by Tim Dowling
‘It’s ridiculous!’ my wife shouts, waving the letter. ‘What if I wasn’t an annoying middle-class person? What would happen then?’ I shudder to think. I have long regarded my wife’s peremptory manner as a kind of superpower. For a time she deployed her sharp elbows in a voluntary capacity, extracting national insurance numbers on behalf of the children of asylum seekers by being demanding and icily polite on the phone. There’s no question such a talent could be dangerous in the wrong hands.
The next day, grey-faced and coughing, the boy goes to school with a doctor’s letter explaining his condition – a mere precaution, to be found on his person should he expire mid-test. Three hours later he is back, flushed and perspiring, forehead on the kitchen table.
‘How was it?’ I say.
‘It was fine, actually,’ he says, opening one bloodshot eye.
‘Fine?’ I say.
I consider the being whom I have cast among mankind, and endowed with the power to effect purposes of horror, and think about all the Frankenstein quotes I can now unmemorize.
We have reached the end of the heady and volatile fortnight between the oldest one’s last A-level and the leaving party for the upper sixth. Had he asked me, I might have suggested that he fill the idle hours with backbreaking agricultural labour, but he didn’t ask. I’ve barely seen or heard him. His younger brothers are still noisy, but he has learned the art of stealth.
On the day of the leavers’ party, however, I hear his unmistakable footfall on the landing outside my office.
‘You,’ I say.
The footsteps pause, and his head comes round the door. ‘Yo,’ he says.
‘I need to be apprised of your plans,’ I say, ‘so that I can strongly advise you against them.’
‘OK,’ he says.
‘Are you, for example, planning to get arrested or anything?’
‘Not planning,’ he says.
It is not until two hours before the leavers’ party that he agrees to try on the black trousers I have agreed to lend him. On his hulking frame, they become three-quarter-length shorts. He cannot do them up. His face suddenly tinges pink with alarm.
‘OK,’ I say, ‘come with me. You’ll need shoes.’
We drive to Marks & Spencer, while I hurriedly dole out all the unsolicited advice I have left.
‘Can I also strongly advise against you and your friends helping yourselves to the cheap red wine left over from my birthday party that I hid in the shed?’
‘Mum told us where it was,’ he says.
‘Two bottles are missing,’ I say, ‘for which you owe me a surprisingly modest amount.’
‘Have you had lunch yet?’
‘It’s five,’ I say. ‘I eat lunch in my lunchbreak, at lunchtime. I strongly advise you to do the same.’
We head straight for the black trousers section of the mens’ department. The boy pulls a pair off the nearest pile.
‘These look OK,’ he says, ‘don’t they?’
I examine them from several angles. ‘There’s nothing obviously wrong with them,’ I say. ‘The fitting rooms are over there.’
I point and he walks to the back of the shop, returning almost instantly with the trousers draped over one arm. ‘They’re fine,’ he says.
‘I didn’t even see you in them,’ I say.
‘You don’t need to see me in them,’ he says.
We cross over to the till. Outside the shop, I hand him the bag and consult my phone.
‘That took four minutes,’ I say. It occurs to me that men should always shop in pairs.
‘Which means you have time to buy me a sandwich,’ he says.
At six o’clock, he appears downstairs, dressed and ready to go, the black of the trousers a near enough match for the jacket he’s wearing.
‘You look very smart,’ his mother says.
‘I would strongly advise you to tuck your shirt in,’ I say.
‘Are you sure?’ he says.
‘Trust me,’ I say.
‘I’ll need a picture,’ my wife says. She stands with the boy in front of the kitchen door, on the spot where he posed in his new uniform on the first day of primary school, age four. He also stood there in every Halloween and school play costume he ever wore.
Today, he is harder to squeeze into the frame. I hold my breath as I line up the shot on my wife’s phone screen, experimenting with a horizontal composition before returning to the vertical to get both heads in. When I finally exhale, a shudder runs through me. My throat closes without warning. I press the button, and then blink several times to get my swimming vision to hold still.
