Owen Booth - What We’re Teaching Our Sons

At an undisclosed location, the television reports tell us, tissue samples will be taken and the whale will be cut up and incinerated.

And we will be left to explain to our sons what the whole thing means.

We’re teaching our sons about their grandfathers.

Their silent, phlegmatic grandfathers who have survived wars and fifty-year marriages. Their grandfathers who are spending their retirement building model worlds out of balsa wood, plastic and flock.

We go round to see the grandfathers. We give the secret password. The loft hatch opens and a ladder is lowered. We usher our sons up the ladder, up into the darkness.

The grandfathers have been working up here for the last five years, tunnelling further back into the eaves, back into their own pasts.

At first they managed to maintain their relationships with their wives by coming down for meals and at bedtimes. They still mowed the lawn at weekends. Interacted with neighbours. Read the paper in the evening.

Then they built a system of pulleys that meant they could have their food sent up to them, so they could eat while they worked. The lawn grew wild. Social occasions were missed. Eighteen months ago they started sleeping among the miles of miniature railway track, the half-finished buildings, the replica suspension bridges and goods yards. Waking up to find the trains had been running all night, the endless tiny whirr and clatter rattling through their dreams.

The grandmothers, with their own interesting lives to lead, barely notice their husbands’ absence any more.

Fairy lights run the length of the roof, hanging above the miniature town like stars. Below, a single evening in the lives of the grandfathers is perfectly recreated in OO scale. The trolley buses. Posters outside the old cinema. People leaving work. A dark swell on the surface of the water in the harbour.

The families of the grandfathers, everything they own packed in suitcases, waiting at the station.

And the grandfathers themselves, as boys, searching desperately through the streets for their own silent, unknowable fathers.

We tell our sons not to touch anything, even as they grab for a small model dog and accidentally sideswipe an entire bus queue with their sleeve. The youngest knocks over a crane and causes a minor disaster down at the docks. The older boys attempt to engineer horrific train crashes.

The grandfathers set about them, us, with their belts. Chase us, yelling, from the loft.

‘We forgive you!’ we scream, as the grandfathers pursue us down the street.

We’re teaching our sons about women.

What they mean. Where they come from. Where they’re headed, as individuals and as a gender.

We remind our sons that their mothers are women, that their cousins are women, that their aunts are women, that their grandmothers are women. The mothers of our sons confirm their status. They’re intrigued to know where we’re going with this.

We take our sons to art galleries and museums where they can look at women as they have been depicted for hundreds of years.

In the art galleries the security guards eye us warily, watch to make sure our sons don’t go too near the valuable paintings and sculptures. There is a security guard in every room, sitting in a chair, keeping an eye on the art. The security guards are all different ages and sizes and shapes. At least half of them are women. There are arty young women and middle-aged women with glasses and older women with severe, asymmetrical haircuts.

Our sons stand in front of the works of art, under the watchful eyes of the security guards. In the works of art young women in various states of undress alternately have mostly unwanted sexual experiences or recline on and/or against things. They recline on and/or against sofas and mantelpieces and beds and picnic blankets and tombs and marble steps and piles of furs and ornamental pillars and horses and cattle. Some of the women are giant-sized. They sprawl across entire rooms in the museum. Their naked breasts and hips loom over our sons like thunder clouds.

‘Is that what all women look like with no clothes on?’ our sons ask us, nervously.

‘Some of them,’ we say, nodding, relying on our extensive experience. ‘Not all.’

Our sons gaze up at the giant women, awed. They sneak glances at the women security guards, try to make sense of it all.

‘What do women want?’ our sons ask.

We notice the women security guards looking at us with interest. We consider our words carefully.

‘Maybe the same as the rest of us?’ we say.

The women security guards are still staring at us.

‘Somewhere to live,’ we add. ‘A sense of purpose. Food. Dignity, most likely.’

‘What about adventure?’ our sons ask. ‘What about fast cars? What about romance?’

We look over at the women security guards, hoping for a sign.

We’re not getting out of this one that easily.

We’re teaching our sons about money.

We’re teaching them that money is the most important thing there is. We’re teaching them that they can never have enough money, that their enemies can never have too little. We’re teaching them that money has an intrinsic worth beyond the things that it can buy, that money is a measure of their worth as men .

Alternatively, we’re teaching our sons that money is an illusion. That it doesn’t matter at all. That, most of the time, it doesn’t even exist.

‘Look at the financial industry,’ we tell them. ‘Look at derivatives. Look at credit default swaps. Look at infinite rehypothecation.’

Our sons nod at us, blankly. They’re not old enough for any of this. What were we thinking?

Together with our sons we go on the run, hiding out in a series of anonymous motels. The receptionists accept our false names without asking any questions. At three in the morning we peer out through the blinds or the heavy curtains, look for the lights of police cars out in the rain while our sons sleep.

‘Who’s out there?’ our sons ask in their sleep. ‘What do they want?’

We can’t remember the last time we slept in our own beds, cooked a meal in our own kitchens. The mothers of our sons have indulged this nonsense for far too long.

Most importantly, we’re teaching our sons how to make money. We’re putting them to work as paper boys, as child actors, as tiny bodyguards. We’re turning them into musical prodigies, poets and prize-winning authors. We’re getting them to write memoirs of their troubled upbringings. We’re using them to make false insurance claims. We’re training them to throw themselves in front of cars and fake serious injuries.

And the cash is rolling in. We’ve had to buy a job lot of counting machines.

We sit up long into the night listening to the constant whirr of the counting machines as they sing the song of our growing fortune, and we watch the rise and fall of our beautiful sleeping sons’ chests.

We’re teaching our sons about geology.

We’re teaching them about sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic rocks, about plate tectonics, about continental drift. We’re teaching them about the history of the earth, and the fossil record, and deep time.

It’s making us feel old.

Our sons want to learn about volcanoes, so we book an out-of-season holiday to Iceland. We stand on the edge of the Holuhraun lava field, staring down into the recently re-awoken inferno. Swarms of separate eruptions throw magma across the blackened, stinking landscape. Dressed in their silver heatproof suits, our sons look like an army of miniature henchmen.

We tell our sons about Eyjafjallajökull and Mount St Helens, about Krakatoa and Pompeii. We tell them how the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 led to a year without summer around the globe. We tell them about the supervolcano under Yellowstone park that may one day wipe out half the continental United States.