Kangaroo Care for the Beach

James steeled himself as he walked down the stairs. The carpet was a little worn and flat, its pattern less distinct than it surely had been back when it was new, and it felt a bit course underfoot.

That reminded him of why he was doing this.

His mum and dad would never have been satisfied with a carpet like this. As soon as something had looked old and worn and no longer its best, they had thrown it out. Uncle Brady didn't do that, and James was still trying to figure that out.

Adults wanted to prove to other adults that they were doing well, didn't they? They liked showing off their money and homes and cars and clothes and children, to prove...

To prove what?

That they're rich, James thought. That everything is perfect?

He felt a sinking feeling in his gut. His parents had wanted everything to be perfect. They were nice people – even their personalities were perfect (he guessed), but something had gone wrong.

That something had seemed to be James himself. The imperfection in a perfect family.

They'd given him everything – nice clothes. He was always dressed smart. He went to a school that everyone around him called a 'good' school, although he was never quite sure what was supposed to be all that good about it. Their choice of school had won everyone's approval though, so somehow it was good. They ate food that mum and dad thought was nice food, but James usually didn't like it. Mum had tried talking him into trying it but he only liked some of it – the bread, the tomatoes, the plain pasta. He usually had to pick the bits he liked from under sauces and dressings. Anything made from a recipe was just weird and he didn't like it. For a long time mum had made a plain version of dinner for him and a recipe for dad and herself.

They had given him nice toys. [i]Very[/i] nice toys. He was grateful, really he was. He didn't want to break them or mess them up, and when he was really little his mum had been so worried about him making a mess when he got out his crayons and drew pictures, and she had never let him have Play-Clay, although he loved the idea of it. They had given him a bucket of colourful plastic building blocks but always made sure he knew to tidy them away and not make a mess with them.

He had obeyed and kept his toys tidy and in order. After a while he found that he didn't want to play with them anyway. But they gave him lots of books, and he liked those. Sometimes he felt a little tired of them but he could always lose himself in a book. Quite often he wasn't even really reading the book, he would just prop it open and make it look like he was reading so that he could daydream without anyone noticing.

His dad had sometimes asked him what he was reading about, and sometimes he couldn't answer. Sometimes, his dad said he was worried about James because James would spend so long looking at the same page. James hadn't wanted to explain that he had been daydreaming so his parents had talked to his school to find out how good his reading was, and although nothing had came out of that, they were still worried.

He hadn't admitted to daydreaming because daydreaming was what lazy boys did. He didn't want to be called lazy.

James sighed.

How long had he been staring at the carpet between his feet? Brady would be wondering where he was. James hurried down the stairs and turned left into the kitchen.

Brady was already sitting with Tommy and Gene, and all three were eating.

That caused James some anxiety. “Sorry for being late,” he mumbled, making sure to articulate what he was apologising for, and froze while he tried to figure out whether he was in trouble or whether he would be let off the hook. He wondered whether he should wait for permission to sit. Or maybe he would be in trouble if he didn't sit down and get on with eating breakfast immediately, so as not to hold up breakfast any longer.

Ironically, the thought made him freeze up even more.

“Late?” Brady asked, not having quite finished his mouthful of cereal. “For what?”

Because you had to start without me, thought James, but then the crushing feeling in his stomach lifted. Thinking it helped him realise he hadn't done anything wrong. “I didn't want to stop you from eating,” he said with a self-conscious grin, and sat down.

Tommy gave him a quizzical look, one that shifted one of his stubby lapine ears. “I'll never wait. This is breakfast!”

That made James laugh. Tommy did like his food. In fact, he wondered if anything that Brady had put out to eat was gone, now that he was late to the table and Tommy had had first pick. He looked at the options.

The table was a little messy – not dirty, but the cereal box was still out, and there were spoons and forks piled in the middle of the table instead of next to their bowls and plates, and Brady had one elbow on the table.

The shepherd noticed James looking and said, “It's the weekend,” he said good-naturedly. “If anything, we're in even less of a hurry.”

Gene looked up from his cereal and nodded his agreement with this. “The weeks are cool, but the weekends are really cool.”

The weekend. This was James' first weekend at the house. At mum and dad's house they would have already planned the entire weekend. They would have talked over breakfast but they would have been in a hurry because there were groceries to buy and the car to wash and people to meet and computer stuff to do and something around the house to fix. On Sunday there would be church.

He looked at Brady again, who was gazing into space as if that slice of toast he was munching on was his whole world and it was all he needed to make him happy.

