16. Willow
— ? —
Willow
He asked for a whole afternoon, which was outside the terms, and he asked properly, which was worse.
“I want to make him something.”
“Make him what?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“You have to.”
“If I say it and it doesn’t work, then I’ve told you about a thing that didn’t work.” He was standing at the gate with his hands in his pockets, on the correct side of it, the way he has been every day for weeks. “Let me have the afternoon. If it’s rubbish you’ll never hear about it.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“No.”
“Is it expensive?”
“Define expensive.”
“Michael.”
“It’s not a pony,” he said. “At no point today will there be a pony. I want that clearly understood.”
“That’s not the reassurance you think it is.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got.”
Say no, I thought. Say no and he’ll go, and you’ll have won a thing that cost you nothing and made your son sad.
I gave him the afternoon.
I do not know what to do with an afternoon.
That is not a joke and I did not find it funny at the time. The house was empty, actually empty, in a way it has not been since before Archie, and I stood in Ruth’s kitchen with my hands hanging off the ends of my arms like a woman waiting for instructions.
So I cleaned a cupboard nobody uses. It did not need it. It had not needed it when Ruth was alive and it did not need it now, and I did it anyway, because my hands wanted a job and my head was not going to give them one.
Then I sat down. Then I got up again, because sitting down in an empty house in the middle of the afternoon made my skin go strange, and I started on the second cupboard, and somewhere in the middle of it I got properly angry.
It took me a while to work out what at.
You had a whole life, I thought. You had a self, with edges on it, and preferences, and things you wanted on your own behalf.
And you handed it over in installments so small that not one of them was worth arguing about at the time.
A weekend here. A Christmas there. A name on a lease.
And now you’re standing in somebody else’s kitchen with a cloth in your hand, waiting for a two-year-old to come home and need you, because you have genuinely forgotten what else there is.
I was still holding the cloth when Pia let herself in with a bottle, because she has a key to that house too now, which I have decided to allow.
“Where’s the boy?”
“With his father.”
“Doing what?”
“He wouldn’t say.”
Pia stopped with the bottle halfway out of the bag.
“He wouldn’t say.”
“He said if it didn’t work he’d rather I never heard about it.”
“Right,” she said, in a tone that had far too much in it, and got the bottle the rest of the way out. “And you’re cleaning.”
“I’m not cleaning.”
“Willow, you’ve got a cloth.”
I looked at the cloth. I had genuinely forgotten it was in my hand.
“Put it down.”
“I’m nearly finished.”
“Put the cloth down. You look like a hostage in a proof-of-life video.”
“I don’t know what to do with it,” I said, and heard exactly how it came out. “The afternoon. I’ve got a whole one and I don’t know what it’s for. Is that not the most pathetic thing you have ever heard in your life?”
Pia got two glasses out of Ruth’s cupboard without asking where they were, which told me she had been in that house a great deal more than she had let on.
“No,” she said. “The most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard was my brother explaining sweet peas to me over a chopping board, and getting every word of it right. This is second.”
“Sweet peas?”
“Sit down,” Pia said, “and drink this, and I’ll tell you what my brother did at the Athertons’ when we were fourteen, and you’re going to enjoy it, because he has never recovered and I have been saving it.”
So I sat down in Ruth Folger’s kitchen and drank wine in the afternoon like a woman with a life, and Pia gave me the whole thing, a rowing boat and a hedge and a man who is now a judge, and I laughed until my ribs hurt and I had to put the glass on the floor.
“Better,” said Pia.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not saying a word.”
“You’ve said several.”
“I’ve said none of the ones I’m thinking,” said Pia, “and I would like credit for it, because they are excellent.”
They came back at five, and there was a thing on the back seat under a towel.
Michael got it out with both hands, which should have told me something.
“Right,” he said. “So. He said boat.”
“He says boat about everything.”
“He said boat,” Michael said, “so.”
And he took the towel off.
Two bits of driftwood, a lolly stick and a lot of glue. That is what an afternoon with a two-year-old produces, and I had my face entirely ready for it.
It had a keel.
It had a laid deck with a coaming around it and a hatch that opened, and a rudder that actually moved when you turned the little wheel, and a motor housed in a well at the back with the wiring run inside so nothing could catch on it.
There was a hand-painted waterline. There was a name on the transom in white lettering, done with a real brush by a real hand that had gone slightly wrong on the second letter and had been left that way on purpose.
The name was DUCK.
Oh, you absolute bastard, I thought.
“He did the paint,” Michael said. “He did the paint and he chose the name and he was extremely firm about the name.” He would not look at me. He was fussing with the rudder that did not need fussing with. “The rest of it’s just, you know. It’s a hull.”
