Cowardly

Cowardly. That was the name of the picturebook. I didn’t really understand the title when I picked it up, didn’t give it much mind. I was drawn to it because of the illustration style, the quick sketchy lines of David Walliams combined with these rich, saturated oils that didn’t much care for the boundaries the lines set.

I extracted it off the shelf at the bookstore branch of Oxfam on Bond Street, two doors down from the part that sold clothes and homeware. Cowardly smelled of gloss. Its front cover depicted a burnt-orange sunset overlooking a boy with a twig poking a sleeping sheep, the sheep’s wool like a white Starry Night. I hadn’t yet identified that its eye was hollow, or that there was a little bone visible in its hind calf. The back cover read, A boy and his adventures over the hills of the South Downs. Bored Little Tom is about to discover the wonders of nature.

Perfect for our five-year-old Damian. I’d always wanted to raise someone outdoorsy.

The reason why the purchase was on my husband’s card was simple. Small-town queer couple didn’t sit well with the locals. The cerulean glitter under my eyes and my exposed collar bones were peacock feathers to a village of tigers. Mark wore cargo pants and a baggy North Face, so he flew under most people’s radar; they tended to assume me an accessory rather than us as a package. He didn’t get as dirty a look when showing up at checkout with our kid.

I only realised that the book was problematic when I started reading it.

Damian was folded into his stripey blue pajamas and wrapped up in a dog face-spotted duvet. I assumed my usual place on the child-sized stool by his bedside, which I preferred to a regular chair because it put me at eye-level with him. Equals, we were. I was always keen to emphasize that.

I read, “Little Tom was bored at home. Little Tom’s parents were always at work. ‘Play on your PHONE,’ they said.” On the other side: “‘The outside was NOT made for children like you.’” A little tacky in terms of the obvious message, but that was okay, since it wasn’t the words I was interested in.

I flipped around the book to display the double-spread of Little Tom sitting at one end of a long, empty table. The inside was all dark browns and dishes littered with slime and crumpled yellowish tissues. Meanwhile, the window bade passage to a sun the size of a country beaming over fields and forest, wind billowing zig-zigs into the grass. Damian stared in wonder.

I turned it back to me, and read through five more pages, which detailed Little Tom’s running away from his parents, and his encounter with rabbits scampering into burrows, and seeing a bird utter notes into the woodland canopy as its younglings, still up to their necks in shell, harmonised with their own, smaller notes.

“And Little Tom discovered the wonders of rebirth.” As I was about to flip Cowardly around this time, however, I stopped myself, turned it back to me.

On the first of these two pages, Little Tom was hunched forward as he tentatively approached a chrysalis which dangled from a half-collapsed fence post. This illustration was relegated to a central seventh of the page, the margins exploding with negative white space.

The second of these two, by contrast, was entirely swamped in colour, only—where the previous outdoor pages had made balanced use of golden and green hues—this close-up of Little Tom’s face with the feeble chrysalis before him was all shadowy browns like the inside of the house at the start.

Little Tom was about to clasp the chrysalis. I turned the page. His fist closed, and yellowish goo gushed from the gaps between his fingers.

Little Tom was smiling.

“Hey!” said Damian, responding as if to some moral transgression. “Show, show.”

Pulling the ability out of myself to respond appropriately, I shut the book, leaned forward, and smiled at him. “I think this is a sensible time for bed.”

Despite further protests, I pinched his nose and wished him goodnight. I tapped off the lamp and, with Cowardly pressed to my chest, vacated the room, whereupon I gave a startled jump.

Mark had been standing out of sight around the doorframe. He didn’t look like he’d moved in a while.

I laughed, wrapped an arm around the back of his neck. “You minx, was my voice sending you to sleep as well?”

“Why did you stop reading?” he said.

“Oh, um… I didn’t really give it much thought while we were at the shop, but I’ve since figured out why this might’ve been donated.”

“Why?”

“The illustrations; they aren’t quite appropriate.”

I pulled away from him to flick to the page with the chrysalis, but by the time I’d found it he’d already stomped back downstairs with nothing more than a, “Huh.”

I looked over the bannister. He plonked himself on the living room couch, slipped on his headphones, and started watching something I couldn’t see on his laptop. The light of it blanched his face. There were three empty Cruzcampos on the coffee table by his side, and one swishing in circles in his hand.

With his big clerk job in London lost to budget cuts, and my homemade jewellery storepage not exactly raking it in, we were each coping with having had to move here in different ways.

Same as how we’d coped with both of our parents conveniently discovering they’d had important plans on the same day as our wedding.

