handgun, but thanks to the other kids at day care she is now familiar with the branding and wants to be a blonde. She’s four. In the same week she discovered the computer, soon the internet will follow.
There are monsters under the bed, there are monsters under the packaging and behind every single website that ever existed. We unknowingly bring them into our homes and lives.
Think about it, but for all the right reasons, the ones you pretend not to think about until a random news story or article makes you remember. Indiscriminate and painful, the mother who can’t start her child’s heart because she didn’t find the time to get the training, or that bastard who snatched a toddler from right under the father’s distracted nose. Put faces on them, dead fractured faces. Without hesitation, without pause for reflection or consequences, I know I can become overprotective in a bad way, in a ‘five to nine years but out in four for good behaviour’ way. I’m not prone to violence, but I know it, like I know an alcoholic brother from a safe distance.
Clare is equally guarded and driven. That ability to fight, to protect, it’s remarkable. I can tap into that protective rage like muscle memory.
It’s a very, very bad world out there. I’ve seen human life sold for kicks and snuffed out for much less. I will have to educate my children extremely carefully; they are not growing up in poverty, they will not have to learn the hard way, like I did. Physical education in my day was more than pulling on a pair of what 70s Britain called ‘plimsolls’ and running around a muddy sports field. For my generation, physical education also often meant the back, or indeed the front, of your parent’s hand. This is considered immoral and/or illegal in some places now, but that’s how it was for many kids then. Besides, I couldn’t beat the lessons into them anyway; it never worked for me. So how do I replicate the learning curve without destroying their innocence? Is it even possible? How do I teach my sprogs the value of their word, and the value of every dollar they make, and the value of life?
While I’m out doing the groceries I occasionally see things, triggers learnt over many years of being tuned in, usually men’s eyes wandering over my family in a way that makes all my alarm bells ring. I feel the St Vitus dance vibrate through the floor, the airport travelator emerges through the frozen goods section ready to whisk me first class, at speed, via my gold ticket purchased years ago at the Slut Atlantic desk in Pakadaystan. Onward and upward into a shit-filled bloody broken explosion that would make Tarantino vomit in this lightly chilled flute of Cristal. Wonderful, isn’t it? Being human, normal middle-class rules apply in Legoland malls, chew with your mouth closed and your mind open at all times. I can feel muffled screams, braille messages from behind the defunct veneers of happy family eyes . . . Just doing the shopping, home in time to get drunk and beat the lot of them senseless by dinnertime.
Get me out of here; sometimes the mall disturbs me more than Nigeria did.
CURRY
AFTER SPEED WEEK was cancelled in 2011 and the bike tested at Tailem Bend, we put her into storage and went back to our lives. For me, both businesses were doing well, our court case strolled on into more of the same redundant stalling and mesmerising drone. So we just rolled with it and paid the legal bills in the hope that the trial would be slated before another year went by.
Jason, though, was getting into it; our director was starting to read legal books and really listening to our QC in meetings. One morning when we were in the counsellor’s office in the city I even caught him leaning in when the QC was talking.
‘Fuck, you’re keen,’ I said as we grabbed a coffee in the huge marble-clad lobby during a break.
‘I like it; it’s like chess,’ Jason countered.
‘Yeah, do me a favour.’
‘What?’ He looked at me
There are monsters under the bed, there are monsters under the packaging and behind every single website that ever existed. We unknowingly bring them into our homes and lives.
Think about it, but for all the right reasons, the ones you pretend not to think about until a random news story or article makes you remember. Indiscriminate and painful, the mother who can’t start her child’s heart because she didn’t find the time to get the training, or that bastard who snatched a toddler from right under the father’s distracted nose. Put faces on them, dead fractured faces. Without hesitation, without pause for reflection or consequences, I know I can become overprotective in a bad way, in a ‘five to nine years but out in four for good behaviour’ way. I’m not prone to violence, but I know it, like I know an alcoholic brother from a safe distance.
Clare is equally guarded and driven. That ability to fight, to protect, it’s remarkable. I can tap into that protective rage like muscle memory.
It’s a very, very bad world out there. I’ve seen human life sold for kicks and snuffed out for much less. I will have to educate my children extremely carefully; they are not growing up in poverty, they will not have to learn the hard way, like I did. Physical education in my day was more than pulling on a pair of what 70s Britain called ‘plimsolls’ and running around a muddy sports field. For my generation, physical education also often meant the back, or indeed the front, of your parent’s hand. This is considered immoral and/or illegal in some places now, but that’s how it was for many kids then. Besides, I couldn’t beat the lessons into them anyway; it never worked for me. So how do I replicate the learning curve without destroying their innocence? Is it even possible? How do I teach my sprogs the value of their word, and the value of every dollar they make, and the value of life?
While I’m out doing the groceries I occasionally see things, triggers learnt over many years of being tuned in, usually men’s eyes wandering over my family in a way that makes all my alarm bells ring. I feel the St Vitus dance vibrate through the floor, the airport travelator emerges through the frozen goods section ready to whisk me first class, at speed, via my gold ticket purchased years ago at the Slut Atlantic desk in Pakadaystan. Onward and upward into a shit-filled bloody broken explosion that would make Tarantino vomit in this lightly chilled flute of Cristal. Wonderful, isn’t it? Being human, normal middle-class rules apply in Legoland malls, chew with your mouth closed and your mind open at all times. I can feel muffled screams, braille messages from behind the defunct veneers of happy family eyes . . . Just doing the shopping, home in time to get drunk and beat the lot of them senseless by dinnertime.
Get me out of here; sometimes the mall disturbs me more than Nigeria did.
CURRY
AFTER SPEED WEEK was cancelled in 2011 and the bike tested at Tailem Bend, we put her into storage and went back to our lives. For me, both businesses were doing well, our court case strolled on into more of the same redundant stalling and mesmerising drone. So we just rolled with it and paid the legal bills in the hope that the trial would be slated before another year went by.
Jason, though, was getting into it; our director was starting to read legal books and really listening to our QC in meetings. One morning when we were in the counsellor’s office in the city I even caught him leaning in when the QC was talking.
‘Fuck, you’re keen,’ I said as we grabbed a coffee in the huge marble-clad lobby during a break.
‘I like it; it’s like chess,’ Jason countered.
‘Yeah, do me a favour.’
‘What?’ He looked at me
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