New fiction by Owen Booth, featuring art by Catherine Williams.

The Great Outdoors

We’re teaching our sons about the great outdoors.

We’re teaching them how to appreciate the natural world, how to understand it, how to survive in it. As fathers have apparently been teaching their sons since the Palaeolithic.

We’re teaching our sons how to make fires and lean-to shelters, how to tie twenty-five different kinds of knot, how to construct animal traps from branches and vines. We’re teaching them how to catch things, how to kill things, how to gut things. Out on the frozen marshes before dawn we produce hundreds of rabbits out of sacks, try to show our sons how to skin the rabbits.

Our sons look over our shoulders, distracted by the beautiful sunrise. They don’t want anything to do with skinning rabbits.

Out on the frozen marsh we explain the importance of being self-sufficient, and capable, and knowing the names of different cloud formations and geological features, and how to identify birds by their song.

“Can we set things on fire again?” our sons ask.

The stiff grass creaks under our feet as we make our way back to the carpark. The sky is the colour of rusted copper.

“Can we set fire to a car?”

“No you can’t set fire to a car,” we say. “Why would you want to set fire to a car?”

“To see what would happen,” our sons mutter, sticking their bottom lips out.

We look at our sons, half in fear, wondering what we have made.

Drowning

We’re teaching our sons about drowning.

We tell them how we almost drowned when we were four years old. How we can still remember the feeling of being dragged along the bottom of the swollen river, the gravel in our faces, the smell of the hospital for weeks afterwards.

We don’t want this to happen to our sons. Or worse.

We take our sons swimming every Sunday morning, try to teach them how to stay afloat. Each week we have to find a new swimming pool, slightly further from where we live, slightly more overcrowded. The council is methodically demolishing all the sports centres in the borough as part of the Olympic dividend.

We are being concentrated into smaller and smaller spaces.

In the water our sons cling to us. Our hundreds of sons. They splash and kick their legs gamely, but they don’t seem to be getting any closer to being able to swim. We have to bribe them to put their faces under the water, and the price goes up every week.

We’re sure it wasn’t like this when we were children.

The water is a weird colour and tiles keep falling off the ceiling onto the swimmers’ heads. A scum of discarded polystyrene cups floats in the corner of the pool. It’s hotter than a sauna in here.

Also we keep being distracted by the sight of the swim suited mothers. The mothers who come in all sorts of fantastic shapes and sizes. They look as sleek as sea otters in their black swimsuits. They’re wonderful. They make us ashamed of our hairy backs, our formerly impressive chests, our pathetic tattoos.

We hope they can look at us with kinder eyes.

We crouch low in the water like middle aged crocodiles, stealing glances at the wonderful mothers, and our sons put their arms around our necks and refuse to let go.

In the changing rooms we hold on to our sons’ tiny, fragile bodies; feel the terrible responsibility of lost socks, and impending colds, and the effects of chlorine on skin and lungs. We wrap our sons in towels, blow dry their hair, try not to consider the future and all the upcoming disasters that we can’t protect them from.

We promise ourselves that next week we’ll get it right.

Heartbreak

We’re teaching our sons about heartbreak.

Its inevitability. Its survivability. Its necessity. That sort of thing.

We take our sons to meet the heartbroken men. We have to show our credentials at the gate. We have a letter of introduction.

Our jeeps bounce across the rolling scrubland under huge blackening skies. As we approach the compound a group of men in camouflage gear watch us carefully. They all have beer bellies and assault rifles.

The heartbroken men are heartbroken on account of the breakdown of their marriages, and the fact that they never see their children, and the fact that no one takes them seriously. The fathers of the heartbroken men loom large. Their hard-drinking, angry fathers. And their fathers and their fathers and their fathers before them.

The heartbroken men like to dress up as soldiers and superheroes. It’s embarrassing. How are we supposed to respond?

We don’t like the look of those skies.

“We have a manifesto,” the heartbroken men tell our sons. They want our sons to take their message back to the people. Their spokesmen step forward.

“Are those real guns?” our sons ask.

“We — ”

“Can we have a go on the guns?” our sons ask.

“No, you can’t have a go on the guns,” we tell our sons. “Don’t let them have a go on the guns,” we tell the heartbroken men, “what were you even thinking?”

The heartbroken men go quiet. They look at their feet.

“Well?”

“Fathers are superheroes,” the heartbroken men say, quietly.

“What?”

“Superheroes,” say the heartbroken men, starting to cry. Tears roll down their cheeks and fall upon the barren, scrubby ground.

This is turning into a disaster.

We should never have come.

Philosophy

We’re teaching our sons about philosophy.

We’re discussing logic, metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics. We’re covering philosophical methods of inquiry, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind. We’re asking our sons to consider “if there is something that it is like to be a particular thing”.

We’re on a boat trip up a Norwegian fjord and our sons are gathered on deck to listen to our lecture series. The spectacular mountains slide by as we talk about the sublime. The steel deck is wet from the recent rain.

Our sons are doing their best to feign interest, we have to give them that. They’re disappointed that there are no whales or polar bears to look at.

We’re trying to remember which famous philosopher lived in a hut up a Norwegian fjord.

Not all the children on deck are our sons. The boat is full of beautiful, strapping Norwegian teens on a school trip. They’re all six-foot-tall with no sense of personal space. They make our sons look stunted and reserved. They keep asking our sons if they have any crisps. This has been going on for five days and everyone is getting sick of it.