I tucked Cowardly onto a high shelf in our shared bedroom, out of reach from Damian. I thought it would sit there forever, gathering dust until it eventually wound its way back to the same Oxfam I’d bought it from.

The next day, however, I couldn’t prize my thoughts free from it.

In the craft room, I stopped twisting the thin strip of wire into the shape of a bug’s antennae, and pulled my phone from the tripod where it had been recording. I flicked to the internet and searched the book’s title, alongside ‘oil paint’ and ‘children’s picturebook,’ but found nothing that looked like Cowardly. I tried adding a few other terms, like ‘South Downs’ and even ‘creepy’ but turned up nothing. Perhaps if I had the author’s name I’d have more luck? What had that been?

I walked down the corridor to the bedroom, and looked to the shelf where I had planted the picturebook. It wasn’t there. I popped out a stepping stool and conducted a more thorough search, but couldn’t find it. I checked the bedside drawers, and went downstairs to do a sweep of the living room, too. Nothing. I stared into space a while. Perhaps Mark had gotten curious and flicked through it in the night while I’d slept, and placed it somewhere else.

He was at work, so I texted him, and continued recording footage in the craft room. I wouldn’t receive an answer, though, until he was home that evening, when I asked in-person.

“You were right about it,” he said. “Dreadful.”

“How far did you get?” I said.

“Far enough to know it belonged in the rubbish. Not putting that back up for donation.”

I nodded. “Probably for the best.” Both for the sake of Damian, and perhaps my own sanity.

When I went to bed that night he had laid off the beers, and was sitting on the stool by our sleeping child. He rubbed his palms together and sweated profusely. Was he extra-worried about the boy? Was that the book’s fault? He must’ve known Damian hadn’t actually seen all that much, having been present when I’d read it to him.

Regardless, the next day when I returned to my manufacturing, Cowardly managed to at last slip from my mind. I could breathe easier thanks to Mark’s disposal of it.

Over the next few weeks, inexplicable life was breathed into our address at Tottam Avenue. The Cruzcampos sat unmoving on their shelf in the fridge for longer, to the point that they became buried behind chocolate bars and oranges and locally-picked cherry tomatoes. One night Mark invited me out to dinner, spontaneously, Damian left at home with the nanny we’d come to like (it had taken three attempts to find anyone remotely pleasant). It was nothing extravagant, just some lavishly greasy burgers at The Blue Star pub, managed by a doddering elderly couple who either due to poor eyesight or a kind affect didn’t look down on us. We both drank Sprites. He let me put some pink glitter under his eyes from my to-go kit. He told me about his work friends, filled me in on HR’s mishaps and this sweet young client who could never seem to keep her accounts straight. My mouth ached from grinning.

When he whisked me home he kissed me deeply, and I realised with amazement that it was the first time I’d smelled his sweat in months. Before, he’d always either been fresh out the shower or lathered in beer scent. I’d missed this side of him. Unwashed but sweet, raw but not so uncaring.

A few mornings after that, Damian came home from school, shrugging off his backpack onto the floor with much enthusiasm, and asked if we could drive to Barnaby’s Lake.

“Aren’t you tired?” I said. He usually came back either numb or with puffy red eyes. I suspected bullying, but whenever I pressed the school I only received platitudes and promises to the contrary. And Damian never liked to talk about it.

Today, though, he was bubbling. “I think the park would rein– reinv– reinfff–”

“Reinvigourate?”

“Yes! It would reinstate me.”

I laughed. “Okay, well, get your wellies on. It’ll be muddy out.”

“Perfect,” he said.

It was only on the car ride over that I thought of the book again, and even then only briefly. So what if that had been involved with his want for nature? That first spread with the view through the window had been beautiful regardless of what the rest of the book might’ve had in store.

Damian ended up having oodles more energy than I did, so I would take breaks from chasing him up and down the footpath to sit alone on a bench. I watched the ducks follow each other, making ripples in the algae, while on the bank their fellows napped with their beaks in their feathers. I smiled, willing to relax while I could still hear Damian slosh around in the muddy woodland behind me.

“All done, ready to go home!” He returned to my side panting like a pup.

I frowned. “What’s that?”

“What?” he said, and held his arms behind his back.

“Hold your hands out.” A pause. “Please.”

He eventually obliged me, and I studied his open palms, which were slick with a whitish yellow goo.

“I think a bird pooped on my hands,” he said.

“Maybe.” But I didn’t think this was from a bird, and based on his initial secretiveness, I didn’t think he thought that either.

When we came that evening, I sent him into the shower to buy me some time. I’d realised there was one place I hadn’t looked when I’d searched for Cowardly the day after we’d bought it. I slipped into Damian’s room.

