Untitled

by Tim Dowling

  ‘And,’ she yells, snatching up a set of keys, ‘you can’t speak unless you’re holding these!’

  ‘Bollocks!’ my wife shouts.

  ‘You don’t have the keys!’ everyone else shouts.

  ‘Then give me the keys!’ my wife shouts. The keys sail through the air and smash into the fridge.

  ‘I think we should use a banana,’ I say. ‘Someone’s gonna lose an eye.’

  ‘You don’t have the keys!’ everyone shouts. My wife retrieves the keys and holds them over her head.

  ‘I disagree with everything!’ she shouts.

  ‘There are bananas in the bowl just there,’ I say. The keys fly past me back towards the sister on the end. She grabs them.

  ‘Why have we never thought of this before?’ she shouts.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I can ski. I am, actually, a pretty competent skier, having started at a young age. I stopped for a while, but I started again when I had children, because I wanted them to ski too. It was a difficult decision, because being able to ski in the UK marks you out as a very particular kind of middle-class undesirable: privileged, foolhardy, environmentally indifferent. It’s not something one automatically wishes to saddle one’s children with, but I wanted my children to learn so I would have people to ski with who weren’t as good as me. It’s unlikely my children will ever be markedly better skiers than I am; I just can’t afford it.

  My wife does not ski, and hates skiing, but she also thought it was important for the children to learn, because it was something we could all do together without her. This is her idea of the perfect winter holiday: the kind where she doesn’t come.

  She usually overcomes my grave reservations about such an arrangement by organizing everything, and because she is not coming on the trip herself, she is never afraid to economize. We go where we’re sent.

  In order for our Slovenian ski holiday to be a success it must end soon, and without further incident. Within an hour of arriving on the slopes I had one of the children throwing off his skis and shrieking at me in front of the long queue for the button lift, which was stalled because another of my children was lying in a tangled heap in its path. The third one, mercifully, was missing. At that point I walked over to the ski school hut and booked them all two hours of expensive private tuition.

  The day would have ended happily, had we not been tempted by the prospect of night skiing. This meant lugging all the skis back to the hotel, then back to the slopes, and then back to the hotel. On the last journey I was carrying three sets of skis and two sets of poles. My sense of humour had long since deserted me.

  The rest of the trip was a delicate balance of highs and lows, of laughter at dinner, bickering by the heated pool and tears on the slopes. I kept my wife updated by phone.

  ‘They’re trashing the hotel room, and we’ve lost a glove,’ I said.

  ‘But it’s fun? You’re having fun?’ she said.

  ‘The middle one had a meltdown at the top of the chair lift and refused to move,’ I said. ‘Then we had a forty-five-minute argument about where to have lunch. Then I screamed at them about the glove.’

  ‘So is it a disaster or is it fun?’

  ‘It’s fun,’ I said flatly. ‘We’re having fun.’

  On the last day everyone is skiing happily and confidently, but if the holiday is to be a qualified success, I must get them off the slopes and to the airport without anything else going wrong. One of them, however, has made a Slovenian acquaintance, and is refusing to quit.

  ‘I’m skiing with my friend,’ he says. ‘I don’t need you.’

  ‘We’re leaving!’ screams his brother. ‘Now!’

  ‘I don’t care,’ he says. I am too tired to argue with him.

  ‘One more run,’ I say. But one turns into two, and then three. By the time we get to the ski hire place, the youngest two are in a protracted argument about who is stupider. I pull off their skis and clatter down the steps to the hire shop with as much as I can carry. An English couple are asking the man behind the counter speculative questions about hiring equipment. I run back up the steps to get more skis. The youngest two are still arguing.

  ‘Be quiet!’ I yell. ‘We’re in a hurry. Pick up this stuff and follow me.’

  Back downstairs the English couple are trying on boots. I start to take mine off, feeling for my shoes under the bench.

