— I’m not in the mood today, Son. Not. In. The. Mood.
— Okay I know okay.
He’s still at my level. When I grow up I too will have sharp hairs in my chin.
— Are you cross? I ask.
He puffs out his cheeks and slowly shakes his head. — Let’s just carry on, he says. First-time rule, understand?
I nod.
The first-time rule is that you have to do what you’re told the first time you’re told to do it, not the second or third. It is quite boring but worse than that it is sadly impossible to do right the whole time because it only works if you think about the exact things you are being told and not about other things as well, and the thing about other things is that it is extremely hard not to notice them because they are massive and everywhere. At school in Reception Miss Petit said God is like that but she made a sad mistake. God does not exist. He is a segment of the imagination.
— Come on. Hold my hand, he says.
We walk along the pavement a bit more and I think hard about nothing. It’s hard. Cracks in the pavement. Cracks.
Then Dad’s hand stops so I stop too. We’re outside the café and this is why we walked this way round to the park, the slightly longer up-hilly way.
— Look at that. Barely seven o’clock. Corporate tenacity. Shall we?
— Yes, I say. — Yes.
We go in. Dad orders a coffee and I do my best to stand still which is boring. I don’t ask. Dad takes a newspaper from the rack and unfolds it on the countertop. There’s a picture of a huge gray ship with airplanes actually on it and some people waving. Dad sucks in some air over his teeth and shakes his head. The big words under the picture say STAND OFF something. And below the counter I can see them there in the tray but I do a squint instead of looking and I think about my two feet. If you ask you don’t get. Flamingos manage to do standing on just one leg for ages and birds have tiny brains. My brain is hugely developed. It is clever enough to know that the picture in the newspaper upsets Dad because of the new clear bombs. We have them but they’re not allowed them so Dad took me on a walk with nearly a million other people to tell the Government to do talking about the problem instead of a war. Some of the people on the walk had incredibly loud drums and a man did a wee in the street before we got to the bit with the talking. Megaphones are not huge phones. Later Dad bought me a Coke with two bits of lemon in it in the pub and was happy. — They can’t ignore us now, Son, he said with a four-beer grin. — Not after Blair’s mistake in 2003. Even this lot will have to back off now.
The smell in the café is just about as lovely as it is when I put my nose in between Mum’s hair in the morning. Her head smells of lemons and chocolate. A basset hound has a more hugely developed sense of smell than I do and so it would like it in here more than I do but only blind dogs are allowed in. I am not blind. Out of my eyes even though they are squinting I can easily see Dad’s hand go to the tray and yes, go on, yes, yes, yes!
He’s got one, hooray!
He tosses it onto the glass shelf and tells the woman, — That, too, please.
Oh yes, yes, yes.
A massive chocolate coin!
Maybe the whole day will be okay!
I still don’t say anything though because I don’t want him to change his mind which is easily something he could do. He puts the paper under his arm and picks up the coffee and the lid and the massive chocolate coin which is winking because the lights in here are truly excellent small star-lights aimed at everything. Did you know that stars can tell you where to go? These star-lights are telling Dad to go to the other counter. He walks up to it right near me and he starts ripping sugar into his coffee cup and the chocolate coin is there on the glass sitting next to the lid and I think it’s just about as big as the lid and I lean a bit to one side to see if the coin is bigger or smaller than the lid but I have forgotten I am standing on one leg and I fall over. Not right over. I sort of do a half fall into Dad’s side. It’s okay. Much more massive falls would not hurt me. But sadly I fall into Dad and his arm jerks sideways and knocks over his coffee cup. It goes all over his plaster-cast hand and the paper and up his sleeve.
— Jesus Christ!
I take a few steps away. Dad stands up the cup and grabs for some napkins and starts dabbing and a noise comes out of him which isn’t a word or a shout exactly. It’s more like a growl inside a box. It makes me shut my own mouth so tight my teeth squeak.
— Here. Let me help. The woman who makes the coffee has come out from behind her bit with some cloths. She allows Dad to run his fingers under the big sink. They are red like the cast which he is trying not to splash. Interestingly the sink doesn’t have a tap but a long silver trunk dangling down instead. Dad holds his fingers under the dribble of water for quite a long time, and while he’s doing it the woman makes a new cup of coffee and I stand very still indeed. She puts sugar in the cup for him this time and while she’s doing that she gives the big coin to me. I say, — Thank you, but I feel sick. He still hasn’t looked at me.
I do not eat the chocolate coin. I want to eat it and it wants me to eat it but I don’t because he is cross so I put it in my pocket instead. We walk along the pavement. The white bits could be chewing gum which you should not drop or guano which is an excellent word for bird poo. Birds make whole islands out of it and they don’t know any better so don’t blame them. He is holding his arm with the plaster cast away from his body a bit as if it is still hot but it can’t be. Perhaps he is drying it. I don’t know and I can’t speak yet but I do know this: his arm is making me feel bad.
