by Tim Dowling
It is the night before school starts.
‘You are helping them with their eggs tonight,’ says my wife. ‘Because I have done everything and you have done nothing.’ I know she is referring to the younger boys’ Easter egg competition entries. The older of the two has already decorated an egg with the flags of many nations, and only needs me to paint a tiny red dragon in the centre of the Welsh flag. The younger one has painted his egg in the likeness of Ringo Starr – he hasn’t done a bad job, considering that he neither knows nor cares what Ringo Starr looks like – and only needs me to help him construct a complete scale-model drum kit for the egg to sit behind.
After half an hour spent holding an empty loo roll tube and staring into space, I am suddenly struck by inspiration.
‘We’re going to need more of these,’ I say. ‘Bring me some glue and some wooden matches.’ I look around, and see that I am alone in the kitchen. The boy has gone into the other room to watch television. I scream his name. He slouches into the kitchen and I explain my plan to use sections of loo roll to create the different drums – snare, floor tom, etc. – with glued-on matchsticks for legs.
‘Or we could just use Sellotape,’ he says.
‘No, no,’ I say. ‘Glue.’
Over the course of the next two hours I have to keep reminding myself that this is not my last-minute school project; I am merely here to facilitate someone else’s vision. I disguise my bursts of inventiveness with leading questions.
‘Do we think we need some sort of base, some sort of sturdy cardboard base, to anchor the whole thing?’ I say.
‘Um, yeah,’ says the boy.
‘I agree,’ I say. ‘Brilliant.’
I find a tin of refried beans which, if Ringo Starr were a medium-sized egg, would be the perfect proportions for his bass drum, but it still has refried beans in it.
‘We need this emptied immediately,’ I say, handing it to my wife as she passes. ‘Washed out, label off, open both ends.’
‘I think you can probably manage that yourself,’ she says. ‘Because I have done everything and you have done nothing.’
‘Wait!’ I shout. ‘We’ve changed our minds. Open one end only.’
The boy and I agree on a late innovation: pipe-cleaner arms holding toothpick drumsticks.
‘So,’ I say, ‘should the arms be glued to the egg itself, do you think, or to the back of the cardboard stool?’
‘The egg,’ he says.
‘I think the stool, and I’m going to explain why—’
‘The egg.’
‘You need to clear all this stuff off the table before supper,’ says my wife. ‘Which I’ve just made, again, by the way.’
‘It will look as if they’re glued to the egg,’ I say, ‘but it will be more structurally sound if we—’
‘Because I do everything and you do nothing.’
‘I’m doing this,’ I say.
‘The egg,’ says the boy.
The final debate centres on who will write ‘The Beatles’ on the front of the bean-tin bass drum.
‘I’ll write it,’ he says.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘Good, yes, you write it.’ I hand him the pen. He writes, ‘THE BEA’.
‘Actually, you write it,’ he says, handing the pen back.
‘I’ll tell you what we could do,’ I say. ‘We could download an actual picture of the front of Ringo Starr’s actual drum, and we could print it out and stick it on.’
‘I think that’s cheating,’ he says.
‘It’s not cheating,’ I say slowly, ‘and I’m going to explain why.’
The next morning the Ringo Starr egg, carefully packaged for transport, goes off to school, and I decide that its hasty construction and our troubled father–son collaboration will make a charming Guardian Weekend column. Also I have a deadline, and nothing else has happened to me all week.
In my account I am rashly frank regarding the extent of my contribution, because I figure it’s the only credit I will ever get for my work – indeed for any of my primary school projects.
But that Friday something happens that I don’t expect: Ringo Starr is awarded first prize in the egg competition. I am quietly overjoyed, and also surprised. In ten years, none of my three children has ever won the egg competition. Even Joseph Cast Into The Pit By His Brothers, a biblical tableau produced by my oldest son under my unstinting micromanagement and requiring no fewer than seven eggs, failed to move the judges.
