Embarrassment of Riches - Dan Brotzel
On City FM they’d announced a prize of £100,000 for the first person in the city to locate a tiny golden City FM Bear. A new clue to its whereabouts was broadcast every hour, just after the news and travel. But the children went off the idea of bear-searching within a few minutes of realising that the prize wouldn’t be instantly forthcoming, unlike all the Easter egg hunts and treasure trails they’d ever taken part in. And besides, Matt had promised them a morning of soft play.
The heavy rains of May had given way to the heavy heat of June; it was a day for being outside. KidZone was dark and cool inside, and completely empty. There was just Wendy, who they found mopping the cafeteria floor. She looked up with a start when she heard Matt, Jon and Milly wade in.
‘So…no one comes to a soft-play when the weather’s this nice?’ he attempted. He and Wendy were vaguely familiar with each other from his many visits with the children to this low-lit barn of curvy slides and ball pits and cushioned ramps.
She nodded to the floor. ‘Thought I’d get on with this now,’ she said, flicking the mop handle at the lino with weary ease.
Matt liked Wendy. Her facial expression tried always for the armoured officiousness you’d doubtless need to survive in a world of screaming kids and fed-up parents, but a pinkly vulnerable warmth was always peeping through. She was likeable, despite her best efforts.
Matt paid – £2 for 2-year-old Jon, £4 for 4-year-old Milly, £4 for himself – and signed the clipboard. They were Wendy’s first, perhaps only, customers.
‘That’d do nicely,’ said Wendy, nodding at the latest bulletin about the CityFM bear and the £100k. ‘A hundred grand.’ She had turned back to the yellow bucket on wheels and the smell of disinfectant. ‘Wouldn’t have to do this any more.’
‘What would you do with a hundred grand, though?’
She looked up. In this hot empty space, without the usual screaming crowd and against the overpowering hygiene smell, the question seemed oddly intimate, even impertinent.
She looked back down to her mopping. ‘Stick some away. Get all that interest.’
‘You’d still have to work though, that’s the thing,’ he said. ‘And rates are poor right now. You’d really need a million to give up everything for good.’ She gave him an odd look.
Matt winced to himself. He knew suddenly quite a bit about investment strategies and interest rates and early retirement plans himself, because about three weeks ago he had anonymously won £973,578.81 on the lottery.
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Jon was running round KidZone, heading for the Bob the Builder machine he loved. He heaved himself up next to Bob and sat triumphant in the cab of Scoop (or was it Muck? Or Dig?). Meanwhile Milly, a 4-year-old soft play veteran, had already thrown off her socks and sandals and was scaling the big cushioned zig-zag steps in the direction of the ballpit.
By the time Matt reached her, Milly had set up a production line and was making party food on an industrial scale. Yellow balls went into the pit for ice cream, red she kept on one side for jelly, the rest were rejected. Daddy’s job was to fetch the many balls that had spilled out of the main pit into the mesh-lined alcoves round the side or rolled down the soft steps into the toddler area where the big plastic bricks were.
The knowledge of the money ate away at him. It wouldn’t digest. Only his wife Sally knew the details. He could never have realised that wanting a lot of money could feel so different from having a lot.
But this was fun. Milly sat on the top step, and giggled as Matt whizzed the rogue balls up to her. He was here right now, in the moment. If only we have each other, then are we not rich indeed?...
Jon. Matt looked around. Fuck. Where’s Jon? Fuck. Joooooooon!!
Matt staggered out of the soft play, ducking clumsily through the child-size mesh opening and back out into the cafeteria area, its floor still shiny-wet in patches from the mopping. The fire escape doors were wide open to the blaring sun to help the floor dry. Outside he scanned the bins, the loading bay, the alleyway leading so quickly to the busy main street. Nothing no one nowhere.
Matt had been to this brink many times before. He thought he’d lost Jon out in the road only that morning, when the plumber came and the front door got left ajar. But he would not feel sick, he would not believe, unless or until he had to. He could not even watch films about this sort of thing.
Ducking back inside, he saw that Wendy had heard his shouts and was jerking her head around with the look of one not used to sudden movements.
