I must try and re-engage her with reality. I shout out to her: ‘Do you know where the shin-guards are? Did we ever get them out of the car from last week?’ To which she responds: ‘In Moscow the trees on the boulevards are in leaf, and dust rises from the roads.’
Even the Emily Dickinson phase was better than this. I decide to channel some Dickinson myself. ‘I fret—that we will die here—if this woman—will not move.’
I’m going to have to think outside the square and embrace some radical options. The thought occurs to me: maybe she needs some time to herself. As when Tsar Alexander II freed the serfs, sometimes it’s just as well to let the pressure off a little.
I round up the boys, and we stand in a tight semicircle around her. ‘Give us jobs,’ I say. ‘We’ll all do jobs. As many as you like.’ The boys nod eagerly. Jocasta looks up and finally speaks, not of Tolstoy, but of home. ‘It’s not the doing. It’s the thinking. It’s the working out and the remembering. Why don’t you give yourselves the jobs?’ She shoots out a look in which is contained all the ice of the Arctic Circle, and all the joie de vivre of a midwinter potato famine.
The boys and I creep away. We shall not only do jobs, we shall run her a bath so she may read her book in peace. We jump into action. Or at least we try to jump into action: first we need to locate the plug, a clean towel and maybe some matches so we can light a nice-smelling candle. Also it would be useful to know exactly when soccer starts and the location of the field, so we can figure out the timing on the whole project, but the sheet is missing and the street directory is in the car and I can’t find my keys.
I don’t want to make any allegations, but someone seems to have hidden them.
With the promise of a bath, Jocasta finally comes inside. She finds the plug, and the matches, and the soccer draw, and my car keys, and then climbs into the bath, while we polish off the other jobs. We shall be self-starters: identifying and completing the tasks before we have even been told what they are.
Well, we plan to polish off the other jobs. To actually do them, we’ll need some additional information. Such as the name of my cousin’s dead dog. The age that Bryonii is turning. The location of the other street directory, since the one in my car has vanished. By the time Jocasta has finished her bath and empathised a little longer with poor, overburdened Anna Karenina, there should be quite a list with which to present her.
I shout through the door: ‘Are you finished yet?’
Jocasta shouts back. ‘Just a minute, if you don’t mind. Here in Russia, there’s a train on its way.’
As you can imagine, Batboy’s mother has been in tears. We raised our boy well. We bought him books, we took him to the theatre, we even suggested dance classes. And now this.
Jocasta was the first to come across the telltale signs in Batboy’s bedroom.
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