“Why are we here?” our sons ask us.

“Yes!” we say, pointing to our sons with the chalk, like we’ve seen lecturers do in films. “That’s exactly the crux of it!”

“No,” our sons say. “Why are we here, on a boat, half way up Norway? When we could be exactly just about anywhere else?”

We have no answer to that one.

In the evenings everyone eats together in the dining hall and then the older sons sneak off to try to get a glimpse of the beautiful Norwegian teen girls and boys who gather at the back of the boat singing folk songs and playing acoustic guitars. We put the younger sons to bed and tell them about Descartes and Spinoza, try to pretend we don’t wish we were still teenagers.

Then we sit up long into the night nursing our glasses of aquavit and listening to the distant music and laughter.

We came to Norway in the hope of seeing the aurora borealis, but it’s summer and the sun never sets.

Work

We’re teaching our sons about work.

We’re taking them to the office, the factory, the school, the hospital. They’re coming with us on film shoots, on home visits, on our window cleaning rounds. They’re helping us to study the births and deaths of volcanic islands, to collect unpaid gambling debts, to project-manage billion-pound IT infrastructure transformation programmes.

We’re teaching our sons that it’s important to have a vocation. And that even if you don’t have a vocation you still have to turn up every day and pretend you care. We’re teaching our sons about compromise. We’re teaching them how to skive, how to slack off, how take credit for other people’s work. We’re teaching them how to negotiate pay rises and how to have office affairs.

We tell our sons the stories of our many office affairs.

We tell them about our affair with beautiful Stephanie from reception, and the sunset in Paris, and the helicopter ride, and the accident. We tell them about our affair with Cathy the kickboxing champion, and how it ended with a roundhouse kick to our head. The gay dads tell the stories of their affairs with Steve and Mark and Sunny and John and David and Disco Clive and the two Andrews.

We could go on.

We go on for a bit, until our sons start to wander off.

They’re convinced they’re going to be film stars and astronauts and famous comic book artists. They’re not interested in all the ways we managed to screw up our stupid lives.

The Ultimate Fate of the Universe

We’re teaching our sons about the ultimate fate of the universe.

We’re teaching them that, assuming the universe continues to expand as it has done for the last 13.8 billion years, its eventual heat death — sometime after 10100 years from now — is inevitable.

We’re at Disneyland Paris.

Why are we at Disneyland Paris, we ask ourselves, in the middle of August, on the hottest day of the year? Our sons don’t ask why we’re at Disneyland Paris — they love Disneyland Paris.

Apparently we’re at Disneyland Paris because this is the sort of place that fathers take their sons. And because we got a package deal.

“First the stars will start to go out,” we tell our sons, as we stand before the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril rollercoaster ride. “With no hydrogen left to fuse into helium and power the stellar engines, the sky goes dark in around a hundred trillion years.”

Our sons nod, fidget, shift excitedly in the queue. They can’t stand still. It was the same with the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. And the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. And Thunder Mountain.

“Next, the few galaxies that haven’t already accelerated away from us across the cosmological horizon start to fall apart,” we explain. “Dead stars and planets drift out of their orbits or into tumble into black holes. The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies have long since crashed into one and another and been obliterated.”

Disneyland Paris is horrific. Everything smells of burnt popcorn. Everywhere you look actors are staggering around in demented animal costumes.

At least we brought our own sandwiches.

“By 1040 years, depending on the rate of proton decay, most forms of matter as we know them have ceased to exist,” we tell our sons. “Slowly evaporating black holes make up most of what remains of the frozen, empty universe.”

We hand out the sandwiches. You’re not supposed to bring your own food into Disneyland Paris. We had to smuggle the sandwiches in. It feels like a victory.

“And then, for an almost unimaginable length of time, nothing at all happens.”

Nobody wants to hear this sort of thing. It’s depressing, we know. But it also gives you a sense of perspective. Of scale. It gives you a different angle from which to analyse the frustrations and struggles of your life. One day, we’re sure, our sons are going to need that kind of perspective. To be able to find solace in the immense meaninglessness of everything.

“You’re probably wondering what happens if protons don’t decay,” we continue, as we all take our seats on the roller coaster.

“If it turns out that protons don’t decay,” we shout over the sound of the excited screaming as the cars begin their first climb, “then cold fusion via quantum tunnelling eventually turns the wandering, burnt-out stars into iron.”

“And for a few trillion trillion trillion years,” we yell as we reach the crest, “these magnificent iron relics will bear witness to the passing of our age, silently ringing across the infinite depths of space.”

But we’ve lost them. We’ve begun our descent. Gravity has won again.

And so we never get to explain that the iron stars, too, will eventually collapse under their own gigantic mass, before ultimately evaporating away to leave a universe empty of everything except lonely, drifting photons. And silence. And an eventual, unremarked end.

Still, we have time.

We can wait.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Owen Booth won the 2015 White Review Short Story Prize. He is currently working on at least three different short story collections.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Catherine Williams is a veterinary surgeon and artist, currently reading for a PhD in reptile anaesthesia and analgesia at Aarhus University. Her artistic practice is founded on drawing from life, and has led to works held in private and public collections in Europe and the USA.