Connie and I also argued. Raising Albie accentuated the differences between us, differences that had seemed merely entertaining in the carefree days before parenthood. She was, to my mind, absurdly informal and laissez-faire. To take an analogy from botany, she imagined a child as an unopened flower; a parent had a responsibility to provide light and water, but also to stand back and watch. ‘He can do anything he wants,’ she said, ‘as long as he’s happy and cool.’ In contrast, I saw no reason why the flower should not be bracketed to a bamboo stick, pruned, exposed to artificial light; if it made for a stronger, more resilient plant, why not? Of course Connie cajoled and encouraged him and made him do his homework, but still she felt that his natural qualities and talents would make themselves known unaided. I did not believe in natural talents. For me, nothing had ever come naturally, not even science. I had been obliged to work hard, often with my parents standing at either shoulder, and saw no reason why Albie shouldn’t too.
And Albie could be maddening, quite maddening; self-pitying, irresponsible, lazy, and was I really so oppressive and joyless, so short-tempered and ill-humoured? I’d meet other boys’ dads at school events, sports days and fundraising barbecues, note their avuncular ease, their joshing tone, like football managers coaxing a promising young player. I’d watch them for clues.
Albie’s best friend Ryan’s father was a farm-worker, handsome, stubbled, frequently topless for no good reason, always smelling of beer and engine oil. Mike was a widower, bringing up Ryan in a shabby bungalow at the edge of the village, and Albie became infatuated with this pair, would go there after school to play violent video games in a house where the curtains were perpetually closed and the weekly shop came from the petrol station. I went to pick Albie up one night, edging past the caravan, the dismantled cars and motorbikes and barking dogs to find Mike with his shirt off, sitting in a deckchair and smoking something other than tobacco.
‘Hello, Mike! Any sign of Albie?’
He raised a can in greeting. ‘Last I saw he was on the roof.’
‘Okay. On the roof?’
‘Up there. They’re doing target practice.’
‘Oh. Okay. They have a gun?’
‘Only my old air rifle.’
On cue I felt movement in the air near my ear as a pellet pinged off the cement mixer and ricocheted into the unmown grass. I looked up in time to see Albie’s grinning face disappearing behind the guttering. ‘What can I say?’ said Mike. ‘Boys’ll be boys.’
Ryan’s house became a kind of paradise that summer, Ryan’s dad a kind of god. He let them drive the van, climb towering trees, go night-fishing; he’d drive them to quarries, the two of them bouncing around in an open-bed truck, and hurl them off high rocks into the black water. The rustier and sharper an object, the more exposed the wires and blades, the more suitable a toy for the boys to play with. They welded! He let them weld! Mike never sat Ryan down to patiently explain the periodic table; there were no ‘school nights’ in Mike’s domain. Oh no, life with Mike was just one long burning mattress. ‘I think Albie’s spending too much time at Ryan’s,’ I said, after one more revision session disintegrated into tears, bribes and acrimony. ‘We can’t ban him,’ said Connie. ‘Forbidding it will just make it more appealing.’ This was a notion that I found alien. When my father forbade something, it became forbidden, not appealing.
Sometimes Mike would drop Albie home at some ungodly hour and he and Connie would stand in the front garden talking, talking. ‘He’s very charming,’ she’d say, flushing slightly on her return. ‘He’s sparky, he’s got a twinkle. I think it’s admirable, the way he brings up Ryan on his own.’
Admirable! What was admirable about letting your kid run wild, with no thought to his future? What about my work, the years of late-night study that had been required to get me there? Albie had no desire to come and see the lab and meet my colleagues. If anything, he had a vague contempt for it, part of a growing ‘political’ consciousness that he refused to debate with me. ‘What does Ryan’s dad do, exactly?’ I’d ask. Albie didn’t know, but he knew about the girls, scarcely more than teenagers, that Ryan’s dad brought back from the pub. He knew about the roll of banknotes that Mike kept, squeezed into the pocket of his greasy jeans.
A showdown was inevitable, and it came at the school’s annual Parents’ and Teachers’ Quiz, part of the never-ending jamboree of social events to raise funds for a new theatre (because it’s always a new theatre that’s needed, or a pottery kiln or a piano, never a new centrifuge or fume cupboard).
