It was my wife’s fault, mostly. The entire chain of events can be traced back to one interaction she had a few months back with another mum, when the subject of jigsaws came up. Having always enjoyed them, our son is now so good at them he routinely completes them with the tiles facing down, ignoring the design in favour of merely matching the shapes on sight. Our natural inclination towards pride in our son notwithstanding, we allow that this is objectively impressive. It’s just that I also find it slightly unnerving, like something I can imagine kids being made to do in a Cold War orphanage.
My wife has no such qualms and has happily internalised this as one of his, and thus her, best qualities. ‘Benoît is great at jigsaws, too,’ the other mum said. ‘Really?’ my wife replied, her voice dripping with kindly derision, ‘Ours can do 60+.’ By this she meant jigsaws with 60+ pieces, not jigsaws judged only suitable for people aged 60 and over, but I didn’t want to interject as she was in full flow. ‘Does he do them upside down?’ she asked. I don’t know what she expected from this exchange, presumably for the other mum to admit her child was a doughy dunce compared to ours, and maybe to give us some money for time wasted. She winced to recall it a few days later, but it speaks to a confidence in our son’s problem-solving ability, which has now gotten us in other troubles.
I speak of his birthday gift, a Transformers toy that was marked 8+. I’ll admit that I thought he’d make short work of it, until I saw him thrashing it on the floor in frustration some minutes after it had been presented. ‘Hey!’ I said, like a caring, resourceful dad from an American sitcom, ‘Don’t give up, let’s try again.’ Tragically, this became a lesson for both of us; not only was my son unready for Transformers marketed to eight-year-olds. The ‘8+’, it turns out, might as well have been specifying the hours required to make this thing or the sessions of therapy necessary to overcome the trauma of making an attempt.
Beginning as a humanoid robot, there were – the instructions insisted – merely 24,000 moves to turn it into a pleasingly 80s-era hatchback. The mechanisms by which this was to be achieved were oblique. There were slots that broke all rules of Euclidian geometry, sliding slivers of plastic that refused to conform to any spatial reasoning defined by man.
After a length of time I’d rather not divulge, and more than a few noises which suggested I’d succeeded in transforming this toy into a paperweight, it finally looked vaguely car-shaped. Unfortunately, I had no idea how I’d done this and, in any case, my efforts weren’t exactly met with satisfaction from the bored four-year-old floor manager who inspected my work afterwards. It was misshapen and lumpy, with robotic limbs peeking out through its joins. It looked like a car that was wearing all its clothes at once, in order to skirt airport baggage allowance.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘it’s finished.’
My son flashed me a look of pity. ‘Don’t give up,’ he said, placing a conciliatory hand on my arm. ‘Let’s try again.’
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
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