a rational man

by J S Hollis

  Despite the jokes, Sebastian’s lack of activity concerned Cecil. He knew that after a couple of months Sebastian should have been smiling, gurgling and generally interacting.

  While Sebastian sat impassively in his bouncer, Cecil suggested they ask Childminder what to do. “I know you’re worried,” Clara said, “but I’m not about to be replaced as a mother by an AI parent. Seb is not just a thing to be improved.”

  “I’m not suggesting any such thing, but what’s the harm in listening?”

  Sleep deprived, Clara consented and soon they were following Childminder’s recommendations without fail. Using it to judge when to feed, when to change, when to put him to sleep. But the “unbiased” “research based” approach failed to tackle Sebastian’s blank face or to encourage him to see the point in crawling from one object to another.

  Donatella tried a different approach. She felt a strong attachment to Sebastian, her first grandchild, and she was determined to make him smile or giggle. She spent hours bouncing him, tickling him and making funny expressions, but all her efforts were met with a phlegmatic stare. One Saturday afternoon, she gave up. She bounced Sebastian on her left knee and began to watch a cooking programme on her palm screen.

  She heard a giggle and then one of Sebastian’s tiny hands reached for her palm screen. Instinctively she pulled the screen away and Sebastian’s lower lip protruded in response. She brought the screen back. Sebastian giggled and reached out again.

  Donatella called in Cecil and Clara and told them to watch. When Sebastian laughed again, they kissed him with delight.

  “Take it away now,” Cecil said.

  Donatella pretended she hadn’t heard.

  “Take it away now, Donatella.”

  “But he’s enjoying it.”

  Cecil stroked Sebastian’s head. “We need to show him the real world first.”

  “What real world? It’s all fantasy.”

  “He’s watched me cook before,” Clara said, “and I didn’t get this reaction.”

  “It’s a short cut,” Cecil insisted.

  “He’s happy.”

  “No, just because he’s laughing doesn’t make him happy. Happiness is more complicated. Booze and drugs are fun for a few minutes too.”

  Cecil held out his hands for Sebastian. Donatella looked to Clara first.

  “We know how to entertain him if we need to,” Clara said.

  Donatella passed Sebastian into Cecil’s arms and the baby began to really cry. Cecil walked around the living room patiently listening to Sebastian’s wails.

  Once Sebastian could walk, he would move around more readily but only when there was no one else in the room. He also began to misbehave. On one occasion, Donatella left him in the living room while she went to the toilet. Sebastian raised himself up and headed straight for the vial of bright red focus tablets on the coffee table. He had chewed five of them before Donatella returned. For the next twelve hours, he spoke gobbledygook, as if he was expelling all the sounds he had stored up since birth.

  He pinched and bit any children he was placed with. Clara tried to explain to him that they could always see what he was doing or had done. But explaining W to a two year old proved difficult and Sebastian continued to misbehave in private. When he got the chance to use W himself, he loved it, controlling the browser adeptly so that he could watch his parents.

  “Maybe he is really bright,” Clara said to G one day at work, “but just not in the way we expected.” The primary school aptitude test suggested otherwise. Sebastian’s score was in the bottom fifty per cent, which meant he would receive slightly decelerated learning. Clara was devastated. Lying flat on the bed, she suggested that they send Sebastian to a private school.

  “Interesting. Why do you think that?” Cecil said, his back perfectly parallel to the headboard.

  “Because I disagree with the results and don’t want Seb’s education to be decelerated on the basis of them.”

  “I understand but we are in no better position to judge. We are probably in a much worse position.”

  “Be honest. Are you just saying that because you refuse to send Seb to a private school?”

  “No, I’m not,” Cecil said, “but as it happens, my position on private schools hasn’t changed.”

  “I know.” Clara turned to face Cecil, who maintained his pensive stare at the opposite wall. “But he is our child. Do we want to take a risk on this school system?” She pushed the duvet away and drew herself up to Cecil’s level. “If the aptitude test is wrong, which I think it is, he’s going to be well behind the education he deserves.”

  “Clara, I understand. But it’s not that simple. Sebastian’s impression of society will be skewed by the small selection of children he will mix with. His school will promote inequality and, while we can abandon our values for his benefit, he will lose out on the opportunities of mixing with a diverse range of children. And, in any case, I doubt his school will make much of a difference. Sebastian will do as well as he can wherever he goes. We decided that he would be a natural child and now we must follow through with the consequences.”

  “OK,” Clara said, hit with the sucker punch of Cecil’s blame. She had no ammunition to respond with and slipped back down into the bed. What did she know about Seb’s intelligence? Maybe decelerated learning would be better for him. And was she at fault for Sebastian’s problems?

  Cecil could hear her mind whirring. He slipped down to join her but her body was half a metre away, looking away from him. He rubbed his finger over a mole on her shoulder blade and then squeezed her arm gently. “When we decided to have Sebastian, you said to me, ‘Who are we to decide what is a good child?’ And you were right. We have to enjoy Sebastian as he is.”

