AFTERNOON
When I was at varsity I used to sleep sometimes in the afternoon: especially late in the year, around exam time when I should have been swotting. The heat would do it, and the futile, rote revision. Sleep was a temporary escape, like alcohol, or gambling. My room in the flat faced north and the sun blazed in while I sat in shorts, and tried to tabulate amino acid indicators, or the evolutionary pattern of change in the shell markings of brachiopods. I would wake in the early evening, over heated, full of despair and self-loathing. During sleep at other times I often had dreams, but I don’t remember one dream during those lost afternoons. They were pits of oblivion. The shrunken remains of a burst balloon hung from the light cord. It was there when I came to the flat, and also when I left after two years.
After varsity I never slept in the afternoons, except maybe after sickness, or a long-haul flight. I was busy with things that mattered to me: wife, family, career. I have no patience with people who are both idle and unsuccessful. The thing is to gain some control over life, limited and transient as that may be. So it was most unusual last Thursday when I went quietly up the stairs to the master bedroom, took off my tan shoes and lay down on the cream duvet of the large bed.
Emma was downstairs with our new neighbour and her fouryear-old son. Normally I would have been at the office, but I was working on a corporate mission statement that I hoped to email in. I had spent some neighbourly time with Summer Neil and her son, Jack. I wondered if Summer had decided on a traditional name for her son because of the liberty her own parents had taken. She was attractive in that slightly washed out way of some thin, blonde women. I found her pleasant to talk to, but later, when I was outside with little Jack looking for the cat that had more sense than to be found, her disembodied voice had a slightly querulous tone. When Jack and I went in again, Emma and Summer were in one of those apparently trivial, relaxed conversations that women use to decide if there’s any basis for friendship. My wife never finds the need to change her initial assessment of character in any significant way. By the time Summer and Jack returned to their house across the hedge, Emma would know what intimacy, if any, the relationship would have. My own first impressions are less secure and less accurate.
I’m not sure why I made the unaccustomed decision to lie down: maybe because the bedroom faced north and was warm on a cold day, maybe stooping to little neighbour Jack, in the way I had to my own children twenty-five years before, had tweaked some unaccustomed muscle; maybe it was just that I knew no contribution of mine was needed in the conversation downstairs. I lay still and relaxed in mortuary position and regarded a smoke alarm on the ceiling. For a brief time I ran through the main points of the corporate mission statement, but then just enjoyed the warmth of the sun on my face and hands. No demons came.
Jack’s cry came through the thickened atmosphere of half sleep, and then the clearer cries of his mother and Emma. I went downstairs to find them in the bathroom. Jack had gone outside again by himself in search of the tabby, and tripped on the raised concrete drain, cutting his eyebrow, which bled freely. His howls were not so much because of the pain, but the horror of the blood running into his eye. When that was stopped, and his eye bathed, he became manfully stoic. He stood in the bathroom, pale-faced, solemn, and with a large wad of bandage taped above his eye.
‘I think it needs a stitch or two,’ said Emma.
‘Why don’t I run him in to Dr Posswillow?’ I said. A man is expected to show initiative in such times of crisis. ‘You ring him and say we’re on our way.’
So within an hour of sitting quietly in front of my computer, I was driving into town to seek medical help for a four-year-old boy and his mother. Two
When I was at varsity I used to sleep sometimes in the afternoon: especially late in the year, around exam time when I should have been swotting. The heat would do it, and the futile, rote revision. Sleep was a temporary escape, like alcohol, or gambling. My room in the flat faced north and the sun blazed in while I sat in shorts, and tried to tabulate amino acid indicators, or the evolutionary pattern of change in the shell markings of brachiopods. I would wake in the early evening, over heated, full of despair and self-loathing. During sleep at other times I often had dreams, but I don’t remember one dream during those lost afternoons. They were pits of oblivion. The shrunken remains of a burst balloon hung from the light cord. It was there when I came to the flat, and also when I left after two years.
After varsity I never slept in the afternoons, except maybe after sickness, or a long-haul flight. I was busy with things that mattered to me: wife, family, career. I have no patience with people who are both idle and unsuccessful. The thing is to gain some control over life, limited and transient as that may be. So it was most unusual last Thursday when I went quietly up the stairs to the master bedroom, took off my tan shoes and lay down on the cream duvet of the large bed.
Emma was downstairs with our new neighbour and her fouryear-old son. Normally I would have been at the office, but I was working on a corporate mission statement that I hoped to email in. I had spent some neighbourly time with Summer Neil and her son, Jack. I wondered if Summer had decided on a traditional name for her son because of the liberty her own parents had taken. She was attractive in that slightly washed out way of some thin, blonde women. I found her pleasant to talk to, but later, when I was outside with little Jack looking for the cat that had more sense than to be found, her disembodied voice had a slightly querulous tone. When Jack and I went in again, Emma and Summer were in one of those apparently trivial, relaxed conversations that women use to decide if there’s any basis for friendship. My wife never finds the need to change her initial assessment of character in any significant way. By the time Summer and Jack returned to their house across the hedge, Emma would know what intimacy, if any, the relationship would have. My own first impressions are less secure and less accurate.
I’m not sure why I made the unaccustomed decision to lie down: maybe because the bedroom faced north and was warm on a cold day, maybe stooping to little neighbour Jack, in the way I had to my own children twenty-five years before, had tweaked some unaccustomed muscle; maybe it was just that I knew no contribution of mine was needed in the conversation downstairs. I lay still and relaxed in mortuary position and regarded a smoke alarm on the ceiling. For a brief time I ran through the main points of the corporate mission statement, but then just enjoyed the warmth of the sun on my face and hands. No demons came.
Jack’s cry came through the thickened atmosphere of half sleep, and then the clearer cries of his mother and Emma. I went downstairs to find them in the bathroom. Jack had gone outside again by himself in search of the tabby, and tripped on the raised concrete drain, cutting his eyebrow, which bled freely. His howls were not so much because of the pain, but the horror of the blood running into his eye. When that was stopped, and his eye bathed, he became manfully stoic. He stood in the bathroom, pale-faced, solemn, and with a large wad of bandage taped above his eye.
‘I think it needs a stitch or two,’ said Emma.
‘Why don’t I run him in to Dr Posswillow?’ I said. A man is expected to show initiative in such times of crisis. ‘You ring him and say we’re on our way.’
So within an hour of sitting quietly in front of my computer, I was driving into town to seek medical help for a four-year-old boy and his mother. Two
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