By an awful, if wholly foreseeable accident of scheduling, the column in which I had been so rashly frank regarding the extent of my contribution to my son’s Easter egg competition entry appears in print on the day of the annual school Fun Run.
I am sitting on a picnic rug near the back leg of the Fun Run course, drinking coffee and trying not to catch anyone’s eye. Another father of my acquaintance approaches.
‘So,’ he says, ‘I understand you engineered a victory in the egg competition. Nice one.’
‘I didn’t know it was actually going to win,’ I say.
‘I heard you slipped in a Fabergé egg,’ he says. ‘That’s the rumour.’
‘It was an egg playing the drums,’ I say, weakly.
From where I am sitting, I can see my wife circulating with a copy of the Guardian Weekend magazine, just in case any of the other parents have missed the column in which I was so rashly frank. She stands over them, pointing out relevant passages. Eventually she returns to our rug.
‘Everyone’s shocked,’ she says.
‘You’re jealous,’ I say, ‘because you’ve never won anything.’
‘That’s a lie,’ she says. ‘I won for a Book Week costume. Captain Underpants.’
‘You sent that child to school in his pants. In March.’
‘And a bathing cap,’ she says. ‘It was brilliant.’
‘Well, they can’t take my prize away,’ I say. ‘He’s already eaten the jellybeans.’
‘Ooh,’ she says. ‘There’s the headmistress. I’m going to show her.’
‘Please don’t do that,’ I say, but she is gone. I watch my sons jog around cones, wondering how many relatives I’ll have to invent to pad out their Fun Run sponsorship forms. I think back to a humiliating encounter with my seventh-grade science teacher, who felt he had reason to suspect that my project on The Causes And Symptoms Of Gum Disease did not spring from a private passion.
‘Is your father a dentist or something?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I replied, feebly. I have a sense of an unbroken line of academic corruption, passing from generation to generation.
‘Look how many I’ve done,’ says my son, pointing to the little stickers decorating the number on his front, each representing a completed lap.
‘Wow,’ I say. He turns to show me his back, on which he has a different number, equally studded with stickers. ‘Where did you get that?’
‘Someone gave me theirs. Can I have money for an ice cream?’
‘You can’t just appropriate someone’s number,’ I say. ‘You’re meant to run your own—’ I stop, because I realize his only responsibility is to sponsors I have yet to invent.
‘The headmistress would like a word with you,’ my wife says.
Fortunately, the headmistress, who is holding the magazine my wife has lately presented to her, is smiling. I am smiling, too, as broadly as I can manage in the circumstances. It is ironic, the headmistress says, that this year they had gone out of their way to ensure that prizes went only to entries that were clearly the children’s own work.
‘That’s a sort of double deceit,’ my wife says, ‘because he deliberately made it look like he didn’t help.’
That’s not true, I want to say. Yes, there was a certain deliberate naive quality, but that was just part of the effect, so the materials could be seen for what they were as well as for what they represented – a section of loo roll cardboard serving as a snare drum; arms that are still identifiable as pipe cleaners. It’s about clarity of vision. It was never abo
ut the jellybeans.
I don’t say this, though, because everyone is laughing, and I think it best to laugh along as realistically as possible.
CHAPTER TWO
Did I teach my children to use the internet? I certainly don’t remember offering any lessons or demonstrations. I first got online at some point in 1997, before two of my three sons were even born. My recollection of the web in those days is of a half-finished cyber-suburb, a construction site giving on to vast fields. There wasn’t much to do, and there was hardly anyone around. And it was slow. For a long time, sending emails just seemed like a less reliable form of faxing.
In the early days I stood over my children when they used the internet, not because it was a threatening new environment, but because it was expensive. One thought twice before going online to seek information; it wasn’t even that likely you’d find it, and it might turn out to be quicker and cheaper to drive to the library and ask someone. The internet was, first and foremost, a test of one’s patience.
