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2

Boys Aren’t Shy

‘Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?’

Alan Bennett, Forty Years On

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman of thirty with three sons and no income must be in want of a husband.’ I’m pretty sure that’s how Pride and Prejudice begins. Something like that.

But it’s fair to say that, had one of Jane Austen’s penniless heroines, in Derbyshire say, in the early 1800s, found themselves in Pat’s situation in Lincolnshire in 1977, they would probably come to a similar conclusion. Austen’s women can be shockingly dry-eyed when it comes to marriage: yes, it would be preferable to marry for love, but love is only one of the reasons to marry. They are ‘accomplished ladies’ with no formal education; Pat is a working-class woman who’s certainly clever, but not clever enough to avoid getting knocked up before finishing her A levels, bless her. For Austen’s heroines to sign on to the dole was impossible; for Pat, socially unthinkable. She has always had a part-time job – as a school secretary, a hotel secretary, a bar-worker – but she’s just as likely to ‘retrain’ or ‘get a BTEC from Loughborough’ as Elizabeth Bennet is to split the atom. Lizzie can’t rely on the support of her parents because they are genteel but broke. Pat can’t expect long-term help from Nan and Dada because their gentility runs to an aspiring regard for the Daily Mail, but not to having any spare cash whatsoever. And Austen’s ladies won’t receive maintenance payments from their errant husbands to provide for their children. And neither will Pat. At least, not for a long time.

Dad treats maintenance payments with the same baffled incredulity that his generation will soon adopt when told that wearing car seat belts is now the law. It’s as if he can’t believe the dumb literalism of it: what, every month? The full amount? On time? Seriously? He has to be threatened with a court appearance before he starts supporting his family with anything like the same rigour with which he previously buggered it up.

So yes, we’ve come a long way: Mum concludes that she needs another husband. I’m not saying that’s the decision every woman in her position would have made, but it’s the one she made and I respect it.

Anyway, she doesn’t have to find Mr Darcy. She just has to avoid another bloody Heathcliff.

She’s down to her last two cards: her diffident charm and (it’s only an opinion but what son could say less?) considerable beauty. It’ll be enough.

The helpless target is Derek Limb.

They meet at a village ball at the Golf Hotel. He is not the only man offering to buy her a drink that evening, but he’s the one who looks sufficiently grateful and claims to own a racehorse, which is a start. Derek is not exactly Sacha Distel: eight years older than Mum, he has a colourless wart on his top lip and a paunch which presages a future rendezvous with Fat. Fat is coming for Derek, Fat will have its day. There again, Mum is on the pull and not wearing her glasses.

More to the point, Derek is teetotal and mild. Winningly, there is nothing in his demeanour to suggest an interest in screwing other women or hitting children. For Mum, this makes him a veritable prince amongst men.

It’s not so much a courtship as an Anschluss. She marches peacefully into Derek’s heart and plants a flag. Not the Nazi flag, you understand. I don’t know what Mum’s flag would be, but I imagine it would feature the singer Elkie Brooks holding a bottle of Gordon’s gin and looking whimsical. In any case, they marry.

We all move into ‘the new house’, which is a three-bedroom bungalow in Coningsby, a village about ten minutes down the road from Woodhall but less leafy. On return from their honeymoon in the Lake District (the first time Derek has left Lincolnshire), we begin to learn more of Derek’s fascinating habits.

He smokes forty Consulate menthol cigarettes a day and his (according to Derek, totally unrelated) ‘cough’ is treated by his ‘cough medicine’. The medicine comes in an endless series of large brown bottles from the chemist on a repeat prescription that Derek’s GP wrote shortly before he died. Derek self-medicates by up-ending the bottle into his mouth and counting to twenty.

Once a week he buys himself half a pound of aniseed balls which he keeps loose in his trouser pockets, along with his small change and the keys to his glamorous ‘Pacer X’ American car which he can’t afford to drive very often because ‘it drinks petrol’. When he gets to the seed of an aniseed ball, he’s in the habit of taking it out and leaving it on any convenient surface. The only time he gets cross is if my brothers or I talk over the racing results when he’s trying to listen to them on the radio with the 5-mm aniseed nucleus stuck to the top of the Radio 2 knob. It’s fascinating to watch the speed and efficiency with which he can fill in those results on the racing page of the Daily Mirror.