  There is a sudden burst of swearing and slapping from outside, followed by the sharp ring of metal on metal. The youngest two enter the shop in mid-fight. They are actually hitting each other with ski poles – ski poles that I am tantalizingly close to returning undamaged. Their two little faces are purple with fury. The man behind the counter shakes his head and looks at the English man.

  ‘They’re not mine,’ says the English man, with a disapproving snort.

  I try to pitch myself forward in time to the point at which I will find this funny, but I can’t get past the moment a few seconds hence when I will have to shake my head ruefully and say, ‘They’re mine.’

  I am skiing down a long, straight run, approximately 2,500 metres above sea level. Behind me I can once again hear the sound of swearing and ski poles clanging in anger. We’ve come a long way from that hire shop in Slovenia. Three years and several expensive lessons later, my children have graduated to fighting while travelling downhill at twenty miles an hour. Despite my determination to keep well ahead of them, they eventually draw up either side of me.

  ‘He’s being a total idiot,’ the middle one says. ‘He just hit me with his pole for no reason.’

  ‘It was an accident,’ the youngest one says.

  ‘That is such a lie,’ the middle one says.

  ‘Oh. My. God,’ the youngest says.

  ‘You shouldn’t fight while you’re skiing,’ I say. ‘It’s not safe.’

  ‘I’m never skiing with him again,’ the middle one says.

  ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ I say, ‘no one is ever skiing with anyone again.’

  Later I get into a rather public argument with the youngest one because I won’t let him ski alone. It’s a battle I’ve already fought and lost – he’s been skiing alone for an hour and a half – but I’ve suffered a late pang of conscience over my lack of supervision. From his point of view, this sudden reversal is monstrously unfair. He makes this point in a manner that leaves me wondering how many people in the immediate vicinity understand English.

  ‘Don’t call me that,’ I say.

  ‘Why not? That’s what you’re being like.’

  ‘You’re coming with me,’ I say. ‘And that’s that.’ After this exchange he refuses to speak for the whole of the long ride up the chair lift. I stare into the mist, feeling slightly guilty for being glad of the peace and quiet. Somewhere below us I can hear a father shouting at his child, and I think: jerk.

  At the top of the mountain the weather has turned nasty: a hard wind is driving heavy snow across the piste, rendering its contours invisible. In these conditions, it seems steeper than I remember.

  ‘This is terrible,’ shouts the boy above the wind’s rip. ‘I hate you, Dad!’ I pick my way down the slope until his outline fades, but as soon as I stop it begins to sharpen up again, making tight little turns in my direction.

  ‘I can’t believe you forced me to come up here!’ he shrieks. ‘I’m freezing! This completely sucks!’ A year ago I would have had to coax him down one turn at a time using a combination of promises, soothing words and terrible threats. I probably would have had to carry his skis part of the way. I notice, however, that his skiing has really come along over the course of the week; all I have to do is retreat to the limit of the audible range of his abuse, and let him catch me up.

  A few hundred metres down, everything changes again. The wind dies and the sun comes out. With my hat off, I can hear birds singing. From out of the mist I see the boy racing towards me, arms out, coat flapping. As he passes he turns to look at me with cold blue eyes.

  ‘You don’t have to
wait for me,’ he says.

  Italy: my wife has described this Easter late booking to me as a triumph of cost-cutting on her part. This would account for the fact that our destination is a six-hour drive from the airport where we landed, and why our two-room apartment comes equipped with very little. This is how I find myself shopping for bare essentials early on Easter morning. A few shops are open, but none is the kind that will sell me a washing-up brush.

  Despite my wife’s budget-consciousness-by-proxy, skiing is still an inherently expensive pastime. Every time someone shows me a bill I have to resist the urge to let my mouth hang open. By the time we hit the slopes I am thinking only of the hard times ahead. By the time our first lunch is paid for I feel obliged to conceal from my children the fact that we are ruined.

  ‘After that lunch we don’t really need supper,’ I say to the older two that afternoon. ‘Just some basics – milk, wine, a washing-up brush.’ Eventually we find an open shop.

  ‘Here,’ the middle one says, pulling scouring sponges from a shelf.