When somebody makes you feel bad what should you do? Sadly there is no answer to this question, or rather wherever you are the answer is different. If you are in a game of chess the answer is that you should attack back because attacking back is the best form of defense. But school is a different cuttlefish. At school Miss Hart says the first thing you should never do when somebody is mean to you is retaliate back because Jesus wouldn’t. If you hit Jesus he just kisses your cheek. Or rather that is what he used to do. He is dead now but some people don’t think so because when he was alive he was excellent. The animal kingdom is different from the kingdom of heaven. When a warthog is cornered by a pride of lions it uses its razor-sharp tusks to infect slashing wounds. I found a dead cuttlefish washed up on the beach last summer and it was quite razor sharp, too, but I am less excellent than Jesus because here’s what I would do if I had that cuttlefish now: I would jab Dad’s bad hand with it.
I walk behind a bit. Then I walk farther behind so that when we reach the zebra crossing — lie down there, zebra, we’re all going to drive over you unless somebody wants to walk on you instead — he has to wait for me to catch him up. The flashing-ball lights are pelicans which isn’t very realistic because you don’t get zebras and pelicans with the same habits in the wild.
— Hurry up.
I slow down a bit more.
— Come on, stop dawdling.
Dawdling is a gentle word when he says it like that and, look, he’s holding out his hand to me as I arrive. But do you know what, I am not ready yet, I’m just not, so I don’t take it, and he whips the hand back down to his side and says something I don’t hear because he says it in a quick quiet un-gentle way, so that although I know that it is mean I don’t know what it is exactly, and that’s exactly the effect he’s striding for.
I walk straight past him onto the stripes.
— Hey! He grips my shoulder hard and spins me around, jerking me back a step in a way that is not nice at all even before he makes it worse by shouting, — You don’t just walk out into the road, Billy! Hear me? No matter what!
— But it’s a zebra—
— Don’t talk back to me! How many times do I have to . . . You wait for me. We look both ways. We cross when I say.
And on say he jerks me forward again so that my feet are scrabbling to keep up and you know what, this is very complicated. Shall I tell you why? I will, because you will never gu
ess. There are two things. The first thing is that he hates roads. Or rather he hates the cars that go on the roads because the cars, he says quite often, to get it into my head, and normally he rubs my head when he says it, are modern-day top predators. Saltwater crocodiles, Siberian tigers, Great Whites. They’re out to get you so you have to be on your guard because there’s no way I’m going to lose you to one of them, okay? That’s the first thing. And the second thing is the even more complicated thing and it is this: he is actually quite pleased that I stepped into the road because now he has a proper reason to be cross with me. Spilling the coffee and running ahead and ducking through the sign thing and going too slowly and not putting on my shoes and waking him up early were all bad reasons to be cross, but walking into the road without looking is a good reason, one of the best! Polar bears, sea eagles, Galápagos iguanas. It’s such a good reason it means he can be very angry and quite happy at exactly the same time! Excellent!
But sadly it is not excellent for me. For me it is horrid.
I kick out at the road and I miss and hit his shin.
— Ow! Billy! What the—?
He pushes me with a stiff arm across the road and through the railings into the park which is empty except for a man and a dog. In the war they cut down lots of railings to kill people with, but they put these ones back up. The dog has three legs, two at the front and one at the back. If it is a male it won’t have to cock a leg to wee but half of the time it will have to turn around to aim at the tree. Girls have to sit down. I don’t know what to say about kicking Dad’s shin apart from sorry and I can’t say that because sorry sticks in your throat when you try to say it. Try for yourself. Sorry is exactly like a fish-bone.
Luckily just then Dad’s phone goes off in his pocket again.
He pulls it out and glares at me and says, — Don’t go far, to me and, — Yes, to it.
I do as he says this time. It’s relatively easy because he’s not on me anymore. He’s concentrating at something else. Whatever the else is I can’t tell you exactly but I can tell you this: whoever Dad is speaking to has something to do with his work and is saying annoying things.
— And there’s really no chance of changing their minds? he says.
I go a few steps farther away to the roundabout thing and get on it and go round half a turn and get off the other side. Thank you, roundabout.
— That’s what they said, word for word? It’s final?
Dad’s job is called communications projects. He does it on his own except when he does it with other people. He used to have a different job in a big building where there was a man in charge of him but now he can do his own communications projects for clients at home in his study-office which is in fact a sediment of his and Mum’s bedroom. Shortest possible commute, Son. Laptop, phone, know-how, and low cunning. When Dad speaks to people on his phone to do with work his voice sounds different, sort of hopeful and disappointed all at once. If you know him well like me because we are connected, Son, you can tell that he is saying one thing but really he’d like to say something else much crosser. The man in charge at his old office was just called the man.
Now Dad is using a voice which sounds like the one you might use if you got a present you didn’t really want at Christmas, so that although what you really want is to say no, no, no that’s not the right thing, you’ve got it all wrong, you can’t, because if you’re ungrateful for one present you might not get another one ever again, so you say thank you anyway, but it comes out like a mouse peeping from a hole, gray and small and ducking back in again quickly.
— Well thanks very much for all your efforts. Next time, perhaps.
This sounds like the end but it isn’t because now he’s got his eyes tight shut like he needs to answer a really hard question or perhaps even pluck up the courage to ask to go to the toilet in the middle of Miss Hart’s storytime, and the knuckles of his good hand have gone pointy yellow like teeth, and he’s carrying on.
