‘Hello, Mike! Any sign of Albie?’
He raised a can in greeting. ‘Last I saw he was on the roof.’
‘Okay. On the roof?’
‘Up there. They’re doing target practice.’
‘Oh. Okay. They have a gun?’
‘Only my old air rifle.’
On cue I felt movement in the air near my ear as a pellet pinged off the cement mixer and ricocheted into the unmown grass. I looked up in time to see Albie’s grinning face disappearing behind the guttering. ‘What can I say?’ said Mike. ‘Boys’ll be boys.’
Ryan’s house became a kind of paradise that summer, Ryan’s dad a kind of god. He let them drive the van, climb towering trees, go night-fishing; he’d drive them to quarries, the two of them bouncing around in an open-bed truck, and hurl them off high rocks into the black water. The rustier and sharper an object, the more exposed the wires and blades, the more suitable a toy for the boys to play with. They welded! He let them weld! Mike never sat Ryan down to patiently explain the periodic table; there were no ‘school nights’ in Mike’s domain. Oh no, life with Mike was just one long burning mattress. ‘I think Albie’s spending too much time at Ryan’s,’ I said, after one more revision session disintegrated into tears, bribes and acrimony. ‘We can’t ban him,’ said Connie. ‘Forbidding it will just make it more appealing.’ This was a notion that I found alien. When my father forbade something, it became forbidden, not appealing.
Sometimes Mike would drop Albie home at some ungodly hour and he and Connie would stand in the front garden talking, talking. ‘He’s very charming,’ she’d say, flushing slightly on her return. ‘He’s sparky, he’s got a twinkle. I think it’s admirable, the way he brings up Ryan on his own.’
Admirable! What was admirable about letting your kid run wild, with no thought to his future? What about my work, the years of late-night study that had been required to get me there? Albie had no desire to come and see the lab and meet my colleagues. If anything, he had a vague contempt for it, part of a growing ‘political’ consciousness that he refused to debate with me. ‘What does Ryan’s dad do, exactly?’ I’d ask. Albie didn’t know, but he knew about the girls, scarcely more than teenagers, that Ryan’s dad brought back from the pub. He knew about the roll of banknotes that Mike kept, squeezed into the pocket of his greasy jeans.
A showdown was inevitable, and it came at the school’s annual Parents’ and Teachers’ Quiz, part of the never-ending jamboree of social events to raise funds for a new theatre (because it’s always a new theatre that’s needed, or a pottery kiln or a piano, never a new centrifuge or fume cupboard).
I like to think I’m not too bad at quizzes. I know things, facts, equations — it’s the way my mind works, always has been, and not just science, either. As a teenager I was entranced by the Guinness Book of Records, and memorised great chunks of it. Temperature of the sun, speed of the cheetah, length of a diplodocus, these facts were my party trick, though they rarely came up at parties. Never mind, because while some knowledge had faded, certain key elements — highest mountains, deepest oceans, speeds of light and sound, pi to many places, flags of the world — were as indelible as tattoos. Connie would be there to cover art and culture, and I think that the Petersens felt quietly confident as we entered the sports hall.
‘Sorry, no spouses on the same team!’ said Mrs Whitehead, who had told me that very week that Albie lacked basic numeracy skills. ‘Oi! Connie! Over here!’ shouted Mike, resplendent in a boiler suit unzipped to the navel and I noted how, suddenly giddy, Connie practically skipped across the hall to join his team. Albie went to sit with Ryan on the benches, and I cast around for a prospective team, settling on a shuffling band of lone parents loitering by the door as if about to bolt. Not the most prepossessing group of contestants, but never mind. I raised my hand to Albie and allowed myself to imagine the conversation in class the next day. ‘Your dad was on fire last night!’ ‘He carried that team. Your dad, he knows his stuff!’ I understand, perhaps more than anyone, that intelligence is not the quality a son most values in a father — Mike, as far as I could tell, was as stupid as a wall — but it would do no harm for Albie to see me win at something, and in a public forum too. We were offered bottled beers and a selection of snacks and took our place at our trestle table.
Few activities in life are more unpleasant to me than the task of deciding an amusing name for a quiz team. I have undergone surgical procedures that were less painful. Why couldn’t we be ‘red’ or ‘blue’ or ‘green’ team? After long deliberation it was decided, for reasons I can’t bring myself to recall, that we would be the Kranium Krusherz and that I would be captain or, presumably, kaptain. Mike and Connie’s team were called Mobiles at the Ready, which got a laugh but made me anxious, because that kind of anarchy is just intolerable to me. I pushed it out of my mind and thought about deepest lakes, longest rivers, highest peaks. A whistle of feedback and we began.
Of course the quiz was a travesty of what I understand by ‘general knowledge’. The music questions were skewed heavily towards the current pop scene, the sports questions almost entirely towards football, the news and current affairs were trivial and tabloid in nature, there was nothing at all on science or geography, inventions or mental arithmetic. We did what we could but Mike’s team, the aforementioned Mobiles at the Ready, were a tight little huddle of whispers and giggles, Mike and Connie head to head at its centre. ‘Yes!’ they hissed to each other. ‘Well done! Write it down!’ It seemed that Mike was not as dim as I’d imagined, at least with regard to song lyrics and celebrity tattoos, and Connie’s hand gripped his forearm tight. ‘Yes, Mike, yes! You’re brilliant!’
Elsewhere other teams were cheating in a supposedly light-hearted way — you could hear the tap-tap-tap of tiny keyboards, phones bleeping in their pockets, and as the evening progressed my indignation increased, magnified by the effect of the bottles of beer we were encouraged to buy in aid of the theatre fund. Our chances dwindled. I slumped in my stackable chair.
‘And now,’ said the quizmaster, ‘our penultimate round, flags of the world!’
Finally! I sat up straight. While the other teams scratched their heads I ticked them all off and showed both thumbs to Albie, who was distracted and didn’t see me. Then, I couldn’t quite believe it, name the rivers, name the lakes! I rallied our team, the correct answers accumulated, and it was time for marking.
We swapped papers with Mike and Connie’s team and I watched as they laughed and jeered at our answers on pop music. In turn, I shook my head at their suggestions for the flags. Venezuela? Oh, Mike, I’m sorry, no. I remained rigorously fair in our marking, but in general the process was sloppy and ill-conceived. Was it one point for a bonus, or two? Eventually our team’s papers were returned with a smug grin from Mike, and immediately I noticed several errors. Clearly there had been some spiteful marking down, points lost for writing USSR instead of Russia, when in fact USSR was the more accurate answer. Too late, though, because our scores had been noted and now the results were being announced.
Sixth, fifth, fourth, third. In second place — the Kranium Krusherz. Mike and Connie’s team had beaten us by two points. I watched Mike and Connie embrace to cheers and applause, and on the benches, too, Ryan and Albie were clenching their fists and whooping in that simian way.