  ‘That’s a packet of three,’ I say. ‘We just need one cheap brush.’

  ‘Don’t even pretend you don’t want these,’ he says.

  When we get back to the apartment my wife calls.

  ‘How’s it going?’ she says.

  ‘There has been some challenging behaviour,’ I say. ‘And some unforeseen expense.’ I put a brave face on everything. Later we receive a Skype call on the laptop from my family in America, who appear to be spending Easter drinking champagne in the sunshine while my nephew burbles contentedly in his car seat.

  ‘We’re in Italy,’ I say. ‘Skiing.’

  ‘Don’t break anything,’ my sister says.

  ‘We always do,’ I say. It’s only later I realize she meant bones, whereas I was thinking of cups, chairs and light fittings.

  After a quiet meal of chocolate eggs, we turn on the television and pass the time revoicing an Italian-dubbed episode of NCIS back into English, taking charge of a character apiece. I play the sombre head agent trying to solve the mystery of a corpse found in the woods while his colleagues giggle, swear profusely and spontaneously declare their desire to have sex with one another.

  ‘Enough!’ I say finally. ‘It is time to wash up. There is a scouring sponge for each of you, just like the royal family have.’

  ‘I need to charge my phone first,’ the middle one says.

  ‘I need to charge my iPod,’ the youngest says.

  ‘It’s my turn to charge,’ the oldest says.

  ‘I am charging the laptop,’ I say, snatching our only European adaptor from the youngest one’s hand, ‘because I have to get up before dawn and write my column, and I’m worried about it.’

  ‘What’s it gonna be about?’ the middle one says.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘That’s why I’m worried.’ I push the adaptor into the socket upside down. There is a loud sparking sound, and all the power in the apartment goes dead. We stand in the pitch-black for a moment, in silence.

  ‘Why don’t you write about this?’ the middle one says. Something like a guitar string snaps in my head.

  ‘This?’ I shriek. ‘I can’t write about this! I can’t write about anything, because there’s no fucking electricity!’

  Somewhere behind me I can hear the youngest one trying to suppress a fit of laughter. There, in the dark, I promise God that if he gives me a better idea for a column by morning I will never go skiing again.

  God does not give me a better idea. I end up writing about my ski experience to that point, and when it appears online a few days later someone appends a comment which reads, ‘I don’t like to be a pedant, but it’s not funny if it’s not true. Actually in this case it wouldn’t be funny if it were true. There is no up or down to plugs used in Italy. The type used in the UK has an up and down, but they are not symmetrical, so it would be impossible to insert it wrongly.’ Reading it over, I find it difficult to believe he doesn’t like being a pedant.*

  As the Gatwick Express pulls into Victoria station, I count bags and coats for what I hope is the last time.

  ‘It was a good holiday,’ I say to the oldest. ‘Let us never speak of it again.’

  ‘OK,’ he says.

  My wife will not tolerate this pact of silence. She created the perfect recipe for six days of mayhem, and she wants a full debriefing.

  ‘Was it fun?’ she asks as we pile through the door.

  ‘Yeah, it was good,’ the youngest says.

  ‘Your father looks as if he’s had some kind of near-death experience.’

  ‘I’ve been given another chance,’ I say. ‘That’s the important thing.’

  Platitudes do not interest my wife. She requires only details. ‘What was the very first thing to go wrong?’ she asks.

  I tell her that shortly after leaving I discovered I didn’t have the credit card on which the flights, hire car and apartment had been booked. This, it turns out, didn’t matter, at least until an Italian cashpoint refused to give me any money on any of my remaining cards. This, it turns out, didn’t matter either – another cashpoint was less rigorous in its assessment of my finances – but after each scare it took longer for the colour to return to my cheeks.

  ‘What about the skiing?’ my wife asks.

  I describe what it’s like to be suspended above the Alps on a stalled chairlift while two of your fellow passengers are trying to have a fistfight.

  She smiles at this, but wants more. ‘So you ski all day. Then what?’