  Cecil was right. Clara knew that. But she couldn’t help feeling like she was emerging from a jousting match in which Cecil picked up her lance and smashed her around the head with it. Conversations with Cecil always turned into games of logic. One wonders why she agreed to play at all. She could have said, “I want Sebastian to go to private school and that is that.” But she never rejected Cecil’s arguments. She feared that if disputes came down to who was more stubborn, Cecil would always have the public backing and she would be ripped to shreds. And so, after an initial desperate foray to protect Sebastian, just enough to convince herself she wasn’t a deserter, she pulled back. The next day she grinned as she walked over the adverts for private schools beaming out from the pavement.

  Clara couldn’t keep her dissatisfaction fully contained. It expressed itself in her decade long hunt for Sebastian’s “gift”. The slightest sign of aptitude on Sebastian’s part was immediately mapped out into an illustrious career.

  The first example of Clara’s delusion was Sebastian’s sculpting phase. On his third birthday, he opened the Plasticene Emma had bought him and formed the blue material into a lanky figure with a big nose.

  When Clara saw it, she took the toddler by both arms and looked at his big eyes. “Sebastian, you have made something really impressive,” she said. “You should be proud of yourself.”

  “Thanks,” Sebastian said.

  Clara picked up the blue man and put him on a shelf in the living room under a large glass jar. Then she gave Sebastian some more Plasticene to play with. He rolled it with his thin fingers into cigar shapes and circles.

  Clara wasn’t deterred. She began reading about sculpture and discovered that Brâncuși had carved shapes out of wood as a child. While she wasn’t ready to give Sebastian a knife, she bought him some large pieces of soap to carve. He turned them into “rocks”.

  By this stage, Clara was a patsy for advertisers, who plied her with sculpting guides, materials and classes. She bought various apparatus that allowed Sebastian to manipulate Plasticene into specific shapes.

  But Sebastian resolutely refused to improve, making the same characters out of
Plasticene a year later and whittling through the soap with the creative instincts of a lumberjack. The blue man remained the zenith of his work.

  Eventually Clara lost her enthusiasm for sculpting and moved onto drama. By the time Sebastian reached adolescence, a history of his extracurricular activities was an encyclopaedia of sport and culture (and failure).

  While other hobbies fell aside in an ebbing tide of used equipment transactions, Clara continued to encourage Sebastian to play electronic games. She hadn’t seen Sebastian demonstrate any particular skill at gaming – his attraction to virtual exploration was not matched with an ability to strategise – but she continued to encourage him for other reasons, not only because it created some distance between her and Cecil, who avoided “irrelevant” gaming, but also because it gave her an excuse to disappear down the rabbit hole of alternative worlds. She remained unconcerned that with each of her multiplayer victories, she was damaging Sebastian’s confidence.

  In this way, Sebastian became the battleground for Cecil and Clara’s proxy wars. Blood was drawn with each little conquest, though too little to be visible. Wounds healed, leaving the faintest scars, and the marriage continued effectively enough. The tension eased as they began to recognise Sebastian for the unremarkable child he was and not the super child they refused to realise they had expected.

  The détente heated up again when Sebastian was twelve. The turning point was Cecil’s decision to run for the Pentonville seat in Parliament and, specifically, the first set of polling data collected by his campaign team.

  Cecil’s campaign manager, Isabella Smith, stood up and announced the results in the Green’s office30 to Cecil, his policy wonk, Sam Clark, and his head of communications, Aristotle Kline. Isabella was evidently aware that others would be watching. A selfproclaimed “Fatty”31, she had dressed in a stylish jump suit, programmed black, that was casual enough to maintain the pretence that she was only presenting to the campaign team.

  “So first things first,” Isabella said. “We’re six points behind Labour but four points ahead of the London Independents.” She shifted her frame so that she could lean against her desk. “So we are doing well but Labour will be hard to shift. The good news is our policies our popular. Voters like our ideas on penalisation for overwork, restrictions on advertising and on a greed tax. They want to like Cecil too, not least because of his background in industry, but they are sceptical. They say that Sebastian is too …” She paused. ”Maverick. And for this reason, they wonder whether Cecil is the right person to look after the people. There are more details we can discuss but those are the headline points.” Isabella took a seat in the square they had formed.

  Cecil remained seated, pretending that the meeting was not being carefully analysed by journalists and his political opponents.

  “Thanks for that, Isabella,” he said, “and thank you all for your excellent work so far. All that matters here is our policies and our ability to implement them effectively. While I want people to like me, it is more important that they believe I can get things done. I believe I have demonstrated that. In any case, we are not going to try to change my son for the purpose of an election. He is a fine boy and I love him very much.”

  Cecil was too clever to say anything else. He knew that he would have to work on Sebastian clandestinely. Control had to come wrapped in cotton wool.

  Clara and Cecil had not really noticed Sebastian’s oddities. As he grew up, they took the widespread view that children should not be constantly supervised. They knew Sebastian was quiet and had the tendency to respond to questions with unflinching silence but they were unaware of anything particularly unusual. After the polling information, Cecil began to pay more attention to his son’s activities or lack of them. One thing in particular struck Cecil: Sebastian’s infatuation with watching other people have sex. Cecil was surprised he hadn’t learnt about this earlier.

