How to be a Husband (20 page)

Head of Security

I
f you were to ask me what, as a husband and father, keeps me up nights, I would answer straightaway: it is the night itself. Nothing brings me more constant, unrelenting anxiety than the obligation to protect my family from unknown, unpredictable harm, the kind that swirls up from the darkness—or occasionally drops from a clear blue sky—without herald. It's not really anxiety—it's just plain fear: the fear that I'm not up to the job. Or more precisely, the
knowledge
that I'm not up to the job. Were the position vacant, I certainly wouldn't hire myself to fill it.

It's not that I am insufficiently paranoid. Whenever I see my children enjoying themselves, my mind begins to enumerate potential hazards. And for every potential hazard I can conceive of, I have a corresponding, gruesomely detailed imagined outcome, all because I spotted a sharp edge and said nothing. So I say something.

My wife has a name for me that she deploys whenever I start fretting about having more car passengers than seat belts, or I insist that sharp knives are loaded into the dishwasher points down. She calls me Mr. Health and Safety.

That's what she called me at that drinks party where the host had just proposed to light the two dozen or so candles decorating her Christmas tree. I was in the middle of making an unpleasant little scene, and ignoring criticism from several guests who said I was being kind of a downer.

“Have you ever heard of a candlelit Christmas tree not catching fire?” I shouted.

“I think you're being a bit paranoid,” said someone.

“Have you met my husband?” said my wife. “Mr. Heath and Safety?” I made no apologies for my reaction then, nor do I now. Because of my tireless, swivel-eyed insistence, the candles stayed unlit, and thirty people were spared the prospect of dying like characters in an Edith Wharton short story. My children weren't even there; I was just trying to keep them from being orphaned.

I wasn't always this way. I have a history of personal recklessness. Once, on coming home without keys after a night out, I climbed the facade of my apartment building in Boston with a knife in my teeth to slit the screen of an open second-story window. I don't suffer from any debilitating or unattractive phobias; I don't much enjoy being in the same room as an uncaged bird, but I can cope.

I do, however, suffer several disorders on behalf of my children, the most crippling of which is acrophobia-by-proxy. I cannot watch them hang over balcony railings, or gambol on
clifftop coastal paths, and I will not share anything described as a viewing platform with them. They're the ones who stick their heads through the bars to spit on the cars below, but I'm the one who gets the vertigo: my heart pounds, my palms sweat, my vision undulates. When they were little I used to hold them by their shirt collars whenever we had to use a pedestrian bridge. Now that they're teenagers they won't permit this, but the urge, I assure you, has not left me.

I still remember the feeling of panic that came over me watching the youngest crawl around on the glass floor of our London Eye capsule, and I still get dizzy recalling our two-day visit to the Grand Canyon. I can't even look at the photos.

Although my antennae are always attuned to danger, real and imagined, that is no cause for anybody to feel secure in my presence. I could go round saying I'd do absolutely anything to protect my family, but I have a rough idea of what I'm capable of, and I know perfectly well it isn't good enough. All the time I've spent looking anxiously out of windows, or fretting late into the night, or crawling through playground equipment with one hand gripping a tiny ankle, or standing on the shore, scanning the waves and counting heads—these have amounted to no kind of vigilance at all. Keeping my family safe and well is largely a matter of hoping circumstances will conspire to keep my limits untested.

And for the most part, they have. But not without some notable exceptions. Occasionally that nameless dread that keeps me up nights takes on hard edges, rears up in my face, and tells me its name.

In January 1998 the oldest one, who had just turned three,
developed a high fever over a number of days. Our GP took one look at him, stabbed him in the thigh with a massive injection of antibiotics, and told my wife not to wait for an ambulance, but to drive straight to hospital. By the time she got in touch with me she was hysterical, having had to beg a stranger for his parking space so she could carry a listless toddler through the doors of the emergency room.

“What do they think it is?” I said.

“Suspected meningitis.”

I was holding the middle one at the time, who was ten days old. He couldn't go to the hospital and my wife, who was breastfeeding, couldn't stay. As soon as the oldest one was admitted we swapped places. I spent three nights on a mat next to his bed, while a nurse came every hour to note his vital signs and check the drip that ran into his arm, secured with bandages and a splint so he couldn't pull it out. It was the first time I'd felt that peculiar combination of terror, powerlessness, and a very bad back, but it would not be the last.

*   *   *

I
n November 1999 my wife woke me to say that she'd heard a noise.

“What kind of noise?”

“Like a bang,” she said. “From downstairs.”

I got up and walked to the landing, from where I stared down into the blackness and listened. After five minutes I went back to bed. Only when I woke up in the morning did I notice the splintered front door hanging loosely from a twisted dead bolt. Although the perpetrator did not ultimately gain entry, he
did manage to destroy one of the most expensive things we owned: our front door.

My wife called the police. I went and had a bath, where I spent a long time thinking about the risk an intruder might have posed to my family, and my failure to investigate a noise even to the extent of turning a light on, because I was sleepy. By the time I got downstairs a policeman was examining trainer prints on the outside of the door.

“Here's the have-a-go hero himself,” said my wife. I tried to explain that I was guilty not of cowardice, but of a total failure to grasp the situation. In the cold light of day it sounded a rather lawyerly distinction.

“I would have done the same thing myself, sir,” said the policeman, but we both knew I hadn't done anything.

When the youngest was a newborn I left him asleep in his pram in a fish shop, completely forgetting that I owned an infant. I then walked half a mile to a playground to meet my wife, without it once occurring to me that I might be missing something. I was still wondering how to explain my decision to purchase two dozen goose barnacles to her when she looked at me and said, “Where's the baby?” I was lucky. I know for a fact that no one in that shop would have batted an eyelid if a sweaty, panting, furtive-looking oddball had suddenly burst through the door and run off with a sleeping infant, because no one took any notice when I did it.

