The Boys Are Back Read online

  Simon Carr

  The Boys Are Back

  Simon Carr is a writer and columnist for The Independent. He was described by Tony Blair as “the most vicious sketch writer working in Britain today.” In the 1980s, he helped launch The Independent, and was a speech writer for the prime minister of New Zealand from 1992 to 1994. His previous books include Sour Gripes and The Gripes of Wrath.

  Also by Simon Carr

  The Gripes of Wrath

  Sour Gripes

  The Hop Quad Dolly

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2009

  Copyright © 2000 by Simon Carr

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Great Britain as The Boys Are Back in Town by Hutchinson, an imprint of Random House Group, Ltd., London, in 2000.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79378-2

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  for

  Susie MacGillivray

  1954–1994

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part one

  Part two

  Part three

  Part four

  Epilogue

  Part one

  Can we start with my fat green friend?

  Every day, for a full year, I held my breath and opened the lid of the wheely bin from as far away as possible, closed it as softly as possible and backed away sideways, so as to create the smallest possible slipstream. And every time I did, the thought of the far greater problem under the house always had to be tidied away. It was like a mad relation tethered down there, in chains, fed on buckets of fish heads. Our dangerous and shameful secret stood in the corner of the basement on a beaten-earth floor. It was a top-of-the-line, fifty-gallon kitchen freezer in mint condition and perfect working order – but for the fact that it was loaded with meat, vegetables and ice cream, and hadn’t been turned on for three years. If you lifted the lid and inhaled the fumes for long enough, experts agreed, you’d pass out; prolonged exposure would kill you. You couldn’t clean it, you couldn’t give it away. Eventually I solved the problem – but only by selling the house and moving overseas.

  Now, it may be that I’m a victim of false consciousness, maybe I’ve been deceived by over-assigned gender roles but, broadly speaking, I assert that mothers run their households better than this.

  When Alexander’s mother was alive – and even after she got ill – she used to say that a tidy house created a force field. You walked into her well-ordered environment and you got a charge off it. The plumped cushions, the magazines squared off on the table, the beds crisp and fresh, everything in its place – it was like action stations. You were energised by what had been prepared for you. If you wanted to do something, there was nothing you had to do first.

  And there was something else, I see now, something more personal about it. Her housekeeping was a way of surrounding her family. Her presence was everywhere – in the drifting scent of Givenchy from the bedroom, or rosemary from the kitchen, or that lemon-scented cleaning agent coming from the bathroom. Everywhere you turned she was there, in her fragrance, or countless touches that made the house inviting.

  We miss that now, we do miss that. Now that she’s gone we live in a very different world. There’s less attention, less warmth, less sense of a home in a house without Susie; and my housekeeping – if that’s not too strong a word for it – occupies some of the most distant positions on the spectrum.

  You know what the seven dwarfs were like before Snow White turned up?

  We are a father and two sons living in a household without women. We are like an experiment in a satellite, free of normal earthly influences (like guilt, and bleach, and sock drawers). We’ve been way off the norm, well outside the boundaries, so we know all about the hog-heaven theory of childhood. We are very widely experienced in the world where boys sit on the carpet gaping at the television like cultish prisoners. We’ve known Sunday nights when you can’t see the carpet for video boxes, takeaway packaging, clothes, plastic games, cats, goggles, guns, popcorn, plates, cutlery, papers, paintbrushes, cushions, soft toys, comics, newspapers, dart launchers, picture books, colouring sheets, crayons, lego and game CDs called Living Dead, Krypt, Resident Evil 2, where innocent bystanders are eaten alive by hungry zombies.

  We’ve lived for years now in a whole new, all-male institution. Given its inadequacies as a child-rearing unit, I like it. It’s so different from a household run by a woman. It’s home alone except there are three of us. Here are a few characteristic gender moments:

  One: Hugo is the most fastidious family member. He was holding one of our two little dogs. These are the only female elements in the house (and even then they poop all over the place). So: Hugo’s holding one of the animals when it licks him. He looks around for a cloth and, realising he has both hands full with the animal, he lifts her up a bit and rubs her against his cheek. I say: ‘Hugo. You just wiped your face with a dog.’ That made me laugh and I thought it would do the same to his brother, this example of how unlike girls we were, but after asking which dog it was, Alexander made just one, rather irritable comment. He said: ‘Why can’t he wipe his face with his own dog!’ This wasn’t a plea for tolerance (‘Why can’t he wipe his face with his own dog!’), it was a protest against property abuse: (‘Why can’t he wipe his face with his own dog!’).

  Two: A naked six-year-old walks to the washing line in the early morning. It’s late spring and one of those days when you know life is good. His rear end bobs between the plants and flowers; he climbs on a garden chair to select his wardrobe for the day. He spins the carousel to get at a T-shirt; he chooses the long navy-blue shorts; if he considers underpants he decides against them. And that’s a blessing because it’s one less thing to process. When I can get both of them to undress in front of the washing machine I’ll have cut out several annoying links in the laundry chain. Using the washing line as a hanging rail eases a lot of pressure and this is why summer has been so important. It’s allowed the evolution of a dressing system that doesn’t distress and depress us. What I’m trying to ignore is the fact that summer doesn’t last all year.