My children were eerily patient with it, which is why my supervision eventually became patchy. A six-year-old will wait all day for some stupid online game to load. I won’t. The first hard evidence that my children were using my computer without my knowledge came from the computer itself.
You’ll know what I mean by it, even though I had to look up the correct term: saved form data. It refers to those words and phrases you type into little boxes on your computer, which your computer then stores so it can helpfully offer them up as suggestions in the future. So, for example, whenever you type a ‘T’ into Google, you might be greeted with this list:
technical term remembering box suggest type in Google
Tim Dowling
Tim Dowling smug
Tim Dowling twat
That’s what I get, anyway. None of us, I suspect, would care to be judged by his saved form data – I’m embarrassed for myself on a regular basis – but occasionally I am greeted by search terms I know I have never typed. Once, for instance, I typed a ‘Y’ into Google and was greeted with ‘YouTube 10 most funneist goals’. It’s a typical example of a clutch of unfamiliar search terms one might file under Poor Spelling Fails To Yield Desired Results, along with ‘1000 beast footballgames’ and ‘stange insturments’.
When my children were small they were permitted to use my work computer under circumstances that numbered precisely zero, but I knew that if they wished to access the internet when they were supposed to be asleep, my office was easy to get to without being detected.
The discovery of this unfamiliar saved form data prompted me to sift through the search terms left on both computers – mine and my wife’s – to see if I could gain any insight into my children’s internet habits. If this sounds like spying, let me say in my defence that I was really bored that day. I went through the whole alphabet.
Most of the searches were more or less what you would expect: ‘fantasy football’; ‘hamster in a blender’. Some were mildly mysterious. The cryptic phrase ‘brought me out of bed for this shrit’ seemed to me to be one child complaining to another – typing it out softly, so as not to wake anyone – that a website he’d been woken up to view was proving insufficiently diverting.
Then I got to ‘m’ and up popped ‘my Dad is an island’. For a long moment I forgot to breathe in. I am familiar with virtually every sentence on the internet that features both my name and the word twat, but nothing I’ve seen chilled me as much as ‘my Dad is an island’. What did it mean?
I tried to imagine one of my sons sneaking up to the computer in the middle of the night to tap ‘my Dad is an island’ into Google. Why would a child do that? It makes no sense, I thought. And then I thought: it makes no sense to you, because you are an island.
Google was no help. I got no meaningful results for ‘my Dad is an island’. The sentence did not exist anywhere on the World Wide Web. I couldn’t stop thinking of my youngest son, the most likely suspect, trying to phrase his tearful query without using the word ‘aloof’, which he doesn’t know, or ‘unreachable’, which he can’t spell. ‘My Dad,’ he writes, alone in the dark, ‘is an island.’ There are zero results.
When he gets home from school the next day, I ask him to come with me. His oldest brother, intrigued by my artificially breezy tone, follows us. On the way upstairs I explain about saved form data, and by way of a warm-up I type a ‘b’ in the box. Up pops the phrase ‘brought me out of bed for this shrit’.
‘What does this mean?’ I ask.
He looks a bit sheepish. ‘You know they have those shirts that say, “You got me out of bed for this?” I just really wanted one.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Well, what about this?’ I press ‘m’.
He peers at the sentence ‘my Dad is an island’ and starts laughing. ‘What the hell!’ he says. ‘I didn’t write that.’
‘That was me,’ says his brother. ‘I was looking for a book of poems we read in primary school. For Mum to put it in her bookshop.’
‘But you get zero results,’ I say.
‘I know,’ he says. ‘It’s actually called Daddy Island.’
Over time my children and the various machines in my life came to control and manipulate me in much the same way. The children realize I do not fully understand the machines. The machines seem to know that I do not fully understand the children. The children and the machines take it in turns to misbehave wilfully at critical times. Occasionally, when I send a child’s phone thirteen unanswered ‘where r u??’ texts, only to receive the cryptic reply ‘wots good cuz’ four hours later, I feel they are acting in concert.