What was going to happen today? Surely the groceries were important. Mum went into a panic if she couldn't get groceries early on a Saturday. James remembered a time when the car had broke down and she couldn't get to the store, and she was so worried that they wouldn't have anything in for dinner that she and dad had got in a fight.

“What happens with groceries?” he asked.

Tommy glanced at Brady but then turned and answered James himself, leaning back. “They go in here,” he said, patting his stomach, which made Gene snort and try to restrain himself from laughing.

James felt irritated by this, and when Brady responded his anger turned briefly to worry before he realised that the big shepherd was laughing.

“And before that,” Brady picked up where Tommy had left off, “we head to the cash and carry to pick up supplies. We can do that later. You can come if you want,” he offered.

'Later' wasn't a time. “When?” pressed the mouse.

Brady shrugged. “Eh, whenever. I try to make it before 6.”

James was stunned. “At night?”

Brady looked at him with a kind of smugness, as if this was the key to understanding the secrets of the universe. “At night.”

James didn't know what to say. “Oh.” He took some toast and ate it plain, a little bothered by the late timing of the grocery run but unsure what else he could say. There was spread and preserve on the table but they reminded him of mum and dad, and not in a good way. They usually only had toast with spread and preserve in hotels on holiday mornings and they normally spread the toast before giving it to him. He had only ever wanted to eat the plain toast.

Brady never encouraged him to use spread and preserve, so James at his toast plain. It was good.

“So we got all day,” said Tommy with an air of satisfaction.

“What are we going to do?” asked James. Surely they wouldn't be doing nothing?

“Wanna go to the beach?” the rabbit said.

Gene looked up at the other two children again and smiled, clearly keen on this plan.

Yes, James wanted to go to the beach!

James had grown up a long way from the sea. He had seen it before but he hadn't gone onto the sand. This week, Tommy had shown him around, not just the house but the beach too. The memory of feeling sand under his feet for the first time still thrilled James, even though he'd replayed it a few times already since two days ago. Sand was meant to be soft but it gathered into little hills and didn't quite give under his feet, so it had hurt his soles a little, putting pressure in the arches of his feet, but he didn't mind, because when he kicked the sand it gave way.

They had gone to sit on the sand and all of a sudden, he'd found himself in an all-natural sandpit! He'd never even been in a wooden-box sandpit before! He wanted to enjoy it, but he wasn't sure how. While he and Tommy had chatted he'd looked down at it again and again, and although he had wanted to reach out to touch it he hadn't been sure what to do next.

But the beach had been so magical that he wanted to go back. He wanted to hear and smell the sea. He wanted to walk along like he had with Tommy to find whatever they could find. He wanted to look back like he had the first time and see two sets of footsteps.

He didn't know why, but seeing those footsteps had been... He didn't know the word for it. It wasn't happiness, but he liked it.

“Yes,” he said. Then he cast an uncertain glance at Brady. Surely this was Brady's turn to say, [i]Make sure you're back by 12 noon[/i] or something like that?

Brady noticed. “You look like you're feeling something.”

⌘⌘⌘

This wasn't he first time Brady had said this to James. Actually, it was the second. The first time he'd said it was on James' first day. They had arrived the previous day and Brady had helped him unpack and shown him around the house with a kind of unhurriedness that James had found so alien that he wasn't sure how to make sense of it. It wasn't as if Brady lacked a sense of masculine authority – he was definitely still the 'dad' of this household – but it was is if there wasn't a timetable to stick to.

After Brady had shown him around, James had expected Brady to 'shoot off', as his dad had called it, to go and do something else. Answer an email or check the post or make a phone call to the CEO (whatever that stood for) or any one of a thousand different things.

Instead, Brady had invited him to go with him down to the family room. James had been so wrong-footed by this change of pace from his dad's way of doing things that he had frozen up. Weren't dads meant to have really full, important lives? Sure, they could be loving but didn't they have to keep to a schedule? How could there possibly be an invitation to spend more time together?

And that was when Brady had said it.

“You look like you're feeling something.”

That was it. No demand that he find the words to explain his feelings. And why the interest in his feelings, anyway? Maybe James would have parsed it as a complaint, but Brady's expression had been so sympathetic and, well, interested in what was happening between them then and there, that James hadn't known what to say.

To his shame, he had started crying.

Brady had knelt down and watched James sadly as James tried to cram this sudden Jack-in-the-box of emotion back into its appropriate box. It was hard work. They had stayed like that for a long moment.

“It looks like it's been hard,” said Brady eventually.

James didn't answer. A real man couldn't admit to life being hard. Why was Brady trying to make him admit it?

“Sometimes it does get too much.”

James sniffed and looked at Brady, surprise mixing with his vulnerability. You could say that?

