A Short Story

Eley Williams

‘Would the Minotaur moo?’

Surprised by the question, my elbow caught on his night-light and the lampshade coughed fiery and tufted dust against the shadows of the bedroom.

‘I imagine it would bellow rather than moo.’

I closed the book close with a clap of covers. Bernard’s face turned on the pillow, eyes already gummed together with sleepiness.

‘So, it would speak?’ he continued.

‘I don’t think Ovid mentioned either way. I imagine he bellowed. The Minotaur, not Ovid. Or perhaps it would bell like a stag.’ Bernard’s eyes began working fast under their fastened lids, rolling from one thought to another. He did a similar thing when playing chess. ‘It wouldn’t have anyone to talk to, anyway,’ I added. I intended this in a fatherly, practical way.

‘No. I suppose not.’

He moved in the sheets, tossing himself maggoty-fat in the duvet.

My sleepy son. Pearl from my grit.

I am not sure I like Bernard.

I have tried all the things that fathers do in the adverts with their children. I ruffle his hair, I touch his shoulders. I sometimes pass him rugby balls. Neither of us plays rugby; I bought one of the balls expressly so that I could pass it to him over the breakfast-table and excite the dogs.

The word ‘prodigy’ has often been bandied about concerning Bernard. Banded about him. I will rephrase that: ‘banded’ sounds too restrictive. Certainly there is a restrictive pressure upon him to perform well, what with this buzzing bright blob of a brain in his head, as my wife reminds me. ‘Branded’, perhaps. Does the term ‘prodigy’ give him both a plinth and a yoke, then? A yinth. A ploke. He is horribly clever, whatever. Next week he will play chess against a shiny – the shiniest – computer (‘And him only twelve!’); if he wins, I will see this little pillow-propped head inked and reprinted in all the newspapers the next morning. The pictures will have him holding a cheque larger than his whole body. The headlines will have exclamation marks. He will be a national treasure, Bernard, my son.

‘What’s the describing-word for something by Ovid?’

‘The adjective? And I thought you had no time for English!’ I said, and poked him in the crease under his ribs, beneath the blankets, in the bed, in my house, where he used to be ticklish as a baby. He had never actually said such a thing about English. He was always a maths boy – the mathsiest boy; I always supposed there was no room in that mind to be interested in much else. I had never thought to ask. Was he even taught English?

Nerd, geek, dweeb. They sound like brands of sweets. I work in advertising.

He stayed inert, despite my nudgings, and answered his own question with another, steadily, considering, ‘Ovine?’

‘Ovidian, I think. Ovine means something to do with sheep.’

‘Like ‘bovine’ is do with cows?’

‘Yes. Cows that moo.’

The eyelids paused in their flickery; cogs of thought were now grinding deep in his head, deeper than the thin slip of skin over his eyeballs could translate to me.

I have learnt from twelve gingerly, curious years of Daddydom that an adult should never presume to understand what a child is thinking. If I jambed a thumb into each of his ears and broke that little head over my knee, I would not be able to read what I found there. I cannot create thoughts like a child, that is the reason; I think in bullet points and animated .gifs and spreadsheets; I am not sure when the switch happened exactly, when the adult rushed in and threw the toys out of the cradle of my mind. But I do know that I just cannot see things like Bernard. This bedroom, for example: for a child it is caves and dens and monsters and oceans and lava. The only potential I can rustle up is the potential sound of a shower, the potential smoothing of linen.

So I cannot see like a child, cannot think like a child, cannot reason like a child, and certainly cannot see what my horribly clever son Bernard, whose very breath is calculation, might be thinking.

‘Can you read it to me again tomorrow?’ he asked.

‘This is the third time I’ve read it to you this month.’

‘I like it.’

‘You like it.’

‘Yes.’

The eyes opened, and looked at the ceiling. I watched him for a while, then turned off the bedside light.

I remained on the edge of the bed.

I realised I was using the slackness, then the tautness, then the falling slackness of the cover over his lungs to gauge whether he was still alive. He was.

I moved my foot.

When had I last held him? Did it matter?

I am tired.

‘Good night, Bernie.’

I leave.

My wife and I in bed. A careful observer might link the fact that we have been married for some time and the unworn stripe of cold sheet separating us. I am facing the door, she the window, and my tongue is playing with a boomerang of toothpaste that has lodged in the corner of my mouth.

And we’re off.

She asked, ‘Did he get to sleep alright?’

Exchanging words is a lot like holding hands.

‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘I read the story then left. Theseus and the Minotaur again.’

‘I read the minotaur one to him yesterday!’

‘He obviously really likes it.’