I am spending a long, lazy afternoon trying to print something for my wife. The printer, which has not worked properly for some time, refuses to spit out anything legible. I clean the printhead, put in new ink cartridges, clean the printhead again, deep clean the printhead, and manually realign the printhead, printing a new copy between each step, but they all come out the same: ridged, smudged, squashed.
Frustrated, I give up and go downstairs, where I am ineluctably drawn to the television. There isn’t anything on. My wife walks into the room and sits down.
‘Busy day?’ she says.
‘I just wanted to check the tennis,’ I say. ‘But there isn’t any tennis yet.’
‘Did you print out the thing I sent you?’ she says.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I tried, but I couldn’t.’
We watch the Queen arriving at Wimbledon for the first time since 1977. My wife is weirdly excited by this, while I am unaccountably pissed off on Wimbledon’s behalf.
‘I love the Queen,’ my wife says.
‘I’d be like, oh, thanks for turning up,’ I say. ‘How did we manage without you for the last thirty-odd years.’
‘Leave her alone,’ my wife says. The screen freezes, with the Queen wearing a fixed grin that cannot hide her contempt for tennis. I push the remote and the screen goes blue. Nothing I own works.
‘Arghh!’ says my wife. ‘Fix it!’
‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘We need a child.’
That afternoon I go to pick up the oldest one, wondering how many questions I should ask about his school trip before I raise the subject of the blank blue screen. As I drive, my phone pings and buzzes continually in my pocket, ten, fifteen, twenty times. Finally I pull over. It transpires that the phone is logged into the middle one’s Facebook account and that I am receiving a stream of comments about a photo from the whole of Year 7. All the machines in my life are working against me, I think, or in the service of others. This eventuality was probably predicted by somebody. I should have read more science fiction.
The next day is bright and sunny, the hottest of the year so far.
‘What are we going to do today?’ my wife asks.
‘I’m going to buy a new printer.’
‘I wish you’d buy me a printer,’ she says.
‘I’m going to get a printer for both of us,’ I say. ‘A wireless printer that will print everything from e
verywhere.’
‘Really?’
‘I think so.’
The printer I end up buying is black and twice the size of the old one. It looks like Darth Vader’s head. I carry it up to my office, where I spend a sweltering half-hour crawling around under my desk with wires. The configuration process is meant to be straightforward, but it’s not, and I have to back up and start again a few times. Then I go downstairs and repeat the process on my wife’s computer, which is a different make and requires a different installation procedure.
Finally, with the afternoon gone, I find a picture of the dog on my wife’s computer and press Print. Nothing seems to happen, but when I go up to my office a picture of the dog is waiting in the printer tray, richly coloured and exquisitely detailed. It’s a miracle.
‘Look,’ I say, showing it to the oldest one.
‘Did you just print that?’ he says.
‘I printed it,’ I say, ‘from downstairs.’
‘Whoa,’ he says.
The next day, I’m at my desk looking up the word ‘ineluctably’ to make sure I don’t really mean ‘inexorably’, when the printer beeps and grinds into life. Oh my God, I think. What have I done? I didn’t even touch anything! I watch as it sucks a sheet of paper into its belly and judders with such force that it rocks the spindly little table I’ve set it on.
The piece of paper slides out and lands on the floor. I pick it up. It says, ‘HI DAD’ on it. It knows me, I think. It knows it’s mine.
Late at night I creep up to my office to check my email before bed. I should know by now that emails of promise rarely hit one’s inbox after 11 p.m., but one can dream.
While trying to delete some fresh junk mail I hit an unknown combination of keys with a fat thumb and the computer starts to read its screen to me.
‘Subject – mega deal on drill bits and power files,’ it says, in a loud robot voice.
‘Sorry?’ I say.
‘Reply to no reply at tool shop direct dot co dot UK.’
‘Shut up,’ I say, clicking the mouse repeatedly. I try to turn down the volume, but pressing the mute key only makes the screen scroll upwards.
