‘Cool.’
When I next come downstairs, he has made an A4 chart labelled ‘Coach: Lawrence, Student: Mummy,’ with boxes to tick for each day of the week.
‘And,’ he adds brightly, ‘if you attend all the sessions in the week, you get one free.’
When my willpower evaporates and it’s clear that Week One will be the only week, he takes to following me round the house babbling, ‘Gissa job: I can do that,’ like Yosser Hughes in Boys from the Blackstuff, Alan Bleasdale’s bleak 1982 drama about the destruction of a Merseyside community through unemployment resulting from the demise of its traditional industries. Though he lacks the intense, manic desperation – and three children – that put Yosser up there with the great tragic heroes, he does share his ill-fated tendency to set himself challenges he isn’t quite up to, in his case cleaning all the windows in the house before Top Gear.
The following day he sets his sights more realistically on the bin drawer, a deadly cavern encrusted with the spatterings of a thousand dinners, which Peter and I thought a brilliant idea when we first saw it in a friend’s house, the same as my parents did with venetian blinds in the sixties, never thinking it would one day have to be cleaned.
‘Are you sure?’ I say. ‘You have to lift out the bin, the old bread tin with the compost, and the huge drawer.’
To my surprise, he is straight in there, like David Attenborough in the infamous bat cave, as the fumes from the droppings overwhelmed him and his final words were audible only as a croak.
When he emerges, the drawer and the alcove are spotless; we are still averting our eyes, though now from the dazzle of its whiteness. I hand over a fiver. But Lydia is feeling left out.
‘Lawrence will have £65 and I won’t have anything!’
‘He’s been saving.’
Her understanding of the relationship between not spending money and still having it later is still embryonic.
‘Well, think of a job you’d like to do.’
She is low on motivation. Having the guinea pigs to muck out has given her a perspective on cleaning which has rather pushed it down the running as a possible career.
‘I have to do it every week and I don’t even get any money.’
‘Well,’ I say, ‘that’s what comes of wanting guinea pigs; it’s like being a parent.’
‘There’s ice cream for after supper!’ says Peter, sounding like the persistently cheery wife in The Truman Show.
‘I don’t want ice cream,’ says Lydia. ‘Can I have money instead?’
‘No,’ we both say together.
‘Why not? When I got a toy at the airport, you let Lawrence have the money.’
‘It doesn’t apply to food,’ I say wearily, ‘because otherwise . . .’
I lack the will to go on.
Eventually we wave them bedwards and slump down in front of the TV. About ten minutes in, Lydia appears with a small piece of paper.
‘Head Massages and Hair Fiddles,’ it says. ‘Only 10p a minute.’
‘Very good. We’re up for that,’ we say. ‘But tomorrow. It’s bedtime now.’
Then Lawrence comes down with a larger sheet, advertising foot rubs at the same rate but with a discount for regulars. Also, his ad has a Before and After, with the After foot going ‘Mmm!’
‘He’s copying me!’
This sparks a turf war, which only ceases when Peter and I both agree to get into bed early and be manipulated. Lawrence does the feet and Lydia the heads. It’s wonderful.
‘Put yourselves to bed; we’ll pay you tomorrow,’ I murmur.
‘We don’t give credit,’ is the last thing I hear as I drift away.
The Art of the Deal (2)
The lovely woman who looked after my sister and me as children used to admonish us gently from time to time for being unladylike. She was much stricter than both our parents about manners and endeavoured to stamp out troglodytic habits like grabbing toys from each other or eating with our mouths open, which we generally got from Dad.
Yet I am by far the less ladylike of the two adults in the house. In the early days of our relationship, Peter was practically traumatized when I once ate a lettuce leaf straight from the salad bowl. It’s taken him more than twenty years to tame me to an acceptable level, though I’m still given to road rage, shouting at the television and swearing vigorously at the squirrels currently vandalizing our bird feeders. That the children regularly shout ‘Bugger off!’ at them while banging the back door is entirely thanks to me.
