SHORT STORY
Deciding the rules for bringing up children can be exhausting. It can also be liberating, involve the drinking of cocktails, and reveal unexpected, if questionable, links to our past.
Architecture Rampant, by Dave Leys.
Iyelled out. “Standing near the water is not the same as having a shower! You have to be under the water!” “I’m busy,” glowered Tigg. He was drawing on the shower screen with his finger.
“The soap,” I continued. “Pick it up. Wet it. Rub it on the body. This is traditionally what we do when we clean ourselves.”
Marla snickered as she stood in the room adjacent to the bathroom. Most of the statements made in the house by any of us were partly for the respondent, partly for ourselves and partly for a general audience. There were multiple performances happening nightly, daily, morningly. Maybe we amused nobody, maybe we amused somebody, but we continued to verbalise regardless.
Tigg glared now but retreated under the water. “Every day,” he cried, “every day same thing!”
“Naked!” screamed Finn as he leapt around me.
“Yes,” I said, “believe it or not every day we get naked, every day we wash.”
“Sucker,” said Finn to no one in particular. He shimmied into the bathroom and back out again, shedding clothes as he went.
“Sucker,” whispered Tigg. I was pretty certain it was directed at me.
I was actually being a little disingenuous. Most days I washed but I could hardly claim it was three hundred and sixty five days a year. Our neighbour, Enola, had gently suggested to Marla and me we should be equally liberal with the boys. “Let them go without a bath occasionally,” she murmured one afternoon, standing with us at the bell end of the cul-de-sac. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
I’d nodded, but not too vigorously. On one hand I agreed with the general rude health sentiment, the sense that you shouldn’t overdo things, that kids needed a little wildness in them. It was partly an outgrowth of my vague, underdeveloped feeling that there were too many rules in life, a general resentment of decorum, a feeling I liked but knew wasn’t fully thought through.
But on the other hand I felt I’d earned the freedom to go without a shower now and then, or if not exactly earned, I had the privilege of choosing for myself because I was past the age of 40. I didn’t want to give my boys those kinds of liberties too early. What else was there to look forward to otherwise? Marla and I justified living in the suburbs by the same logic – surely we wouldn’t want to deny our children the chance to rebel when they hit 20 by moving somewhere more dirty, urban and dangerous?
Enola was more than a neighbour; she was a dear friend. I liked to think her occasional libertine sensibility was because she was Austrian. And 87 years old. I imagined her as a child hiking in the Alps around Tyrol in the early twentieth century. Surely no one badgered you about petty things when there were icecaps and breath-shuddering views. Besides, she’d taught German to opera singers at the Conservatorium of Music. Dame Joan Sutherland, she sniffed, spoke the language “as if it was Sanskrit”. Such actions and judgements gave you licence.
Any variation during the night routine was minimal and therefore magnified. Marla and I ran a tight run sheet. Eating. Washing. Viewing. Reading. All the -ings.
Gustave Flaubert had said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Henri Matisse had said, “Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue.” Those French guys were really free in giving out life advice, it seemed.
Cocktail Hour had also entered the run sheet, edging in over months until it was now pretty much a daily occurrence. I was aware I was teetering on alcoholism, but of the most benign variety – no more than one drink a day.
I hedged my habit around other caveats, other borders. I was on a mission to go as long as possible without repeating a drink. Last night had been an Americano, the night before a Manhattan, before that a Frangelico Sour, a Bramble, a White Lady. A series of ghosts lined up behind each other. Every drink I positioned on top of the cooker, photographed and posted on social media. Why? It was a way of keeping the endeavour public – partly to amuse others, partly to avoid what seemed to me most shameful – the recourse to drink in private. A habit shared, even remotely, was a burden halved, or something. Not that it was a burden.
Other fence lines arose. It was 2020. It was the year of my father’s death. This was a managed breakdown; not a breakdown but a breaking down of something. Older habits.
And then there was the liquor cabinet. The colours and designs of all those bottles of spirits breathed the romance of the Old World becoming the New World, of telegraph lines, railways, boulevards, piazzas. Of radio, Art Deco, of motor cars and women showing newly minted ankles. The ruby red of Campari. The softer orange of Aperol. Dark blood red Pimms. Gin Lane in the green solidity of a Tanqueray flask. The backwoods American boys of bourbon. The feminine frivolity of a pretty bottle of Chambord, wafting perfume and its late medieval pretensions. The conquistadors and their monopoly on tequila and violence. Skeletons on the label.
Charles Baudelaire had tried hashish but preferred wine, had written a paean to it in fact. “The one vice beyond redemption is to do bad things out of stupidity,” he wrote. Was I doing a bad thing out of intelligence? A good thing out of stupidity? What was the architecture here beyond the foundation of a cocktail book and a vaulted ceiling of upper limits?
I was at an age where I was ready to act as a mentor. An ex-student, fiercely intelligent and becalmed this year between school and the next world, corresponded with me. I sent her my stories, read her own work, prodded her to enter literary competitions and recommended books to her. She chided me on my poor meme game. She loved the poetry of Robert Frost. Emails ended with absurdist lines – ‘Also, here is a photo of a chicken wearing pants that I think is important’ – below which, improbably, was inlaid a hen in pink pantaloons. It was the special gift of the 20-year-old to be both prematurely middle aged and playfully young.