  Cecil avoided the conversation for a few days. This was not just a conversation with his son – it was a presentation on his skills as a father. After one dinner, he turned to Clara, who was listening to her messages, and asked her if she wouldn’t mind leaving the room while he had a word with Sebastian. Once she had left, Cecil turned to his son, who had been quiet throughout the meal and said, “Sebastian, I need to talk to you about a couple of things and I don’t want you to be embarrassed about it. I just want to discuss. I am not telling you off or telling you to do anything.”

  Sebastian didn’t respond but continued to concentrate on Cecil’s lips with such intensity that Cecil wiped them with the back of his hand.

  “I’ve noticed that you have been spending a lot of your free time watching other people making love. Is there a reason why? Do you have any questions you want to ask about intercourse?”

  “No,” Sebastian replied with a slight shake of the head and slighting protruding lower lip, treating Cecil’s question as trivial.

  “OK. That is good to know.” He moved his chair closer to Sebastian’s and put his hand on Sebastian’s bony shoulders. “But do you realise that it isn’t really the done thing, you know, to watch such moments?”

  “Oh.” It was unclear if he was feigning surprise.

  “Yes, not really the done thing. These are intimate moments. People get suspicious of what you are thinking about if you watch them. You’re young. It’s not a big deal but you might not want to make a habit out of it.”

  “But I thought we could watch anything. Isn’t that the point?”

  “Well, yes, you can watch anything but you should exercise that freedom carefully. People deserve privacy. And what you watch can have repercussions. In terms of friends, relationships, job prospects.”

  “OK.” Sebastian inspected a broccoli floret. “But I do find it interesting. They all get so excited and lost in the moment. And I can’t work out why. It seems to be such a pointless exercise unless you want children.”

  “Ah, well, that brings me onto the other thing I wanted to talk to you about. Masturbation. Have you ever done it?”

  “No,” Sebastian replied, dropping the floret and running his finger around the edge of his plate.

  “Never felt the urge to?”

  “Nope.” Sebastian placed the finger in his mouth.

  Cecil nodded. “Well, that’s fine. I just wanted to say to you that is a perfectly natural thing to do when the time comes – you are probably still a bit young. There was a lot of guff about it ten, twenty years ago, but if you want to, just masturbate away.” Cecil stretched his arms up. “In private, of course. And no pressure to do so.”

  The conversation was of some success. Sebastian stopped watching people’s private moments. But he became more passive. Spending hours doing nothing except lying on his bed looking at the ceiling.

  Cecil tried to become more encouraging by going to watch Sebastian keep goal for the school’s third eleven. Shuffling up and down the line, he shouted “great save” and clapped his palms into slabs of raw meat. Clara was talking to some of the other parents but when Sebastian pulled the ball out of the net for the third time, she sidled up to Cecil and placed her hand in his. Cecil looked into her eyes for a brief moment, past the thick frames of eyeliner, and turned back to the game.

  “I think I am ready for another one,” she said.

  “Another what?” Cecil replied as he watched Sebastian kick the ball back to the centre circle.

  “Another child.”

  “Really?” Cecil blew warm air into his hands. “I’m not sure that would be good for us.”

  “Why not?”

  “A number of reasons immediately come to mind. Mainly, that we should concentrate on Sebastian.” It was almost certainly not his primary reason. “And what about the child’s future job prospects if the economy continues in the way it has? We would both find it harder to do the charity work we currently do, and we need to think about the environmental impact of ano
ther child. You are not so young either, there could be complications.”

  “You mean to say that we are not going to have another child because of the environment.”

  “That is one reason, yes.”

  “I’m sorry, Cecil, I think somehow your reasoning is all muddled up. Whether we have a child or not should be an expression of our love.”

  “We also need to think about the child.”

  The ball intersected them, allowing Eunice, the mother of one of Sebastian’s school friends, to butt in. “Sorry to interrupt, my loves, but, for what it’s worth, I agree with Cecil. Not appropriate to be having two children at this time. Not when there are children with barely anything to eat. You would need a bigger house too. Not going to look good with all this pressure on property.”

  “Thanks, Eunice,” Clara said, her smile a wall of daggers, “but I don’t see what this has to do everyone else.”

  “It has everything to do with everyone else,” Eunice and Cecil replied in unison. They both laughed and so did Clara, eventually. It was the right position of course. Clara was just being idealistic.

  Clara didn’t argue with Cecil. He was not usually prone to changing his mind. In her pitiable way, she sought to undermine him. That evening, while cuddled up on the couch and watching an edit Sebastian had made of his goalkeeping, Clara said to Cecil: “You seem to be watching Seb more recently. Anything I should know?”

  “Nothing at all. I just think we need to keep our eyes on him from time to time. Help him on his way.”

  “I thought we had agreed to leave him alone unless he does something wrong. He is nearly thirteen. He has enough to deal with. We should let him be.” It is unlikely Clara appreciated the hypocrisy of her comment.

  “OK. I just thought he might need some guidance.”

  “He’ll find his way.”