‘I’d better do another one,’ I say.
I arrive home from a trip on a Sunday night in mid-July. The remains of a big lunch are spread across the kitchen table. A large box of Lego pieces, which has been dragged from a cupboard to entertain a visiting toddler, is sitting on the sofa. The oldest one and the middle one are presently using the Lego to create constructions chiefly designed to explode impressively when they collide, having been fired at one another across the sitting room floor. It’s a game that used to set my teeth on edge ten years ago. Now I find it rather soothing.
The oldest one’s overstuffed backpack is propped against a chair in the corner. His paperwork is neatly stacked on the table next to it. My wife looks at the backpack, and then the oldest one, and then me.
‘He’s going tomorrow,’ she says.
‘I know,’ I say. She keeps looking at me, her eyes edged with insistence. It’s like the expression she deploys when she’s trying to remind me to tip someone.
‘What?’ I say finally.
‘Well,’ she says. ‘Did you go off to Vietnam on your own when you were his age?’
‘I didn’t have to,’ I say. ‘They stopped the draft when I was ten.’ I see what she’s getting at: this is a big deal. I’m just not sure what she wants me to do.
There’s an enormous crash at my feet; the air fills with Lego.
The middle one is sent to bed at eleven. My wife and I sit with the oldest one in the garden, reviewing a mental checklist of things he needs to purchase at the airport and repeating our warnings about the draconian drug laws in South-East Asia.
All our friends told us to make him watch Midnight Express before he left, but we showed him The Deer Hunter instead.
‘It’s more touristy now,’ I say, ‘but you get the idea.’
‘How would you know?’ my wife says. ‘Did you go to Vietnam on your own, straight out of school?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I spent the summer working in an ice factory, making ice.’
‘Really?’ the boy says.
‘You think ice makes itself? It doesn’t.’
‘So we’re talking about you now, are we?’ my wife says.
‘It was back-breaking,’ I say. ‘I cried on my first day.’
‘I’m going to bed,’ my wife says, standing up. Even in the dark I can tell she’s making her insistent eyes.
Alone in the garden, I pour myself and the boy a glass of wine each. I’m casting about for something significant to impart, because I’m pretty certain it’s what my wife was hinting at, but I can’t think of anything.
We sit in silence.
‘Actually,’ I say, ‘the ice does sort of make itself, but someone has to put it in bags.’
‘Huh,’ the boy says.
‘Be sure to email,’ I say. ‘You have no idea what it’s like for a mother to send her oldest child off to Vietnam.’
‘I will,’ he says.
‘And don’t forget to come back,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to have to go out there and retrieve you, like at the end of The Deer Hunter.’
‘Yeah, OK,’ he says. ‘I think I’m going to go to bed.’
‘Me, too,’ I say, stretching my arms. I go inside to lock up and turn off lights, trying – and failing – to imagine how I will feel this time tomorrow.
On my way back to the kitchen I step on something pointy in the dark, which sticks to t
he sole of my bare foot. I meet the boy at the garden door.
‘I’ll probably never have the chance to tell you this again,’ I say. ‘But you need to pick up all your Lego, right now.’
The next morning we take the boy to the airport where he meets his two travelling companions. It is almost unbearable to watch three boys continually drop vital documents on the floor while juggling sheaves of paperwork. I just smile and think: there is no way they’re going to make it as far as the plane. But they do.
In the two weeks following his arrival in South-East Asia the oldest has offered up just a single fragment of communication – a Facebook message consisting, in its entirety, of the word ‘YO’. This was to be expected – I remember being his age well enough to understand that to experience true independence from one’s parents they must, at least temporarily, be dead to you – but I also knew my wife would not leave it at that.
‘I’ve found him,’ she says one morning, prodding me awake. ‘He’s in Laos.’ It’s clear that she has been up for some time, possibly all night.
