Sports Day
“We’re going to be late.”
I nod, raise my finger and signal one minute. But I keep tapping away on the computer with my other hand.
I’m not supposed to talk at the moment. I’m awaiting surgery on my vocal cords. So my wife and I have tried as much as we can to communicate non-verbally. But it’s difficult and frustrating, and my attempts at sign language are almost always misinterpreted.
I try to finish the email I’m writing.
My youngest approaches. She’s got something in her mouth. I try get her to spit it out with one hand, the other still typing on the computer.
It’s hard to concentrate. I’ve hardly slept. She was up most of the night and then, at 5am there was a pigeon or a crow or something making a racket, right by the bedroom window.
“We have to go! It’s starting in three minutes!”
I give up. I’ll send it later.
As we walk out the door my youngest is pushing a pram with a doll in it. She’s only a year and a half old. How does that happen? How does a one year old child have a desire to look after a baby like that. She can barely walk!
Anyway she’s still got something in her mouth as we approach the gate, and I finally get her to spit it out. It’s a snail. Alive still, I think.
My only memory of Sports day when I was a kid is sometime in the early 90’s. I don’t remember any others - just the first one. I was the same age my eldest daughter is now. I know it was my first one because I was only at that particular school for a year. I very clearly remember my Dad being late, and being annoyed at him.
Memories of that sunny afternoon in 1992 come to me for the first time since they were etched in my mind as I approach the gates of my daughters school. Before today I hadn’t even thought about the concept of a Sports day for at least a decade.
“They’re out on the field, they’re literally about to start.” the teacher at the door says, wishing he could hurry us along with a touch more militance and a little less politeness.
By the time we get to the field the kids are almost at their starting positions. I can see my eldest in line, scanning the audience, looking out for us. I remember doing the same thing for my Dad when I was her age.
She sees me.
She looks like she might be rolling her eyes, and then she smiles.
I feel bad because I know she’s been looking for us for the last half hour while all the other parents arrived. At least, that’s what I would’ve been doing when I was her age.
When she starts running I have to fight my instinct to shout for her. Every part of me wants to cheer but the vocal cord thing gets in the way and I have to stay quiet. I listen to the other parents shouting their kids names. She comes in second.
An old friend of mine, whose son is in the same class as my daughter, comes over and stands next to me. He knows about the voice thing so doesn’t make me talk. He just shoots the shit for a while and I try and not respond. Which is a weird thing to do. Makes you feel like you’re being rude.
So the older kids I the school run their races and the sun rises a little higher in the sky. And then it’s our kids’ turn again, to do the relay. This time when she runs, my old friend shout her name for me. He shouts for his own kid too of course, but he shouts for us too.
“Did you see me Daddy?”
“Yeh! I saw you! I was so proud of you!” I abandon the silent thing. It’s harder to be quiet with her. When she asks questions I just have to answer, I can’t stop myself.
We walk home through the parsed, heavy light that is struggling to penetrate the early summer cloud. The little one tries to pick up another snail from the pavement. We all stop her at once.
“No! You can’t eat those!”
“Not raw a least” I say, “But you know the French consider snails a delicacy?”
“Yeh I know” My eldest says. “They eat frogs legs too.” She continues, barley looking up from her game avoiding the cracks on then pavement. I used to play that too. I played it until I was in my twenties. But I haven’t in a long time. Maybe I should take it up again.
“Who’s ready for their holidays?” My wife asks as we get back home. My daughter shrugs. She already knows I’m not coming but she asks anyway.
“Are you coming?”
I explain that I have to stay home and rest my voice so I can sing again as soon as possible. Once we’re home, I help her pack the last of her toys and explain that it’s going to be kind of a weird summer.
They’re heading to London for a night to stay at my brother’s to check on the cat while he’s away. Then they’re leaving early tomorrow morning to stay with family up north. I’m staying at home, on a sort of silent retreat, before my next appointment with the doc. Trying as hard as I can to stick to the monk like rules I was given when I found out about all this shit.
I help pack the kids bags, and end up talking way more than I should be, but it feels unfair not to chat to them before they go. A few hours later I’m waving goodbye at the door and they’re driving off into the greyscale of the early evening.
