The Sophist 14: A palace that collapses

On turning my child into me

On Thursday afternoons I sit in a cafe with my daughter in Islington, north London. It’s on one of the few streets around there that is still cheap, full of market stalls and small caffs that sell tea from various continents in various guises. Bubble, chai, builders. We go to a greasy spoon that serves the builder’s sort, to me, while my daughter has an Oreo milkshake with two straws, just so I can check it for poison, and for 45 minutes we play hangman before she goes off to her drama class to improvise the interior monologue of a neurotic cat. 

It is the best, purest, 45 minutes of our week. There is war raging in the world and in people’s homes and in people’s lives, a war I have been studying with some intensity for two weeks, but just for a moment I can pretend it is not raging in Cafe Sizzles.

Afterwards I get into a quiet huff as I say goodbye to the child and she goes into the class, because I want to go to the drama class and perform the interior monologue of a neurotic cat. I have never wanted anything more than to go to a drama class in Islington in all my life. Alright, so it’s for 7 to 12 year olds and they won’t let me in but have these people even heard of equal opportunities laws? I should sue. 

And alright I’m that parent who tries to live out their unfulfilled dreams via their child. I wanted to be an actress, or French and Saunders, but I became a journalist who interviewed actresses and comedians; a shadow artist instead. I won’t allow this for my kid. She must become the source material. She must become the fulfilled version of me. The shining palace. Not the shadow, the light.

“If you can’t say something nice,” I used to mutter over her pram, “have a fucking punchline.” So far it is working. Her punchline is usually me. 

“It’s not that I didn’t get the joke, Mum,” she says, most days, her face kept straight by a will of steel, her face an expression of disappointment at the failure she has in front of her, disappointed in herself for having raised me so badly. 

“It’s that your joke wasn’t funny,” she finishes.

And because of reasons, perhaps to improve my storytelling, my jokes, my punchlines, I have been looking into Gilgamesh, which is the oldest story in the world. Don’t quote me on that, I know it’s really a poem, I know I should say something about cuneiform writing on tablets but I don’t have an English degree, not that it’s English, it comes from Sumeria, which maybe became Mesopotamia, which maybe became Iraq, readers, do not write in with your corrections, we are not going for accuracy here, we’re going for mood. 

(Which reminds me of a story my mother once told of coming home from university, where she was studying social sciences, and citing a statistic at the dinner table. My grandmother was perfectly sharp but hadn’t been allowed much of an education, because she was a girl, and perhaps she had mixed feelings about her own daughter doing something different, having sent her to a school where daughters of army officers were prepared to be the wives of army officers like Granny was, perhaps with a nice spot of secretarial college to kill some time between the two. These young women were not expected to go not go off and study politics. So Granny told her daughter off, because you should “never be accurate with numbers dear, it’s vulgar,” which I’m sure was fantastically annoying for my mother to hear at the time but now, with great distance from the occasion, just seems fantastic. I found my granny to be fantastic.)

(She had mischievous eyes, a desk drawer full of chocolate and a kitchen cupboard full of empty toilet rolls, all for my brother and I to enjoy. Although to be honest she did seem disappointed by how underwhelmed we were by her offers of the chocolate. It was used cardboard packaging all the way for me, there were no other grandchildren, I was rich beyond measure, I had every single loo roll to myself.) 

But I digress. 

We’re in Cafe Sizzles and in between losing every game of hangman to my vicious child I’m trying to tell her what I’ve learned about Gilgamesh, the oldest story in the world, which is really a poem. In which our hero Gilgamesh, or is he our ruin, our fuck-up who seeks immortality all the same, is offered love by the goddess Ishtar. 

Ishtar says he can have lapis lazuli, gold, twins and triplets for his sheep and his goats, fertility and a chariot, real talk. All if he accepts her love.

And he says, bothered. 

You are a brazier that goes out in the cold, he tells her. You are a door that lets in the wind, a palace that collapses on top of its warriors, a water skin that leaks, a shoe that pinches the foot. The men that you loved: what became of them? One you turned into a frog, another into a wolf. No thanks, he says.

My daughter nods, she feels his vibe, she shares his dismissive ways. 

I get home and ask my boyfriend if he is a palace that collapses on top of its warriors.

No, he says, he is the warrior. Which I can only assume means that I, Sophie, will have to be the collapsing palace.

SEXIST I say. Typical man I say. Why do YOU get to be the warrior, I say. Why can’t you and Gilgamesh be the collapsing palace, I say. 

I turn away, I get into a huff about being a collapsing palace, even though he points out he never said I was the collapsing palace, he only said he was the warrior. I will never offer him a chariot made from lapis lazuli . I seethe. I fume. I unintentionally rehearse the interior monologue of a neurotic cat.

This would never have happened in Cafe Sizzles, I think.