The abrupt sudden oxytocin-soaked slap in the face of parenthood has sent me reeling and the whole point of parenthood is to be stable. I am the father of two little girls and my job is to be a nurturing protective constant while these two females pass through hormonal tundras and emotional hurricanes. Parent. Parenthesis. Again, to hold them, like this ( ) while they grow. Unfortunately a man with my unreasonable degree of sensitivity, my tendency to smell the lurking sacred, sees threats to their sanctity everywhere. Our first social engagement with our first daughter was another kid’s party, and people come looming and cooing at the baby I am holding, and I want to quickly puncture their tracheas with a fast darting spearing blow to the neck. I bargain myself down to slapping away the never ending flock of (as far as I know) unwashed hands and this alone creates tension. I see her as being just like me and I wouldn’t want, I don’t want, people I don’t know coming over and touching my head. This coupled with my willingness to kill, which seems somehow like a newly relevant duty, not an abstract possibility, meant that the kid’s party had a little more aggression than was necessary, much of it emanating from me.
Neither do I like tickling. Before I was a father I was a right pain in the arse, Johnny come lately interloper at a party, razzing up kids with daft voices, sugar and excitement; tickling was a de rigueur part of my game. I had this thing I’d do called ‘The Driller Killer’ where I’d wheedle the shank of the hysterical child with my finger, held, as the name suggests, like a drill. A regular victim of this was Ezra Baddiel, my friend’s son, and I must say, Your Honour, he loved it. He laughed and we chased each other and capered and screamed and had a bloody good relationship that went way beyond the tickling and into chats, play and, I hope, good counsel. But even to recall doing this to Ez fills me with dreadful shame and makes me want to punch myself in the face. Which is what I will do to anyone who tickles either of my daughters until they are old enough to decide for themselves whether they want to be tickled or not, which by my reckoning is at thirty-five. I loathe it, it is an attempt to subvert the child’s bodily autonomy, to take control of them, to take away their right to their own space and peace. Would you do it to an adult? Would you approach an adult and insert your rigid fingers into their belly or their armpits? Of course not. I’ve actually enraged myself by thinking about it – reformed ticklers, like ex-smokers are always annoyingly evangelical. What, though, when the transgressor against your child is a child themselves? What then? Not with tickling but with any kind of disrespectful, less than doting and reverent behaviour?
We have friends with children, of course we do, that’s life now. It seems but the twinkling of an eye ago that my life was all Lear Jets and enthusiastic orgies, well now it’s playdates and there is nothing playful about a playdate. It’s an unrestrained, unmanaged, dangerous experiment that places my precious, perfect little girl in the company of anonymous, unvetted, potential arseholes.
Our lovely friends came round with their two-year-old when my daughter was about ten months old. These are good people. Kind, generous, fun, warmhearted, wise, lovely people. They come round, flowers, food, good-quality gifts, and let their child roam freely into our kitchen. My daughter was just walking at that point and was excited, visibly, at this new social possibility. She is barely yet formed, she is mostly pure light and golden hair. The memories that stretch back to her conception are so few, new and cherished that I can hold the whole of her being in my mind, moment to moment as I watch the cells in her immaculate face divide and grow. This boy walked up to her, my daughter, this living and breathing irrefutable proof of God’s love, and pushed her in the face with the bolt-armed, right-angled palm of a Rugby League scrum half. It was like someone had fired a gun. An involuntary yelp was cut from deep within me that filled the silence between the push/punch/strike (maybe we need a new word for this? Prunk?) and her tears. Now of course I know this is normal kid behaviour. Life. But that was the first time it had happened. That was the first time anyone had been anything other than loving to her in her whole life. My hope was that I would be able to chaperone her through life, from inception to expiration without even an ill breeze disturbing her perfection. To stretch the womb to the tomb, a life in utero where she is constantly enshrined and protected and nourished, never truly born to the world until the grave. My infallibility cracked like Nimrud antiquities under Islamic State attack.
It took a while to get my breath back. I told Chris at the next BJJ session. I suppose I do BJJ because I want to protect my family. I said: ‘What do you do about all this, the tickling? The other kids? The touching at parties?’ He said: ‘You just gotta suck that stuff up.’ Pretty simple. But my fear, I suppose, is that I am inadequate and incapable of protecting my family specifically because I’m not a badass BJJ blackbelt; Chris is and it makes no difference. This is life and it’s okay to be you, it’s okay to be me. Jimmy said, ‘They move further and further away from you; first they are in your arms, then they toddle at your feet, then school, university, work, until…’
I anxiously awaited the outcome of the twelve-week scan and I said to Meredith, ‘Once you get through the twelve-week scan, 90 per cent of pregnancies succeed. If we can just get through the twelve-week scan…’ She said, ‘Yeah. Then it’s the twenty-week scan, then the twenty-eight-week scan, then the thirty-six-week scan, then the birth, then playschool, then school, then the wedding. You’re a hostage to fortune now, for the rest of your life.’
This spiritual life, in the end it is not a choice, it’s what’s left when you run out of choices. If when you’re in a crowded room you automatically find yourself thinking ‘all of us in this room will die. Someone will be the first to die, and someone the last to die, but there is an order,’ then gloomily ponder what the order might be, I suggest that you are already excluded from material solutions to the spiritual problem of being alive.