What she has actually found is the blog of a twentysomething Australian IT consultant called John. John is from Bondi Beach and likes running, wine, movies and opera singing. His favourite films include Star Wars, Alien and Whistle Down the Wind. He has travelled extensively through South-East Asia, and it is a mere coincidence that he finds himself on the same five-day guided tour of Laos as my oldest son.
I’m not sure how my wife found the blog, but when I went looking for it later all I had to do was type the oldest one’s name and ‘Laos’ into Google. It’s a fairly exhaustive chronicle – part travelogue, part potted history, part food diary – with plenty of pictures: landscapes, temples, John sampling a glass from a clear jug of rice wine in which several bear paws are steeping. The middle section includes a long account of a boat trip up the muddy Mekong River. It’s a bit like the screenplay for Apocalypse Now, but with more exclamation marks and the prices of all the drinks listed in Australian dollars.
My wife and I pore over each new upload with a combination of fascination and frustration. Our son is a very minor character in John’s narrative. He occasionally turns up in a picture, one of twenty tourists seated round a restaurant table, or at the far left of a posed group in a cave, smiling, with a torch strapped to his forehead.
‘He’s changing his shirt,’ I say. ‘That’s good.’
‘Are you sure that’s the back of his head?’ my wife says.
He’s namechecked on one or two occasions, but in the most recent entries he doesn’t figure at all, unless you count oblique references to ‘the rest of the group’. We know he’s seen a jug of rice wine with bear paws floating in it, but we don’t know if he had any.
‘At least we know he’s OK,’ I say.
‘How do we know that?’ my wife says.
‘Because if anything terrible happened, it would definitely be interesting enough to earn a mention from John.’
Sadly the day comes when the tour ends and the oldest one and John part company. John is off to stay with his friends Lucy and George in Bangkok, which is more than we know about our son’s movements.
‘I think I can hack into his email,’ my wife says. ‘Give me time.’
The boy rings from Vietnam two days later, catching my wife as she’s getting into the car.
‘How is it?’ she says.
‘I wish I could tell you I’m having a good time,’ he says, before inserting a long, provocative pause. ‘But there’s a problem.’
My wife also pauses when she recounts this bit to me an hour later, because she wants me to experience something like the bolt of terror that shot through her as she sat in the car, wondering whether he was in hospital or behind bars.
‘What is it?’ she says, her throat closing on the words.
There is another pause.
‘The bank stopped my card,’ he says.
The day before the oldest one leaves for university, he takes to wandering absent-mindedly through the house with a glazed look and a sock in each hand. It’s like watching myself freak out in a mirror, and it disturbs me to think that, among other traits, I have bequeathed the boy the mannerisms of panic.
When my wife enters the room, she fixes me with a hard stare and mouths the words ‘Talk to him’. She suggests a walk in the park, and the boy goes off in search of the socks he is already holding.
In the park, I try to think of calming things to say. I tell him about my first day at college, but I cut the story short when I realize it ends with me shouting, ‘What do you mean, you’re leaving?’ at my parents and then spending a long hour sitting alone on a bed watching dust float on the air. I decide it’s better to speak of other things. I give him a brief history of the illegal dumping of tyres at the back of the park.
‘They just pull up behind there,’ I say, ‘and dump them over the wall in the night.’
‘And they roll all the way down here?’ he says, kicking a tyre that lies in our path.
‘Some do,’ I say.
The next morning, as we put his boxes into the car, it becomes clear that he has grave reservations about the whole notion of tertiary education.
‘It’s going to be fine,’ my wife says, ‘and you can come home whenever you want.’
‘No, I can’t,’ he says. ‘You’ve rented my room.’ Unfortunately, this is true: my wife’s goddaughter is moving in almost immediately.
‘That’s temporary,’ my wife says. ‘Your room is yours when you need it.’
I ceremoniously hand over the spare key to his bike lock, which I have kept on my key chain for years. He attaches it to his keys.