  Three: I’m driving Alexander down a dusty beach road to the pie cart. A woman waiting on the bank takes one look at us and loses control – so much so I assume she’s on drugs (or perhaps she’s not on drugs – keeping up your medication isn’t as easy as it sounds). ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing!’ she cries. She’s doing the voice that only angry mothers can do, it sounds like a power saw biting into timber. No, it sounds like one of those kung-fu fighting cries; it’s like someone throwing a javelin into your ear. It’s a voice that frightens Alexander far more than anything we’ve been doing driving round the park; and actually, because this voice goes to the roots of men, it rather frightens me too. Suddenly, both of us are five years old.

  ‘Get that child off your windscreen,’ she shrieks, ‘you bloody fool!’ We’re driving at ten kilometres an hour and Alexander is sitting on the windscreen; she assumes he’s in danger. But what danger she sees that I don’t is unclear. He’s holding on to one of the windscreen wipers, he’s got both feet firmly on the middle of the bonnet, what’s the problem? And it seemed it wasn’t just a woman thing because her husband comes up to the car to add his voice to hers. ‘You’re crazy,’ he says. ‘You irresponsibl
e fool!’

  I suppose in marriage you have to support your spouse. ‘Back me up!’ we say, whenever we say or do something indefensible, like making children turn off The Simpsons because it’s dinner time, or shrieking at amiable strangers peacefully driving their sons on the bonnet of their car.

  Two years later I had devised the perfect retort to them both. I should have drawn myself up to my full height, as you are supposed to do in these situations, and said: ‘Bite me.’ That would have taught Alexander how to stick up for himself without being offensive. That’s one of the most important lessons in life.

  The fact is, I run a pretty loose ship. There’s a lot of give in the structure. In our world of fuzzy logic and more-or-less, we need a lot of give to get by.

  It hasn’t been easy eliminating the details but we’ve managed to work our way into a very light-handed regime: we found that the more rules we had the more crimes were created; petty prosecutions started to clog up the machinery of life. Conversely, the fewer the rules we had, the nicer we were to each other.

  Fewer rules, that’s the important thing, fewer but bigger rules.

  It is what I like to think of as a masculine quality, the theory of outer markers. The boys have very definite limits that they mustn’t go beyond. Inside the perimeter they can do very much as they please, but they must stay inside the boundaries. It’s murky on the other side, they’re frightened of the dark out there, I’ve had to see to that. But within the limits it’s summer-time and it’s easy living. And that’s what boys like – which is just as well because it’s what fathers are good at: exercising a regime of benign indifference and establishing outer markers their children mustn’t go beyond.

  Mothers tend to a different theory. They take a more active interest in the details and the way stations through the day. Mothers like a routine; they even say that children like a routine (‘It gives them security’). The bath before bedtime calms them down. This may be true, too, but in our house there aren’t bedtimes, let alone baths before them.

  The canon law my boys operate to is listed here in no particular order. No interrupting adults. Of course we like talking to children and we like them talking to us, but those demands for food, drink or attention that come in from nowhere, unasked, unexpected, they drive you nuts. Yes, and no swearing if you’re a child not even words that sound like swearing. Except damn, of course, and hell. What else? As little stealing and lying as possible. No wanton littering, no fighting except for fun or out of earshot. Be polite as much as possible – of course, you can’t when you’re very angry. You must work hard at school. Screaming insanely, running round the house making absurd and disgusting noises, sliding in the mud in the park after dark and throwing water bombs and tennis balls at windows – all these were encouraged.

  But essentially, here was only one rule: they had to do what I told them. The advantage of this regime was obvious to them: I told them less – much less – than half of what two parents would tell them to do. I had also taken President Hoover’s remark seriously: ‘My children always obey me. And the reason is that I find out what it is they want to do and then advise them very strongly to do it.’

  Not surprisingly, respectable women have found it all very under-regulated. Something must be missing, they feel. Proper homes aren’t like this. It’s hard to understand how my boys can be so nice without bath times. They can’t understand why my boys do what they’re told without complaining.

  Even though their own children behave with much less respect, obedience, politeness, I feel an amused attitude to our household from a certain sort of mother. When they’re pleasant about us, I’m told, they call us ‘free-range’. I haven’t asked what they call us when not so well-disposed. Perhaps we are ‘semi-feral’, perhaps we are ‘feral’. Perhaps they’ve looked through our hedges when we’re playing a summer session of garden laser hunting. That has a certain Lord of the Flies quality that takes some getting used to.