As a reward for being particularly good at the moment, I have bought them a large bottle of a well-known carbonated soft drink. They have quite a bit of it at supper, and are soon exchanging burps like an end of the pier novelty act from the days before comedy was funny. The burping’s bad enough, but Lawrence embellishes it with an imitation of a boy at his school who is a proficient burper, complete with actions.
‘He pushes his chair back at the same moment, see? And then it looks as though the force of the burp has propelled him backwards!’
‘Something,’ I say, ‘that only eleven-year-old boys are likely to find appealing.’
Lydia is offended.
‘Well, I’m a ten-year-old girl and I find it appealing, thank you very much!’
Until now I’ve always assumed a fascination with bodily expulsions to be a predominantly male preoccupation, shared by females only in the very early years. With girls, farts and bottom anecdotes are generally replaced quite early on by ponies, Hannah Montana and chatting to each other on their DSs while sitting next to each other on the same chair. Yet at ten Lydia likes both.
Could it be because she’s the second child after a boy? We brought them up on Thomas the Tank Engine, Fireman Sam, The Beano and The Simpsons – I vainly hoped she’d take Lisa as a role model – though I suppose there was also Top Gear.
We built endless towers of Lego for them to knock down. And when we inherited Peter’s nephews’ toy cars, plus a garage with ramp and wind-up lift, I suppose a male-ish slant was established as the default. She never really took to my old dolls’ house and it was Lawrence who tucked up his cuddly toy animals at night, including the ‘twins’, Tortoise and Elephant: ‘They’re both eight.’
But why should playing with toy cars lead onto expelling air at the supper table? And Lawrence was never a boysy boy in any case. As well as being devoted to the animals, he has never played a violent computer game. Well, not in this house. And when we visited a family with two girls, he was far more fascinated by their toy supermarket than Lydia was.
Maybe we should just follow the fashion and blame it on their viewing habits. The obvious culprit is A Knight’s Tale, a medieval variation on My Fair Lady starring Heath Ledger as William Thatcher, a peasant who fakes it as a knight. Near the end, almost like an outtake, the main characters have a farting contest, where the loser – whoever’s farts are the quietest – has to buy a round. And the pretty female blacksmith holds her end up, as it were, with the men. Just possibly, Lydia has remembered that scene better than any of the stuff about chivalry, or even Paul Bettany naked. Yes, I think it must be that.
But although the burping is tedious, I prefer my daughter this way. She is never coy or mimsy and knows herself to be her brother’s equal. And if that means she occasionally sounds like a halfback on a stag night, we can probably live with that.
Shortly after this, the kitchen sink stops emptying properly, and without a murmur of protest Peter gets his rubber gloves on and goes outside to unblock the drain. He is soon joined by Lawrence, who also grapples personfully with the stinking sludge as, inevitably, it starts to rain. I look up from my biscuit dough and over at Lydia, who is stitching a top for her toy rabbit. I’m pleasantly surprised by how quickly Lawrence jumps to it.
‘I guess clearing the drain really is a boy thing,’ I say.
‘Definitely a boy thing,’ she says.
‘Look at you,’ I say when he comes back in, ‘elbow deep in the slime while Lydia sews. I guess as a male you�
�re programmed to do that stuff.’
‘Don’t be dumb,’ he snorts: ‘Dad said you’d give me a pound.’
The Eternal Wisdom of Sid Arthur
Saturday afternoon. Lydia has lots of homework, and I have a pile of admin. We discuss which order to do our tasks in. Then we get some chocolate mini rolls, curl up on the sofa and watch Total Wipeout, in which people run along large inflatable things and fall off them into water.
Later, a schoolfriend of hers comes over and happens to tell us about Sid Arthur, who gave up striving for understanding, sat under a tree to meditate, gained enlightenment and gave the world Buddhism.
It’s a pity Sid Arthur never wrote a parenting manual. You just know that people who would never watch Total Wipeout and eat mini rolls with their kids would probably do it if some expert said it would help get them into Oxbridge.