‘Actually,’ my wife says, ‘leave your house keys behind for now. I’m not sure the other two have a set between them.’ She holds out a flat palm and the boy gives her a wild-eyed look.
‘If you try to take these keys off me,’ he says, ‘I’m not going.’
As we drive out of London, my wife chatters nonstop to keep the mood light. I try to join in, but I find my voice has a deckled edge that’s incompatible with amusing observations. When we pass a billboard advertising mortgages that reads ‘Because a Place to Call Home MATTERS’ alongside a picture of a dog, I realize I am very close to crying. I blink and roll down my window.
‘Can you roll up your window,’ the boy says.
On arrival, everything changes for the better. We pull up beside a white marquee, where jolly students in ‘Welcome’ T-shirts wait to greet us. The boy puts on the brave, smiling face of the urgently outgoing.
The car must be moved as soon as we’ve unloaded; the road is narrow, and there are other shellshocked parents behind us. A man in a high-visibility vest issues complex parking instructions that include two tight bends, some doubling back, a code needed to raise an automatic barrier and a warning about a fixed-penalty notice for turning left instead of right.
‘You can handle that,’ my wife says, tossing me the keys.
‘Wait,’ I say. ‘You’re just going to leave me here?’
My wife and son disappear into the tent. I have no choice but to get in the car and drive off into the unknown. I can’t stay where I am, and I can’t back up.
I sense the annual approach of the moment when my wife draws me aside and politely asks me to stop ruining Christmas. It’s one of those Yuletide harbingers that seems to come earlier every year, like the one where my debit card is declined by someone wearing a Santa hat.
I would like to be able to oblige my wife, but I don’t feel the matter is entirely under my control. Christmas, as far as I am concerned, is self-ruining, full of unrealistic expectations, disasters-in-waiting and panic-buying.
My wife has already selected a date for the purchase of a Christmas tree. Normally I would protest that it’s far too soon, starting an argument that lasts until the tree is up and decorated that afternoon. But this year I lack the strength to protest, and it is also the day the oldest comes back from university.
Then I t
hink: I will take my sons to buy the Christmas tree. Instead of bickering about price and size, we will laugh and grow apple-cheeked and buy a tree we’ll have trouble getting into the car. It will be like all those memories I have of buying a Christmas tree with my father – many of them false – rolled together. And even if it’s not the most special tree-buying expedition ever, it will look like it to strangers.
I am late for the oldest one’s bus, and find him walking along the road with his bag, looking cold and hungover.
‘I’m wrecked,’ he says.
‘We’re going to buy a tree!’ I say.
‘Ugh,’ he says. ‘Take me home.’
As soon as my wife sees him, he is excused from the tree-buying expedition. No matter, I think: he’d only take up room in the car.
I go up to the middle one’s room. ‘Shoes on!’ I say. ‘We’re going to buy a tree!’
‘Nah,’ he says.
‘It’s a tradition!’ I say. ‘A new annual tradition!’
‘I’m good, thanks,’ he says.
I find the youngest one where he always is – in front of the Xbox – and pull the controller from his hand.
‘Get in the car,’ I say.
The tree lot is very busy. There are young people in green fleeces ready to assist customers, but we keep being passed over in favour of later arrivals. Either I’m not good at looking needy, or I’m way too good at it. Instead of asserting myself I stand stupidly among the netted spruces, watching a young person who has promised to be right with me leave for lunch.
‘You need to get some help,’ the youngest one says.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I’ve heard that before.’
Finally, after exhibiting a certain amount of petulance in the cabin where the till is kept, I am assigned my own sales assistant and shown a tree.
‘How tall is that?’ I ask.
‘That’s eight feet,’ says the young person. I pretend to assess its proportions while rolling one eyeball towards the sign listing prices by height. The sales assistant juts his chin expectantly. I’ve only seen the one tree, and already I feel as if I’m testing his patience, and the patience of my son, and of the many people waiting to be helped. I feel I am testing the patience of Christmas itself.