Derek has inherited an agricultural spare parts business from his late father. Essentially, he buys tractors and takes them to pieces. This would be a good business for someone who was there to do it but Derek is mainly not there. Derek is at the bookies’. He has a low-level gambling addiction which means that when ‘customers’ turn up, we know what number to call. I know the bookies’ phone number off by heart before I’m eight years old. A quarter of an hour later, the Pacer X makes its stately return: sometimes the customer is still there, sometimes he isn’t.

In short, Mum has married another prize turkey. She’s swapped Darth Vader for Jabba the Hutt. That is, if you can imagine Jabba not so much as a dangerous gangster but more as a silly bugger picking his nose and watching Bullseye.

The search for a likeable father figure goes on: a man who is gentle without being docile, dynamic without acting like a psychopath. I wonder to myself if such a man really exists.

Well, there’s always Dada (pronounced ‘dar-dar’). This is Mum’s dad, John. He and Grace (Nana and Dada) are the steward and stewardess of the kitchen at Woodhall Spa Golf Club. Grace’s sister Trudy (Auntie Tru) works in the kitchen too. The three of them live in a little house which you get to from the kitchen by running across a field, although for some reason they prefer to walk (what is it with grown-ups and all this ‘walking’?).

I stay with them every weekend and for about half of any school holiday. One day in the distant future, Derek will express disappointment that people in the village tell him my Wikipedia page says that I grew up in Woodhall Spa, when in fact I lived with him and Mum in Coningsby for fourteen years. I tell him truthfully that I don’t have anything to do with that page. What I don’t say is that this impression has certainly come from the answers I’ve given in interviews.

‘Where did you grow up?’

‘Woodhall Spa.’

Or, more accurately, the kitchen, grounds and gardens of Woodhall Spa Golf Club. That’s where I grew up. And in front of the TV. That’s the other place. Buck Rogers, Michael Knight, Zorro, Dick Turpin, Bo and Luke, Jon and Ponch, Steve Austin, the Doctor, Thomas Magnum, Hannibal Smith, Colt Seavers, Captain Kirk, Commander Koenig, Dr David Banner, Mr T, Tucker Jenkins, Roj Blake, Flash Gordon, Logan, Monkey, Steel, Starbuck, Stringfellow Hawke, and Robin Hood. What a great bunch of guys and not a father among them. Not one.¹ And according to most of them, there are few problems in life that can’t be solved by punching someone quite hard in the face. These are my alternative role models. We’re off to a terrific start.

Dada is hammering a wooden stake into the earth and I blink with every strike. I’m going to use his name, John, from now on because ‘Dada’ is annoyingly close to ‘Dad’ and we can do without the confusion. John’s a big man in his early sixties, with grey hair kept neatly in check with a steel comb. His moustache is grey too, more bristly but somehow friendlier-looking than Dad’s. He has some extra weight these days, but carries it with the upright economy of a soldier, which is of course what he was. They all were. Trudy and Grace were in the ATS and the Wrens respectively (the women’s branches of the Army and Navy). The kitchen crosstalk is peppered with wartime idioms like ‘Ooh, stand by y’beds!’ or ‘Do we think it’s time for a NAAFI break?’

I’m here because I’ve been encouraged by Nan and Tru to ‘go and help Dada with the greenhouses’. Since I’m not much taller than your average tomato plant or stronger than one of its stems, it’s not so much a matter of ‘helping’ as of ‘watching’. But I quite enjoy these trips to the greenhouses with John. On the way we have ‘slow bike races’ down the back lane, seeing who can go slowest on his bike without falling off. He never seems to be in much of a hurry and that’s the main thing I like about him – no sudden moves. Currently, I tend to win the slow bike race because my little red Raleigh still has stabilisers, although I’m perfectly capable of overbalancing and falling off anyway.

As well as the kitchen steward, John is also one of the club gardeners. In my memory, the greenhouse itself is this vast glass menagerie of flowers and shrubs, roughly the size of The Crystal Palace. I suppose it was actually just a fairly big shed with a mouldy glass roof. He would find the greenhouse key, the one with the blue string kept under a flowerpot. And then I’d follow him inside, my nostrils suddenly accosted by the chlorophyll funk of tomato plants. I could just about manage one of the smaller watering cans, so he could make that one of my ‘jobs’.

Outside, John is banging in those wooden posts. He’ll use them to stretch a taut string down the line of carrots and then tie on the ‘bird scarers’. These are rectangles of coloured foil that flutter in the wind as if we are growing a patch of Willy Wonka’s Golden Tickets.