On a beach in Cornwall the following summer, the middle one, aged two, toddled behind a rock formation and tipped soundlessly into a deep pool, conking his head on the way down. At the time I had my back to the sea and was busy trying
to get my towel laid out just so. The first I heard of the incident was when a stranger with a wet child in his arms started shouting, “WHOSE BABY IS THIS?”

Not long after that, the youngest one was rushed to hospital with a high fever. Once again, my wife rang me from the hospital.

“What do they think it is?” I said.

“Suspected Kawasaki disease.”

By this time the Internet had become quite a thing, and there was no need for my fears to be contained by the limits of my imagination: within seconds I was reading a terrifying list of complications. Fortunately the hospital where the child was lying listless and feverish was Britain's leading treatment facility for Kawasaki disease. Even more fortunately, he didn't have it. But before we found that out I spent another sleepless night on a hospital floor, trying to find the words to ask a God I simultaneously feared and didn't believe in for help.

On the morning of July 7, 2005, when bombs were detonated across London as my children were on their way to school, I was on a train to Paris with a bunch of sandwich-board signs with French slogans ostensibly designed to console Parisians over their loss of the Olympics to London the previous day, or, if you like, to rub their noses in it. I was meant to march around the city with them strapped to me, front and back, in order to attract as much opprobrium as possible. So much did I regret accepting this assignment that I'd spent most of the previous night wishing a disaster would arise to prevent my carrying it out, although to be honest I was thinking of
something more along the lines of a small fire in the Channel tunnel.

A month later a nail bomb was discovered in the park across the road from where we live, having been dumped there a week previous by one of the more reluctant July 26 bombers. I spent the next forty-eight hours of enforced indoor living—while policemen with machine guns patrolled the pavement—trying to reassure my children that the world was still a nonterrifying place, basically by shouting, “Look! Our house is on TV!” A week after that, when we discovered that the bombers were more or less our neighbors, I employed the same tactic: “Look! Our house is on TV again!”

One night the following summer I was awakened by a loud noise I could not square with the deathly silence that followed. Can you dream a noise loud enough to wake you? While I was considering the possibility I fell back asleep. In the morning I found the front window wide-open, and everything portable of value—money, credit cards, laptops, phones, iPods—missing from downstairs. I realized we'd been robbed by the sort of burglar who wants you to be home—he's after the stuff you take with you when you go out—and is probably prepared for the possibility that you might wake up and raise objections. I was rather grateful to have slept through the whole thing. It saved me having to make a difficult moral choice between cowering in fear and getting beat up.

Not long after that, my oldest son reached the age where boys start getting mugged by other boys on their way to and from school. The other two soon followed. As a father I find
few things more upsetting than having to hear these regular tales of confrontation. For a child there are few things less useful than advice rendered after the fact. I'm never quite sure what to say anyway.

As someone who spent the better part of his childhood poised on a continuum somewhere between fear and embarrassment, I am perhaps not in the best position to offer tips on how to cope with bullying and intimidation. There's only one instructive story from my past I ever trot out for them, and I don't actually come out of it very well.

When I was twelve I got cornered by a larger boy—although my age, he was six inches taller, with a dense beard—between two rows of lockers after gym class. He walked over and rested a giant foot on the bench where I was sitting. “You,” he said. “Tie my shoe.”

At first I pretended not to hear, and continued getting dressed. When he repeated the words, I looked up as if I had not realized he was speaking to me. Then I affected not to understand the exact nature of his demand. I acted as if it were merely rhetorical, an insult requiring no action from me other than to seem a bit hurt. Then I pretended to assume the demand was actually a generous offer that I was, alas, too humble to accept. Then I admitted—as if this were the real secret I'd been trying to hide all along—that I was really bad at tying laces, and that he was better off seeking help almost anywhere else. I expressed all this haltingly, sometimes drifting off in midsentence while I did up a few more buttons on my shirt. Eventually a bell rang, a gym teacher strolled by, and my tormentor lost interest in me as a victim.

“In the end it doesn't matter what you say,” I tell my children. “The point is, you must never tie the shoe.”

They're not remotely impressed by this little parable, and much prefer the story about my being punched to the floor in the hallway by a girl the previous year. My wife doesn't think either tale has much of a moral.

“If someone wants to steal your phone, you give it to them,” she says. “It's just a phone. It's not worth it.”

Actually, would-be muggers have so far always rejected their phones for being too shit, so they really aren't worth it. Even so, most of the time my sons just lie and say they don't have a phone, while never slowing their gait, and this usually suffices. They're probably in the best position to know the difference between a bit of speculative bullying and a genuine mugging, and how to behave if one suddenly becomes the other. They're out there every day, after all. It's nothing to do with me, but I like to think they know exactly when a phone is just a phone, and when handing it over would be tying the shoe. I hope so because, although I hate to admit it, they're on their own out there. It's a sad fact of fatherhood that by the time your children are old enough to need it, all your advice turns to dust in your mouth. The opportunities to provide protection from the world diminish daily, or so I imagine.

In the autumn of 2009, on the afternoon half term started, the oldest one, half a dozen of his friends, and his youngest brother went to the park over the road with a football. When I next looked out an upstairs window an hour later, they were playing a jumpers-for-goalposts-style match with some other kids who happened to be out there. With the sun setting, it
looked from where I stood an idyllic scene. When my wife called me back to the window half an hour after that, things had changed.

“There's something going on out there I don't like,” she said.

Evidently the game had ended, or was ending, in dispute. In the charged, not altogether wholesome half-term atmosphere of the crowded park, other kids were streaming over to take sides. Even from a distance, it was clear that my son and his friends could count very few well-wishers among them.