“It’s got a hatch.”
“Well, you want to be able to get at the battery.”
“That’s the third Duck.”
“It is the third Duck. There’s the rabbit, there’s the snail, and now there’s this.” He straightened up at last. “I did raise it. I said, mate, we’ve already got two. He was not interested in the argument. He heard it and he dismissed it.”
“He’s two.”
“He argues like my board and he wins more often,” Michael said. “It’s Duck. It was always going to be Duck. I’ve made my peace.”
“Where did you-” I stopped. “You’ve had somebody helping you.”
“I’ve had nobody in the boat shed.”
“There is no version of this afternoon where a two-year-old and his father produce a working rudder. Not in the hours you had.”
“That’s fair.”
“So who?”
“Levi helped me clamp the frames, because I’ve only got the two hands, and he was extremely rude about it the entire time and I’d rather not repeat any of it. Other than that it’s mine.”
“Michael, you have not built that this afternoon.”
He went back to the rudder.
“The hull’s been in the shed a while.”
“How long is a while?”
“Since about the time you stopped answering the phone,” he said, to the rudder, “and I’d rather we didn’t do that bit, if it’s all right with you. He did the paint today. That’s the part I’d like to talk about.”
Fine, I thought. We’ll do the paint. We’ll do the bloody paint and I will not ask you what you were doing in a boat shed at night on your own, because I already know, and because if you say it out loud I will have to do something with it.
“He’s got it on his elbow,” I said.
“He’s got it in his hair. I’ve tried. It’s in there for the duration.”
We took it down to the pond with the light going, all three of us, and I want to be honest and say I fully expected it to sink.
I wanted it to sink slightly. Not badly. Not enough to make him sad. Just enough to take the edge off the afternoon and let me go back to being certain about things.
Archie put it in the water. Michael leaned over him and turned the wheel.
And that boat went out across the pond in a dead straight line, absolutely level, throwing a little wake off its bow like a real thing, and made a wide unhurried turn around the reeds and came back.
It came back to us.
Archie made a sound I have never heard a human being make. He went flat on his front in the mud to be at eye level with it as it came in, and neither of us stopped him, and Michael got a hand into the back of his coat so he did not go the rest of the way into the water.
“AGAIN.”
“Hang on, mate. Let it come in first.”
“AGAIN. DADA. AGAIN.”
“I’m going to need you to let go of my leg if you want it to go again. Those are the two things and you can only have one.”
Archie let go of his leg at visible personal cost.
“It works,” I said.
“Of course it works.”
“You don’t have to say it like that.”
“I’m a shipping man, Willow. If I can’t float a boat in a pond I’d want to know about it, and so would several banks.”
“BOAT,” said Archie, at maximum volume, to the entire island. “BOAT. DUCK. MAMA. BOAT.”
“I can see it, baby.”
“MAMA LOOK.”
“I’m looking. I’ve been looking the whole time.”
And that was when I went.
I laughed. Properly, from underneath, the way you do when you have not done it for a long time and something gets in past everything you have put in the way of it.
I laughed at a two-year-old lying face down in mud shouting the name of a rabbit at a pond, and at a grown man in ruined pants who had built a scale hull with a hatch in it because his son said one word to him, and at the fact that not one single thing in my life was where I had left it.
Michael did not turn around.
He stood there with his back to me and his hands in his pockets, watching Archie, and let me have it in private, and I could see from the set of his shoulders exactly what it was costing him not to look.
Don’t, I thought. Don’t you dare decide he has changed because of a pond. You decided that about a window table.
He waited until I had finished. Only then did he say, without turning around, “It’ll run until he’s sick of it. It’ll want charging overnight.”
“Right.”
“I’ve put the lead in the bag. It’s the white one, not the phone one. They look the same and they are not the same, and if you use the wrong one you’ll get nothing and think it’s broken.”
“Right.”
“And there’s a spare propeller taped inside the hatch, because he’ll put it through the reeds and then it’ll be a whole thing on a Sunday and you’ll want the spare.”
“You’ve thought about this a lot.”
“I’ve had a lot of evenings,” Michael said.
Then he crouched down and put his arm around our son, and pointed at the reeds, and said something about the wind that Archie received with tremendous seriousness.
I stood behind the pair of them in a wet field with my arms folded, watching that boat come in across the water one more time, laughing at absolutely nothing, and furious with myself in a way I could not have explained to anybody.
Because the boat was not the problem. The boat was beautiful.
The problem was that he had built it in the dark, on his own, in a shed, while I was blocking his number, and had said nothing about it until his son could take the credit.