“Why don’t we have prawns for lunch?” I say to the gathered throng. “We could buy an iceberg lettuce and some crunchy bread rolls. A scrape of butter on the rolls and it would be perfect.” I see my son glance towards his life partner. Her eyes twinkle and they share a small, complicit smile.
“What?” I say. “What’s so funny about prawns?”
Jocasta looks up from the book she’s reading. “Yes,” she chimes in, “what’s so funny about prawns?“
Batboy, for it is he, spreads his arms wide as if offering a benediction. “It’s just that prawns are Dad’s answer to everything.”
Prawns always have, and always will, make everything better.Credit:Illustration by Kathleen Adele
Batboy and his partner chortle merrily, delighted with the accuracy of this observation. It’s at this point that I suddenly understand something about life. Your grown-up children talk about you. They share observations about you with their partners, listing your various eccentricities, your failures and successes. The portrait they create may, alas, bear only passing resemblance to the one you might have drawn of yourself.
For instance: I’d never considered that one of my key characteristics was an excessive enthusiasm for prawns. Handsome? Yes. A brilliant mind? Of course. But prawns?
I don’t know why I’m surprised that Batboy and his partner have been discussing me. Jocasta and I spent years talking about our parents behind their backs. We would create pen portraits of their various traits, both positive and negative.
I wish her father, now gone, could have heard the affection in his daughter’s voice as she described his foibles, his monastic dietary choices, his devotion to his offspring. He never would have imagined what a giant figure he was, and is, in her life.
Meanwhile, I would entertain our friends with what became a virtual stage show about my mother and her peculiar ways. Oh, how they’d laugh as I described her manufactured aristocratic past, her possibly unconsummated marriage to my father, her insanely large teddy bear collection, her monomania about germs.
I’d have them doubled-over with hilarity. Later they’d proclaim a refreshed love for their own, relatively normal, parents.
Never, though, did I imagine my own children would have anything to say about me, at least not until my funeral, at which point both boys would deliver a joint eulogy, along the lines of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, enumerating my various fine qualities, while Jocasta, keening, would throw herself atop the coffin.
But no, it’s clear they’ve already been putting in the work. For instance: Batboy and his partner chattering about my love of prawns. And if that, what else? Do they regard me as a workaholic, alcoholic or cheeseaholic? There is evidence, after all, for all three.
Do they chortle indulgently about my assertion that I am a good cook? Do they think my anecdotes are not as amusing as I believe them to be, a defamatory contention which, if printed in the Nine newspapers, then taken to a court of law, could lead to a spirited defence on the grounds of truth, with numerous witnesses called to testify, and a verdict in favour of the defendant?
Here’s the reality: None of us is safe, we parents, despite all we’ve done for our children.
Jocasta, for example, has been the target of similar observations, forcing her to develop fierce methods of retaliation. One of our sons, I seem to remember, uttered some minor criticism of her driving. She turned around in the car seat. “Look mate,” she said, “I taught you how to use a spoon.” This, I recall, rather reduced the amount of wind residing in the sails of that particular child.
In this case, it’s my love of prawns, which is no big deal, but it never occurred to me that I had “a prawn thing”. Everyone loves prawns, don’t they, religious prohibitions and allergies aside? When Batboy said, “Dad thinks prawns are the answer to everything”, my first thought was: “Well, of course, because they are”.
All the same, if Batboy and his partner have discussed this, where does the ridicule start, and where does the ridicule finish? Does my son hold sway at dinner parties, telling stories about me, much as I told stories about my mother? Are his pals doubled over with mirth, much like my pals were? Do they hold their sides and say to Batboy, “No, you are making this up, no one has a father quite as weird as yours?”
And is my mother looking down on all of this, sitting in whatever heaven might exist, delight in her eye, saying, “Go for it, Batboy, go get him. Karma has rarely produced a result this sweet.”
I push aside these troubling thoughts, since lunchtime beckons and Batboy and I must fetch some supplies. We head to Colesworth where I buy a kilo of prawns, an iceberg lettuce and some crunchy rolls. I insist on this option, convinced that only a prawn roll will return my troubled thoughts to a more even keel. They really are the answer to everything.
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