My kitchen, lunchtime

What are your thoughts on...

What are your thoughts on taxidermy, he asks before he’s barely in the room. I’m cutting cucumbers. I have never once had a thought on taxidermy. Recall media training, how pauses work in your favour. Pass him the plates, ask him to put them in the dining room cupboard. Figure it will buy me approximately 30 seconds to gather my never had thoughts on taxidermy. When he comes back into the room I tell him a story about the time his big sister was terrified by the whole stuffed animal corridor in the museum, refusing to walk through it. For years, a whole wing of the museum off limits because of one single, poorly stuffed polar bear. He rolls his eyes, a new trick seeming to coincide with his recent 11th birthday; yeah but I more mean the ethics of it, and I have never once thought about the ethics either, I scrabble for an answer, aren’t they dead already; his eyes, again, on the roll, it’s a phase, I used to say when they were little, hunting then, he says, what do you think about hunting?

Recently, this is the way the days go. I look through my camera roll and it hardly seems possible it’s nearly been a month since they’ve been in school. I have not asked, but I don’t think I’m meant to be home schooling them until the council find them a school place. I hope not. I am not the right person to home school anyone. Especially not my children. Lockdown taught me that. Quickly think of the ethics of hunting, this is easier. I am writing about a deer herd. I spend a lot of time listening to deer calls on YouTube. They are nearly impossible to describe. I should be able to describe the sound of them but since they so distinctly belong only to deer, their calls are difficult to translate to paper. I fear I might have to resort to simile. I tell him next year I will visit a deer cull. He doesn’t roll his eyes. Instead, he leans on the worksurface, puts his head in his hands, proceeds to tell me his thoughts on hunting, on deer, on culls. He does not remember the deer that used to regularly pause in front of our kitchen window when we lived on the farm. I would stand there, the baby strapped in the papoose in the hours before a late Scottish dawn, and out the mist the deer would arrive, leaping between deep furrows. When we lived there, I took to walking the dog long, solitary Sunday morning walks. Often, on these walks deer would surprise us from the woods, their call somewhere between a cow and a dog’s bark, if a cow barked, I said recently to a friend - see, I told you I can’t describe it - and often on these walks it would seem that around me everything else was communicating to each other and I was the one who couldn’t understand anything, language setting me apart, some deeper instinct, gone. When I lived on the farm I very much wanted to be with my own kind. It was uncomfortable to be so isolated with such young children for such long stretches of time. I wanted light pollution and bodies pressed too close in a club, I wanted the early morning crush of the tube and the incessant hum of the city. I wanted life I could understand and not these mystical deer rising out the mist, leaping over hedges or once, when I rounded the bend on the way home, just standing in the middle of the road, antlers magnificent and flesh so weighty it would likely kill me if I hit it. No, I did not want these deer I am now writing about on the island I am also writing about and really, all this writing is just a way of getting something back or going back somewhere, business only half done; he’s still talking, stealing bits of cucumber, he straightens up, shifts on his his feet, what do you think about hostile architecture, he says and I am on the home straight now, because this, I have many thoughts about.