Chapter 7 Anna #2
‘Sure,’ I reply, and we keep trekking along the path until we hit the park gates.
Mum worked until six today, and dinner took forever, so the sun’s starting to set by the time we finally get onto the bridge.
I had it in my head we’d be able to look east and see all the way to Westminster, and beyond to the hodgepodge skyscrapers of the City.
In reality it’s mostly the rail bridge, the building works at Battersea Power Station, and the Lego blocks of Vauxhall, the top of the London Eye winking over them.
Mum directs us to the west pavement instead, bathing us in the sunset’s glow.
I always think of London as being a concrete jungle, but here the river is mostly lined by trees, bending over the high walls that contain the Thames.
The tide’s low, and mudbanks and wavelets replicate the gold-and-red sky.
They’re far enough away I don’t have to worry about seeing the-face-that-isn’t-my-face reflected in them, and can just enjoy the scene.
We stand up against the balustrade, the breeze on our faces. I was right, there are still hardly any cars about, but the occasional cyclist whizzes past at alarming speed. With no one else around, Mum braves taking off her mask, and lets it dangle from one ear.
My phone pings and I check it automatically.
‘Maddie?’ Mum asks.
‘Yeah.’ I scroll through the message, sliding my phone back into my pocket with a huff. ‘She says we should meet up after school next week. She’s going to bring a teddy bear and I should bring one too, so we can exchange them and cuddle them instead of each other because we’re not allowed.’
‘Crikey, this pandemic.’ Mum heaves a sigh. ‘I can’t imagine you and Maddie not hugging hello.’
‘I don’t know, I think she’s being really fake.
’ I cross my arms and tread an empty beer can flat against the pavement.
Normally I’d pick it up, but it might have COVID germs. I hate thinking like this.
Litter’s bad, pandemic or not. ‘She’s just trying to cover the fact she’s screwing me over by fancying Julian. ’
‘I thought she was into Joseph?’
‘Joseph-Always-Joseph.’ I sigh. ‘Well, she was. But she hasn’t seen him in forever, so, like, who knows what anyone feels anymore.’
‘Yeah.’ Mum stares upriver towards the wedding-cakey Albert Bridge. ‘Who knows.’
‘That’s not your “who knows” voice, Mum, that’s your “Anna’s too young to understand” voice.’
She smiles, turns, and strokes my new fringe out of my eyes.
It was Lockdown Project Number Seventeen and it quite didn’t go to plan—TikTok lies about how easy it is to cut your own hair.
I mean, it’s easy to cut it, just not well.
It’s growing out OK though. ‘I was just thinking that when you really love someone, it doesn’t really matter how long you spend apart, you meet and you still love each other. ’
‘You thinking about Dad?’
Her face does something that’s hard to figure out.
‘Mmm hmm.’ She clears her throat and looks back to the river, leaning on the balustrade with her elbows and hunching her feelings to herself.
She looks tough and self-sufficient, like when she goes to parent-teacher meetings.
‘But you know, it can go for friendships too. Sometimes I don’t see my childhood friends for years at a time, but then we meet and just slot back in place, gabbing away like no time’s passed.
Maybe it’ll be like that for you and Maddie. ’
‘Maybe. But I can feel this, like … distance growing between us, and it scares me.’
‘How come?’
‘Well.’ I lean my elbows on the balustrade too, not quite tall enough to exactly copy Mum’s pose, but doing my best. ‘I guess, with this climate march, it is important, it really is. We need to do something because the world is literally on fire, and it’s like two seconds to midnight.
But also, I just don’t want to be left behind.
Because everyone will be there together, and I won’t be.
So they’ll forget about me, right? If they haven’t already. ’
‘They won’t forget you,’ Mum says, with diamond-hard Mum confidence. ‘You probably all feel the same way, like those kids writing chalk messages to each other.’
‘Yeah, that really got to me,’ I say. ‘The way those adults had come along and spray-painted over the top. I get why they did it, I get the point they were trying to make about childhood, like, not being sacred anymore or something, but … I don’t know, it just didn’t sit right.’
Mum nods slowly, eyes on an ant crawling across the balustrade’s thick curve. ‘We have this thing at work when we’re coding,’ she says. ‘It’s hard to explain, but I don’t know how else to put it. We do this thing called version control—it’s how we manage changes to software.’
‘Like a filing system?’ I ask, thinking about the rows of books in the school library, and Ms Davies’s endless tutting when one of us has put a title back in the wrong place.
‘It’s more helpful to think of it like a tree: The stable, tested, good-to-go code is the tree’s trunk.
Coders like me make copies of that trunk code, separating it out into branches that we can play with and test. Of course the trunk isn’t perfect, either, so we might use a branch to design improvements as well.
Multiple coders can work on multiple branches at once, but because the branches are copies of the trunk, they all inherit the trunk’s form and attributes.
