Tony Parsons - Starting Over

The silent prayer of the terrified parent.

I wanted to stop the clock.

We rarely saw Rufus at breakfast. In the morning he was an almost mythical figure, elusive yet lumbering, his enormous form sometimes glimpsed banging out the door, rucksack stuffed with books slung over one shoulder like the Yeti of Year 13, or whatever they call the sixth form these days.

The kitchen was full of clues that he had already come and gone. His chair pushed roughly back. A lone Coco Pop on the floor. The cereal bowl dumped in the sink for someone else to wash up.

I felt a ripple of irritation. I knew what this was about. He just wanted to avoid my porridge.

I made one meal a day for my family, and it was breakfast – tasty, nutritious Scott’s Porage Oats. I figured a healthy start balanced out the unhealthy remainder of my day – the cigarettes I secretly puffed, the junk food I noshed at work, the spikes of blood pressure. Every morning I built a barrier against early death. A wall of porridge. But my son never stuck around for it.

Lara appeared as I was drying his bowl. ‘He makes me so angry,’ I said.

She kissed my cheek and patted my ribs. ‘Everything makes you angry, darling.’ She looked up at the ceiling. ‘Ruby!’ No response. She took the bowl from me and put it away, shaking her head. ‘She’ll be late again. Go and get her, will you?’

I checked that the porridge was simmering nicely and went back upstairs. The door to our daughter’s room was open. She was sitting at her computer, in her school uniform, pulling her hair back and knotting it in a ponytail. I smiled at the seriousness of the expression on what was a fifteen-year-old version of her mother’s perfect face.

It wasn’t true that everything made me angry.

My daughter never made me angry.

I could hardly look at her without smiling.

And it had always been that way.

Apocalyptic images moved across her computer screen. Factories belching industrial filth. Dead fish floating in polluted rivers. Highways jammed with unmoving cars.

‘Anyone in here like porridge?’ I said, knocking on the open door.

‘Just let me…’ Her voice trailed away as she stared at ice caps melting, the earth’s crust boiling, the sky ripped asunder by plague and pestilence. ‘I just have to see…’

‘Ruby,’ I said, ‘don’t worry about all that stuff. It’s not the end of the world.’

She looked at me and grimaced. ‘That’s not funny, Daddy.’

But it made me laugh.

When we came downstairs the porridge had gently bubbled to that perfect consistency of creamy thickness that I liked.

Lara came in from the garden, holding something in her right hand. A cigarette butt. She threw it at me. It hit me in the middle of the chest, just where I always felt the tightness. A spitfire, my dad would say. She’s a little spitfire.

‘Do you know what that is, George?’ she said, her eyes shining. ‘That’s another nail in your coffin.’ She sat down at the breakfast table and covered her face with her hands. Ruby and I looked at each other and then back at Lara. ‘Thanks a lot, George,’ my wife said, her voice muffled by her hands. ‘Thanks a bloody million.’

Then we ate our porridge.

Rufus was still at the bus stop.

I stopped the car on the other side of the road and opened the window. He looked across at the car containing his father, his mother and his sister, and seemed to cringe, and looked away. There were a few other kids from his school at the bus stop, but he didn’t seem to be with any of them.

‘Do you want a lift?’ I shouted, the rush-hour traffic roaring between us.

He tore his eyes from the pavement and screwed up his face. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Can’t hear.’ Other kids stared across at us.

I looked at Lara in the passenger’s seat. ‘What could I possibly be asking him? What else could I conceivably be asking the kid?’

Ruby leaned forward. ‘What’s the capital of Peru? If God really exists then why is there so much suffering in the world?’ She sat back with a chuckle, smiling wearily at her big brother scanning the street for a sign of his bus. ‘He wants to get the bus, Daddy.’

She was right.

So we left him at the bus stop, and took Ruby to school – right up to the gates. We were still allowed to do that. She even gave us both a peck on the face, without first checking who might see.

She really did make me smile all the time.

And the smile only faded when she fell into step with one of her classmates, and I saw her moving her skinny hips from side to side as she hiked up her grey skirt. She had started wearing her white school socks above her knee and it was not a good look.

‘Young lady,’ I called.

She turned, raised her plucked eyebrows, and gave us a little wave of the hand that could have meant anything. Okay. Goodbye. Bugger off. But the hemline on that grey school skirt did not go any higher, and that felt like the most I could ask for.

Lara touched her watch as we eased back into the slow morning traffic. ‘I’m going to be late,’ she said.

I hit a switch on the dashboard.

‘No, you’re not,’ I said.

I swung the car to the wrong side of the road as the siren began to wail, watching the oncoming traffic pulling over at the sight of the two blue lights that were flashing inside my grille, and everyone hearing me long before they saw me, and all of them getting out of the way.

Life the way it should be.

‘You know you shouldn’t do this,’ Lara said, sinking into her seat with embarrassment, but laughing at the same time.

I smiled, happy to make my wife happy, proud that I could get her to work on time, and looking forward to the moment when I was alone at last, and lighting up the first one of the day.

Just as Eskimos have fifty different words for snow, so the police have endless terms for the copper who never leaves the station.

Station cat. Canteen cowboy. Shiny arse. Clothes hanger. Uniform carrier. Bongo (Books On, Never Goes Out). Flub (Fat Lazy Useless Bastard). And an Olympic torch (yet another thing that never goes out).

And despite the light show that I had put on for Lara, that was me. A shiny-arsed canteen cowboy. Or at least, that is what I had become.

I was third generation. My father and grandfather were both coppers. Unfortunately, policing wasn’t the only thing that ran in the family. So did heart disease. Health issues, a man with glasses called it, not an expression that my grandfather or my father ever had to hear. So despite the dodgy tickers that ran in the family, the old boys never suffered the humiliation of being a shiny-arsed station cat.

But that was another time.

When I got to the station, I went straight to the parade. This is the part of the day that the cop shows get right – a room full of men and a few women, most of them in uniform, all of them drinking the first caffeine of the day while listening to an Onion – onion bhaji, sargie, sergeant – also known as the skipper – talk them through the shift ahead. At the back of the room I saw someone watching me. A heavy man in his forties wearing a cheap suit, grubby white shirt and a tie as lifeless as a dead snake. My old partner, Keith, now in the company of some bright-eyed young boy who was actually taking notes. Keith grinned and lifted his Styrofoam cup in salute, spilt a splash of tea on his chin, cursed and wiped it off with the back of his hand. Then, stifling a yawn, he looked back at the Onion.

‘Might seem a long way off, but already we need to start thinking about Carnival weekend. I have before me the official figures –’ the Onion was saying, turning a page of his notes ‘– and I know you will all be enormously relieved to hear that, according to these statistics, last year’s Carnival went off without a major incident.’