There’s not much ‘helping’ I can do here, so John takes a hoe and – a little optimistically – tries to show me how to break up the soil in a nearby bit of the garden. He hands me the massive wooden pole with a slab of rusting iron on the end and gets back to his work. I wield the hoe with the panache of Fred Astaire dancing with his cane. Except in this case, Fred’s lost his cane and his friend Mike, who is a professional pole-vaulter, has lent Fred his vaulting pole and Fred is trying to twirl and spring around with that instead. On his return, John watches my efforts for an amused moment and then says, ‘Yeh, y’getting in your own way, mate.’ He takes the hoe as if it’s made of polystyrene and expertly turns the soil, slashing weeds and flicking unwanted stones onto the gravel path with all the untroubled grace of Zorro using a bullwhip to extinguish a candle at twenty paces.

He’s a kindly grandparent, my Dada, but not exactly a born teacher. I watch the display of manly competence and feel my infant pride being gently compressed into a pancake.

Back in the kitchen, Nan lets me run a finger around the bowl of the delicious scone mix that she’s just made, and Auntie Trudy supplies me with a ham sandwich the way I like it – quartered diagonally with the crusts cut off. I take the sandwich, hoping that John won’t notice the absent crusts. He is a strong advocate of what seems to be the male consensus that the crusts on sandwiches are ‘the best bit’, as is the fat on ham, the rind on bacon, the runny surface of a fried egg, the stalk of any vegetable and the skins on sausages. All of this is ‘the best bit’, a view which I think insane but I’m clearly in the minority.

Tru: Were you helping Dada?

Me: (Nods)

John: Ooh, he was ’elping all right! He was ’elping me like mad! (Winks at me)

Tru: I bet he was!

John: Every time I turned round, there was Rob, ’elping his head off!

Nan: Course he was, a big strong lad like him!

John checks his watch and moves to the oven, taking one of the vast beef joints out and setting it on the table. The meat crackles in its juices at my eye level. He takes his bone-handled carving knife in one hand and a sharpening steel in the other, and flashes the blade against the steel with scarcely credible speed and power. I eat my sandwich, watching.

Outside, I play on my own whenever I can, which is almost always. Mark and Andrew are so much older and they do their own thing. To me, this seems to consist mainly of going to Jubilee Park with their friends in order to fall out of trees. I can hardly picture my brothers from those days without one of them with his arm in plaster.

I take a more cautious approach to the outdoor life and I don’t do it with other children. Unless, of course, you count the Guy-Buys. The Guy-Buys are my imaginary gang of friends. I am the Captain of the Guy-Buys, obviously, and they are my twelve – yes, twelve, like the apostles – men.

One day, my wife will put this together with what she knows of my sexual history and come up with one of her favourite ways of taking the piss.

‘What were they called again, your imaginary friends? The Gay Boys?’

‘The Guy-Buys.’

‘The Gaybo’s?’

‘The Guy-Buys.’

‘Not the Bi Guys.’

‘No, dear. Not the Bi Guys, the Guy-Buys.’

Let me tell you, there is nothing gay about the Guy-Buys. If there were girls in the Guy-Buys, that would be different and, indeed, gay. If I understand two things about masculinity at the age of seven, it is a) the Sovereign Importance of Early Homophobia, and b) the Paramount Objective of Despising Girls. Nobody wants to be a gay and only gays play with girls – this much has been made clear. As I hold the door open for the Guy-Buys and count them into the kitchen, I remind them that to play with girls would be lunacy.

Generally, we go around on our bikes, fighting crime. Actually, I go around on my toy tractor with pedals or, for a while, on an apple box which I’ve tried Sellotaping to Andrew’s skateboard. But basically, we range around the whole of the Golf Club, acting out scenarios from TV shows. Sometimes I’m Zorro, sometimes one of the wisecracking traffic cops from CHiPs, and always heavily armed with a selection of my favourite plastic swords and guns.

Of course, like Steve Austin and Buck Rogers, I am also an expert in karate. I get used to the quizzical looks on the faces of golfers as they walk by observing the seven-year-old kicking and chopping the teeth out of some invisible villain. Occasionally a golfer will mime a quick-draw and say something inscrutable about ‘Buffalo Bill’ and chuckle to himself. I just stare back, waiting for him to go away.

*

Spend any amount of time with middle-class, liberal parents (and, speaking as a middle-class, liberal parent, I find these cunts impossible to avoid) and sooner or later you’ll find yourself talking about gendered play. You’ll hear a version of the following . . .