Just then, Jon padded out from behind the Bob the Builder machine with the insouciance of the child in the Temple. (‘Did you not know I would be about Mr Bernard Bentley’s business?’) Jon, with his muppet gait and blond Boris mop-top and mock-baleful expression. Jon with his precocious scootering skills and liberal sloppy kisses and his insistence that seals were a kind of bird.
Jon, with his untroubled pulse and heartbeat.
‘Oh God. You gave me heart pains then.’ Wendy shot Matt a look that was part relief, part accusation. And Matt thought: What profiteth a man, if he gain the whole world but lose his 2-year-old son under a bus?
‘Morrisons!’ he said.
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The money had not brought instant happiness. When Jon and his wife had first found out, they had sat down for a celebratory meal and ended up solemn and anxious.
Sally had cried at the thought of people she loved who had died too soon and never known such good fortune. People they could have helped, people with hard lives that could have been so different with a bit more cash. And Matt had realised that money can only make you happy if you have some idea of who you are or where your life is heading.
He had dreamed of money as ease; you had to have it to know it only made things more complex. A million was an abstract thing that was easily mistaken for a concrete thing.
There was the bewildering array of options that suddenly opened up, that did not so much liberate or exhilarate as dazzle and confuse. There was the fear of being the one who’d had it all but threw it away, like waking up after a piss-up to discover that you’d spunked it all on some dodgy pub-inspired deal involving timeshares and a racehorse.
And then of course there was the guilt that all of the above were absurd first-world, one-per-center anxieties that anyone in their right mind would kill to be wracked by.
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The cafeteria in Morrisons had much to recommend it. The coffee was pretty good. It was all very cheap. The fish and chips were award-winning, apparently. And the place was a sort of unofficial drop-in centre for the local community.
Matt didn’t work Thursdays now, so after a morning’s soft play or playground supervision or swimming, he liked to come here with Milly and Jon for lunch. The kids knew the place, understood the protocols, liked the food, and would sit still-ish for 25 minutes making a mess for someone else to clear up. What was not to like?
Sally pointed out that there was plenty of food at home, that it was wasteful to eat out every single Thursday. In addition, he was giving the kids the unfair impression that she was austere, penny-pinching mum while he was expansive, fun-times dad.
Matt protested that Morrison’s was cheap, and it wouldn’t be that long before the children were both at school and these treats would no longer be possible. But the truth was that, with all that cash sitting ill-digested in the bank (several banks, actually), he struggled to see the point of saving money any more, or of chasing after discounts and money-off deals, or any of that reusing, reducing and recycling stuff they used to go in for.
He struggled to remember the point of that whole proud scrimping philosophy that had always underpinned their marriage. Scrimping was fun and righteous; it meant the allotment they’d put so much into and presents wrapped in newspaper and refusing to play the brand game. It meant making sandwiches for lunch and getting the bus to school and saving up Clubcard points to pay for a treat trip to Legoland. And it was anchored, too, to an idea of sustainable family happiness.
But now that they could afford everything, what was the point of skimping on anything? Why not eat out every day? Why not get a cab instead of the bus? Why not hire a cleaner and a nanny and a gardener?
Why go to work at all, come to that? What price value now?
At the next table, a youngish man in a mobility buggy was telling his story to a man in his late 70s or early 80s who brought his wife in for lunch every day and always talked to everyone. Matt heard the younger man say, ‘I’ve been in this for 17 years. Bike accident’ and ‘Hospitals in Cyprus are no better’ and ‘I believe in fate’.
The older man’s wife was in a wheelchair. She used to join in such chats but now her expression was fixed and her head lolled heavily to one side. Did the man look after her single-handed, Matt wondered? Did they have children? Matt always thought it the height of injustice that at the end of a long marriage and decades of parenting, one of you ended up having to spend your final years as carer for the other. Back to all that spoon-feeding and arse-wiping when all you wanted to do was sit down and watch some telly.
Just then a woman sat down at the next table. She wore a T-shirt that said ‘YOLO’. From the branding on her top YOLO seemed to Matt to be a thing, some sort of cultural meme he should be aware of, and so he slyly googled it on his phone.
The woman had ordered poached egg on toast and a cup of tea; YOLO turned out to stand for ‘You Only Live Once.’
