Here’s something I remember from 20-odd years ago: lying on the carpet, bone weary, in front of a pack of cards laid in a messy grid. Opposite me, cross-legged, sits the middle one, aged three, blond hair standing on end. I turn over a card, revealing a picture of a triceratops. I turn over another card: a diplodocus. I let out a puff of exasperation – really, I want to swear – and return both cards to the face-down position.
The middle one turns over a card: a pterodactyl. Then another: also a pterodactyl. He takes both cards, adds them to his pile and goes again. Triceratops, and triceratops.
When the game is over I have six cards in my pile; he has 30. When the afternoon is over we will have played 17 times, and my performance will not have improved.
“You can’t even say pterodactyl,” I say. He just shrugs, because he’s winning.
At the time I feared my brain was dying. But if I could go back and speak to that thirtysomething father now, I would simply say: you have no idea.
It is Sunday and I am just back from a three-date stint with the band I’m in, exhausted and weighing up three equally likely possibilities: that I have made myself a coffee and drunk it; that I have made myself a coffee and left it somewhere weird; that I have not yet made myself a coffee.
“Should I keep looking, or just make another one?” I say. My wife walks into the kitchen with some shopping.
“Who are you talking to?” she says.
“I forget,” I say.
“We’re just having salad and cheese for lunch,” she says. “I couldn’t get to the supermarket because of the car.”
“The car?” I say.
“It makes a terrible noise whenever you brake,” she says. “I told you.”
“Oh yes,” I say. I think: you did?
“You could drive it around the block now and see for yourself,” she says. I do. The car doesn’t make any strange noises while I complete a single circuit of the neighbourhood, braking sharply and repeatedly.
“I fixed it,” I say.
“How?” my wife says.
“I don’t know,” I say.
After lunch my wife produces a box I have not seen for 20-odd years.
“Dinosaur cards!” says the oldest one.
“I found it while I was looking for something else,” my wife says.
“Are they all in there?” says the middle one.
“I think so,” my wife says.
“I hate this game,” I say.
The table is cleared, and the cards laid out in a messy grid. In his mid-20s the middle one may no longer possess a toddler’s astounding recall, but he still has the knack – pair after pair fall into his clutches. I sit out the first round, refilling my glass and watching in mounting horror: the instant a card is turned back over, I forget which dinosaur is on the other side.
By the second round, my sons have remembered their old nicknames for specific pictures – a key aid, since the cards contain no other information.
“Ah, the long boy,” says the oldest, turning over some kind of sauropod. The next card features a stockier, plated species.
“The scaly lad,” says the youngest one. My wife flips over a card: two apatosauruses walking side by side.
“The gentle friends,” says the oldest.
On my go I turn over two cards and, striking lucky, attempt to retrieve them. Several hands shoot out.
“What?” I say. “Stegosaurus, stegosaurus.”
“Yeah, but they’re different,” says the middle one. I look closely. One stegosaurus is by a swamp, facing left. The other is next to a tree, facing right.
“This is stupid,” I say.
I end up with zero pairs. Testing my memory against my children’s was always humiliating, but now I find it actually hurts a little. I’m still upset about it the next day.
“The dinosaurs were migrating from card to card,” I say. “That’s what it felt like.”
“I’m sure that bottle of red wine you drank didn’t help,” my wife says.
“To be fair, I had some white as well,” I say.
“I’m off to the supermarket,” she says. “Did you really fix the car?”
I think: the car? I say: “Absolutely.”
Once my wife has gone I let out a mournful sigh before heading out to my office shed. There, on the desk next to the mouse pad, is the coffee I made for myself the day before.