‘I mean, we gave India a Star Destroyer for her birthday but she just dressed it in a nightie and put it to bed,’ or ‘I mean, we tried to get Huckleberry to play with a couple of dolls but he just tied them together with string and turned them into Nunchucks.’

Some people can’t get enough of stories like these. Imagine trying to get a girl to play with a spaceship! A-hahahahaha! See how fashionable liberal attitudes get slammed face-first into a wall of timeless biological reality! It’s PC gone mad! A-hahahaha!

Actually, it’s timeless biological reality gone mad. In children, it’s about as easy to find conclusive evidence of a ‘male brain’ or ‘female brain’ as it is to find conclusive evidence of an immortal soul. As imaging technology improves, it becomes clearer not only that every brain is unique, but that they simply do not neatly divide into two groups based on sex.² I’m only citing one study here – and in general you’re not going to find this book very ‘citey’. Other people have covered this ground much better than I could – what with being scientists – and so this would be a good moment to recommend Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine and Pink Brain, Blue Brain by Lise Eliot. But the point stands: if Huckleberry doesn’t like the colour pink, he wasn’t born with that idea in his head – somebody put it there.³

In the above-mentioned Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine cites a study from 2000 in which . . .

Mothers were shown an adjustable sloping walkway, and asked to estimate the steepness of the slope their crawling eleven-month-old child could manage and would attempt. Girls and boys differed in neither their crawling ability nor risk-taking when it came to testing them on the walkway. But mothers underestimated girls and overestimated boys – both in crawling ability and crawling attempts.⁴

I’m sure that most of those mothers would be horrified to hear that their gender assumptions had leaked into their behaviour like that – but, to put it mildly, there’s a lot of it about. Other studies have shown that when parents place birth announcements in newspapers, they are more likely to express ‘pride’ if it’s a boy and ‘happiness’ if it’s a girl. Indeed, if it’s a girl, they are marginally less likely to make the announcement at all. Going even further back along the timeline of a child, research has found that parents look forward to having their baby for gendered reasons – fathers citing the fun they’re going to have teaching their son sports, and mothers showing higher expectations of personal intimacy with their daughters. (Some hope – but hey lads, don’t worry about forgetting Mum’s birthday: you’ve been off the hook since you were in utero.) Expectant mothers who know the foetus is male are more likely to report foetal movement as ‘violent’.

So the odds are that Huckleberry, compared to India, is expected to be more independent, more aggressive, more outward-facing and less interested in personal relationships since before he was born. With the best will in the world, bunging him a Barbie when he’s five years old isn’t really going to cut it.

*

There I am, the Captain of the Guy-Buys, hopelessly unsocialised and massively into my swords and guns. It’s the most normal thing about me. So I prize it highly.

*

In between shoot-outs, chases and swordfights, the Guy-Buys and I retire to one of our dens to make repairs and plan the next massive punch-up. I have about five dens in various locations around the club. They are not difficult to ‘build’. What you do is, you snap a couple of branches in a conveniently thin part of a rhododendron bush and then just step inside. Some of the bushes are literally the size of a house.

Inside, the sunlight dapples the carpet of dirt and leaves and I look up to the canopy and listen. There’s a blackbird singing on a branch of a nearby horse-chestnut tree. Autumn’s coming – must ask Auntie Tru for a Tupperware box; those conkers won’t just collect themselves. And in September, a new school – Coningsby Junior School – where you’re seven till eleven. Bigger boys. And some of the teachers are men. WH Smith’s have already put their ‘Back to Skool’ signs up. Why do they spell it the easy way that’s wrong, instead of the hard way that’s right? Maybe they’re just trying to be nice. Nobody really likes this time of year, do they? Just one long Sunday teatime.

What’s that sound? Miles away, probably. One of the Vulcans? No, not deep enough. A Phantom, that’s the one. Auntie Edna, who works in the kitchen with the others, says it’s good that Coningsby has Vulcan bombers because: ‘If it happens, Robbie, it’ll be over so quick we won’t know anything about it.’ They say on the news that America has more nuclear missiles than Russia, so I suppose it’s good that our team is winning.

A Phantom jet up there, way up there, beyond the roof of my leafy cathedral.

43: Hey there, little buddy!

(7 draws his sword)

7: Friend or Foe!?

43: Friend. So . . . how’s it going, dude?

(Silence)

43: Sorry, erm. Hello. You might not recognise me but . . . I’m 43.

7: Pardon?

43: I’m 43.

7 (Pause): I’m 7.

43: Yes! Exactly. How are you doing?

7: Pardon?

43: How are you?

7: I’m very well, thank you.

