Today I had failed to plug the gaps. Lupo had done a puddle on the floor just as I put the eggs in. While I was cleaning up under Massimo’s hawkeye supervision to his exact specification: kitchen roll, carrier bag, bleach on the floor, outside bin, nailbrush on my hands, Lupo darted about, trying to lick my face. I imagined him turning nasty, hanging off my cheek, biting my nose, disfiguring me forever. It made my hands shake, causing me to be clumsy and slow, forgetful of the damned eggs and the precise three and a half minutes Massimo required for his soft to medium yolks.
I stared into the pan, wondering what would set a worse tone for the day: to serve solid yolks or to tip them into the bin and risk a delay whilst I made some more with runny centres. I lost precious seconds dithering. And then it was too late. Massimo looked up from his newspaper. ‘Are my eggs ready?’
‘Just coming. More coffee?’
Massimo nodded and went back to The Times, idly scratching the dog behind its ears. I willed the kettle to boil quickly.
Fortunately he was distracted by a column in the paper about workplace equality. ‘What a load of old rubbish. Encouraging women to think they can do the same jobs as men for the same money. The women in my office are always having to leave early because their kid’s got earache or a bloody concert.’
I nodded along, as though I agreed with his antiquated views, suppressing my smile at the big fat cross I’d put next to the Green candidate in the local elections. Little rebellions saved me from total insanity.
I managed to get perfectly poached eggs onto the spinach, with a splash of cream and grating of garlic, just as he liked them, before he noticed how long it had taken me.
At that moment, Sandro sidled in, glancing first at Lupo who was now lying under the table, then at Massimo to check he was absorbed in his paper. He showed me the pictures he’d made with his Spirograph. I nodded, smiling and kissing him on the head before saying loudly, ‘Right, you’d better put your homework away and come and have some breakfast.’
‘But I don’t want any breakfast. I want to draw.’
Massimo looked up. ‘You’d better get a move on. You’re trying out the judo class at the leisure centre this morning.’
Sandro’s face fell. He looked down at the floor. ‘I didn’t know it was this week.’
I turned away and started wiping down the work surfaces, little starbursts of anxiety building. Without looking round, I went for a cheery ‘I’m sure you’ll enjoy it once you’re there. What about some scrambled eggs to give you a bit of energy?’
Sandro moved into my line of vision, his shoulders slumping, his eyes beseeching me to make it better.
‘Perhaps this afternoon we can get out the paints that you got for your birthday?’
That wasn’t the making it better he wanted but it was the best I was allowed to do.
He shuffled out to the playroom.
Massimo slammed his knife and fork down. ‘So he’s happy to prat about on his own with his paints but doesn’t want to get stuck in and have some fun with boys his age? Let me go and talk to him.’
My heart leapt at Massimo’s chair scraping back, the predictable roar. ‘Sandro!’ The sound of little feet in slippery socks skidding across the parquet floor in the playroom. He’d be gathering up his precious pencils, the gorgeous Caran D’Ache crayons Nico had bought him as a surprise. A rattling of the door into the hallway. But no frantic thumping up the stairs. He wasn’t quick enough. I closed my eyes.
Massimo’s bellow reached me in the kitchen. ‘When are you going to get it into your head that the only way to do well in life is to learn lots of different skills? It’s no good sitting in the playroom messing about with your pens. You need to get out there and start joining in. Now go put your tracksuit on.’
Sandro scuffed upstairs to his bedroom. The familiar feeling of having my heart pinned in one place when it was straining to be in another swept over me. My poor boy, the loser – again – in the dynamics of Farinelli family.
I dried my hands and went to find Massimo in the playroom. He had that energy about him, that switch waiting to flick. I could still turn this round. I could.
I presented a neutral face. ‘I’ve just remembered I washed his tracksuit. It’s in the airing cupboard. You eat your eggs and I’ll pop up and find it so you’re not late.’ I hesitated a fraction of a second, weighing up whether I’d got away with my excuse to go to Sandro or whether I’d just unleash a rage about my ‘bloody mollycoddling’.
I took Massimo’s grunt as assent and ran upstairs, wondering how I’d become this person. I tried to recall whether my mother had been mild-mannered and gentle, but my memories of her refused to be pinned down. I remembered feeling safe, as though she would take care of things so I didn’t have to worry. Yet again, I felt a rush of guilt that Sandro would never be able to say the same about me.
I crept into Sandro’s room. He was sitting with his head on his desk, felt-tip in hand, drawing a house. I didn’t even want to see what fucked up family he would depict living in it. I cuddled him and he leaned into me, as though I could protect him. How could a seven-year-old possibly understand that every time I fought his corner, every time I stood up to his father, drew my line in the sand, the whole landscape shifted, bringing with it a raft of new ways for Massimo to enforce his will on me? I couldn’t bear to think about the time I’d told Massimo I didn’t want Sandro to do football training any more. Explained that I couldn’t stand to see his skinny legs blue with cold, the fear on his face when a crowd of boys steamed towards him, the humiliation when – yet again, he tried to kick the ball and fluffed it – with all his little teammates jeering in frustration. I’d actually thought Massimo would applaud me for realising that he was unhappy, discuss constructive options about which other sports might be good to encourage.
Not sign him up for rugby coaching to ‘help him stop being such a wuss’.
I kissed Sandro’s cheek and told him Daddy didn’t mean to get cross, he just felt very strongly that he wanted him to make friends to play with because he was an only child. And it was a long time since Daddy had been seven years old, so sometimes he didn’t understand that although Sandro was on his own, he wasn’t lonely. Sandro nodded but didn’t speak.
‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’
He nodded again, looking up at me, dry-eyed and defeated, without lifting his head from the desk.
I couldn’t decipher what was going on in his mind. Whatever it was, it was far too complicated for a seven-year-old boy, who should have been thinking about Disney films, Lego and Meccano sets, not trying to grasp the rudiments of power politics before he’d even stopped believing in Father Christmas.