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What We’re Teaching Our Sons. Owen Booth
Читать онлайн.Название What We’re Teaching Our Sons
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isbn 9780008282608
Автор произведения Owen Booth
Жанр Современная зарубежная литература
Издательство HarperCollins
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We’re teaching our sons about the great outdoors.
We’re teaching them how to appreciate the natural world, how to understand it, how to survive in it. As concerned fathers have apparently been teaching their sons since the Palaeolithic.
We’re teaching our sons how to make fires and lean-to shelters, how to tie twenty-five different kinds of knot, how to construct animal traps from branches and vines. We’re teaching them how to catch things, how to kill things, how to gut things. Out on the frozen marshes before dawn we produce hundreds of rabbits out of sacks, try to show our sons how to skin the rabbits.
Our sons look over our shoulders, distracted by the beautiful sunrise. They don’t want anything to do with skinning rabbits.
Out on the frozen marsh we explain the importance of being self-sufficient, and capable, and knowing the names of different cloud formations and geological features, and how to identify birds by their song.
‘Cumulonimbus,’ we say. ‘Cirrus. Altostratus. Terminal moraine. Blackbird. Thrush. Wagtail.’
We hand out fact sheets and pencils, collect the rabbits. We promise prizes to whoever can identify the most types of trees.
‘Can we set things on fire again?’ our sons ask.
The stiff grass creaks under our feet as we make our way back to the car park. The sky is the colour of rusted copper.
‘Can we set fire to a car?’
‘No, you can’t set fire to a car,’ we say. ‘Why would you want to set fire to a car?’
‘To see what would happen,’ our sons mutter, sticking their bottom lips out.
We look at our sons, half in fear, wondering what we have made.
We’re teaching our sons about drowning.
We tell them how we almost drowned when we were four years old. How we can still remember the feeling of being dragged along the bottom of the swollen river, the gravel in our faces, the smell of the hospital that lingered for weeks afterwards.
We don’t want this to happen to our sons. Or worse.
We take our sons swimming every Sunday morning, try to teach them how to stay afloat. Each week we have to find a new swimming pool, slightly further from where we live, slightly more overcrowded. The council is methodically demolishing all the sports centres in the borough as part of the Olympic dividend.
We are being concentrated into smaller and smaller spaces.
In the water our sons cling to us. Our hundreds of sons. They splash and kick their legs gamely, but they don’t seem to be getting any closer to being able to swim. We have to bribe them to put their faces under the water, and the price goes up every week.
We’re sure it wasn’t like this when we were children.
The water is a weird colour and tiles keep falling off the ceiling onto the swimmers’ heads. A scum of discarded polystyrene cups floats in the corner of the pool. It’s hotter than a sauna in here.
Also, we keep being distracted by the sight of the swimsuited mothers. The mothers who come in all sorts of fantastic shapes and sizes. They look as sleek as sea otters in their black swimsuits. They make us ashamed of our hairy backs, our formerly impressive chests, our pathetic tattoos.
We hope they can look at us with kinder eyes.
We crouch low in the water like middle-aged crocodiles, stealing glances at the sleek sea-otter mothers, and our sons put their arms around our necks and refuse to let go.
In the changing rooms we hold on to our sons’ tiny, fragile bodies; feel the terrible responsibility of lost socks, and impending colds, and the effects of chlorine on skin and lungs. We wrap our sons in towels, blow dry their hair, try not to consider the future and all the upcoming catastrophes that we can’t protect them from.
We promise ourselves that next week we’ll get it right.