Graham Swift: Shuttlecock

I kissed Marian briskly and brushed past her. After all, she is at home when the kids come in from school — she could stop this TV nonsense. I stood in the doorway to the living-room. ‘Hello!’ I said, and then again, more loudly, ‘Hello!’ Martin was sitting, both feet drawn up, cross-legged, in an armchair. In his lap was a plate with two or three digestive biscuits. He turned to look at me, actually biting, as he did so, on one of the biscuits. Peter lay, stomach down, on the floor, head propped in hands, feet in the air. He twitched his bottom.

I know they don’t look up to me. That is the nub of the matter. My own sons don’t look up to their father. They look up to the Bionic Man. The Bionic Man radiates Californian confidence. The Bionic Man performs impossible feats, solves impossible riddles and bears no relation to anything natural. But they look up to him, not their father.

I give them three seconds. Then I cross the room, passing between them, switch off the television and in the same movement round upon them.

‘Can’t you give your Dad a hello when he comes in from work?’

Almost instantly they chime, in unison, ‘Hello, Dad,’ as if this will make me turn on the television again and go away.

I glower at them. I know I am going to go through my whole performance; after the angry indignation, the mocking lecture.

‘What do you think this is?’ I pat the top of the television. ‘A machine, an object. It’s full of wires and valves. And what do you think this is?’ I touch my own breast. ‘This is your Dad. Can you spot the difference?’

Peter, my younger son, aged eight, stifles a giggle and lowers his head.

‘Right! Just for that, my boy —!’

I move suddenly forward to pull Peter up from the floor. I know I am about to act like an ogre, a madman — it’s happened before (when did all this begin?) but I can’t do anything about it. He tries to squirm free but I catch him by the collar. There is a moment when he swings obliquely, dangling in my grip, his sandalled feet not yet having found a footing on the floor, and just at this point, for some reason, I get a sudden mental vision of myself sitting in Quinn’s leather chair. At the same time I glimpse Marian standing in the doorway. She has been watching my anger with a resigned, long-suffering expression — she’s seen all this before too — but when I seize on Peter she bites her lip and clenches the tea-towel in her hand.

‘Don’t you smirk at your father when he’s telling you off!’

Peter is on his feet now. I have my hands on his shoulders and I’m giving him a good, vigorous shaking. His little protuberant eyes bounce back and forwards on the end of his neck.

I finish with him, though he goes on shaking even when I’ve released him. Martin hasn’t moved; he has a hand guiltily covering his biscuits.

‘There’ll be no more television for either of you! This evening or any evening! That’s final. Do you hear? I said, do you —’

From both of them comes a thin, compliant ‘Ye-es.’

And then, again, I know what is going to happen next. I can predict it like a scene in a play. Peter is going to cry. Not helpless tears, of shock and distress — though that is how they will seem, and they will be real enough tears — but tears that are quite perfectly timed and calculated. Both he and Martin know that I am easily beguiled by tears. I will even take back what I have said and say sorry, for tears. Underneath everything, they know that I am essentially a weak man. That’s just the trouble. They know that when I rave at them and wallop them it’s because I’m weak. That’s why they don’t say Hello and turn to look at me when I come in. So all this show of strength means nothing.

Sure enough, Peter starts to blubber.

‘Huh!’ I say. ‘The Bionic Man never cries, does he?’

Peter’s tears actually check slightly at this. But I have to think of something fast to avoid being swayed by them.

‘Now, shall I tell you what you are going to do, right this very instant? You are going to go out into the garden — on this nice, warm evening — and you are going to — dig out all the weeds in the far flowerbed —’ (even as I say this I remember that Marian has carried out precisely this task the previous afternoon) ‘— no, you are going to dig out all the stones, all the large stones, in all the flowerbeds, and put them in a neat pile by the compost heap. Do you understand? Do you —?’

‘Ye-es.’

‘And you say Hello to me when I come in — okay?’

‘Ye-es.’

‘Well out you go then!’

And later, if they had dared and wished to, the boys could have seen Marian and me, through the kitchen window, arguing like sparring fish in a tank. They would have seen me jerking my hands and pointing my finger and Marian clamping her hand over the top of her head, as though to hold it in place, the way she does when she argues. We nearly always argue after my outbursts with the kids. It’s not so much that Marian takes issue with me for letting fly at them (she gave that up a long time ago) but that my tirades against the boys never seem to get used up or have sufficient effect with them alone and have to spill over onto Marian.

‘We don’t live at the top of a concrete block, do we? Or underground,’ I add for some reason. ‘We live in a house, with a garden. There’s a common just up the road. Grass, trees. It’s spring, isn’t it?’ I wave a hand towards the window. ‘Warm weather. So why do they have to sit in front of the television all the time?’

‘Yes! Yes! I’m not arguing with you! I’m not your children, am I? Ask them. Find out from them!’

‘It’s unnatural.’

‘All right. Ask them . You’re in charge.’

Through the window, Martin and Peter are crouched, backs half turned towards us, at the edge of one of the flowerbeds. It is already getting dark. They can probably hear Marian and me arguing. Our garden, like the gardens of the other houses in the road, is small — more a sort of extended back-yard. And it has a wall all the way round it so that anyone in it, viewed from the house, looks confined. Martin has a red polo-neck sweater and Peter a brown one and they both wear identical child’s blue jeans. They seem to be going through some strange semblance of activity, half earnest, half ironic. There are no large stones in our well-dug flowerbeds. They are looking for these mysterious large stones.

‘Tomorrow morning I want you to go down to that rental place and ask them to take our television back.’

‘Oh come on!’

‘I mean it. You do it. I thought you weren’t arguing with me. I meant what I said tonight. You stop the payments and get them to take back the television.’

‘I’m not going to do that.’

‘Oh yes you are,’ I say, grabbing Marian’s arm and poking a finger almost into her face. ‘Yes you bloody well are!’ Her eyes bob just like Peter’s.

And I’m suddenly astounded that all this is so predictable, and yet unpredictable too. Coming home and being bad-tempered and aggressive. As if every night I mean to be different. And tonight I had actually said to myself: a warm evening at the end of April; my interview with Quinn; my penitence on the train. I will say to Marian, ‘Get an old crust of stale bread. Come with me. We’re going to feed the ducks on Clapham Common.’ You see, underneath, I am a soft-hearted man. I wouldn’t even have minded if the kids had wanted to stay in watching television. So much the better. I’ve never told Marian about Quinn and what’s going on at our office. There might have been ducklings on the pond, following their mothers — line astern. We’d have stood and thrown bread in the water. Marian would have been baffled. And perhaps I might have told her about my promotion.