I’m against too much striving in children, particularly when it involves having to drive them anywhere or enforce any kind of extra-curricular regime such as music practice, especially at weekends, when most normal people are in bed with a hangover. We know they will learn to feed themselves, get on a bus without falling under it and eventually even become adults. But for some reason our generation is unable to let them do this; our children have to be endlessly chivvied, cajoled, pushed, tweaked and fixed. It’s like adding six teaspoons of baking powder to a cake because it just has to be better than one.
My mother has always cited the precedents of world-class high achievers who frequently slipped their brains into neutral, where inspiration flowed more freely. James Watson and Francis Crick famously stumbled on the structure of DNA while consorting with girls and playing tennis – well, if not literally in bed or on the court, at least not hunched over a microscope twenty-four hours a day, while their parents muttered: ‘Must . . . Win . . . Nobel Prize . . .’ And others were working on it too, taking the pressure off a bit.
And Winston Churchill of course won the war – and wrote fifteen books – while drinking a pint of champagne a day plus several whiskies, bricklaying, and painting landscapes. Plus he often worked in bed and held meetings while he was in the bath.
But none of them would match up to the exigent standards of the Modern Parent.
I didn’t always think this way. I used to be hard-working and miserable. I didn’t take holidays and believed that the tiniest treat had to be earned, even having the radio on while I did the ironing. Then I had children and discovered Fatigue.
Once you’ve woken up on the floor a few times with a one- and a two-year-old crawling over you like ticks on a buffalo, you’re less inclined to punish yourself any further. And in any case, you prove your worth by doing the really simple things: feeding a hungry baby, kissing a grazed knee – and yelling, ‘For the last time, will you all SHUT UP!!’ during a sleepover.
But in practice I don’t get to relax with the children that often, since being married to Mr Marvellous has pushed me into the role of Enforcer. Because of his refusal to be the bad guy I have no choice but to wield the big stick on things like teeth brushing and, yes, homework. And it’s even worse when, like a shadow chancellor, he makes wild promises he thinks he’ll never have to keep, such as signing a contract agreeing to buy Lydia, for her fifteenth birthday, an alpaca.
Katarina, who grew up in Slovakia, tried to reason with her:
‘My aunty had to get up at 4.30 a.m. to feed the pigs, you know.’
‘Don’t,’ I say, though she’s right. It’s just that these reminiscences usually make anyone frustrated with the English education system sigh with envy; under the Communists they did Maths every day and treated their elders with respect.
‘Don’t worry,’ says Peter. ‘It’s five years away so she’ll have changed her mind by then.’
He obviously doesn’t understand children and their long memories. Decades after my father took me to Paris, my sister – who’d been left behind because she was too small – was still reminding him regularly of his obligation:
‘How’s school?’
‘Fine. Don’t forget you still owe me a trip to Paris.’
So don’t come crying to me when you’re scraping alpaca poo off the carpet. On balance, though, you could say that my enforcing role makes these off-duty moments all the lovelier.
When Peter comes in with a bundle of work under his arm to find us still in front of the TV, the guilt rises in me.
Then Lydia says:
‘We’re creatively recharging.’
And I know that Crick, Watson, Churchill and Sid Arthur would approve.
Freedom Riders
Lawrence is off to his friend Alex’s house, to stay the night and – we hope – see X-Men Origins: Wolverine, so we don’t have to. Alex’s mother has offered to take them, but in the event she does something way more useful, which is to instigate Lawrence’s first adult-free bus ride.
We live in a part of London only patchily served by public transport, a bit like the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula, so even parents with better things to do find themselves spending about a third of their waking hours in the car.
But all that is about to change; our son has now received his age 11–15 Oyster card, giving him free bus travel. It sits by his bed at night, shiny with the promise of unaccompanied future journeys, although it could potentially bode ill for fitness. A neighbour’s child is so smitten with hers she now takes the bus to the sweet shop, one stop away. However, Alex’s house, like so many destinations only a mile or two away from here, requires at least two trains or buses. So I drop him there.
But today is definitely The Day.
He returns the next morning, looking unusually happy.
‘How was Wolverine?’
‘Fine. Shall I tell you about our journey home? Alex’s mum told us to get the 258 but it didn’t go from that stop so we took the 227 instead and found our way from there!’
