If this were a color piece or a feature, the kind of thing I used to write on a daily basis, the editor would have rejected it just for that opening sentence. Openers need to hook people, Pete, she’d tell me, tossing my pages back at me across my desk. Paint a picture, set a scene. Be dramatic. In travel journalism especially, you need a sense of place. Take me on a journey.
So: It was just an ordinary day in Willesden Green, north London.
Because the fact is, before that knock on my door, it was just an ordinary day. An unusually nice one, admittedly. The sun was shining, the air was crisp and blue. There was still some snow on the ground, hiding in corners, but it had that soft sugary look snow gets when it’s all but melted, and none of the kids streaming into the Acol Road Nursery and Preschool could be bothered to get their mittens wet trying to scoop it up for snowballs.
Actually, there was one small thing out of the ordinary. As I took Theo into the nursery, or rather followed him in—we’d given him a scooter for his second birthday, a chunky three-wheeler he was now inseparable from—I noticed three people, a woman and two men, on the other side of the road, watching us. The younger man was roughly my age, thirty or so. The other was in his fifties. Both wore dark suits with dark woolen coats over them, and the woman, a blonde, was wrapped up in a kind of fake-fur parka, the sort of thing you might see on a fashionable ski slope. They looked too smart for our part of London. But then I saw that the older man was holding a document case in his gloved hand. An estate agent, I guessed, showing some prospective buyers the local childcare facilities. The Jubilee Line goes all the way from our Tube station to Canary Wharf, and even the bankers have been priced out of West Hampstead these days.
Something about the younger man seemed familiar. But then I was distracted by Jane Tigman, whose son Zack was already starting to thrash and scream in her arms at the prospect of being left. She hadn’t realized that the trick is to make sure they walk into nursery on their own rather than being carried, which simply makes the moment of separation more final. Then there was a note about World Book Day on the nursery door that hadn’t been there yesterday—God, yet another costume I’d have to organize—and after that I had to separate Theo from his helmet, gloves, and coat, stuff the gloves deep enough into the coat pockets that they wouldn’t fall out—I still hadn’t gotten around to putting name tags on them—and help him hang the coat on his peg, deep among all the others, before crouching down to give him a final pep talk.
“Okay, big man. You going to play nicely today?”
He nodded, wide-eyed with sincerity. “Yef, Dad.”
“So no grabbing. And take turns. That’s very important. Remember we said we’d take turns to choose lunch? So today it’s your turn, and tomorrow it’ll be mine. What do you want for lunch?”
“Booby smoovy,” he announced after a moment’s thought.
“Blueberry smoothie,” I repeated clearly. “Okay. I’ll make some before I pick you up. Have a good morning.”
I gave him a kiss and off he went, happy as a clam.
“Mr. Riley?”
I turned. It was Susy, the woman who ran the nursery. It looked as if she’d been waiting for Theo to go. “Can I have a word?” she added.
I snapped my fingers. “The sippy cup. I forgot. I’ll get another one today—”
“It isn’t about the sippy cup,” she interrupted. “Shall we talk in my office?”
* * *
—
“IT’S NOTHING TO WORRY about,” she said as we sat down, which of course instantly made me aware that it was definitely something to worry about. “It’s just that there was another incident yesterday. Theo hit one of the other children again.”
“Ah,” I said defensively. That was the third time this month. “Okay. It’s something we have been working on at home. According to the internet, it sometimes happens at this age if physical skills get ahead of verbal skills.” I smiled ruefully, to show that I wasn’t stupid enough to believe every parenting theory I read on the internet, but neither was I one of those entitled middle-class dads who thought that just because my son was