All of us live suspended on a canyon wire between the person we used to be, the person we are ascending and the person we are aspiring to become. Every day the pugilistic slog goes on for me. A snidy little text, a curt comment, a holy soft focus act of benevolence to a slumped stranger. I’m back and forth between the kind and ideal me, sometimes self-consciously, and the ‘Venom’ version of myself, all fangs and inner eelish sinew, writhing. Sometimes I appear in films, unable to entirely give myself up to the caves and blankets – I mean, I have daughters and being in a film, if undertaken quite gently, I’ve discovered can be a pleasant experience. Now though the days of mirrored shades and entourages are gone. Now I find myself driving to Ireland, where the filming of Four Kids And It will take place, in a Land Rover heaving with kids and dogs; we have a roof rack for fuck’s sake, a roof rack. A ferry is involved and stops to walk dogs and feed infants, mobile domesticity, a travelling family. From beneath the nappies and dog hair and that stink that dogs in cars brew with such abundance, as if fearing a forthcoming stink famine, I think, ‘Wow, the MTV VMAs’; ‘Wow, the premieres, the police escorts and jets’, the eerie privilege, the rootless gaseous glory of fame, gone. Of course, I’m driving to the location of a film that will have Michael Caine in it and Cheryl Cole, not a bareknuckle boxing match in Limerick but still I’m in a different world. I do not deplore the time of cellophane celebrity, I’m kind of in awe of it; hosting Saturday Night Live, the cover of Rolling Stone, shirtless – ‘Who was that man?’ And in all honesty did I leave the party early, despairing at the emptiness, or was I asked to leave because I failed to reach invisible box office targets? The latter, the latter to the letter. But now I think, ‘God has greater plans for you than mere movie stardom.’ Here in the fug of Alsatians and retrievers, inhaling wet clouds of dog breath, I think, ‘Thank God Arthur didn’t make $100 million’ – or I’d still be in the luminous morgue begging corpses for redemption.
In the chapel of Brixton prison I sat breathing only in the top inch of my lungs. Thick with nerves about the unfolding event: ‘Letters Live’, where letters of note are read by people with profiles. The empty adjacent chair awaits Benedict Cumberbatch. We all await Benedict Cumberbatch, that’s the law; the most famous person arrives last and I think about this as I wait, imprisoned. The tablet on the wall that confronts me, intended of course for the convicted, informs us in lapidary the verse from Isaiah: ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you, I have called you by your name, you are mine.’ Redeemed need not be saved or forgiven, redeemed here means regain; you no longer belong to yourself so your fear is redundant, irrelevant, pointless. You belong to God, you belong to death, the death to which you fall like a stone, a stone in water, slowed but falling, gawping at passing experience, at times so enveloping that it’s easy to forget that we are falling at all, easy to forget that we are owned, owned by death, owned by God.
We arrive in County Wicklow, my wife, my babies and I, and I try to settle into the role. I try to see what it is I’m meant to be doing, it’s so unfamiliar, you see. To be a father and a husband on a work trip to County Wicklow in a lovely rented house, a bit too near to the motorway for my liking. I mean I know how to handle a problem like that as a movie star: you tantrum the fuck out of that too-near motorway until all in screaming distance are bowed and bend what used to be their will but is now yours to ensuring either you, the house or the motorway are moved. But the T&Cs are different as a dad, and if you don’t know that, you don’t know much.
The film and the house are all easy, the walks with the dogs in the fields behind the house are all easy. In fact most of life is easy except the cracking and refracting madness diagonalling through my mind in cruel unending triangles. ‘Ooh, I see the Mamma Mia Immersive Dining Experience is coming to the O2,’ says my wife. And I see where this is going and more importantly where I am not going. I am not going to the Mamma Mia Immersive Dining Experience at the O2, not because I don’t like Abba or Mamma Mia or Immersive Dining Experiences or even the O2, especially, but because I know that were I to attend the Mamma Mia Immersive Dining Experience at the O2 I would not be immersed. I would be in my own head questioning and answering the experience; I wouldn’t be able to lose myself there, I would actually find myself more severely than ever. I would be intensely me like a flashing blue light of me. Like a tangerine strobe on a fast dual carriageway. Me with sirens, me with foil blankets, urgent emergency me; me-naw, me-naw, me-naw. I can’t lose my self in fucking Greek waiters, ‘Waterloo’ and ersatz menopausal ecstasy, me won’t go limp for that, me will be covered with a thousand lidless eyes, every surface an eye, eyes like scales, eyes dragging across the concrete floor of the O2, eyes full of disco and pastiche, smashed plates and checked tablecloths, eyes unable to stop seeing. Eyes craving the brown silence of heroin, or the blind gurgling bliss that trails orgasm with a stranger. ‘My, my; how could I resist you?’
Suspended on a sprawling web of newly formed synapses, spun by arachnoid love, I need to be held myself. I need mentors that can bear the tension of these fast expanding, high vibrating threads so the father can be woven and hold it all together. Christ.