She moved, and all the angles in the room changed. ‘He asked me whether minotaurs could moo.’

‘ “Minotaurs”, plural? There is only one Minotaur.’

‘Pedant.’

Exchanging words is nothing like holding hands. ‘Marital’ and ‘martial’ are very similar words, if the ‘I’ bothers to move around.

I said, ‘He asked me the same thing. About the mooing.’

‘I said it could. Like Ermintrude.’

‘Ermintrude?’

‘From the “Magic Roundabout”.’

I thought, Wife: you are banality itself. You are lumpen, waxen, dry-lipped, salty, porous, squeaky, mild, creased. I am strong and wayward. I might consider myself swarthy, if I only understood what that word really meant.

She continued: ‘Why did you set him off on the Minotaur-thing again anyway? Why read that story to him? I think it startled him.’

‘What.’ I am too tired for question marks.

‘I mean,’ she said, ‘he looked petrified when I was reading it.’

‘No one talks about mooing if they’re petrified.’

‘It’s a scary story. He’s still only young and I just thought that the whole Ermintrude reference might bring some levity to the situation.’

‘Ermintrude from the “Magic Roundabout” trapped in a labyrinth, feasting upon the ripe flesh of Athenian youth is the very stuff of nightmares.’

‘Well!’

‘Well.’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘he just can’t afford to have nightmares with the chess tournament coming up.’

‘He’s too old to be having stories read to him, full stop. Twelve years old? He should be shooting up monsters on a game console. Or working out whether he likes girls. Or happy-slapping the elderly.’

She kicked me under the sheets. Her feet were freezing and, with some ridiculous sudden instinct I could tell that her toenails were too long. This clothing-less, fleshy trapezium of a woman with nails on her feet is sleeping next to me. I stopped nudging the toothpaste on the side of my mouth.

‘I want you to take him to Crowley’s farm to see the cows tomorrow.’

This warranted not only a question mark, but an actual turn of my actual head. ‘What? Why?’

‘Make him see they’re not frightening.’

‘What?’

‘Cows. I don’t want him developing a complex about them. He looked entirely disturbed by the story you’ve been feeding him. By the cow element.’

‘I don’t – ’

‘All I’m asking, David, is that you just take him on a father-son trip into a field there; show him that they’re not big and scary. Tomorrow.’

That is the second time this conversation that she has used the word ‘scary’. Do not think I have not noticed. ‘When have I ever taken Bernard on a father-son trip?’

‘That may well be my exact point.’

I started the engine, and enjoyed flexing my knuckles on the steering wheel. For no reason, of course; my hands need not be nimble at this point. But it looked good, the flexing. I did it again.

‘Seatbelt on?’ I asked as Bernard slid into the front passenger seat.

He fiddled. ‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

Ignition, and out of the driveway.

‘Do you feel confident about it?’ I murmured, a mile further on.

‘About what?’

‘The tournament tomorrow. Against the computer with the funny name.’

‘Yes.’

‘Great.’

He was all hunched against the window, marbling his cheek-flesh against it. He is quite a squashy kid.

The car tugged itself along by the nubs of cats’ eyes in the road, useless in the daytime; we counted them in our heads.

There is something of a myth about bloodlines, I have always thought. A magic lie in the concept of descendancy that I found I had bought into, even when I realised Bernard was not going to be the hero-son every father wants. He was a fat-headed, tuggy-fisted mewling little personling, like every other baby in the ward. Always a squashy kid.

But twelve years ago I thought something along the lines of, ‘I am begetting! As I was myself begat! I will start a dynasty, a race of men, and they shall sing and laugh and talk of fire and of sun! And they shall be stronger than all other sons, and shall prove themselves as such!’ Was that really what I had thought of fatherhood? Of sonhood? ‘All shall look upon my son’s works (mighty, many, manly) and despair!’. Because that is the thought which had first come to my mind, swelling, proud, ridiculous, when the nurse with the crackly plastic mask had wiped the gel off my wife’s midriff in a white room and told me about unborn Bernard’s gender. The prodigy son, I think, my little fatted calf.

Bernard and I winced as we sped over a piece of pheasant road-kill lying rainbow-faced in the middle of the tarmac.

Look at you, you clever, weak sapling. You seedling you, busy about the head with bees.

‘You missed the turning, Dad.’

I am having an affair, Bernard.

No. I cannot just tell you.

‘Righto,’ I said.

