Well, too much sugar rots your teeth, Mr T.
Is the fairy that collects the out-teeth a good or a bad fairy?
There’s no such thing as a bad fairy, Tommy.
Yes, Yaya, there is, you know there is.
22
A week later and I see him again: Mr Sober Smythe, sitting by the grubby back window in the cafe. I’ve just come from chicken duty and have ten minutes before my next group session. I watch him a moment, cradling his cup, blowing on it, but not drinking from it. Those hands. I debate with myself a moment, then walk over and ask if I could join him. He nods, coolly, I think. I wonder who he has been counselling and am surprised to find I don’t like that thought.
‘How are things, Sonya?’ He stays sitting.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t arrange another session. Until I get my son back I’m not able for any of this.’
‘Ever heard that one about putting on your own oxygen mask first?’
Ah now, I’d have given him more credit than that.
‘Why are you here, Sonya?’
‘Because I have to be. For Tommy.’
‘See?’
‘He’s four, David, four. He doesn’t have a father. I’m his world and without me he can’t function.’
‘How do you know that’s true? Maybe he’s functioning much better without you around?’
That is pretty fucking harsh and out of order and out of line and all out of whack. David seems to recognise this as he says in a much softer tone: ‘I’m just trying to make you see how much better he’ll be when you’re in his life in a stable capacity.’
I sit on my hands. This man makes me sit on my hands. How dare he presume to tell me how to think, how to live, how my son operates? This whole ‘recovery’ operation stinks of that corralling of self, of instinct, into a small, tight, constrained way of being. Start your day on your knees, pray for guidance. ‘Thy will be done’， for mine is warped, maniacal. And yet.
Sometimes I exhaust myself. I just wish I could do life, in the ordinary sense. I wish I was on a date with this good-looking man, being normal, instead of discussing my need for recovery. It seems unfair that he saw me pissed, with my child, when all I know of him is this upstanding version. I wish I knew the other side too, to level off the playing field.
A young guy about eighteen, a new recruit on work duty as a waiter, approaches our table.
‘What you having?’ he says to me.
‘Peppermint tea. Thanks.’
The boy sucks in his lips. ‘Doubt they have anything like that in here.’
‘They do, actually.’
‘Right,’ he says as he walks away, looking as if he’d like to rip someone’s windpipe out.
David smiles at me, conspiratorially, I think.
The boy returns with my tea, which he throws down on the table, liquid sploshing over the sides. David jumps, his thighs scalded through the soft cotton of his chinos.
The boy’s hands form into automatic fists, every muscle and sinew in his body straining.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I say, trying to catch his eye. ‘Can happen to any of us.’
David looks furious. He goes to the bathroom.
‘Are you new here?’
The boy’s mouth is a hard line.
‘This place is a joke.’
I don’t contradict him.
‘Would you like me to show you around later? Have you met the kittens?’
‘Has no one drowned them yet?’
It’s only bravado, he’s still a boy, and yet I sense an undercurrent of hurt that needs to hurt in return. I watch him walk away, his prowling back.
David returns.
‘You ok?’
‘Bit scalded, actually, but I’ll live!’
‘I don’t think he meant it.’
David looks at the boy, studying him like he’s a rare exhibit in a zoo.
I suddenly want that gaze on me.
‘Tommy came to see me last Sunday,’ I say, in a spurt.
‘Did he? That’s great. How did it go?’
‘Difficult, and lovely.’ I allow myself to relive the lovely. The moment with the leaf, the kissing it, the final hug at the end.
David sits up straighter in his chair. Neither of us have touched our drinks.
‘Did your father place him in care?’
I can sense my joy as an external thing – a pink balloon with ‘LOVELY’ scrawled on it – floating loose from my grip. I have to stop myself climbing on the table to draw it back down.
‘It can be a difficult process to get a child back once they’re in the system.’