structure) which was located (and this meant nothing to Fleet, he was six years old, and geography, to him, was just a clumsy four-syllable word) in the beautiful, French medieval town of Albi.
Fleet’s tools: a trusty pair of children’s paper-cutting scissors (the blades of which he’d secretly stropped on a stone until they were razor-sharp), some general-purpose adhesive (the white kind which came in a blue tub and smelled of marzipan), and matchsticks (in abundance; pristine – never spent – with the brightly tinted sulphured end cleanly lopped off).
He had a small black and white picture of the cathedral (a partial view – it was a monumental, many-faceted construction, 200 years in the making) which he’d discovered, by chance (at least, that’s how he remembered it), aged four, in a French holiday brochure. He liked to keep it hidden (he didn’t know why: instinct, perhaps) inside a folded strip of cardboard hoarded from a cereal packet, shoved under the dishcloths in the back of a kitchen drawer.
Sometimes he would creep into the kitchen at night with his torch, open the drawer and stare at the picture for hours, without blinking (or until his re-chargeable batteries faded). He would consume it, devour it. Then he would squirrel it away, and not feel the need to refer to it for days.
It was all a question of dimensions with Fleet, and of form: the scale of a thing, the logistics (what was feasible, what was not). Aesthetics didn’t enter into it. Beauty was just something that worked. Beauty paid its way. It was infrastructure. It was superstructure. All the rest was simply floss.
He had no pictorial evidence of the cathedral’s interior (which was legendarily beautiful, with an immense nave containing an Italian fresco of the Last Judgement, hundreds of sculptures, and one of the world’s most impressive organs), but the inside of his matchstick monolith had been just as fastidiously re-created (was just as pristine – no bish-bosh job, this) as the exterior.
He’d made certain, educated leaps based on his tours of Ashford Church (the inside a crazy mish-mash of ancient period detail) and – but of course – two wonderful day trips he’d taken (aged three and a half and five) to the astonishing medieval village of Chilham, with its grand, stately home, thirteenth-century church and numerous timber-framed houses and cottages.
It was a big project –
Big
– and his parents weren’t what you might call ‘entirely behind it’. In fact they’d done everything they possibly could to try and disrupt him (financial and spatial restraints had been suddenly – and arbitrarily – imposed at various points, karate lessons were posited, extra reading classes, the bloody cubs).
Fleet was even suspicious – although this was sheer paranoia on his part – that the leaky roof scenario was yet another complex gambit they’d suddenly dreamed up to foil his progress (since his quality time alone with the cathedral had been profoundly undermined by it).
The truth was that Elen and Dory hadn’t particularly minded the cathedral – at least, not at first. They’d found it charming; extraordinary, even (although – as was only to be expected – their tolerance of ‘difference’, or – worse still – of ‘eccentricity’, was entirely predicated by Isidore’s own mental health scenario. The question of heredity was naturally an explosive one).
Fleet’s burgeoning ‘obsession’ with structure (and they didn’t even dare use this key word in private together) had been some time in the making, although Isidore held himself chiefly responsible for initiating this current phase (which they both thought especially severe), after he’d idly bought Fleet a small, Airfix aeroplane from a closing-down sale in a local toy shop.
His son had always been a frail, cerebral little creature – physically unadventurous – and his father (in whom nature found the perfect, working definition of ‘robust’) battled constantly to try and toughen him up. He’d take him out for walks, or cycling, or to the park to mess around on the Adventure Playground. He tried to interest him in competitive sports.
Fleet absolutely dreaded these activity-based excursions, would be sullen, uncooperative, virtually monosyllabic. When his father threw a ball at him, he’d simply neglect to raise his hands, and if it hit him, he would buckle and fall, without a sound (like a tragic young soldier in a silent film, mown down, in his prime, on the front line).
Sometimes his mother joined them (acting as a buffer between her husband’s enthusiasm and her son’s recalcitrance) and he’d cling miserably to her skirts, begging her, in urgent whispers, to help him, to save him, to just take him home again.
Isidore felt like the whole world was alien to his son; that he was a stranger, dispositionally; that there was a quality within him which was fundamentally ‘foreign’ (this was something which he understood only too well himself – and why on earth wouldn’t he? It was the keynote of his own existence; something, as a German, an outlander, that he battled constantly to overcome). Yet he found Fleet’s total inability to fit in – the boy’s effortless facility for bucking and chafing against even the most basic of social conventions – unbelievably infuriating.
Home life wasn’t much better. When they’d moved to the new Cedar Wood development, Fleet had been inconsolable for weeks; kept feeling for the familiar walls of the old house whenever he walked in his sleep – as he sometimes would, when he was especially stressed – calling out, in sheer terror, when he couldn’t locate them; or, worse still, they’d discover him, pushing, exhaustedly (tears streaking his cheeks, panting for breath) against a solid surface, as if fully expecting that it might desolidify in front of him…(or that he might, even).
During his waking hours he rigorously avoided the new kitchen appliances, quivered at the bathroom taps, baulked at the low-flush toilet and the dimmer switches. He even had to re-learn how to use his fork (exactly the same fork he’d used at their previous address); would hold it, loosely, in his hand, head tipped on one side, like a suspicious young thrush, inspecting the prongs with a mixture of fury and wonder.
It was all a matter of context, Isidore felt, and a question of adaptation. Neither of these concepts had any kind of hold on him. His dreamy, impish mind would simply wriggle free and he’d be set loose in the world again, unconstrained by anything.
It was an awful kind of liberty.
Model building – on the other hand – was something they could share in, something simple and quiet and relaxing; a perfect opportunity – or so Dory thought – for a little gentle father and son bonding. After the plane they’d made a tank (Isidore still taking the lead at this stage, Fleet mainly standing by, standing back, observing), then a sports car.
They’d graduated on to aquatic vehicles – a hovercraft, a submarine. Finally, a boat. A big one. Fleet chose the model himself (as a special fifth birthday treat). He plumped for a clipper (a 200 foot-er).
He built the bulk of the main structure, virtually single-handed, in just under three days (the age recommendation of the box specified twelve years and over) then got caught up in the rigging – tangled, knotted – spent hours on end perfecting the whole thing, even adding – much to Isidore’s amazement – several home-made modifications where, apparently, ‘the model wasn’t proper.’
They’d visited the Cutty Sark, in Greenwich, as a family, when Fleet was just a toddler, and he’d completed a school project on deep sea diving (earning himself a much-coveted gold star), but these meagre, boat-related provenances were barely adequate – Dory felt – to justify the extent of his son’s precocity.
There
