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  ‘Terrible,’ Ethan said.

  ‘Terrible?’ This is strong for him. He usually confines pronouncements of quality to “fine” or “okay”, occasionally peaking in a devil-may-care “good”. I suspect the deployment of “great” would require the school suddenly deciding to hand out free chocolate. I’d never heard “terrible” before, either. ‘Why terrible?’

  ‘Arthur Milford was mean to me again.’

  I snorted. ‘Arthur Milford? What the hell kind of name is that?’

  Ethan turned his head in bed to look at me. ‘What?’

  ‘How old is this kid?’

  ‘Six,’ Ethan said, with gentle care, as if I was crazy. ‘He’s six. Like me.’

  ‘Sorry, yes,’ I said. I tend to talk to my son as if he’s a miniature adult for much of the time — too much of it, perhaps — but there was no way of explaining to him that the name “Arthur Milford”, while theoretically acceptable, seemed more appropriate to a music hall comedian of the 1930s than a six-year-old in 2011. ‘What do you mean, he was mean to you again?’

  ‘He’s always mean to me.’

  ‘Really? In what way?’

  ‘Telling me I’m stupid.’

  ‘You’re not stupid,’ I said, crossly. ‘He’s stupid, if he goes around calling people names. Just ignore him.’

  ‘I can’t ignore him.’ Ethan’s voice was quiet. ‘He’s always doing it. He pushes me in the corridor, too. Today he said he was going to throw me out of a window.’

  ‘What? He actually said that?’

  Ethan looked up at me solemnly. After a moment he looked away. ‘He didn’t actually say it. But he meant it.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, suddenly unsure how much of this entire story was true. ‘Well, look. If he says mean things to you, just ignore him. Mean boys say mean things. That’s the way it is. But if he pushes you, tell a teacher about it. Immediately.’

  ‘I do. They don’t do anything about it.’

  ‘Well, if it happens again, then tell them again. And tell me, too, okay?’

  ‘Okay, Daddy.’

  And then, as so often in such conversations, the matter was dismissed as if it had never been of import to him — and instead merely something that I’d been rather tediously insisting on discussing — and my son asked me a series of apparently random questions about the world, which I did my best to answer, and I read him a story and filled up his water cup and read more story, and eventually he went to sleep.

  We tend to alternate in picking Ethan up (as with most parenting duties), and so Tuesday was Kathy’s turn. I had a deadline to chase and so — bar him dashing into my study to say hello when they got back — I barely saw Ethan before I kissed him on the head and said goodnight when Kathy led him up toward bath and bedtime.

  Fifty minutes later, by which time I’d made a start on cooking, my wife appeared in the kitchen with the cautiously relieved demeanor of someone who believes they’ve wrangled an unpredictable child into bed.

  ‘Is he down?’

  ‘I’m not enumerating any domesticated, egg-producing fowl,’ she said, reaching into the fridge for the open bottle of wine. ‘But he might be. God willing.’

  She poured herself a glass and took a long sip before turning to me. ‘God I’m tired.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said, without a lot of sympathy.

  ‘I know. I’m just saying. By the way — has Ethan mentioned some kid called Arthur to you?’

  ‘Arthur Milford?’

  ‘So he has?’

  ‘Once. Last night. Why — did he come up again?’

  ‘Mmm. And it’s not the first time, either.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Ethan mentioned him last week, and I think the week before, too. They’re in after-school swimming together.’

  ‘I know. Last night he said this Arthur kid had been mean to him. In fact, he said he’d been mean “again”.’

  ‘Mean in what way?’

  ‘Pushed him in the corridor. Called him stupid.’ I thought about mentioning the threat to throw Ethan through a window, but decided not. I didn’t think Kathy needed to hear that part, especially as the telling had subsequently made it unclear whether it had taken place in what Ethan called ‘real life’.

  ‘Pushed him in the corridor? That means it’s not just happening during swimming class.’

  ‘I guess. If it’s happening at all.’

  ‘You don’t believe him?’

  ‘No, no, I do. But you know what he’s like, Kath. He’s all about the baddies and the goodies. It just sounds to me a bit like this Arthur Milford kid is in the script as Ethan’s dread Nemesis. And that maybe not all of his exploits are directly related to events in what we’d think of as reality.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean there isn’t a real problem there.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, a little irritated that Kathy seemed to be claiming ownership of the issue, or implying I wasn’t taking it seriously enough. ‘I told him to talk to the teachers if this kid is mean to him again. And to tell me about it, too.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘But ultimately, that’s the way children are. Boys especially. They give each other grief. They shove. Little girls form cliques and tell other girls they’re not their friends. Boys call each other names and thump each other. It has been thus since we lived in caves. It will be so until the sun explodes.’

  ‘I know. It’s just... Ethan’s such a cute kid. He can be a total pain, of course, but he’s... so sweet, really, underneath. He doesn’t know about all the crap in life yet. I want to protect him from it. I don’t want him being hit, just because that’s what happens. I don’t want him being hurt in any way. I just want... everything to be nice.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, relenting. ‘Me too.’