Why did we call you ‘Bernard’, I wondered as the car looped back around the roundabout the way it had come. You are growing into a squashy librarian of a Bernard-man. I can envisage you, Bernard, getting older over your chess set the way I have over my desk, the way your mother has over her dressing-table. Maybe you will run to fat, and cold thick wrists will worm out of your cuffs, collared with a gold watch with a gold face, and you will wear two too shiny brown shoes, and you will have yellow teeth with black edges. You will have sweet-smelling hair. Brilliant-Bernard the Young will turn into a pawn-pushing St. Bernard, the too-big dog with jowls and a barrel around his neck.

Boys should like dinosaurs or jet fighters, not the Minotaur. My son should like dinosaurs or jet fighters. Bernard did not like chess, I am pretty sure of that at least. He just did it, without thinking. Clever with it, of course. The cleverest son a man could hope for, cleverer than his old Dad who missed the turning. If you took both our heads, broke them over your knee and filled them with ball-bearings, his might even hold more ball-bearings than mine.

He thinks of bishops as oblique, knights as horse-headed, queens as tall and kings as crucial, stunted. He is very careful to call the castles ‘rooks’. They are not named after the birds, I had told once him when we last played a match; they’re named after the Persian word for ‘chariot’. Rook-birds enjoy carrion, chariot-rooks enjoy charging. He nodded, then took my queen. He was five years old.

The less said about ‘pawns’ back in my schooldays, the better. Pawns from a pawn-shop. Pawn from the top shelf. Bernard did not go to school but was instead tutored by his mother, my wife, at home. She was also his manager, and had arranged all the press conferences for after Wednesday’s tournament. Bernard had been managed since the manger.

I think my wife knows Bernard quite well.

I know some facts about Bernard, however; vital statistics that I have observed in his natural habitat. I recall he has developed a curious hatred of draughts. Or was it chequers. Whichever, I also know he loved the names of the different chess-gambits: Benko, Albin, Elephant. And I knew about the movements of his eyelids during matches, and of the way he folded his hands in his lap between moves, holding them clasped inward like two crabs pressing their bellies together. There was no victory possible for any opposition once he did that.

Our destination was advertised on a post, and I flapped the indicator on.

I do not understand chess, so I do not play it with him any more. Or, more precisely, I do not understand how Bernard plays chess. He plays it both mathematically and naturally, pushing pieces into brackets in his head. He mouths when he makes moves and his fingers twitch. With his head kept quite still, glutted on numbers, his fingers and eyelids snap at invisible abacus-strings. Pink, soft, wandering fingers and eyes.

There is no air of glory about him, either, when he wins. I am an air-punching man, a hooting man: HELL YES. But Bernard just nods at the job well done then leaves the hall. His competitions are always held in halls; I think my wife arranges it this way so that the vaulted décor emphasises exactly how small he is. The trainers I bought him trot in little squeaks across the glazed parquet flooring after every match.

I wish I could say that he is a mathematician and that I am a wordsmith, and that he is just a different chip off the old, bigger block. But that just is not true: my thoughts sag and bow inward unlike his, which work with gears and steam.

As for my achievements, the bacon I have brought home? My greatest triumph, the reason that I am pointed out with hors d’oeuvre-laden fingers and lip-clacking congratulations at my wife’s dinner parties; the jotting in the ‘Whatever Became of…’ column left blank thus far in my school yearbook next to a picture of my head? My greatest conquest lay in advertising, conceived at a board-meeting. Everyone loved me for a week. I am the man that decided to have ‘I Got Rhythm’ as the background music for a new brand of prune-juice. Clients touched my shoulders. I punched the air, at the time. I hooted.

So in sum, Bernard, you are better than your father.

Can you imagine giving birth to a baby with the head of a bull?

At least I do not put undue pressure on you, unlike your mother, and that is not because I do not care but because I care so much that I do not want to help you.

That is because I resent you, Bernard.

I can never tell you that, either.

‘Where are we going again?’ Bernard asked, not complaining.

‘To the Crowley’s farm to look at cows.’

The car gnawed into a gravelled stop by the swing-gate. We pulled in, and I registered the cows in the field beyond. ‘I know that,’ Bernard said. ‘Why are we going to the Crowley’s farm to look at cows?’

‘For your mother.’

He considered. ‘Will there be a bull?’

‘I imagine so.’

He turned back to the window and then, quietly, opened the car door.

I swung open the field’s gate for him.

‘Right,’ I said. The cold spring air embroidered my breath in front of me. ‘There are your cows.’

He stood for a minute. We watched them.

‘Milk,’ I said. ‘Milk, beef, gravy, satchels. Cud. All kinds of things come from those animals.’

He shifted on his feet.

