6’.
‘At least now we know why he’s smaller than the rest of the class,’ said Peter.
Two days later I come down to find the children reading the book together: result!
And from sex it is but a short step to drugs.
Lawrence is doing them already. He’s only in Year Five so it’s all happening rather sooner than I expected.
Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years Page 5