  I rubbed her shoulder on the way over to supervise the closing stages of cooking, and privately raised my State of Awareness of the Arthur Milford situation to DefCon 4 to DefCon 3. Despite what everyone seems to think, the readiness-for-conflict index increases in severity from five to one, with one being the highest level (the highest level ever officially recorded is DefCon 2, which obtained for a while during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I knew all this from some half-hearted research for an article I was drafting on Homeland Security).

  Be all which as it may, and despite my pompous such-is-life declaration, Kathy was right.

  I didn’t want anyone hassling my kid. Much more of it, and words would need to be spoken.

  I picked Ethan up the following afternoon, and remembered to ask him about his day as soon as we got into the car. He proved surprisingly well-informed on his own doings, and filled me in on a variety of Montessori-structured activities he’d undertaken (neither Kathy nor I truly understand what Montessori is about, but we believe/hope that it’s generally agreed to be A Good Thing, like lowering CO2 levels, and being kind to dogs). There was no mention of Arthur Milford. I thought about asking a direct question but decided that if Ethan hadn’t deemed him worth mentioning, there was probably nothing to say.

  Ethan went to bed easily that night, in his unpredictable fashion. We had a laugh during bath-time, he brushed his own teeth without being asked, and then — after quite a short reading — he drifted off to sleep before I was even ready for it. I sat for five minutes afterwards, enjoying the peace of quietly being in the same space as someone you love very much. There’s usually a hidden edge to the observation that nothing’s as beautiful as a sleeping child (the point being it’s all too often nicer than them being awake), but the fact is... there really isn’t. To watch your son, asleep in his comfortable bed with a tummy full of food that you made him and a head full of story you’ve just told, arm gripping a furry polar bear you bought him on a whim but to which he’s taken as if they’d been separated at birth... that’s why we’re born. That’s why everything else is worth it.

  Yet sometimes I get so angry with him that I don’t know what to do with myself. And he knows it. He must.

  About six ho
urs later I woke in my own bed, dimly aware I could hear a noise that shouldn’t exist in a house in the middle of the night. By the time I’d opened my eyes, it was quiet. But as I started to relax back into oblivion, I heard it again.

  A quiet sob.

  I quickly hauled myself upright and staggered out of bed. Kathy lay dead to the world, which was unusual. She generally sleeps on far more of a hair trigger than me. She evidently was really tired, and I blearily regretted my snipe before dinner the evening before.

  I padded out into the hallway to stand outside Ethan’s room and listen. Nothing for a minute, but then I heard the sound again. I opened the door.

  Before I even got to the side of his bed, I could tell how hot he was. Children beam their heat out in the night, like little suns. I squatted down and put my hand on his head.

  ‘Ethan, I said. ‘It’s okay. It’s just a dream.’

  He sobbed once more, very quietly.

  ‘Ethan, it’s okay.’

  He opened his eyes suddenly. He looked scared. Scared of me.

  ‘It’s Daddy,’ I said, disconcerted. ‘Just Daddy, okay?’

  His eyes seemed to swim into focus. ‘Daddy?’

  ‘Yes. It’s okay. Everything’s okay.’

  Ethan’s eyes swiveled. ‘Is he still here?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Arthur Milford.’

  The back of my neck tickled. ‘No. Of course not.’

  ‘He was here. He came up the stairs and stood outside my room saying things. Then he came in. He stood by my bed and said he was going to...’

  ‘No, he didn’t,’ I said, firmly.

  ‘He did.’

  ‘Ethan, it was just a dream. No-one’s in the house apart from you and me and mummy. Nobody can get in. The doors are locked. The alarm system’s on.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ I said. ‘I did it myself. I promise you. It’s just the three of us, and everything’s okay.’

  Ethan’s eyelids were already starting to drift downward. ‘Okay.’

  He was asleep five minutes later. I went back to bed and lay there for an hour before I could get under again. Once I’ve been woken, I find it hard to get back to sleep.

  The next morning I was irritable, and snapped pretty badly at Ethan when he made a laboriously annoying job of putting on his school shoes. I shouldn’t have, but I was tired, and for fuck’s sake — he should be able to put on his own shoes.

  But as I watched him and Kathy walk down the path toward the car, the wailing over and a new détente being hammered out between them, I realized that at some point after coming back to my bed in the night, I’d raised the Arthur Milford Awareness Level to DefCon 2.

  On Thursday evening Kathy has yoga, and so The Ethan Going To Bed Show once again featured Daddy in a co-starring role (or supporting actor, more likely, my name below the title and in a notably smaller typeface), for the second night in a row.

  Bedtime did not, however, follow the same course as the night before. That’s not how the shorties roll. Like some snappy young boxer on the way up, they’ll pull you in, fake like they’re running out of steam, and then unleash a brutal combination that will leave you glancing desperately back at your corner as you take a standing eight count. I’m getting better at rolling with the punches, shifting the conflict to safer ground and letting the passion defuse, but that night I went back at Ethan like some broken-down old scrapper who knew this was his last chance in the ring, and wanted to go out in a bare knuckles slugfest.

