A DAD'S LIFE:Overactive imagination – I blame the mother, writes ADAM BROPHY
‘SHE SAYS she had a bad dream.” The missus is telling me why the elder wound up in our bed again last night.
“Yeah? What about?”
“Well, at first I thought she was talking about the Maori. She’s been studying them in school, so maybe she got scared for some reason.”
“She’s scared of the Maori?” I’m struggling to cope with the depths my daughter will plumb to sneak into our scratcher. “What, that they’re gonna Haka in her bedroom?”
“Turns out not to be the Maori at all,” the missus goes on. “It’s the Mafia she’s worried about. I misheard.”
“Of course. The Mafia. Every 10 year old’s worst nightmare, much more logical than the Maori.”
“It’s because of Aoife. She’s been telling her about Silvio Berlusconi and the Mob. Now the child is convinced the Italian prime minister runs around offing people and if we go to Italy on holidays we’ll be dragged into the whole corruption thing.”
I should explain. Aoife is the missus’s sister, who lives in Rome and is prone to bouts of exaggeration and inaccuracy.
She is currently visiting, touring her new baby around the country, and she likes to wind the brats up. I look forward to returning the favour to her Irish-Italian offspring when he’s old enough.
I have to address the Mafia fear, though I do think it is the most spectacular piece of creativity in the elder’s ongoing drive to have all of us sleep in one room. Forever. I tell her the Mafia doesn’t exist, that it’s a government construct to undermine the Italian-
American community. I got that line from The Sopranos.
I tell her we do have gangsters in Ireland, that they either wear shiny suits and work in offices, or wear shiny tracksuits and hang around on corners. Both are easy enough to spot and, while they are talented enough at removing money from pockets, they pose little threat to our day-to-day existence.
She seems unperturbed by my pronouncements, which serve only to reinforce my impression that she was conning us all along. Still, she is a soaker – every bit of gruesome news she hears on TV or radio is hoarded away for release at a later date, usually when she’s seeking refuge in our bed.
Last summer, on a sleepover, a slightly older cousin suggested they watch Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder and we spent months afterwards checking for murderers under beds before lights could be put out at night.
I blame the missus. She’s far too positive and upbeat. If, as I suggested, we had bred a cynical, hard edge into them from the start, we wouldn’t be having all this “oh my God, there are bad people in the world!” concerns. Instead they would be shocked to bump into the occasional good person as opposed to the hordes of ne’er-do-wells I would convince them live beyond our walls.
The missus was reared in a house where she was taught, for some insane reason, to expect the best from people. Her only fear as a 10 year old in the 1980s was The Communists. A nun – a paragon of human decency of course – had convinced her whole fourth class group that The Communists were a hair’s breadth from sending an invasion force into Dublin to quell the un-Party-like thoughts of girls in the 6W postcode.
It’s not so far away from fear of the Mob. I married a lunatic and have bred one too.
When I point out the similarities to her, she counters with, “What about your Planet of the Apes paranoia?”
Oh yeah. I shrink back into my shell. After badgering my mother for weeks, I had stayed up late one night to watch an episode of the POTA TV series. Subsequently I was convinced that every night, after I went to bed, my parents removed their human masks to reveal their true ape faces and sat around the living room eating bananas, pointing and “ooh-ooh-oohing” at the idiot humans on the news. Some day soon I was sure the apes hidden among us, like sleeper spies, would rise up and force us into servitude.
It’s not easy being 10. The world is still big and mysterious, not small and devoted to bitching about austerity budgets. The elder has an active imagination, that’s all. I better warn her about the apes.