43: Good.

(Silence)

43: Yup. You see I’m writing this book and I wondered if you could help me.

(Silence)

43: (Looking around) Great den. One of the bigger ones, I think.

7: Not the biggest.

43: No. Of course not. There’s the one near the old railway line.

(7 looks at 43)

43: You have to be quite brave to get in it, jumping over the dyke and through the gap.

7: I can do it!

43: I know you can.

7: I do it all the time.

43: Yes, mate, I know.

(Pause)

43: Any Guy-Buys around at the moment or can we talk privately?

7: The Guy-Buys aren’t real.

43: No, course not. But play-real.

7 (Slowly putting his sword back in his snake belt): Yeah, they’re play-real.

43: Real in the story.

7: Yeah.

43: Sometimes more real than real life.

(Silence)

7: Is that what your book’s about?

43: Well, the themes of memory, fantasy –

7: Is your book about the Guy-Buys?

43: Oh! Er, no, not really.

7: Oh.

43 (Pause): It’s about the Captain of the Guy-Buys.

(7 smiles)

7: What happens?

43: He has adventures.

7: What sort of adventures?

43: Oh, this and that. Wouldn’t want to give the game away.

(7 nods, imagining)

43: Well, I’ll be off, leave you in peace.

7: You said you wanted me to help.

43: You’ve helped already. It helps me that we’ve talked, if only for a bit.

7: Right.

43: Will you be OK here, on your own?

(7 draws his sword again)

43: Yep, dumb question. Anyhow, take it easy.

7: Wait. Are you from America?

43: Er, no, we all talk like this now.

7: That’s a bit rum.

43: Isn’t it!

(43 makes to leave)

7: Will I see you again?

43: Yeah . . . when you’re 15.

7: Who will you be?

43: I’ll still be 43.

7: You stay the same?

43: No, I change. But I’ll always be 43 in the story. Stories are like that.

Alone. Safely, invincibly alone.

I don’t want attention. Attention hurts. Yes, there are twelve Guy-Buys, but they’re not disciples and they are certainly not my boyfriends.

They’re bodyguards.

It’s not like I don’t have real friends, not quite. And my last year at Coningsby Infant School (across School Lane from Coningsby Junior School) is going quite well. At the birthday parties of friends I wait for the moment when someone’s mum clears away what’s left of the Angel Delight and says plaintively, ‘I wish they were all like you, Robert.’ Which is to say, ‘I wish they were all as quiet as you, Robert.’ I’m almost indignant if I don’t get that compliment at some stage. But then, I’m also uneasy, because I know that boys are not supposed to be quiet. Boys are supposed to be ‘cheeky’, like my brothers.

And like Roger Baxter. Roger is my Best Friend. Matthew Tellis, Michael Key and I follow Roger around during playtime. Roger is obviously the leader. Bradley Hooper used to be the leader, but his dad was in the RAF and they moved to Cyprus. So Roger, being the Avon to Bradley’s Blake (don’t worry if you never saw Blake’s 7 – I just mean the spikier, more interesting second-in-command finds himself suddenly in charge), is elevated in a way he doesn’t enjoy. ‘Blummin’ ’ell, I can’t even have a wazz in peace,’ says the seven-year-old Roger as the three of us follow him into the boys’ loo to watch him urinate. While I pretend to have my own wee (having a real one is impossible unless completely alone), I can’t help being fascinated by the way Roger pulls his whole foreskin back on these occasions. It’s not something I’ve been inclined to try for myself yet, just in case it’s only my foreskin that’s keeping the whole thing in one piece. I have visions of the round bit on the end just falling off. You can’t be too careful about this kind of thing.

You also have to be careful about girls. They’re everywhere. At playtime, someone usually starts a game by striding round the playground chanting, ‘All join up for playing . . .’ and then whatever the game is. Any boy who wants to play links up and chants along, so you might get six boys walking about the playground with their arms around each other’s shoulders, shouting, ‘All join up for playing . . . War. NO GIRLS!’ or maybe, ‘All join up for playing . . . Star Wars. NO GIRLS!’ It was a remarkable girl who tried to join in, but she would literally be pushed away. It was, of course, unthinkable that we would join in with whatever the girls were doing. Unless you count the pitiless destruction of anything they were trying to build, like a snowman.

Because how dare they? I mean, it’s not called a ‘snow-woman’, is it? A seven-year-old in pursuit of the Paramount Objective of Despising Girls finds it all conveniently laid out for him: the culture, the language – it’s really no effort. And if you’re especially frightened and insecure, as I was at that age, or as Donald Trump is now, then membership of the in-group is best secured by showing the maximum contempt for an out-group: in this case, girls.

