My phone chirped. It was Scott.
I thought you were sending me that code
At play center can we talk later?
A pause, a thinking pause. Then I could see that he was writing again.
Rob please call me I’m getting pissed off now
Will do later no probs.
I wasn’t going to write that code. The Chinese company was huge, flush with cash, and would snap us up. They had their own people, their own infrastructure. Simtech would be dead as we knew it—and with it my chance of launching my drones.
I looked for Jack. With another boy, he was trying to get inside a plastic car through the windows, Dukes of Hazzard-style. I put down my phone and watched him. Since he had been small, I loved to see him play with other children, his first fumbling efforts at making friends: how he would cautiously smile and raise his eyebrows, his attempt at an opening; how he would try to woo his suitor by showing them all of his things, his colored pencils, his toys, the picture on his T-shirt.
I felt in my pocket for the shopping list Anna had given me. Her lists always made me laugh. Their neatness, their specificity, how she would state the particular brand of cherry tomatoes, her starred annotations, instructions on precisely which asparagus tips to choose. I used to keep her old shopping lists in my wallet and read them on the train, the bus, whenever I was sat somewhere waiting for her to arrive.
“Please turn over,” she wrote once, “for the cheeses to buy if they don’t have Gruyère.” On the back of the paper, there was a neat numbered list of seven cheeses, with a parenthetical note to say that they were in descending order of importance.
I looked up from the shopping list and suddenly couldn’t see Jack. I stood up, slopping my coffee on the table, but he wasn’t in the ball pit, or inside the Toytown car. Then I spotted him, in the corner on the edge of the mat, lying motionless on the floor.
I ran over to him and he was still in the same position, lying on the floor, looking up at the ceiling.
“Jack, Jack, are you okay?”
He looked at me, his eyes glazed. It was as if he had just woken up and didn’t know where he was.
“Did you hurt yourself?”
“No,” Jack said, “I just fell over.”
“Do you have any injuries?”
Jack narrowed his eyes. “I feel... I feel funny...”
“Funny how, beautiful? Like dizzy?”
“What’s dizzy?” he asked.
“You know when you’re on the roundabout in the playground?”
“The big playground or little playground?”
“The big playground.”
Jack nodded.
“So you know when you go really fast on the roundabout and then you jump off and you feel funny. That’s dizzy. Is that how you feel?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“And have you had it other times, when you’re at school?”
Jack considered what I had said.
“I was on the jumping pillow with Nathan, and it felt like spaceships flying through my head.”
“And can you feel the spaceships now?”
“No, Daddy, don’t be silly,” he said, sitting up, the color returning to his cheeks.
Ever since he had fallen off his bike in the park, Anna was sure that Jack’s balance was off. I wasn’t convinced. It was just clumsiness or overexuberance, I told her. It was normal for kids to bang into things. But she was insistent. It wasn’t just when he was running around, she said. She noticed it when he was walking to the bathroom before bed.
“Can I go and play with my friend again?”
“Are you feeling okay now?”
Jack tapped his head and patted down his stomach and legs. “Yes, I’m fine.”
“Go on then, but be careful,” I said, looking him up and down.
He ran off and found his friend. I watched him, as he navigated the tunnels and climbed inside the police car and then, with his new partner in crime, started to pelt the playhouse with rubber balls.
* * *
“How was your day?” Anna asked when she got home. She’d had a meeting with a client and ditched her laptop bag and sensible shoes for heels and makeup.
“Was good. Pretty quiet,” I said, folding the risotto over itself.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, fine, just a bit tired.”
“Where’s Jack?”
“Upstairs in his room.”
“Ah, okay. I’ll go up.”
She filled her glass with some tap water, leaned back against the kitchen counter and kicked off her shoes. I knew she didn’t find it easy, to be working at the bank while I did the school runs and looked after Jack. Even though she had gone to a progressive school, where girls were taught to be independent and empowered, she still found it hard to come home and find me cooking Jack his dinner, joking with him about the things we had done that day—things that, deep down, she felt that she should be doing.
Anna, though, was never one to allow a feeling to get the better of her. She found a way. When she came home, instead of putting her feet up, she spent all her time with Jack, doing his bath and his story, the little bits of homework he now had. After working all day, it was Anna who made sure that Jack’s water glass was filled, that his bedroom door was at the right angle, that Big Teddy and Little Teddy were standing guard.
She put her arms around my waist and nuzzled my neck. “Are we having kids’ food or adults’ food tonight?”
“Adults’ food.”
“Really?”
“You want fish fingers and beans again, don’t you? No, I’ve made a risotto.”
“Ooooo, fancy.”
“Are you disappointed?”
“No, risotto sounds great,” she said. “How was playtime by the way?”
“It was good. Jack loved it,