This is bad so I walk farther away toward the goals.
The Year Threes from school play football here. They wear boots. Strangely their boots are not boots, though, but instead they are shoes with little teeth knuckles of their own called studs. And here’s the evidence: hundreds of tiny holes. I kneel down on the mud and put my fingers into the dents which are slug-size. Sixty million years ago the earth was teething with fossils like this. Yes I am excellent at spotting them in the modern world and, look, here are some more next to these worm-casts. Tracks. Worm-casts aren’t like plaster casts at all because for one you can crush them very easily between your fingers and for two they are all the same color. Perhaps these tracks were not made by Year Threes playing football but sand people from Star Wars. There’s only one way to find out and it’s a good thing I thought of it because it means that instead of going away from Dad, which is really what I want to do, I can think no I’m actually following some tracks in search of my very own prey. Don’t bother with praying, Son, he can’t hear you because he doesn’t exist. That said, there’s nothing wrong with sitting quietly for a think from time to time.
It’s windy on the football-pitches bit of the park and my coat has somehow come undone which gives me two choices. Actually it’s just one choice with two bits to it: common mistake, Son. First I could try to zip it up, or second I could run to keep warm. Zips are a right pain. Even when your fingers have come straight out of a nice warm bath zips will defeat them. So two seems the obviously best option, doesn’t it? If I run like this, following the tracks by keeping my eye on them, then quite quickly my heart will start pumping blood from the hot bits of me like my knees and ankles to the incredibly cold bits like my ears. And I’ll also be faster at hunting down my prey, and this is excellent, because it is called a wing-wing situation.
The football pitches are quite big and empty like Canada.
Canadian wolves are tireless like prairie dogs.
I wish Mum was here but she is working tirelessly.
Prairie dogs, wolves, and Mum. They all use the tireless method of hunting their prey. It is called loping. And since I am a wolf with my nose to the ground loping tirelessly onward it is no problem to cross one pitch and then the next and then cut through the line of popular trees that stand like soldiers at the top end of the big flat bit, with their leaves all shedded off by the wind, so that they’re naked soldiers in a way, which is quite funny, or at least it will be when I tell it to somebody, somebody being Ben. Ben laughs the whole time, except when he doesn’t, but mostly he does, particularly if you mention naked things, or things that have done a poo, or even a wee. Ben may find it funny, Son, but surely you don’t? You’re not a baby anymore, are you?
No! I’m not! So why does he have to say that in front of my friend, because he might as well tell Ben he’s being a baby, only he can’t do that because he only ever says things like that to me. Why? I don’t know. But I do know I am not going back there even though back there is a long way away now. You can’t even see it because of the popular trees.
I switch off my loping tirelessly which is called calling a halt, and I’ve run quite a long way. There aren’t any stud marks here, or if there are they are covered by all these shedded gray leaves. Don’t go too far, Son. Stay within sight. He likes saying that but he’s not here to say it now and it’s a silly thing to say in any case because you could stay really close and hide behind something or go miles and miles away and still be in sight if you were on a salt pan. And I’m six. And there are cars over that side of the park. You can hear them. Their tires on the damp road make a sound as if they are tearing cardboard lids off Cheerio boxes, and I’m hungry.
I reach into my pocket for the chocolate coin. It’s there and I pull it out and look at it and notice that it has gone a bit sticky along one edge; you can actually see the melted chocolate grinning out of the gold seam. Go on, it says, lick me but I won’t. I won’t!
And it’s all his fault for making us come out before breakfast.
And I can
hear him in the distance, calling my name, and there’s something odd about the way he’s calling. — Billy. Billy?
He is worried.
I stand up again. And I don’t know why. But instead of walking back toward where his voice is coming from through the trees I decide to do the exact opposite and I begin loping tirelessly farther away toward the road with cars on it instead.
One of the best places is the car but watch out, it can also be the worst. Seat belts are difficult to put on. You can pull them across you but if you let go when you’re looking for the hole they rush back inside themselves again. Snails also do it, if you touch them. Inside the car we’re all together which is good until you need to get away and then that’s it, you’re stuck, and there’s no way you’re getting out of there again. But that’s not true, not precisely. Because if you’re very cunning which is quite like stealthy only in your head, there are one or two things you can say to make the car stop so you can get out. I need the loo can work but not if you say it too often. I feel sick is another one though whether or not that does the job depends on what sort of mood they’re in. Birds regurgitate food for their young. What a wonderful trick that would be if you could do it. I feel sick stop the car please no yes I do feel sick no you don’t really I do stop it whoa regurgitate. A trick is not always the same thing as lying.
Even once you’ve stopped the car and been sick or gone to the loo the problem is that you have to get back in again. They can’t leave you there. You wouldn’t want them to. Many animals, birds and fish, including wildebeests, albatrosses, and salmons, migrate, covering epic distances across the planet in vast schools and flocks and herds. Predators pick off the weaklings which means the old and the sick. And the young. Keep up at the back there! Put your coat and shoes on! Lope!
What I Did Page 2