‘Lovely day for it!’ I said, and spread my hands wide. This was not entirely a lie. There were certainly many details I disliked about the scene. The crispy rinds of earth blistered up into cowpats around my feet, for example. The cows’ blue tongues and swagging blue saliva; the way they are ginghamed unevenly in the light through the chicken-wire. There are brambles over there that could catch on our clothes, on mine and Bernard’s skin; springtime brambles that are thickening up for their blackberries. I hate blackberries almost as much as I hate prunes. Trussed up, bulbous, suppurating excuses for blackcurrants, that is all blackberries are.

There is a wood beyond the cows that is full of cherry blossom.

‘Did you say something, Bernard?’

‘No.’

I was more accustomed to the indoors than out here; I could feel the cold in unexpected folds of my face. In my face’s inboxes. I could feel the plaque on my teeth. Bernard looked a little cold, too, with raw red and pink patches competing on his face and hands, so I pulled him closer to my jacket. We squinted at the nearest cow.

‘How do you feel, looking at them? Feel calmer? See at that one? The yellowy one that looks like that politician, with the eyebrows? I like her. Watch them stand up, sit down, mill about. It’s therapeutic, don’t you think, Bernard? Like watching goldfish in a barrel.’

‘You shoot goldfish in a barrel.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s fish in a tank that are supposed to be relaxing. To watch. You’re thinking of “like shooting fish in a barrel”.’

‘Barrel of a gun. Gun on a tank. Armoured tanks.’

‘That’s an entirely different kettle of fish.’

‘Good one,’ I say.

‘The word “bull-dozer” is a funny thing, isn’t it, Dad.’

‘Yes.’

I was aware of all the details in the field. I could stand and count the eyelashes on the cows, the blades of the grass, the number of flies. Even the bluebottles’ bodies had a lustre in this light. The cherry blossom in the distance was pink in a brown wood. Chocolate and quartz. The textures of the field hurt my eyes.

‘You feel more relaxed?’ I asked, looking down at him.

‘I like them.’

‘You have to do well on Wednesday, Bernard.’

‘Mum wants me to do well.’

‘Yes. Don’t you, too?’

‘I guess.’

‘Well, that’s good.’

‘I’m a special boy,’ said Bernard, clearly quoting his mother. He was looking at one of the cows trying to scratch its nose with a hindhoof, making an unlikely and ungainly circle of its body.

‘Yes. Yes you are.’

‘So was the Minotaur. And look what happened to him.’

‘His father put him in a labyrinth,’ I said, and thought about lunging in for a jokey head-ruffle.

‘His dad was a bull,’ Bernard corrected me. ‘His mother’s husband put him in a labyrinth.’

‘That is true.’

‘Bulls eat grass,’ he added after a while, disappointed.

‘That is also true.’

‘He ate meat in the book. He eats meat in the book.’

‘It certainly devoured people. Maybe it oughtn’t have, however. If he’d just stuck to grazing, maybe it would have been fine. Digestively speaking.’

‘I doubt there was grass in the labyrinth.’

‘Me too.’

Is this bonding with Bernard? Trying to work out what his head is doing, where it is going? Could I tell you anything now, Bernard? That I am afraid your mother and I are having problems. That I am going to go to my secretary’s sister’s house after this, and that her house is way out of town. That my secretary’s sister is an American and says ‘milk’ in the most charming way, that she is plush when all else is brittle. I think you would like her. She eats croissants really very delicately.

You are a strange, cloying little boy and I have let you down.

‘Do you think the Minotaur spoke to the people they sent to him?’ Bernard asked. He was swivelling a finger in his ear.

‘I thought we decided it couldn’t speak at all.’

‘He must have been lonely.’

‘That cow has ticks on it. Let’s look at this one instead.’

‘The trick with chess,’ Bernard said, looking at the cow I pointed out, ‘is knowing a move ahead.’

There is a black cow in a big red triangle on the side of the road, on a sign behind us.

‘So I’ve heard.’

‘Not a single move ahead, Dad. Not really even two moves ahead. It’s something to do with knowing, when the other person sits down opposite you, what their first move will be.’

‘I don’t know how to do that, Bernard.’

You do not hug a calculator, I told myself.

‘We could let the cows out of the field,’ I said, keeping my eyes on the wood beyond. ‘That’s not supposed to happen.’

My son said something, but I could not catch the words.

‘We could leave the gate open for them,’ I said.

‘Open the gate?’

‘If we wanted.’

‘We could follow them.’

‘If we wanted.’

Bernard took his finger out of his ear. ‘Would the cows be alright?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know,’ Bernard said, and he hugged me.

I touched his shoulders, and we watched the cows.