Man at the Helm by Nina Stibbe Page A

have us back from London anyway, and relieved that we weren’t going to end up on ATV, which shethought would be a wrong career choice for both of us. She always imagined my sister would become a vet – if she could just overcome her fear of science experiments – and that I would be a teacher or a writer. She had no idea what Little Jack might become but felt sure it would be something ‘extremely important’. That’s what she said but Jack probably didn’t believe she really thought that. I didn’t.

8
     
    While we’d been in London – staying too long at the zoo and crying in Devonshire Place and getting pills – Little Jack had been scheduled to visit our father, on his own – a thing none of us liked. And it hadn’t gone to plan.
    Little Jack liked our father but going to his new house with his new wife and baby was always somehow awkward. It was the kind of awkwardness that overwhelmed things or gave you a headache. Mainly, it was the baby. Firstly, the baby was very popular with its parents. He had blond hair with brown eyes, which must have been an unusual combination because they never stopped saying how lovely it was in a baby.
    ‘Look at that blond hair with those brown eyes,’ they’d say.
    And that was irritating but, more importantly, Jack claimed that the baby didn’t like him. Jack’s problem with the baby had started during a visit Jack and I had had together a couple of months before. It had been Sunday lunch and Jack had said he wasn’t hungry. He’d pushed his food around the plate and just scooped the odd mouthful and chewed it for ages and our father had said Jack must use his cutlery properly.
    This annoyed me. I thought that if you decide to leave your children, fine, but you don’t then have the right to stop them scooping in the European way just because you don’t choose to scoop.
    I was so annoyed I spoke up on the subject.
    ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘it’s the modern way. If we ate like you, prongingone pea at a time, we’d look like idiots at school. Everyone scoops nowadays.’
    Our father did a small head bow. ‘Thank you for your contribution,’ he said, and told an anecdote about a brilliant genius overlooked for promotion due to being known for his poor table manners. And turned his attention to Little Jack.
    ‘Jack, you must eat your peas and carrots.’
    And no sooner had our father uttered those words than the baby started saying ‘more’ – meaning he’d eaten all
his
peas and carrots and wanted some more. We’d never heard him speak a proper word before, so we couldn’t just ignore it, and the rift between Jack and the baby began.
    And our father’s wife, with a look of pride, spooned a few more peas and carrots into his little bowl of semi-mushed-up lunch. And the baby gobbled them up, staring at Jack, and asked again for more.
    I had my own crisis at that Sunday lunch table. I say crisis, though it was more of a philosophical meandering. I asked myself how it was that our lovely tall father had suddenly become the husband of a new woman and the father of a whole separate new baby who could already say ‘more’ and outdo Little Jack on the veg front. I gazed at the blond-haired baby. What would it make of us, I wondered, as it matured, its half-siblings arriving every month or two and eating a roast dinner (badly) and being tutored in table manners and being irritable about it? The baby was sure to grow into a table-manners expert and to be well rounded with our proper and fussy ex-father as its man at the helm. As these notions floated around my mind I felt a surging wave of sadness for this little half-brother of mine. Imagine, I thought, having someone’s ex-father as your own and having to see the unruly cast-offs for Sunday lunch every three months – it would be horrible, surely, and really annoying.I felt sorry for him and hoped to God that our new man at the helm (when we’d secured one) didn’t come with anything of that sort. My heart sank