When I get back to the house the silence is all encompassing. It feels like it's smothered all over the furniture and the walls, and after an hour all I can hear is the bubbling of the fish tank.
I finish writing the email and soon after crack open a beer. I put early Van on the stereo. But after a few seconds the music goes dead and the house is suddenly filled with the sound of Let it Go form Disney’s first Frozen film. My eldest’s favourite song. Those high pitched, autotuned, sweet as vomit vocals screech through the air and swaddle my ears like cling film across a toilet seat.
My wife and I share the same Spotify account. Seems they’ve made good use of it early into the drive and anything she puts on I hear, and vice versa. I turn off the stereo and sit outside in the garden, letting the sound of the trees rustling and my own anxious mind be my soundtrack.
I drink the beer, and then another. I use all of my might to avoid smoking, on account of the doctor’s orders. I try and write a song but the paper remains empty.
Six beers later my mind is in Germany and New York. I am daydreaming plans to play shows again. I am sending email to contacts in the music industry I haven’t seen for five years. I am picturing US tours and late nights in seedy bars, playing pool after the show with Stewart or Joel in the middle of nowhere and waking up early. Long drive. Get in the van. Big tour next year? Or the year after?
And then it hits me. As I grab for another bottle from the freezer by the door. As I try to imagine my old life again, after covid, and (hopefully) after this vocal cord thing. I realise in that moment that it will never be the same again.
Probably for loads of reasons. But in that moment I realised that wherever I go, whatever I do, for the next fifteen, maybe twenty years. Maybe even for the rest of my life. I’ll be wondering where they are. Those two kids. Wondering if they’re ok. Wondering what they’re up too.
Their image sticks to me and I struggle to shake it off. I scroll thorough my phone looking at pictures of them from a year ago. Videos from when my eldest was the same age as my youngest. I look at photos from the night she was born. Then a couple of months before that. February 2018. Back a little further. Mid 2017. A stare for a long time at a photo of my wife and I dressed as vampires at a Halloween party.
I drink the last two beers in mostly a blur. I remember staring at the stars not long before I went to bed. Worrying about the fires in Greece and California. About the whole world burning. About the cost of living. About my voice. What if it never gets better? And even if it does, how we gonna pay the bills next month? How we gonna look after the kids? Are we ever gonna feel safe on this planet? How can I protect them after I am gone. What's the point? Tomorrow. Sleep.
Pass out.
Morning. Bird sounds.
They are part of my dream at first. The word sounds. Something in the background. I don’t remember the dream but the sound of the birds got louder until my eyes were open in the house and all I could hear was this screeching bird. Right on the roof, next to my window. I look at my phone, it’s ten to five.
So I get out of bed, and I’m a little hungover, maybe even still drunk. And the noise is so loud I just end up outside the house in my boxers. And there is this seagull on the roof, and it’s branching across the garden, into the neighbours yard. And as I stand there, bemused and exhausted, I realise there is this other noise. A tiny noise. And it’s the noise of a baby gull. And it’s clearly fallen, or lost, and this adult gull is its mother or father and it’s trying to find it. And it keeps looking down, and then swooping really low over the gardens and then coming back up to our roof. And I’m just watching in my boxer shorts and I realise that this noise the seagull has been making, the noise that’s woken me up for the last two nights, it’s a noise of desperation.
So I spend the next forty minutes trying to track down where the sound of the baby is coming from, but I can’t. I search around the houses (Don’t worry, I’ve got trousers on by now) and try to track it down, but the way the fences are connected, I just can’t work out where it’s coming from.
Plus it’s only 5.30am. It’s too early to got knocking on doors.
So I head back to the Kitchen. And I can still hear that seagull screeching outside. And I’m met with the sight of the beer bottles I left in the Kitchen the night before. So I start clearing them up. And I try and put something on the stereo. But the same thing happens, almost straight away Spotify flicks over to Show Yourself from frozen. They must be up already. On their way up north.
This time I leave it on while I clear up. Let it play. My girls and I listening to the same songs a few hundred miles apart. As the sun tries again to rise up and penetrate the clouds outside the window.
Later, when it’s not so early, I’ll go around to the neighbours and see if I can find the little seagull and reunite it with it’s mother.
Yesterday was Sports day. I wish I knew what today was called.