Hanif Kureishi - Collected Stories

‘Watch, you guys! Pay attention!’ he said.

What were fathers for if not to kick balls high into the air while their sons leaned back, exclaiming, ‘Wow, you’ve nearly broken through the clouds! How do you do that, Daddy?’

He enjoyed it when, after this display, they grabbed the ball and tried to kick it as he had done. The seven-year-olds, who lived a few streets away with their mother but were staying for the weekend, had begun to imitate many of the things he did, some of which he was proud of, some of which were ridiculous or irrelevant, like wearing dark glasses in the evening. When they went out together they resembled the Blues Brothers. Even the two-year-old had begun to copy the languid way he spoke and the way he lay on the couch, reading the paper. It was like being surrounded by a crowd of venomous cartoonists.

Now, the father dropped the ball towards his foot but mis-kicked it.

‘Higher, Daddy!’ called the two-year-old. ‘Up, up, sky!’

The two-year-old had long blond hair, jaggedly cut by his mother, who leaned over his cot with a torch and scissors while he was asleep. The boy was wearing a nappy, socks, T-shirt and shoes, but had refused to put his trousers on. The father had lacked the heart to force him.

The father jogged across and fetched the ball. Making the most of their attention while he still had it, he screamed, ‘Giggs, Scholes, Beckham, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy — it’s gone in!’ and drove the ball as hard and far as he could, before slipping over in the mud.

Some shared silences, particularly those of confusion and dis belief, you never want to end, so rare and involving are they.

The oldest twin set down and opened the small suitcase in which he kept his guns, the books he’d written and a photograph of the Empire State Building. He peered into the tree through the wrong end of his new binoculars.

‘It’s far, far away, nearly in heaven,’ he said. ‘Here, you see.’

The father got to his feet. Removing his sunglasses, he was already looking up to where the ball, like an errant crown, was resting on a nest of smallish twigs, at the top of a tree not far from the entrance to the playground.

The two-year-old said, ‘Stuck.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said the father.

‘Bloody bloody,’ repeated the two-year-old.

The father glanced towards the playground. His wife-to-be still hadn’t emerged.

‘Throw things!’ he said. One of the older boys picked up a leaf and tossed it backwards over his head. The father said, ‘Hard things, men! Come on! Together we can do this!’

The twins, who welcomed the pure concentration of a crisis, began to run about gathering stones and conkers. The father did the same. The youngest boy jumped up and down, flinging bits of bark. Soon, the air was filled with a hail of firm objects, one of which struck a dog and another the leg of a kid passing on a bicycle. The father picked up one of the twins’ metal guns and hurled it wildly into the tree.

‘You’ll break it!’ said the son reproachfully. ‘I only got it yesterday.’ The father began to march away. ‘Where are you going?’ called the boy.

‘I’m not going to hang around here all day!’ replied the father. ‘I need coffee — right now!’

He would leave the cheap plastic ball and, if necessary, buy another one on the way home.

Did he, though, want his sons to see him as the sort of man to kick balls into trees and stroll away? What would he be doing next — dropping twenty-pound notes and leaving them on the street because he couldn’t be bothered to bend down?

‘What are you up to?’ His wife-to-be had come out of the playground. She picked up the youngest child and kissed his eyes. ‘What has Daddy done now?’

The twins were still throwing things, mostly at each other’s heads.

‘Stop that!’ ordered the father, coming back. ‘Let’s have some discipline here!’

‘You told us to do it!’ said the elder twin.

The second twin said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m going up.’

Probably the most intrepid of the two, he ran to the base of the tree. As well as his Indiana Jones hat, the second twin was wearing a rope at his belt ‘for lassoing’, though the only thing he seemed to catch was the neck of the two-year-old, whom otherwise, most of the time, he liked. At six o’clock that morning the father had found him showing the little one his penis, explaining that if he tugged at the end and thought, as he put it, about something ‘really horrible, like Catwoman’, it would feel ‘sweet and sour’ and ‘quite relaxed’.

The boy was saying, ‘Push me up, Daddy. Push, push, push!’

The father bundled him into the fork of the tree, where he clung on enthusiastically but precariously, like someone who’d been dumped on the back of a horse for the first time.

‘Put me up there too,’ said a girl of about nine, who’d been watching and was now jumping up and down beside him. ‘I can climb trees!’

The two-year-old, who had a tooth coming through and whose face was red and constantly wet, said, ‘Me in tree.’

‘I can’t put the whole lot of you up there,’ said the father.

The youngest said, ‘Daddy go in tree.’

‘Good idea,’ said his wife-to-be.

‘I’d be up there like a shot,’ said the father. ‘But not in this new shirt.’

His wife-to-be was laughing. ‘And not in any month with an “r” in it.’

Unlike most of his male antecedents, the father had never fought in a war, nor had he been called upon for any act of physical bravery. He had often wondered what sort of man he’d be in such circumstances.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘You’ll see!’

They were all watching as the father helped the boy down and clambered into the tree himself. His wife-to-be, who was ten years younger, shoved him with unnecessary roughness from behind, until he was out of reach.

Feeling unusually high up, the father waved grandly like a president in the door of an aeroplane. His family waved back. He extended a foot onto another branch and put his weight onto it. It cracked immediately and gave way; he stepped back to safety, hoping no one had noticed the blood drain from his face.

He might, this Sunday morning, be standing on tip-toe in the fork of a tree, a slip away from hospital and years of pain, but he did notice that he had the quiet attention of his family, without the usual maelstrom of their demands. He thought that however much he missed the peace and irresponsibility of his extended bachelorhood, he had at least learned that life was no good on your own. Next week, though, he was going to America for five months, to do research. He would ring the kids, but knew they were likely to say, in the middle of a conversation, ‘Goodbye, we have to watch The Flintstones ,’ and replace the receiver. When he returned, how different would they be?

Now he could hear his wife-to-be’s voice calling, ‘Shake it!’

‘Wiggle it!’ shouted one of the boys.

‘Go, go, go!’ yelled the girl.

‘Okay, okay,’ he muttered.

At their instigation, he leaned against a fat branch in front of him, grasped it, gritted his teeth, and agitated it. To his surprise and relief there was some commotion in the leaves above him. But he could also see that there was no relation between this activity and the position of the ball, far away.

The nine-year-old girl was now climbing into the tree with him, reaching out and grasping the belt of his trousers as she levered herself up. It was getting a little cramped on this junction, but she immediately started up into the higher branches, stamping on his fingers as she disappeared.

Soon, there was a tremendous shaking, far greater than his own, which brought leaves, twigs, small branches and bark raining down onto the joggers, numerous children and an old woman on sticks who were now staring at the hullabaloo in the tree.