“And when it does, it's okay to look after yourself until you feel better again.”

The little mouse didn't say anything but he watched Brady, eager to hear more.

“You're not the only boy here. Downstairs there's my nephew, Gene, and Tommy, a rabbit. They're both about your age and they've been here a while now. Tommy knows what it's like to come and live here without knowing what he was coming into. Maybe you could talk to him. They're probably both watching television, and there's paper and coloured pencils in the storage box if you want to draw. Ask them to show you where they are if you want them. I'll show you to the family room so you can meet them both, and then I'll go into the kitchen and start making dinner. You can stay with the boys or you can come through and talk with me in the kitchen. Or you can stay in here until you feel ready to come down. You can do whichever you choose.”

James had looked around this bedroom. Being by himself sounded best but this wasn't a familiar room yet. Maybe he'd meet Tommy and Gene.

“Family room please,” he murmured from behind his hands.

Brady nodded. “Okay.”

Brady had taken him downstairs and introduced him to the young shepherd and rabbit, and had then disappeared into the kitchen. Tommy was more talkative than Gene, so they had chatted for a while. Occasionally during James' conversation with Tommy, the mouse had leaned across to look into the kitchen to see what Brady was doing. He had expected to see Brady on a laptop or pacing back and forth talking to somebody about sales targets or networking meetings or corporate clients. Instead, Brady had been cooking. And not in the fast, busy way mum did either. He had the radio on quietly and as he worked, he looked relaxed.

⌘⌘⌘

James looked down at the table as he thought about Brady's words. He was feeling something. What was it? After a moment's silence he hadn't come up with the words.

Brady spoke up again. “It looked like you want to go to the beach, but something about me is making you unsure.”

“I... guess...” the mouse said haltingly, “I... don't want to be there too long or keep you waiting.”

The big shep put his toast down. When he spoke, his tone of voice was a gentle but serious. “I appreciate you being thoughtful. How about this? If you're still at the beach and I need you to come back, I'll come down and tell you.”

James didn't know how to reply to that. Sometimes he had kept his parents waiting by accident and he knew they didn't like it. But he didn't know how to articulate that to Brady so he said nothing else.

“You already asked me what we're doing today, so you have checked with me as much as you can. If something else comes up or you lose track of time, I'm able to come to you and tell you. And that's okay.”

James looked at Tommy for reassurance.

The rabbit shrugged, a smile on his face. Beyond Tommy, Gene nodded his agreement.

Everyone around the table went quiet for a while as each person finished eating.

While Brady was finishing his coffee (and he took his time doing that) Tommy announced, “I'm done. Let's go!”

“Okay,” answered James, and headed towards the hall so that he could go upstairs and get changed into his trousers.

“Where are you going?” asked Tommy.

James looked around at him. The chubby rabbit had his hand on the handle to the kitchen door, which led outside, and Gene stood beside him, clearly eager to go outside.

“I'm getting dressed.”

“But you're already dressed.”

James looked down at himself. He had a polo shirt and underpants on. On that first day Tommy had introduced him to the 'house uniform' which was tshirt and underpants, and at first James had been embarrassed and politely refused to wear it. It had taken James two days to change his mind. That had been because for the first two days he had felt overdressed, so in the end he had given those up. He still felt more comfortable in a smart shirt than a tshirt so had worn polo shirts and underpants.

So far, he hadn't left the house without his trousers on.

Certainly not for the first time, James found himself freezing up with indecision. That in itself made him angry. Brady, Tommy and Gene were so easy-going. Why couldn't he be the same? He made his decision.

“Okay,” he said, and followed Tommy and Gene, very aware that he was trembling.

He reached the threshold and stopped so that he could crane his neck and look left and right, and then scan the horizon. Was anyone around to see? It didn't look like it, but somebody could turn up at any time.

The rabbit and shep backed up a few steps and waited (in plain sight of anyone inland!) for James to join him. They hadn't even looked!

Well, if they could do it, there was no reason James couldn't either. The mouse steadied his breath and stepped out onto the doormat.

Then he took another step, onto the sand, which had little broken twigs in it.

Then he took another step, which put him next to the other two boys.

Tommy and James smiled at each other.

“Come on,” said Tommy, and the trio wondered around the house and towards the beach.

This feeling! James had never felt anything like this! Well, maybe sitting around in the house in his underpants made him feel like this, but being outside took it to a whole new level! It felt dangerous, but in a good way.

He looked around again to check nobody was around to spot him. And then he looked at Tommy again. If anyone spotted him, they would see Tommy too. Whatever happened, he could follow Tommy's lead.

The End.