All my best intentions seemed to backfire, and even my loving nicknames didn’t stick. Connie invented Egg, as in Albie/albumen/egg white/Egg, a pleasing name that seemed to fit. Noting the somewhat simian way he clung to his mother’s hip, I made a play for ‘Monkey’ but it didn’t take, and I abandoned it after a week or two. Then there was the incident with the Lego, an episode that has since passed into Petersen folklore as an illustration of … I don’t quite know what, because my behaviour always seemed entirely reasonable to me. Needless to say I was raised on Lego, which was a rather more rigorous and austere toy in my day but nevertheless something of a secret vice for me; that satisfying click, the symmetry, the neat tessellations. Maths, engineering, design — they were all there disguised as play, and so I looked forward to the day when Albie and I could sit shoulder to shoulder in front of a tea-tray, open the cellophane bag, turn to page one and build!
Yet Albie’s technique just wasn’t there. He seemed incapable of following the simplest instructions, happy instead to jam different-coloured pieces together at random, to chew the pieces so that they became unusable, gum them up with Plasticine, drop them behind the radiator, throw them at the wall. If I constructed something on his behalf — a police station say, or an elaborate spaceship — he would smash the toy to pieces within minutes and make instead some nameless, formless thing to shove down the back of the sofa. Set after set expired this way, a perfectly good toy turned into detritus for the vacuum cleaner.
One night, motivated entirely by a desire to give my son something lasting and permanent to play with, I waited until he and Connie were in bed, poured myself a large Scotch, mixed together some Araldite adhesive in a jam-jar lid, laid the instructions before me and carefully glued together a pirate ship, a troll castle and an ambulance. Now, instead of a box of expensive shingle, here were three terrific, long-lasting toys. I displayed them on the kitchen table and went to bed, anticipating much acclaim.
The tears and wailing that woke me the next morning were therefore something of a disappointment, and certainly quite out of proportion to my crimes. But look, I told Albie, now they’ll last forever! Now they won’t smash! But he doesn’t want them to last forever, said Connie, consoling tearful Albie, he wants to smash them, that’s the point! That’s what’s creative about them. That destruction could be creative seemed like one of those things artists say, but I let the point go and went off to the lab, sour and frustrated, the pleasures of Lego quite lost to us now. The offending articles were stashed away in a high cupboard, the story materialising years later as an anecdote at dinner, signifying … what, exactly? A lack of imagination on my part, a lack of creativity, I suppose. Lack of fun. Oh yes, they remembered that.
Anyway, the anecdote always seemed to get a big laugh, and as a father I have learnt to develop a thick skin and appreciate jokes at my expense. Nobody would ever have dared to laugh at my own father and this is progress, I suppose, of a sort.
Certainly the boy on the Siena train found me engaging enough and by the time we arrived at my destination we were firm friends, nodding away at each other, nodding, nodding. I was grateful for the sweet he offered me and would gladly have gorged on all of them, because who knew when I would eat again? But we were pulling into Siena. Ciao, ciao! Say goodbye to the nice crazy man. I shook the sticky fingers of the boy’s hand and stepped out into the brutal heat of a Tuscan noon.
The bus that shuttled into the old town was packed and I was aware of how smugly unencumbered I felt amidst the backpacks and suitcases, as free and light as a recently escaped lunatic. Now we were passing through a mediaeval gate, now disembarking, the suitcases rumbling behind me as I hurried ahead, through another gate and then, without any expectation, out into the bright light of an immense piazza, a fan divided into nine slim wedges like a peacock’s tail or a tin of Scottish shortbread, radiating from an immense Gothic palace, the whole scene baked a terracotta red. Quite, quite overwhelming, and heartening too, because Siena was a walled town, compact and self-contained, and if Venice was a maze, this was a shoebox. The Piazza del Campo was inescapable, with a clear focal point at its base. Like ants beneath a magnifying glass, it would be impossible for Kat and Albie to avoid passing before me. Optimistic, alert, I chose a spot on the herringboned bricks about halfway down the slope, pulled my baseball cap down over my eyes and promptly fell asleep.
I woke a little after three and swore so extravagantly that the tourists turned to stare. How could I have been so stupid? Struggling to my feet, I found that I could barely stand. In my exhaustion, my head had lolled to one side and the right side of my face and neck had the familiar tightness that precedes sunburn. I stumbled, then sat once again on the hot bricks. Three hours! Three hours in which I felt almost certain they had passed me by. I had a perfect image of Albie stepping over me, collapsed here like some drunk. My mouth was dry while my clothes dripped with perspiration — I had left a damp patch on the ground where the bricks had drawn the remaining moisture from my body — and my head throbbed with what surely must be sunstroke. Water, I must have water. I tried to stand again, resting on my toes a moment then staggering up the sides of the sun-baked terracotta bowl, like Lawrence of Arabia clambering up a dune.
In a kiosk at the edge of the square I paid an extortionate amount of money for two bottles of water, draining one and half of the other before stopping to take in my reflection in the mirrored wall. A vertical line divided the crimson half of my face and neck from the white, while across my forehead the shade of the baseball cap had created an equator. My face had been stencilled by the sun into something resembling the Danish flag. I touched the skin — the tenderness told me there was worse to come — and laughed, the kind of laughter that precedes great sobbing tears, and stepped out into the heat.
I felt faint, nauseous, irrational. Returning to the cauldron of the piazza was inconceivable, but there was no hotel room to lie down in and only twelve euros in my pocket, not even enough to get me back to Florence where my wallet and passport were even now accumulating fines. Instead I staggered through the crowds, water bottle in my hand, dizzy and deranged, clinging to the shade like a vampire, with scarcely a rational thought in my head, until the street opened up into a courtyard, the ornate candy-striped façade of the Duomo rising up vertically. A sudden clamour of bells from the campanile raised every eye to the sky and then, even louder than the church bells, I heard the celestial sound of Kat Kilgour playing ‘Beat It’ on her accordion.
I waited until the final chords before I stepped forward and threw my arms around her. ‘Kat Kilgour!’ I said, through cracked lips. ‘I am so, so pleased to see you!’
‘Jeez, Mr Petersen,’ she said, recoiling a little. ‘You look completely f***** up.’
Yes, it was an emotional reunion on my part, but I still wish the police hadn’t got involved.
I’m loath to throw around terms like ‘brutality’. It was all a misunderstanding, or perhaps an overreaction on their part, and mine too. If I’d been more level-headed I’d have handled the situation differently. Nevertheless …
‘Kat, you have no idea what I’ve been through.’