There and back again
Hey Sam,
tonight 2020 ends.
But today, I’m sitting in an indoor treehouse themed playground, surrounded by kids running and screaming excitedly as they climb plastic trees and bounce off painted shrubbery walls. Next door a giant toyshop advertises its latest stock of Avenger weaponry on an enormous LED screen. The shifting light provides our fake forest with a dappled effect as I spot you in the throng. You climb on a log that will never decompose and declare that the floor is lava…
In 10
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I’m distracted by the din and by the view of the escalator that rises from the floor below, outside the playground window. People appear as if being drawn out of the ground. They rise to full height, adding torsos to floating heads, then arms, legs, feet, until they step off and join the multitude of shoppers.
5
A multitude that includes us. Somewhere in this hyperdome your Mum is filling our holiday cart as we sit and let the last moments of 2020 tick past.
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This is a long way from the real forest we were camping in a few days ago. That one had waterfalls, enormous fig trees, plateaus that cast a green eye over valleys shielding long extinct volcanoes like the bones of dead giants.
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And giants were on our minds while we were there because we were deeply engrossed in your first reading of The Hobbit.
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At the last moment a couple of other kids clamber onto the log beside you.
0
The floor is now lava.
2020 is the year that everyone says they want to forget. The year that wasn’t. Now we tell ourselves we want to get back to normal, but we don’t know what that means. Maybe we’re all just pining for the past, rewriting it as we remember it and making it safer, nicer, easier than it probably was, because the new future we face has dragons in it.
In the fake forest, one of the little log kids (brat?) just told you you look like a girl. You tell him you’re getting your hair cut, which is true, and you start fingering the long locks at the back, the ones with the curl in them, wishing them already gone. Down the escalator, and out the window behind me, our names are written on a chalkboard at the barbers. If I look over my shoulder…
…I can vaguely make out the shapes of our names hastily scrawled on the board. From this distance, across the mall space, it just looks like a snail took a shit and there’s still at least a half dozen other shits lined up before ours. I’m happy to wait. The truth is your hair is not that long, even if your Mum and I wish it were, and you don’t look like a girl, you look like Sam. The two brats (?) you’re playing with both have buzz cuts that make them look like child soldiers, so there’s no point listening to them. Maybe it’s also your leopard print pants? I don’t know, I think you look great.
Yesterday we were at a friends 40th birthday party in the park. A random game of cricket started up and pretty soon I found myself at bat. You seemed surprised and delighted to see me there, so after I spooned up a catch (on purpose of course) I joined you in the outfield to encourage you to join in. As I wandered over I told you to catch the ball if it came our way.
You responded, “I’m not that kind of man.”
Back in the neon hypermarket you’re playing pretty well with the child soldiers and even I can see they’re actually pretty cool. The question about your gender was nothing more than curiosity. Maybe you’re just pretty, that’s the issue. Like an elf king.
I notice you’re ostracising a small girl who wants to join your game in what I perceive as an act of masculine bonding. I look up at the girl’s father to try and gauge the situation but I don’t get much back, just a nod that’s hard to read, so I tell you to be nicer.
Less Thorin, more Bilbo.
I loved reading The Hobbit to you, it took me back to my own childhood. Perhaps it was the combination of that book and our campsite, which looked like a tropical version of Hobbiton, but Middle Earth really caught your imagination. And held it, at least until screens came back into our lives. I glance with annoyance at the giant display pointed at the playground. Hulk thunder blast. Captain America’s sonic missile. Iron Man’s fist of fury. Something like that. It doesn’t seem fair to line up a plastic forest next to the Times Square of children’s toys.
I crane my neck and look back out the window to the barber’s shop again. We’re inching closer, only a couple of snail shits to go…
The year ticks along to its conclusion, something I personally feel myself lacking. At the end of The Hobbit the dragon is slain, the goblins are routed, dwarves, men and elves all get along without fighting (or calling each other gender related insults) and Bilbo gets back to his home safely. In our world it’s less clear cut. Our dragon keeps mutating and our home no longer seems to be the nice little hobbit hole we left behind when we journeyed under the mountain.
I don’t know whether I should get your hair cut short. I love it long but I don’t want you to get teased either. Still, I’m not ready to pay for something that makes you look like you’re ready to shoulder an AK47. On the other hand I also don’t want you to be hurt or to make a decision based upon my own ideas of personal rebellion. I don’t have long hair, so what’s that about? Am I wanting to live vicariously through you? I don’t know.
I remember your hand playing in your hair at the back of your neck self consciously. Such a small thing but maybe it’s trying to tell me more. For a moment I am overwhelmed. The simple decision of talking to the barber suddenly seems important and I can’t seem to find the right path, it’s like I have strayed off it somewhere and got lost.
Should I have taught you how to catch when you were younger? Maybe we should have watched cricket on the couch together, fists pumping the air and shouting out random “Aussie, Aussies” and “oi, oi, ois”? I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m like Bilbo in the dark under the mountain, scrabbling around on wet, smooth stones, Gollum watching me with his twin fisheyes. I’m slipping about in a sea of grey that imagines itself black and white.
Even in the dark Bilbo had some clear parameters to work with (not to mention a magic ring):
A dragon must be slain to get the gold.
Only the brave and the true win out.
Tick.
I crane my neck.
Time’s up.
The floor is lava.
Happy New Year.
Love,
Ragnar.