*

Two years earlier, my recently divorced mum had brought me in to meet my new teacher, Mrs Walker. This was during the brief moment after Dad had been kicked out but while we were all still living at Slieve Moyne. I would wake up most mornings in Mum’s bed – the nightmares took their time to get the memo that the danger had passed – and Mum would stretch and yawn and say, ‘Well, this won’t do.’ Maybe she just liked the company: I guess she hadn’t slept alone for a long time.

One afternoon, we sing along to Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’ on the way over to the new school, but then as soon as we’re in the company of Mrs Walker, the world’s friendliest primary school teacher, I, of course, turn into Mutey McMute-Child, Professor of Total Silence at the University of No Sounds At All. ‘He’s just very shy,’ explains my embarrassed mum. I hear that word a lot. ‘Shy’ is my defining characteristic. Everyone tells me I’m shy so I must be.

But then, what is Mum supposed to say? ‘He’s just mildly traumatised by all the domestic argy-bargy. He and particularly his brothers were subjected to a level of physical admonishment which in future, more civilised decades, will be quite reasonably described as “abusive”. His father scares the living Christ out of him, I’m afraid. And even though I divorced that guy’s sorry ass months ago and permanently kicked him into touch, the thoughtless durr-heart still haunts Robert’s dreams like an Avenging Demon from Planet Shit. So, y’know, Rob doesn’t talk much.’

No, that would be unladylike. So I’m ‘shy’. Mrs Walker finds a book with which to assess my reading. When we don’t get very far, she tries another book, and then another. Eventually, we try the kind of book that you give babies to test their gums on. Mrs Walker is making a good job of not looking surprised, but I can sense that this isn’t going swimmingly and I feel embarrassed.

After a couple of quiet years in the bungalow I’ll become an unusually good reader, so I won’t pretend to you that this was all my fault. Mum, on the other hand, watching one book being swapped for another, is dying a thousand deaths of shame. But the shame doesn’t belong to her either. She’s carrying it for someone else.

I’m not sure where Dad was that day, but it was about four in the afternoon so I could hazard a guess.

*

At the Golf Club, I find a bumblebee on the ground. It looks all wrong because the ground is not where large bees are supposed to be. He’s alive (bees are always a ‘he’) and moving his wings slowly, somehow testing them. We’re on a large, gravel concourse in between the kitchen and the first tee. Golfers wander back and forth. The sky is grey and it’s getting dark.

I think my bee might be dying. He’s trying to crawl but not really getting anywhere. Maybe he was struck by a lethally big raindrop. Or maybe he just stung someone. I’ve heard that bees only have one sting and they die when they use it. This makes them just as scary as wasps, but much more wise and noble. Stupid, stinger-happy wasps. No, my bee is in bad shape for some reason. I extend a finger, wanting to stroke it, but don’t dare. That’s the other difference with wasps, of course – bees look sort of furry: they remind us of mammals. I can smell the moisture in the air and know that it’s about to rain again. That won’t help. I build up a circle of tiny stones around the bee to offer it some protection, and then wonder if I’m just trapping it, so I make a little gap in the circular wall in case the bee needs to get out. The rain starts to fall and I go inside.

In the kitchen I look through the window towards my bee in his roofless castle. But the lights are on and I can only see my reflection. Why am I Robert? Why is my name Robert Webb and why do I have curly blond hair? Do other people feel ‘me’ the way I feel ‘me’? It seems unlikely. And why am I crying? I mean, it’s only a bee.

I try to dry my eyes before anyone notices. I’m not going to tell anyone about this, not even Nan or Tru or Mum. They would be nice about it, of course, but I know the truth about my bee.

I wasn’t supposed to look after it. I was supposed to stamp on it.

________________

¹ Sci-fi pedants, stand down. The Doctor becomes a sort of father in the David Tennant era, but not in the time we’re talking about. And yes, it turns out Kirk is a dad, but again, in a later movie, and he’s been completely absent from his son’s life anyway, so who cares.

² Science magazine, 30 November 2015: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/11/brains-men-and-women-aren-t-really-different-study-finds.

³ And quite recently: for the first half of the twentieth century the colour pink was associated with boys and blue with girls. See Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America by Jo B. Paoletti (Indiana University Press, 2012).

⁴ Delusions of Gender (Icon Books, 2011), pp. 198–9.