However, over time as things get added and deleted, the branch’s code might become quite different to the trunk. ’
‘So … it’s like you and me? I came from you, but as I’m growing up I’m getting different ideas about what I want to do.’
‘Got it in one, Kiddo.’ Mum grins. ‘Or like you being frightened of losing your friends, and me seeing the impossibility of that because you’re so awesome.’
I smile back despite myself. ‘Whatever. Carry on.’
‘So, if the branch code gets tested and approved, it can be merged back into the trunk code.’
‘Unity!’ I say, throwing my arms in the air.
‘Sure. However, there’s stuff the trunk needs to do to keep operating the way it was intended which might prevent a branch getting approved for integration.
Sometimes even if the branch code is doing something super cool, or fixing a big problem, it still wouldn’t get approved for merging back into the trunk because the coders have to make sure that core functionality is still there. ’
‘Yeah, and it’s mega irritating!’ I say, thinking of her stopping me from going on my march.
‘I certainly remember it being that way when I was a kid.’ The ant Mum’s watching crawls over the balustrade’s lip, and she squints up at the sunset instead, rays catching her eyelashes.
‘It’s not always senseless. You can’t put food on the table without expelling a whole bunch of carbon, for example, but you still have to eat.
A branch containing an improvement might also present a risk to the trunk—a bug or a vulnerability which might endanger the whole codebase. ’
‘Yeah, but who gets to decide that?’ I interrupt. ‘Who gets to do the approving?’
‘I’m coming to that. In version control, it’s obviously the coders who are making the choices.
But when it comes to me and you…’ She inhales as she assembles her thoughts.
‘When you’re coding really well, when the whole team’s working together seamlessly, you’re able to negotiate to the point where the branch code gets merged in because of its cool stuff, but the trunk code still retains its core functionality.
The team might even reassess what its core functionalities should be to integrate large improvements.
I think that’s what it’s like when you’re really knocking it out of the park parenting, when you’re in good communication with your child.
When you and I are really getting each other. ’
I’m furrowing my brow trying to follow everything she’s saying, but I think I get it. ‘Yeah, I mean like you’re my friend, not just my Mum.’
‘You’ve got a gift for efficiency,’ Mum says with a smile.
‘The problem is that parenting isn’t an individual concern anymore.
It’s not just for me to witness your awesomeness and figure out how to merge that with our core familial functionality.
I can’t just decide that maybe you’re right, and make a massive alteration to our codebase.
Parenting nowadays isn’t even a village concern.
It’s globalised, right? Like everything else?
It’s not enough anymore for your code to merge to mine individually, it needs to happen at a societal level too, and it’s not. ’
I look around at the empty bridge and filthy brown river water.
Mum’s right, she can’t approve and accommodate all my wishes for the world on her own, even if she wanted to.
Which, if I’m honest, she probably does.
My frown of concentration deepens. ‘So, you think your generation’s screwing my generation up by, like, collectively not approving to merge our branch code into the societal trunk? ’
Suddenly, Mum looks really tired, like she’s pulled a bunch of all-nighters in a row.
‘Well, we are, aren’t we? I mean, you can’t even hug your friends and send chalk messages in peace, because we don’t live in a world where kids have the time and space to do that anymore.
That’s what got to me about those messages. ’
Most of the time, I think Mum’s a bit of a middle-class capitalist—Maddie says most of the parents at our school are—but I know that if she had a choice, this isn’t the world she’d pass on to me.
Maybe there’s some comfort in blaming Mum’s generation, because at least if they’re screwing up, someone’s in control.
But right now, honestly, Mum looks as lost as me and Julian and Maddie.
Maybe she’s not a trunk or a branch in the human code, maybe we’re both just twigs waving in the wind—like, how many centuries or aeons would you have to go back to really find the root of this problem?
And how many rungs up the ladder would you have to go to find the people who are really in charge of approving the trunk’s priorities?
Maybe climate change makes us all helpless kids, and maybe that’s what freaked me out about the chalk and spray-paint messages.
I sigh very deeply, the trapped feeling worse than ever. ‘It’s alright, Mum. You didn’t make the world. You just live in it.’
I watch the sunset, wondering if the extra carbon in the atmosphere is turning it redder than it should be. That did happen after Krakatoa erupted in the Victorian era, but I’m not sure it was because of carbon.
‘I’m not oblivious, you know,’ Mum says quietly. ‘I do see all this stuff you’re talking about. I’m trying—don’t look at me like that, I am—but my parent code is really strong, and its first instinct isn’t to protect the world: It’s to protect you.’
‘Isn’t that the same thing?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s not.’
I look at the can at my feet, which I’ve squashed flat as a fifty pence piece. ‘Mum? Can we shout at the river now?’
Her face clears. ‘Absolutely.’
So we clutch the balustrade, and open our mouths, and scream. And it feels really, really good.