The next morning, Tigg arrived at our bed with his attitude in full force. He threw himself on the covers next to me. “When are we going back to Eddie’s? Today?”
It was not a question. Technically it was a question, but the inflection at the end of
the sentence was perfunctory. It was a demand. I knew what lay behind it.
We had been to Eddie’s house on the weekend where Tigg had played with Eddie’s collection of plastic laser guns. Eddie could backflip, scale walls at pace, draw ogres and swing from trees but right now I knew Eddie and his household had been reduced to one thing in Tigg’s consciousness – the arsenal of sci-fi weaponry. There were yellow and black pistols with barrels that lit in flashing primary colours. There were laser shotguns with crystalline orbs that spun. I could see it from Tigg’s view – a haul of liberal carnage-creation that was better than El Dorado because it had been unearthed.
I tried to play for time. “Good morning, my darling boy. I bet you’re hungry.”
He was having none of that palaver. “Today,” he said. His eyes narrowed. “Back to Eddie’s. You promised.”
That was an outright falsehood I chose to ignore. Marla groaned and rolled over. She was a smoother-over of great power, a mediator of acumen and tact, but she was not at her best in the early mornings. A slow starter as long as we’d been together, Marla retreated beneath my shoulder. I was on my own.
I decided to mirror his desires. “He’s got great guns, hasn’t he?”
Tigg looked suspiciously at me, wondering what I was up to, and nodded. A little of the ferocity went out of his eyes and in its wake crept in a dull, almost sickly longing.
We’d never had guns in the house. It wasn’t that we were reflexively anti-weapons, although they were an unthinking aesthetic we’d naturally swerved away from. Marla and I were wary of gender roles in general: disarming our boys was a way down the ideological list. But a couple of years ago my sister had bought our children foam swords and shields and they’d hung on in the cupboard, occasionally retrieved for backyard pirate battles.
“You know what,” I said to Tigg, “I’ll buy you some guns today. How about that? I promise I’ll buy you some. You can have them this afternoon.”
I rarely bought him gifts. Just like that I’d made a choice. Marla opened the one eye, cast it my way, and closed it again.
Tigg’s shoulders relaxed and he nodded. He even allowed a faint smile to creep over his face. “Breakfast time,” he said. “I’m hungry.”
I’d just agreed to buy guns. From one angle I’d effectively been stood over – under the threat of emotional violence I’d bent the knee and guaranteed future figurative violence.
As Tigg padded off to the kitchen Marla lifted her head slightly. “The noise.”
“I know,” I said. The lurid sound of these plastic guns – it was approaching us already.
She smiled ruefully and resumed her position. She was so beautiful among the pillows I pulled a strand of her hair behind her ear, I kissed her cheek. Then I followed Tigg out to the fridge and made him a bowl of cereal. He sat dreamily in his chair and spooned up the milk. He’d clearly banked my promise and was moving on.
I was comfortable with my decision. Definitely. Desires as elemental as these were like water. There was no holding it back. Channels must be dug, the levee would not hold. I felt like I was transmitting Yeats.
Earlier in the week I’d been leafing through a book entitled Masterpieces of the British Museum. Unsurprisingly it tended to encourage the long view of things. Every museum made decisions but the chapters were familiar in their overtures to the human condition: Seeing the Divine. Dress. Rulers. Violence and War. Mythical Beasts. Death. Animals. Eating and Drinking.
Again and again I was struck how we turned to objects – a ship’s scarred figurehead from provincial Germania, a crocodile-skin suit of armour found in Egypt, the bronze mask of Dionysos – only to find ourselves again.
Cast into history that morning, I decided to look my surname up while I toasted a crumpet for Tigg. I scrolled on my phone, expecting to confirm what my father had told me of our ancestry – Scottish, English, a little Dutch and French. Instead I uncovered a potted narrative. The name had arisen with the Norman Conquest. And there was more: a coat of arms and a crest.
Force avec vertu. Strength with Virtue.
The heraldic design was a knight’s head looking right, a red lion rampant. Above the knight, a hand held a broken spear aloft. That was a vow of peace. The colours gold and red. It was gorgeous.
I honeyed the crumpet and placed it before Tigg. He began to nibble in a semi-circle.
Was it a scam? A section of archival grey area to lure in the foolish and hidebound? I was able to download the PDF. I could print it on a T-shirt. On a coffee mug. Hell, I could get it tattooed if I wanted. How could we have our own motto? Just us? I’d checked the site again and saw the crest was effectively ‘shared’ with variants of the name. Leys. Leigh. My suspicions allayed. Sometimes history really was that available.
Our children were ours. Our liquor was ours. The rule book was ours. Our history was ours: what we laid claim to. And the future?
They were big questions to ask in the morning.
Tigg wiped his mouth, the last golden smear. “Good?” I asked.
He nodded. “Remember the guns,” he said.
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