Читать книгу What We’re Teaching Our Sons - Owen Booth - Страница 8

We’re teaching our sons about heartbreak.

Its inevitability. Its survivability. Its necessity. That sort of thing.

We take our sons to meet the heartbroken men. We have to show our credentials at the gate. We have a letter of introduction.

Our jeeps bounce across the rolling scrubland under huge blackening skies. As we approach the compound a group of men in camouflage gear watch us carefully. They all have beer bellies and assault rifles.

The heartbroken men are heartbroken on account of the breakdown of their marriages, and the fact that they never see their children, and the fact that they’re earning less than they expected to be at this point in their lives, and the fact that no one takes them seriously any more. In their darkest moments the heartbroken men suspect that no one took them seriously before, either. The fathers of the heartbroken men loom large. Their hard-drinking, angry fathers. And their fathers and their fathers and their fathers before them.

The heartbroken men like to dress up as soldiers and superheroes. It’s embarrassing. How are we supposed to respond?

We don’t like the look of those skies.

‘We have a manifesto,’ the heartbroken men tell our sons. They want our sons to take their message back to the people. Their spokesmen step forward. There’s a banner too. They’re planning to hang it off a bridge or some other famous landmark.

‘Are those real guns?’ our sons ask.

‘We –’

‘Can we have a go on the guns?’ our sons ask.

‘No, you can’t have a go on the guns,’ we tell our sons. ‘Don’t let them have a go on the guns,’ we tell the heartbroken men, ‘what were you even thinking?’

The heartbroken men go quiet. They look at their feet.

‘Well?’

‘Fathers are superheroes,’ the heartbroken men say, quietly.

‘What?’

‘Superheroes,’ say the heartbroken men, starting to cry. Tears roll down their cheeks and fall upon the barren, scrubby ground.

This is turning into a disaster.

We should never have come.