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Non-Fiction
| print friendly version | |
| the sleepover | |
| By Snodlander | ||||||||||||||||||||
| 16 November 2006 | ||||||||||||||||||||
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I could fill a book about my daughter's boy friend. Grace. So beautiful at birth that she could only be a gift by the grace of God. My first-born. My only daughter. When she was small she was full of character. She would bring me Mr Tickle, on the solemn understanding that I wouldn’t tickle her whilst reading. And, just like the night before, and the night before that, I would tickle her as I read it. She would tell me off if I was being silly, but show me off to her friends because I was so silly. She filled herself with questions about the world, then brought them all to me to answer when I got home at night. And though you think you bring up all your kids the same, she was her father’s daughter, and Jonathon was his mother’s son. Then she became a teenager. For those of you not blessed with a female teenager, let me try and explain what that means. Have you heard of the terrible twos? The terrible teens exceed that by an order of magnitude. When small, she once asked me how come I knew the answer to every question she asked. I explained that before you could be a daddy, you had to go on a course. On the course they would teach you everything in the world, so that you could answer your children’s questions. To her credit, she didn’t believe it for a minute, and constantly tested it. As soon as she became a teenager, I flipped from knowing everything to knowing nothing. From the little girl who loved being tickled she became the fiend from hell, scratching and thumping at the slightest touch, flinching if anyone came within two feet of her. She would look so pretty in pink, wearing baubles she had saved up to buy from Claire’s. Now she dressed in mainly black, with fluorescent fishnets and makeup that would scare children. In fact, on one school trip she reduced a peer to tears simply knowing she would be sharing a room with The Goth Punk. Nirvana were great, because they were Grunge Metal. Linkin Park were pants, because they were… some other alloy I can’t remember now, though to my ancient ears their big single sounded just like Smells Like Teen Spirit. Apparently, the fact that they sounded the same to me said everything anyone needed to know about me. She adopted various causes, and fought for their black and white issues with the intensity of a zealot. This, of course, was totally different from the causes her father fought at that age. She was going to make the world a better place. I had failed to make it better. In short, my darling little girl became a right miserable cow. Now, I had always feared the boyfriend stage. I thought that I was going to be the worst kind of father, in the vein of Steve Martin in Father of the Bride. When Steve arrived (Not Steve Martin, you understand. Her beau) I was actually just relieved to discover that she wasn’t gay. Steve. How can I best describe him? Would it be that at eighteen his ambition was to be an economics teacher? (What sort of 18-year-old wants to be an economics teacher? One that is no good at PE, presumably). Would it be to disclose that my pet name for him is wimp-boy, and that he answers to that? That three years and an engagement later he still refers to me as Mr Simms? Even when he’s talking to Grace. But the mysteries of the heart are unfathomable, and though she could do so much better, she has kept him. He wouldn’t be my first choice for her, but we have to make do with what we are given in life, I suppose. And from their first date she started to change. She smiles now, even laughs. She listens to music that doesn’t make my ears bleed. When she makes the effort she scrubs up a treat, and moves me close to tears with her girlish beauty. But for some reason, wimp-boy feared me from the outset. I didn’t make him nervous, I made him visibly shake with fear. I don’t know why. It was a completely novel experience for me. When she was small, Grace’s friends would flock around me when I took her to school. Even my son’s friends’ belief that I am a serial killer lends me an air of excitement and fascination, not fear. But wimp-boy was scared silly of me from our very first meeting, when I took extreme pains to be nice to him. My daughter studies psychology. She understands. People react to the personality that you project on them. I couldn’t help myself. He made me scary, and so I conformed to his expectations. It doesn’t help that he does not have the Simms sense of humour. I have three brothers. We are all totally different, physically, in temperament, in what we do and think. There is just one attribute that we share. The Simms Sense of Humour. When the four Simms boys get together, no-one else stands a chance. The wives go and gossip elsewhere. The children endure it until they have gotten gifts from their favourite uncle (the favourite being the one that has the best gifts at the moment), then flee. The secret is, we know exactly when one of the others is joking. But no-one outside the circle can tell. Shortly after they started courting, we all went down to Tony’s for a barbecue. Tony leant forward from where he was sitting next to the happy couple, and addressed me on the other side of them. “So who’s Steve then?” “Grace’s boyfriend.” “Oh! Right!” and all three of my brothers rubbed their hands together. “No, no” I chided them. “I’ve made a promise to myself. We won’t give Steve a hard time until they have been going out together for at least two weeks.” This is how much Steve does not get our humour. This is how stupid he is. “Actually, Mr Simms, Grace and I have been going out for three weeks now.” Grace tried to shut him up, but it was too late. All three brothers rubbed their hands together with renewed vigour. Much of his afternoon was spent explaining to one or other of my brothers what his intentions were. Later that afternoon he tried to rally. Grace asked me if it was OK for her and Steve to go for a walk. “OK, but no snogging in the park.” “Oh no, Mr Simms. I wouldn’t do that. The park is far too public; I’d take her down an alley to snog her.” All four of us turned and stared at him, stony faced. “Erm… I don’t know you well enough to make those jokes, do I?... Erm… We won’t be long.” And with that he literally ran from the house, much to our amusment. So, having set the scene, let me tell you about the sleep-over. One night wimp-boy slept over at our place. Between them, they agreed that wimp-boy would sleep in her room, and she would sleep on the couch downstairs. He was probably too delicate for the couch, bless him. I decided that it was down to me to build bridges, as he was too frightened to speak to me otherwise. As I went to bed I knocked on my daughter’s bedroom door. But what to talk about? Grace had already made it clear that I had nothing worth contributing towards contemporary culture. Maybe history would be a safer option. “Steve. Do you know anything about history? Do you know what ‘nightingale floors’ were?” “Erm… No?” “Ah, well, this is fascinating. In medieval times, assassination was a legitimate political tool, so rulers of the day would deliberately tune their floorboards to squeak. They were called ‘nightingale floors’ because they would ‘sing’ when trodden on. That way they could hear an assassin creeping up on them during the night, evil on his mind.” I casually indicated the bare floorboards of the landing with the baseball bat I happened to be holding. “I really must get around to carpeting this landing. Do you snore?” “No, Mr Simms.” “Good. Good. Because I’m a very… light… sleeper.” And he’s scared of me! Go figure.
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