  ‘Then Dad would select an errand friend,’ the middle one says.

  Each evening I forced one of my children to accompany me on a shopping excursion, to carry stuff, pass the time and bear witness to any small humiliations. Apart from hello, goodbye and thank you, my Italian extends to just one phrase, Lo stesso, which means ‘the same’. It serves well enough in restaurants, but in shops you sometimes have to linger until another customer appears.

  ‘What kind of meat is that?’ the oldest said as we left a butcher shop during his turn as my errand friend.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but the lady before me in the queue wanted it, so it must be OK.’

  My wife isn’t interested in this stuff. ‘But what,’ she asks, ‘was the worst moment of the whole week?’

  The children stop to think for a minute. ‘Probably when Dad skied into the pit,’ the middle one says.

  ‘I suppose that was the only full-squad, four-man meltdown,’ I say.

  ‘The pit?’ my wife says.

  ‘It was more of a trough,’ I say.

  I explain that on day four we awoke to find it snowing heavily. Conditions on the slopes were challenging, and we were already heading back for an early lunch when visibility dropped to zero. The other skiers vanished. We picked our way slowly downhill in a line. Unable to see my feet, I skied off the trail into a dip, and the children followed me. Against my advice, they all kicked off their skis in order to climb out; in the knee-deep, new-fallen snow, nobody could get them back on. I started out using calm and encouraging words, but towards the end I may have suggested, in raised tones, that we were all going to die on the spot.

  ‘But the next day the snow was really good,’ the youngest says.

  ‘So you’d go back there?’ my wife says.

  ‘I don’t think anyone’s saying that,’ I say.

  The Austrian expedition is one of those isolated occasions when my wife decides to come skiing with us. She doesn’t join in, but when it comes to accommodation we at least benefit from her higher standards.

  On the day before our flight I wake to find my wife in the early stages of packing, making neat piles of winter clothes on the bed. Because my wife does not ski, none of the stuff in the piles is hers: she takes a largely curatorial interest in the collection, storing it in an inaccessible cupboard, lending it out occasionally and adding to it when necessary.

  ‘For once, I think they have everything they need,’ she says, proudly. />
  I have a strong desire to go on the sort of holiday where I lie in a bed all day and all night, occasionally glancing at the spine of a book before rolling over and going back to sleep. Ideally, I would take this holiday in my own bed. I realize that what I really want is not a holiday, but a life-sapping mystery virus. It occurs to me that I might already have one. It would certainly explain a lot. With great reluctance, I get dressed.

  ‘You’d better check to make sure everything’s here,’ says my wife, before leaving the room. I look over the piles. She is right: it’s an amazingly comprehensive collection of gloves, coats, fleeces and socks. There’s only one thing missing. I go downstairs.

  ‘Where’s my hat?’ I say.

  ‘What hat?’ says my wife.

  ‘My new hat, that I just got,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t know what hat you mean,’ she says.

  ‘It used to be there,’ I say, pointing in the general direction of the hallway.

  ‘It’s blue, and it has an R on it.’

  ‘I’ve never seen a hat like that,’ she says. This infuriates me, but it also makes me doubt the colour of the hat. And the R.

  ‘There is such a hat,’ I say.

  ‘It might have got left in the cupboard, but I doubt it,’ she says.

  ‘Where’s the ladder?’ I say.

  ‘In the garden,’ she says.

  I find the middle one lying on the sofa in front of the television.

  ‘When was the last time you grabbed a random hat on your way out the door?’ I say.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he says.

  ‘Was it blue?’

  ‘I don’t really wear hats,’ he says.

  ‘Let me put it this way,’ I say, ‘did you take my hat?’

  ‘What hat?’ he says.

  ‘Am I going to find my hat in your room?’ I say.

  ‘No!’

  I make the same inquiries of the youngest, peppering him with questions while rifling his drawers. At some point – about the point when I find myself dragging the ladder up to the inaccessible cupboard on the landing – I realize that this isn’t really about the hat. Never mind, I tell myself: we’re making it about the hat.