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Authors: Fiona Neill
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clever of you. We must arrange for some photos, so that the whole school can see it. Well done, Mrs Sweeney. That is so imaginative.’
She takes the two eldest children by the hand and leads them towards the school. Then Sam comes running back. ‘Mum, remind me what I mustn’t say,’ he whispers.
‘Don’t tell the teacher that I did three of your paintings and don’t tell anyone that the car always looks like that. I’m not asking you to lie, I’m asking you to be economical with the truth.’
‘Is this a grey situation?’ he asks.
‘It is.’
As I stand on the pavement, holding on to the hood of Fred’s coat, I shut my eyes briefly and hope for a moment of reprieve. It is not even nine o’clock. When I open them, Fred has his trousers down round his ankles and is peeing against the wheel. ‘My wheel,’ he says proudly and I bundle him back into the Peugeot.
I look up to see Sexy Domesticated Dad sitting on his bicycle beside the car. He is leaning back, legs splayed, and slightly bent at the knees, to stabilise him on the pavement. His helmet hangs from his broken arm. He is wearing a pair of jeans and looks satisfactorily dishevelled and wild, a white T-shirt hanging below a slightly too-small green straight-cutjacket. I would like to say that he is unconscious of the overall effect, but I think there is a hint of vanity there, because he always is careful to remove his cycling helmet and run his fingers through his hair before he goes into school.
I notice the suggestion of a paunch where the coat doesn’t do up and the T-shirt wrinkles over his stomach.
‘It’s my wife’s,’ he says apologetically when he sees me scrutinising him, and smoothes down the jacket over the ripples. But despite all this, and despite his north London obsessions with borlotti beans and cycling as a replacement for religion, there is something inescapably raw and dirty about him.
‘You’re good at thinking on your feet,’ he says, getting off his bike by lifting his right leg over the bar at the front. I’m unsure whether it is a compliment or a challenge, and I know that I should go home right now, because even that small comment will resonate much longer than it should until, by endless replay, it is invested with meaning that he never intended. And then I realise that my mother-in-law has it slightly wrong. The imagination involved in loving your husband is less than the imagination involved in elaborating an unreciprocated fantasy. Attempting to end rather than begin a conversation, I reply, ‘Years of practice, Robert,’ in what I hope is a dry, laconic tone.
It is one of those early-autumn mornings when it is cold enough to see your breath, and he is now so close that when I speak, our breath becomes entangled. I am not wearing any make-up and I feel my cheeks go red in the chill.
‘I’m sorry I had to rush off yesterday,’ says Sexy Domesticated Dad. ‘I’m having a bit of a work crisis. Can’t seem to find the right structure for this book and the Americans want to launch it before the Sundance Film Festival next year.’
It could sound as though he is showing off, but he isn’t. He is trying to engage.
‘At the moment I’m writing about Zapata Westerns,’ he says. ‘Those are the ones that were set during the Mexican Revolution like
A Fistful of Dynamite
, but although they were inspired by Mexican history there wasn’t much other Latin American involvement . . .’
I nod knowingly.
But I am exploiting this unusual verbosity to make a thorough appraisal of his right forearm, which has suddenly been freed from his wife’s jacket, as he uses his arm to emphasise a point.
To my mind, there is no other part of a man’s body that so perfectly summons up the promise of what lies within than the forearm. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you see a man’s forearm, you can define pretty accurately what the rest of his body will look like and he will have no idea of how much can be
She takes the two eldest children by the hand and leads them towards the school. Then Sam comes running back. ‘Mum, remind me what I mustn’t say,’ he whispers.
‘Don’t tell the teacher that I did three of your paintings and don’t tell anyone that the car always looks like that. I’m not asking you to lie, I’m asking you to be economical with the truth.’
‘Is this a grey situation?’ he asks.
‘It is.’
As I stand on the pavement, holding on to the hood of Fred’s coat, I shut my eyes briefly and hope for a moment of reprieve. It is not even nine o’clock. When I open them, Fred has his trousers down round his ankles and is peeing against the wheel. ‘My wheel,’ he says proudly and I bundle him back into the Peugeot.
I look up to see Sexy Domesticated Dad sitting on his bicycle beside the car. He is leaning back, legs splayed, and slightly bent at the knees, to stabilise him on the pavement. His helmet hangs from his broken arm. He is wearing a pair of jeans and looks satisfactorily dishevelled and wild, a white T-shirt hanging below a slightly too-small green straight-cutjacket. I would like to say that he is unconscious of the overall effect, but I think there is a hint of vanity there, because he always is careful to remove his cycling helmet and run his fingers through his hair before he goes into school.
I notice the suggestion of a paunch where the coat doesn’t do up and the T-shirt wrinkles over his stomach.
‘It’s my wife’s,’ he says apologetically when he sees me scrutinising him, and smoothes down the jacket over the ripples. But despite all this, and despite his north London obsessions with borlotti beans and cycling as a replacement for religion, there is something inescapably raw and dirty about him.
‘You’re good at thinking on your feet,’ he says, getting off his bike by lifting his right leg over the bar at the front. I’m unsure whether it is a compliment or a challenge, and I know that I should go home right now, because even that small comment will resonate much longer than it should until, by endless replay, it is invested with meaning that he never intended. And then I realise that my mother-in-law has it slightly wrong. The imagination involved in loving your husband is less than the imagination involved in elaborating an unreciprocated fantasy. Attempting to end rather than begin a conversation, I reply, ‘Years of practice, Robert,’ in what I hope is a dry, laconic tone.
It is one of those early-autumn mornings when it is cold enough to see your breath, and he is now so close that when I speak, our breath becomes entangled. I am not wearing any make-up and I feel my cheeks go red in the chill.
‘I’m sorry I had to rush off yesterday,’ says Sexy Domesticated Dad. ‘I’m having a bit of a work crisis. Can’t seem to find the right structure for this book and the Americans want to launch it before the Sundance Film Festival next year.’
It could sound as though he is showing off, but he isn’t. He is trying to engage.
‘At the moment I’m writing about Zapata Westerns,’ he says. ‘Those are the ones that were set during the Mexican Revolution like
A Fistful of Dynamite
, but although they were inspired by Mexican history there wasn’t much other Latin American involvement . . .’
I nod knowingly.
But I am exploiting this unusual verbosity to make a thorough appraisal of his right forearm, which has suddenly been freed from his wife’s jacket, as he uses his arm to emphasise a point.
To my mind, there is no other part of a man’s body that so perfectly summons up the promise of what lies within than the forearm. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you see a man’s forearm, you can define pretty accurately what the rest of his body will look like and he will have no idea of how much can be
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