I picked my way through his desk and the innards if his desk drawer, and swished apart his shirts one by one. The picturebook ended up being under his bed, buried in some shoes that were too small for him and that we’d been procrastinating getting rid of.

It became obvious, too, why I had not remembered the author’s name. The book credited no names anywhere. Not so much as a publishing house.

I opened it to the first page again, and read from there, as though hoping I’d misremembered its contents. Despite the earnest whimsy of the early spreads, Little Tom came to squash that chrysalis, only now I saw Damian’s face overlaid on the oils. I read on. Little Tom grew angrier. He stomped on beetles, and kicked trees, and wrestled a wolf until the blood of each of them was inseparable from that of the other, seeming to come alive off the page.

Yet the narration continued, Little Tom petted a dog of the forest.

Three quarters in, the illustrations became quieter, returning to some semblance of the balance seen closer to the start, and Little Tom, as the narration intoned, met a fairy. She was at one with a tree stump, the frills of her green dress draped over the bark and a wand with a star at its tip borne in her right hand.

Little Tom knelt, and said that he needed to see her better. He put his hands in front of his eyes, pressed each index into the sockets around his eyeballs, and tugged.

As bad as the following page was, it was the one after that—with the fairy in focus again—that made me slap the book shut, though in truth it was too late. The image had made its mark.

Don’t be cowardly now, the words had said.

“So,” said Mark.

I jumped. I hadn’t heard him approach. He stood behind me with a stern expression.

I twisted to face him, knees cramping up as I hadn’t bothered to rise or sit before I’d started reading. I nodded. “He found it. He must’ve rooted through our bins. It’s my fault. I should’ve checked.”

Mark held up a placating hand. “It’s done the boy good. It’s done me good. Did you get to the part where they merge?”

I stared at him dumbly, barely unearthing the energy to shake my head and say, “You– showed it to him?”

“I can see you haven’t. I really recommend it.”

The shower switched off, and I could hear little footsteps slap out of the tub.

I rose, moving to intercept Damian when he would leave the bathroom, but Mark stepped in front of me. “What is it?” he said.

“Wh- what is it?” I glared him down. “You thought the wolf’s blood was an appropriate sight for a five-year-old? We have a duty of care!”

“We do have a duty of care.” He nodded. “I didn’t realise quite what that meant before. I thought it was about protection, about keeping him from bad foods, keeping him from the rumourmill of this shithole town.”

“And to protect him from stuff like this.” I shook the book at him.

“No. None of that’s it, not really. It’s to make sure he’s prepared. To make sure he knows the truth of the world, knows that it is malleable; to know he has power. We can’t deprive him of his elemental rights.”

“He’s five! He doesn’t have the- the- wherewithal to navigate that yet. He–” I stopped, because Damian’s little face had crept around the doorway, his hair dripping and his towel wrapped around himself. His eyes were wide with worry.

“Hi, darling,” Mark and I said at once.

It was a terrible next few seconds. Me calculating, Mark’s gaze darting back and forth with his own calculations, us trying to read each other, which I failed in because I no longer understood who I was looking at. Worse than that, this affair was recontextualising the last few pleasant weeks, twisting my memory of them. Or perhaps providing clarity. The picturebook weighed heavy in my palm.

I darted for our child.

Mark’s fingers clamped around my shoulder but I wriggled out. I scooped up Damian, towel and all, and sprinted down the stairs.

Mark chased, barking like a dog of the forest.

I yanked the car keys off the hook downstairs, and slammed through the front door. I scrambled to our white Kia, opened the door to the driver’s seat, and reached through to drop Damian on the passenger’s side. I got in and twisted the ignition before the door was closed. Mark rammed into me, knocking the air from my chest, but I pressed the pedal and the Kia reversed. The still-open door banged into his side, and he was sent tumbling over the driveway. As I pulled out, I shut the door at last, put the gearstick into drive, and we fled down Tottam Avenue.

I leaned over to kiss Damian’s forehead. “It’s okay,” I whispered, coughing because my lungs still hurt. “Your dads are going to sort this all out. We always do.”

I had apparently miscalculated, however; Damian squirmed away from me, opened the passenger door. I reached after him, too slowly. He leapt onto the ground. He did not fall. Holding his towel to himself, he ran back to our house, screaming for Mark.

I cursed, about to turn the car around, but then I looked in the rearview. Mark’s small figure was standing perfectly still, and for a moment it was not the man, my husband, there, but the fairy, as she had been once Little Tom had gouged out his eyes.

Don’t be cowardly now.

But I was cowardly. I kept accelerating away from my home, exacerbating the rate at which the sight of my boy shrank in the mirror. The picturebook remained calmly on my lap. I wept all the way out of town.