We’d gone into that fancy children’s shop near our house, the one that sells little wooden toys that kids do not like. Those and the kind of gifts you buy for your richer friends’ kids, but never for your own child, since £9 is a lot for, say, a pair of cutesy socks, but cheaper than a bottle of wine if you have to bring something to a party.
We had popped in to buy our son a new mealtime sleeve bib, since his last one was so caked in gunk that the fabric had hardened. We probably should have replaced it sooner – I picked it up the day before and nearly cut myself – but I was enjoying the way it stayed in place, free-standing, when we took it off.
Since our trip was entirely based on how repulsively messy our son is, it might seem strange that we ended up pausing at the painting supplies. We saw the display images of creatively fulfilled children encouraged by invisible parents to follow their artistic dreams, and felt a surge of shame. Why hadn’t we erected an artist’s studio for our 14-month old, we thought, regardless of whether or not he bears an attitude to cleanliness that would suggest he’s receiving backhanders from whoever wants to keep our security deposit?
We settled on paints we were told were nonstick, easy-clean and free of intoxicating vapours. I know you think you know where this is going and you’re exactly right, but you should know we did put down a LOT of newspapers first, stopping only when we reached those from the print edition of this very column.
After some initial confusion, in which he greeted the blue paint as a new and alluring flavour of yogurt, we cooed with pride as he sat poised and ready to daub paint on the fresh white paper we’d laid out, before deciding to attack his own face instead. Within seconds he was pummelling the pot in a shower of cerulean vapour, wordlessly hurling blue liquid around like the Blue Man Group if it was a dispiriting, asinine farce, which, really, it is.
He took off for the cream curtains and sent another bottle flying towards our white ceiling. The frenzy with which he was dispatching coloured liquids across the room meant we had to immediately lay down more paper, including several more newspapers, and eventually medical documents, banknotes and birth certificates.
By the end, every scrap of parchment, fabric and flooring in the room, and every inch of his own body, was resolutely sodden with oily mess. Everything save for the one sheet of A4 we had given him to colour in the first place, which lay there amid the chaos, preserved in purest Rauschenberg white. Standing in our decimated sitting room, we rejoiced in the clean, white vision of our artist son. A minimalist after all.
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