“The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.”
The Fall of Gomorrah.
The Fall of Rome.
The Fall of Apocalypse Daddy.
Revolution was in the air.
This wasn’t going to end well.
Was it?
“Daddy,” Alice said, eyeing the world from her perch of ridiculous comfort on the back of the sofa. “How do you make apple trees?”
I was shackled to the kitchen, preparing breakfast. Pancakes, blueberries and ice-cream. It was a weekday, not that we cared about the difference after thirty-nine days in lockdown. Every day was a week day. Every day was a Sunday. Every day was an opportunity to raise the game, to raise the stakes, to be better. Or worse.
“You need a seed,” I said. “Plant the seed, water it and wait eighteen years. Takes about as long as you.”
“Where’s the seed?” Alice asked.
“Inside the apple.”
“But where’s the apple?”
“On the tree.”
“But there’s no apple without a seed. So which is first?”
I said we’d need to look it up.
“And apple pie, do you need a seed to make apple pie?”
“No,” I said, “Just apples.”
“Tomorrow, I want apple pie for breakfast. With cream. Daddy, how do you make cream?”
“Milk.”
“How do you make milk?”
“Almonds.”
“No. Cow.”
“Why do you ask if you already know the answer?”
“I wanted to be sure.”
And she fell off the back of the sofa.
And that stopped her in her tracks. For about three seconds.
A loud banging echoed from an as yet undisclosed location. Someone was in trouble.
“Can somebody let me in please?” Said a muffled voice from behind the living room door.
It was Apocalypse Mommy, she was barricaded in the hall.
Again.
It was like Paris before the revolution. We needed Haussmann architecture, not all these badger runs. The whole damn thing was perfect for an ambush. Alice and Luca had built road blocks in the corridor, piled toys, chairs and miniature guitars with only two strings to block the doorway.
Control the narrow streets and you control the epicentre. The army can’t force its way down a rabbit warren. The strategy was as old as city warfare. As old as war. We were Marie Antoinette and Louis 16th, prisoners in our own castles. I made a mental note to build giant thoroughfares and wide boulevards in the New World. In the New Republic.
And to hide the Art of War.
I fought my way through sticker albums and broken cars and the strange remnants of what was once a Barbie. The little shits had piled chaos at every corner. A Fisher Price oven, yellow Play Doh, streams of paper and a deckchair we’d last used on a forgotten holiday to a windswept beach before all of this. They were like broken arrows on a boggy battlefield. The walls looked like the cave paintings at Lascaux. What price the freedom of Apocalypse Mommy?
There was a power struggle.
Rumours were circulating, quiet murmurings of an end to the lockdown, an end to the home-schooling, an end to Apocalypse Daddy. The President had been on television again, his discourse growing more gung-ho by the minute. Five days, ten days. Nobody was quite sure, but soon. Soon the doors to the New World would be flung open and the masses would approach it like tourists in a strange country: tentatively, suspiciously.
Did we come here by mistake? Would we be given the keys to freedom, only to prefer the lack of it?
It was the home-straight.
But school was still in session. So they climbed the bookcase.
Alice was looking for inspiration. She had read all her books backwards, upside down and inside out.
“Daddy,” she said, trying to make her brother cry with her eyes. “Why is the opposite of inside out not inside in? I’ve just turned this book inside in.”
“Where’s your Mommy gone now?”
“Daddy,” she said, ignoring the question, inverting herself on the eighth shelf. “Look, I’m upside up.”
Do you mean the right way up?
She said kind of.
“Back to front and back to back are not opposites?” She said. “Ridiculous. I’m falling down but not falling up. I pick blueberries but you always tell me to pick up my toys. And… and… Daddy, it’s so not easy.”
“You’ll get the hang of it.”
She picked up a book and read its cover. “What’s chaos?”
“Your bedroom.”
“Is that a dad joke? Mommy says the whole whole all the house is chaos and the floor is dirty dirty dirty. I think we should have eighteen houses. Eighteen. Like this.” And she counted on her fingers. “Then that would be chaos. But we could get fairies. Fairies.”
There was another banging on the wall. Apocalypse Mommy had fallen victim to the pincer manoeuvre. It was ancient warfare 101. Whilst Alice had been reading from Chaos and talking of fairies, Luca had piled up a thousand baby books in the hallway and smashed a trike behind the bedroom door. They were like fucking velociraptors.
“When I’m older,” Alice said. “I want to go to Paris and play.”
That’s great sweetheart, but can you go and let Apocalypse Mommy out of the bathroom?
The inmates were taking over the asylum.
“Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.”
Oh great, you again. Hi Buddha, are you talking about non-linearities or fractals and bifurcations this time?
“Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.”
You’re repeating yourself Buddha, like a broken politician on TV trying to orchestrate a pandemic. You’re out of your depth.
Schrödinger joined the party. Temporarily.
“Apocalypse Daddy,” he said. “You are both here and not here.”
“Schrödinger. Trust me, I’m here. All the goddamn time.”
“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
That’s very positive Friedrich. Are you ill?
“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all order a secret disorder.”
Get back on your spaceship Carl. I need something more earthbound. I’m a father, not an astronaut. Hey Mr Tambourine Man. Play a song for me.
“Chaos is a friend of mine.”
That’s the ticket. He was right. I wanted the chaos. The bleeding feet from the tiny toys, the lack of sleep, the books strewn everywhere, toys in the bath, toys in the fridge, toys in the attic. I wanted to be tired and wrecked and beaten down, day after day after day after day.
That was the whole point, wasn’t it?
Punctured ear drums, punctured toes and sunken eyes.
Hello chaos my old friend.
The opposite of chaos is order.
Order!
Who wants order?
I’d get plenty of that soon enough. Seventeen years down the line I’d wake up in an empty house. No noise, no toys, no tears, no tantrums. My heart, our heart, every parents’ heart will ache for a time that once was.
Our own Once Upon A Time.
And we’ll remember the time we spent fifty-six days with Alice and Luca in some kind of human experiment that nobody signed up for. And our hearts will overflow with love and nostalgia and memories.
But it will be gone.
Chaos is the natural order of things. It’s how it’s supposed to be. The universe craves it. Parents should crave it. You should crave it.
“Alice,” I said, ideas raining like confetti at a wedding into my mind. “Lock your brother in his cot.”
It was time to divide and conquer.