Obviously, it isn’t fine. But, come on, nobody forced them into the business.
The divorced and separated and widowed dads among us, of course, have their own take on things. They’re back on the market, whether they want to be or not, after years out of circulation. They all have thousand-yard stares, like men who have been under shellfire.
‘It’s all different now,’ they tell us.
We stop by a silver birch tree, its branches heavy with a month’s worth of snowfall.
‘Different how?’
‘Everyone has more choice than they know what to do with. More choice and more expectations. And less hair. Nobody is expected to have any hair anywhere any more.’
We know about the hair. Everyone knows about the hair.
‘The hair thing has been going on for a while,’ we explain to our sons.
We don’t know how we feel about the hair thing. These days, we realise, we tend to look at women’s bodies with a combination of nervousness and awe. Particularly the bodies of the mothers of our sons. We’ve seen what those bodies can do, what they can take. We’ve watched them carry and give birth to and nurture children.
We try not to think of women’s bodies – and, in particular, the bodies of the mothers of our sons – as sexy warzones, sexy former battlefields, because it doesn’t seem all that respectful.
But there we are.
We wonder how useful any of this is going to be to the gay sons.
‘Oh, you have no idea,’ say the gay dads.
But the snow has started falling again, muffling our voices, turning the world back to white, and we promised the mothers of our sons that we’d all be back in time for lunch.
We’re teaching our sons about plane crashes.
We’re teaching them how plane crashes happen, how to avoid or survive being in one. We’re teaching them that plane crashes are incredibly rare, that the chances of experiencing a plane crash on a commercial airliner are approximately five million to one. We’re teaching our sons that, no matter what they’ve seen on the internet, flying is far safer than driving, than travelling by train, than riding a bicycle.
Nevertheless, by the time the plane climbs to thirty-five thousand feet, we’ve already taken the emergency codeine we’ve been saving for exactly this sort of situation.
We’ve seen those plane crash films on the internet. We know all about shoe bombs, and anti-aircraft missiles, and iced-up pitot tubes, and wind shear, and thunderstorms, and botched inspections, and pilot error. We know how easy it is to unzip the thin aluminium tube we’re sitting in; how much time we’d have to think about our fate as we fell through the frozen air, to think about the fate of our sons.
Our sons aren’t scared of flying. They’re excited about being allowed to do nothing but watch inflight movies for six or seven hours. They point down at the glorious crimson cloud tops, at the ships on the sea, don’t even notice the bumps of random turbulence that cause us to clench our jaws.
We don’t want to look out of the window.
We tell our sons about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote The Little Prince, and who mysteriously disappeared while flying a reconnaissance mission in an unarmed P-38 during the Second World War. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whose father died before young Antoine’s fourth birthday.
Our sons haven’t read The Little Prince, haven’t even heard of it.
‘What are they teaching you these days?’ we ask.
Our sons put their headphones back on. We know what their teachers are teaching them. They’re teaching them to be better people.
Come to think of it, we haven’t read The Little Prince either.
We stay awake all night, listening for slight changes in the tone of the engines, for the sounds of structural failure in the airframe, for sudden announcements of catastrophe. We stare down at the lights of cities, watch for panic on the faces of the cabin crew.
We keep pressing the call button to get the attention of the cabin crew.
‘There was a noise,’ we say.
The cabin crew just smile, tell us everything is going to be okay, give us more complimentary drinks.
Our sons, more used to living in the permanent present than we are, alternately sleep or watch cartoons, magnificently unaware of all the disasters that life has planned for them.
The best we can do, we realise, is to keep their hearts from breaking for as long as possible.
We’re teaching our sons about the Big Bang.
We’re teaching them about the beginning of space-time, and the birth of the cosmos, and the origins of everything. We’re explaining how reality as we know it probably expanded, by accident, from an infinitely small singularity, on borrowed energy that will eventually have to be paid back. We’re trying to make it clear that we’re all potentially the result of a single overlooked instance of cosmological miscounting.
Somehow, we’ve come on a stag do to Amsterdam with our sons in tow.
It’s not going well.
It’s late in the year and Amsterdam is spectacularly beautiful. Along the Herengracht the low afternoon light paints the tall houses in colours that take our breath away. In the Rijksmuseum, the Vermeers and Rembrandts seem to glow from within. On Keizersgracht the most beautiful women in the world ride past us on vintage bicycles.
But whatever way you look at it, this is no place for fathers to bring their sons.
The older sons want to sneak off and look in the windows of the brothels and hang around outside the sex shows, and the younger ones keep being nearly run over by all the beautiful cyclists.
‘How was the world made?’ the younger sons ask us. ‘How did this all be true? Even before the olden days?’
We try to explain about false vacuums and the weak anthropic principle, about Higgs fields and the arrow of time, but it’s no good. Half the dads have already been out to a coffee shop ‘for a coffee’, and the other half are waiting for their turn.
‘But what about even before then?’ the younger sons ask us. ‘What was there before the bang?’
‘Well, before then … there wasn’t really a then for things to be before.’
Nobody is convinced by that. We don’t blame them. This whole trip was a terrible idea.
A