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So began the long trek homewards in the heavy heat. Matt was pushing Jon in the buggy, the boy’s scooter balanced awkwardly on the buggy’s handles. Milly had her scooter too, but she had gone all floppy and impossible, and their progress was halted every three or four paces when she discovered another ‘ant-house’ in the pavement. ‘I am interesting in these!’ she declared. ‘Take a picture, Daddy! Take a picture!’
Around each crack in the pavement, ants had piled up earth to make nests. For Milly, discarding her scooter and pressing her cheek to the pavement, each nest up close – and there were many, many of them to come along the route home – offered a fascinating vista of energy and bustling purpose.
Matt stepped wearily over his daughter, hooked her scooter to the buggy’s handle bars alongside Jon’s, and leant in to start pushing the heavy Phil and Ted buggy up the long, steep street that led to their own road. Progress was slow. The buggy was heavy and cumbersome with the two scooters, and Milly’s endless ant stops were infuriating.
Thursdays with the children. Dads didn’t used to do this, did they? Certainly his own dad hadn’t been expected to, and probably wouldn’t have thought it his department anyway. But this was the real wealth, wasn’t it? Time spent together. Only no one told you that childcare was much harder than grown-up work, or that it required reserves of selflessness and energy and initiative that were beyond Matt, leading to recurrent guilt, anxiety and resentment, and a desperate resolve to just survive the day.
Sally gave him pieces of advice that sounded so obvious and calm and sensible that Matt assumed they could be safely ignored – things like ‘don’t try and do too much’, ‘have a plan for the day and stick to it’ and ‘don’t expect too much of them’.
It was only after a few Thursdays that Matt realised that Sally’s words weren’t idle truisms but vital survival lessons to be adhered to with extreme prejudice.
Matt saw each Thursday as a blank diary page that he filled with strips of colour ranging from white through to darkest black. The white bits represented the moments where he could be satisfied of his performance as a dad – efficient, well-organised, in the moment, selflessly in control; the darker strips were where he had ignored their needs, spent time checking his emails or reading football reports online, lost his temper, or failed to remember they were only 2 and 4. Lots of things really.
Usually the day started off bright white with the can-do optimism and good intentions of morning; but as it wore on the strips turned to grey or darker, especially after lunch, when he was tired and Jon wouldn’t sleep; and again before dinner, when they were hungry and ratty and so, frankly, was he. Some nights Sally worked late so Matt put them to bed on his own too, and these moments were often the darkest strips of all.
Today had not been too bad so far. Obviously there would be a blot in the copybook round the time he had lost Jon, OK both times, and there had been moments of irritability and impatience throughout the morning. But now Milly had halted again.
Milly, with her am-dram renditions of the songs from Frozen and her ridiculously expressive nostrils and her obsession with the Great Fire of London (which she said should have been called ‘The Bad Fire of London’ as there wasn’t anything great about it). Milly, with her nightmares about grasshoppers and her salami face-masks and her tiny eczema-scarred arms. Milly, who had ignored his dozen shouted requests to find her shoes on the grounds that I have to build an igloo for my dolphin.
Not for the first time as a parent, Matt meditated furiously on the word tether.
He remembered an article he’d read in the NCT magazine about a dad who had discovered the joys of ‘Toddler Time’: I always used to be in a rush, dragging my daughter along to get where I needed to go. One day I noticed that she was unhappy and I asked why. She said: “Because you never let me show you things, Daddy!” I looked at her crushed expression and from that day on I resolved to try to live in her time. I discovered a world of joy and wonder – the pleasure of smelling a flower, patting a passing dog, counting all the red doors on our route. OK, so sometimes it takes us half an hour to get to the end of the road but the experience is so enriching – and I finally got to know my daughter.’
It was nauseating and deeply impractical stuff, Matt thought, as, with awkward self-consciousness, he lay full out on the pavement and angled his phone for a better ant-house shot.
Originally published in the author’s short story collection, Hotel du Jack, 2020
Dan Brotzel's books include a novel, The Wolf in the Woods (Bloodhound Books) and a memoir, Awareness Daze (WF Howes) -- an account of his attempt to observe a different awareness day or fake holiday every single day for a year!
Twitter: @brotzel_fiction | Medium: danielbrotzel.medium.com
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