This is major. Not only has he taken his first bus ride without us, he has had to use his Initiative, one of those parts of the modern child you feel sure has withered through disuse and become pointless, like the appendix.
‘And,’ he adds, ‘we gave up our seats for old people.’
I tell my friend Lucy, Milo’s mother.
‘Good,’ she says, ‘because Milo thinks we should let them go up to town together.’
‘Town as in town,’ I say, ‘with all those thieves and weirdos?’
But Milo is an old hand. He has to get several forms of transport across the suburbs to school every day, and has really matured; he’s now about forty in travel years. He reads the paper on the train and has opinions on everything. Maybe it’s convinced his parents that he isn’t twelve at all, but an adult in a slightly crumpled blazer. Is she perhaps overestimating his capabilities?
‘Hm. Where in town?’
‘Oxford Street.’
‘With the huge crowds, hustlers and pickpockets? That Oxford Street?’
‘I know, I know,’ she says. ‘But it’s OK because I thought we could shadow them. Possibly in disguise.’
‘What, in burkas?’
This is too absurd, even for me. On the plus side, it makes her sound far more anxious than me. My strategy is to promise freedom at every opportunity while not bestowing too much – a kind of post-9/11, New Labour parenting.
‘They wouldn’t see us. Well, Milo wouldn’t.’
‘Lawrence certainly wouldn’t; he can’t see a dark sock on a pale carpet.’
Mind you, nor can anyone in this family. The whole place looks like the doorway of a charity shop.
Every week – every day – brings some new crisis of lost pen, protractor, gym shorts, trainers, library book or tights. This morning, when the stress levels were already at maximum, neither of them had their PE kit. 8 a.m. and we were all flinging open cupboards, yelling at each other. I could feel my life expectancy plummeting. If I wanted to spend my life looking for other people’s clothes I’d be a PA to a celebrity and get paid for it. At 4 p.m. they ca
me out and – guess what? Both PE kits had been at school all along. I’d wasted all that energy shouting which I could have used for something else.
How will they get anywhere in life with this inability to think ahead? Barack Obama didn’t get where he is today by forgetting his kit.
‘I was going to run for president, but I lost my speech.’
Or other top leaders. Can you imagine Julius Caesar saying to his mother:
‘I’ve got to invade Britannia, but I can’t find my armour.’
‘Well, where did you invade last?’
In the end, Lawrence and Milo go to town, look round the music shops at the various guitars, and come home safely.
Amazing.
The next day, Peter and I are in town and instead of going home to collect them, arrange to meet our two at the local cinema. They get the bus there from home without a hitch; we have an argument and get off at the wrong tube stop.
‘You have to remember that Clapham has three different stops,’ Lawrence explains when we arrive, growling and late. ‘You should have got off at the Common.’
‘I know! He made us get off at the wrong one.’
‘Now, now,’ he says. ‘Stop it or Lydia and I will go home.’
‘Unlike him,’ I say, ‘I’m from London. I never get these things wrong.’
‘Shut up now: no one cares.’
Lydia hasn’t yet widened her horizons by exploring the possibilities of the transport network. I know the best way to stimulate interest is to withdraw the private taxi service, but whenever I imagine her walking up a badly lit street – such as ours – after getting off the bus or train, I lose my nerve. And Peter’s worse. What she does want though, and right away, is a phone.
She starts following me round the house asking for one – occasionally bumping into Lawrence, who is already shadowing me with the same aim.
‘Hey, you’re like those little aliens who follow Buzz Lightyear around in Toy Story,’ I say.
‘That’s not funny, Mummy.’
In my day, the first stages of maturity were: getting your own front door key, learning how to ‘French kiss’ – how incredibly pre-European that sounds now – and starting to smoke. There were some who managed it all on the same day. A classmate of my sister’s even had a specific sequence for getting off with boys, of which one was ‘Kiss on the Cheek’ and five – the last one – ‘Kissing in Vest and Pants’.
Confessions of a Bad Mother: The Teenage Years Page 9