  It struck me that they felt a threat to their own domestic disciplines; maybe some mothers felt I was bringing unfair competition into the neighbourhood, spoiling the market in parental authority. Maybe they viewed us in the same way that countries view Ireland reducing its tax rate to draw in overseas investment. And in their terms they were probably right. We must have been a threat. Child pressure is very real these days. Once the static starts it’s almost impossible to stop. All round the neighbourhood children might be asking their parents maddening questions: ‘Why can’t I sit on the windscreen while you drive? Alexander does. Why can’t we watch South Park? Alexander’s allowed and he’s eight. Why can’t we go into the park and play hide and seek with flashlights like the Carrs do? Why can’t you chase us round the house when you’ve been drinking going Come here, little boy like a child molester, like Simon does? Why can’t I have a sleepover with girls like Hugo did when he was thirteen and Simon went to a motel for the night?’

  On the other hand, I look at highly regulated households and it’s clear that rules of themselves don’t produce authority. I stood in our sitting room watching a mother trying to get her son to leave. She had a very structured routine for her son Tom, but he wouldn’t do anything she said. ‘Come on, Tom, we have to go now. Tom. Come on. We’re going to be late. Tom. Stop playing now and come on. Come on, Tom, it’s time to go, put down the controller. Tom? I don’t want to tell you again. Tom! Come on, Tom, we have to leave now. Tom, come on. Tom, come on. Come on, Tom! Tom, I mean it! I don’t want to have to say this again! Come on, Tom. Tom!’

  We might be domestic delinquents but when I say, ‘Let’s go, guys,’ both boys are on their feet in moments. Maybe they respect my enormous bulk; maybe they fear they’ll have to walk home (they suspect I won’t wait, it’s happened before). Maybe they want to show our hosts that we’re a working unit. The trade-off we’ve made not only works, it’s seen to work and that’s important.

  In the enchanted garden

  Last year, for Alexander’s birthday, we had a sleepover for his friends and as mothers dropped off their sons I could feel the pulse of their anxiety. Sam’s mum, Tom’s mum, Tim’s mum – they hadn’t brought their 4WDs down my steep drive before, into our woodland setting. Here, it was a little darker than up on the road, up there in the normal world. And down beside the gingerbread house they instinctively knew that all their values (mealtimes, tooth-brushing, no computer games involving hungry zombies) were foreign to this place. Down here on the edge of the twilight zone even the swing, the wholesome swing, took on a sinister aspect.

  Over a bank in the garden there was a branch thirty feet above the ground. From this we had slung a rope and tied a handle to it. Children launched themselves off a rackety platform and the arc of the swing took their feet up nearly to the level of the first-floor ceilings: weeeeeeeeeee! It was a wild, exhilarating ride; it was the best swing in the world. And no child had ever had an accident on it (well, not a serious accident), but even so, no mother was able to watch her child on it without wanting to take a protective step forward.

  Between me and Sam’s mum, Luke’s mum, Georgie’s mum, the dialogue from that party night went like this:

  ‘Are you sure they’ll be all right?’

  ‘No child has ever hurt themselves on that swing.’

  ‘But look! They go so high!’

  ‘That’s why they hang on so tight.’

  ‘But my God, LOOK! He’s touching the veranda! If the rope broke …’

  ‘Don’t worry about the rope, I’m trying not to think of the tree falling on him.’

  ‘But seriously, look! If he let go he’d hurt himself so badly!’

  ‘That’s true, but it’s also true he wouldn’t do it again.’

  ‘But how can you be sure they’ll be all right?’

  ‘Well, you can’t exactly be sure, can you? However, it’s certainly the case that they’ve been all right so far.’

  When confronted with any project, the generalisation goes, women overestimate and men underesti
mate the risks. Whenever you hear a parent say ‘You’ll put someone’s eye out with that!’ on average it’s the mother and when you hear a parent say ‘If you stretch you could get the next branch up’ it usually seems to be the father.

  But there may be something deeper going on in this assessment process, perhaps something more controversial. The reason fathers underestimate risk may be that we just care less than mothers do.

  This isn’t to say we fathers don’t care, we just don’t care as much. Of course we will run into burning buildings to save our little ones, but we don’t feel the scrape ourselves when they scrape their knees. Our fingers don’t tingle when they climb trees. We don’t behave as though they’ll be abducted if they play in the suburban park of a provincial university town. When they hurt themselves we say: ‘Well at least they won’t do that again.’ We don’t feel the need to protect them from germs with bleach warfare. Indeed, my view – rather male, perhaps – is that children should ingest quite a lot of germs on a daily basis to keep their immune systems stimulated. It’s a painless form of inoculation. (Mothers don’t always respond well to this: they trust medical procedures more if they hurt a bit.)

  A woman I know described herself just after her son was born as feeling like ‘an uncurled hedgehog’. Her tenderest part – that is, her child – was now exposed to the world and all its evils. The baby who had so recently been so safe, so secure – such an actual part of her – was now vulnerable to every sort of peril.

  For new mothers it’s as if a part of their body has gone mad, declared independence and gone off into the world to find a life on its own. And that’s why a mother’s embrace is different from a father’s. Whereas a father is welcoming a special little stranger, a mother’s embrace is actually reclaiming a part of herself.