  He wouldn’t eat his pasta, instead deliberately distributing it over the floor — meanwhile looking me steadily in the eye. He wouldn’t come upstairs. He wouldn’t get into the bath, and then wouldn’t get out, and broke a soap dish. I had to brush his teeth for him, and I did it none too gently. He wouldn’t get into his pajamas because they “always itched” — the very same pair that he’d cheerfully gone to sleep in the previous night. He wouldn’t get into bed, instead breaking out of the room and stomping downstairs, wailing dismally for Kathy though he knew damned well she was out.

  By the time I’d recaptured him, harsh words had been spoken on both sides. I had been designated an ‘idiot’ and a ‘doofus’, and been informed that I was no longer loved. I had likened his behavior to that of a significantly younger child, and had threatened to inform the world at large of this maturity shortfall: his friends, grandparents, and Father Christmas had all been invoked as potential recipients of this information. I’d said he was being childish and stupid, and had even called him the very worst word I (or you) know, though thankfully I’d managed to throttle my voice down into inaudibility at the last moment so he hadn’t caught the word.

  The anger had sure as hell made it though, though. The anger, and probably my pitiful level of powerlessness, too.

  I did however finally manage to get him into bed.

  He lay there silently. I sat equally silently in the chair, both of us breathing hard, wild-eyed with silent fury and sour adrenaline.

  ‘Arthur Milford was mean to me today, too,’ Ethan muttered, suddenly.

  I was still pretty close to the edge, and the “too” at the end of his pronouncement nearly pushed me over it into somewhere dark and bad.

  I took a breath, and bit my tongue. ‘Mean in what way?’ I managed, eventually.

  ‘In the upstairs corridor. On the third floor.’

  ‘Okay – so now I know where the alleged event occurred. But how was he unpleasant? In what actual way?’

  ‘Why are you being so mean to me tonight?’

  ‘I’m... Just tell me, okay? What did he do?’

  ‘He pushed me again. Really hard. Into the wall. And then... against the window.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you tell a teacher? Like I told you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why? That’s what you’ve got to do. You have to tell a teacher.’

  ‘He said... he said that if anyone told a teacher about what he was doing, he’d throw me out of the window for sure.’

  ‘Really? He actually said it this time?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you’ve just told me about it — so why not a teacher?’

  ‘Arthur said telling you didn’t matter. You can’t do anything. Only the teachers can.’

  ‘I see. How interesting.’

  I decided then and there that I’d had quite enough of Arthur sodding Milford. I’d like to think this was solely because of the evident discomfort he was causing Ethan during both waking and sleeping hours, but I know some of it was due to pathetic outrage at hearing myself thus dismissed. As a parent you often encounter moments when you feel impotent, and may often be genuinely unable to affect events. I had to take crap from my own child, evidently: that didn’t hold true for someone else’s. It was time for Arthur, and his parents, if necessary, to learn that the world did not stop at the school gates.

  As Ethan and I moved on to talking about other things, gradually opening the doors to each other once more, and calming down, I silently determined that the Arthur Milford situation had finally reached DefCon 1.

  I got to the school a little after two o’clock. My appointment would mean I’d have time to kill in the area afterwards before picking Ethan up, but it was the only time the headmistress/owner would deign to see me. It’s a small school, privately-owned, and to be fair, I imagine Ms. Reynolds is pretty busy. I was shown to a little office, part of the recent extension on the ground floor, and given a cup of coffee. I sat sipping it, looking up through the glass roof at the side of the building. Two further storeys, grey brick, with long bands of windows.

  Schools, even small and bijou ones, all feel the same. They take you back. I knew that when Ms. Reyholds arrived I’d stand up too quickly and be excessively deferential, though she was ten years younger than me and effectively ran a service industry in which the customer should always be right. None of that matters. School is where you learn the pri
mal things, the big spells, the place where you become versed in the eternal hierarchies and are appraised of our species’ hopes and fears. Being back in one as an adult is like returning in waking hours to some epic battleground in the dreamscape — even if, like me, you had a pretty decent time during your formative years.

  It was quiet as I waited, all the little animals corralled into classrooms for now, having information and cultural norms stuffed into their wild and chaotic heads.

  Eventually the door opened and the trim figure of Ms Reynolds entered. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

  I stood. ‘No problem.’

  She smiled briefly, and perched at an angle on the chair on the other side of the desk. I tried hard not to take against her posture, the way it signaled a belief that this was going to be a short conversation. I sat back down, square-on to the table.

  ‘So. How can I help?’

  ‘I wanted a quick word. About Ethan.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s temporary,’ she said, briskly. ‘I honestly don’t think it’s anything to worry about.’

  ‘What is?’ I asked, thrown. ‘Worry about what?’

  ‘Ah,’ she said, smoothly covering a moment of confusion. ‘I talked with your wife about this, yesterday, at the end of school. I assumed she’d mentioned it to you.’

  ‘Mentioned what?’