People LIke Her(16)

There is a part of me that can very easily imagine myself and Emmy telling this as a story, twenty years in the future, when Coco is a writer or an academic or a literary agent; can easily imagine in a distant future the rough edges of the anecdote, any tricky questions it might raise about my parenting skills, gently rounded or glossed over. I can even imagine myself or Emmy doing Coco’s inflection when we get to the word booksop. And there is a part of me that is secretly quite pleased it was a bookshop she was so excited about, not the Disney Store or McDonald’s.

Right now, though, it is the stuffed toy on which my thoughts keep snagging.

When we get home, I take Coco through to the kitchen and make her beans on toast, which she eats sullenly in her special chair. When I ask if she wants a yogurt for dessert, she vigorously shakes her head.

“Bath time?” I ask her.

No response at all to this.

“We’ll get you another . . . bear, Coco. Another teddy. A nicer one. We can go back to the bookshop another time.”

She turns in her chair, pretends she’s looking out at the garden. A gentle rain has begun to fall, the wet leaves glinting in the gathering gloom. Her lips are arranged in what looks very much like a pout.

“The thing is, darling, it isn’t good to just wander around picking things up, is it? You don’t know where they’ve been.”

“Mine,” she says yet again.

I put on a smile and assume a reasonable, soothing tone of voice.

“But the thing is, Coco, it wasn’t yours, was it? I didn’t buy it for you. Mummy didn’t buy it for you. So the question is, where did you get it from?”

I know what she’s going to say in reply to this before her lips have even finished forming the word.

I pull out a chair and sit down. Then I turn her chair so she’s facing me a little more.

“Coco,” I say. “I have a serious question to ask you. Will you look at me? Look at me. Thank you. Coco, that teddy. I don’t suppose there is any way somebody—anybody—gave you that teddy? Like a present? Do you remember?”

She shakes her head firmly.

“No?”

She shakes her head again, more vigorously this time.

“Does that mean no, you don’t remember, or no, no one gave it to you?”

“No,” she says again.

I straighten up, stretch my shoulders, rub the back of my neck. It is time, I decide, to try another tack.

“Coco?” I ask her. “You know that talk we had a little while ago about telling the truth and telling stories?”

She nods her head tentatively, not meeting my gaze.

“And you know how important we agreed it was to always tell the truth?”

She hesitates, still avoiding eye contact, then nods her head again.

“Well, I’m going to ask you once again about where you got that teddy . . .”

“Found it,” she says.

“You found it?”

“Found it.”

Fine, I think. Good, I tell myself. That is a relief, a weight off my mind.

I ask her where she found it, and she tells me in a shop. “A shop?” I say. She hesitates, looks thoughtful, and then confirms this.

“What shop?”

Coco is unable to tell me.

I take a deep breath, count to twenty, announce it is time to start running a bath.

It would appear that big talk we had about always telling the truth has not perhaps sunk in as deeply as we had hoped.

THE NURSERY HAD SUGGESTED it might be best if both Emmy and I were present, if we all sat down with Coco to talk about things—“things” meaning, in this context, our daughter’s recently developed habit of going through the bags on other kids’ pegs and taking stuff and then claiming they’d given it to her as a present. Of knocking things over and letting other children take the blame. The outrageous claims she had taken to making about how rich and famous we were or where we’d been on holiday (the moon, apparently). The reason Coco’s teacher had called us in, she said, was to try to find out whether Coco did the same thing at home, whether there was anything that might be upsetting her or unsettling her or why we thought she might be behaving in this way. “She’s always been imaginative” was Emmy’s rather defensive response. “I was exactly the same at her age.”

I did not doubt that at all.

We pulled our chairs into a circle and had a very serious talk with Coco about how it’s important not to make things up or exaggerate or invent stories. That there’s no point trying to impress people by pretending to be something you’re not. About how you shouldn’t try to trick people into giving you things that don’t belong to you. Coco’s teacher was nodding her head very firmly through all this, very emphatically.

Don’t think for a minute that either Emmy or I were unaware of the ironies of the situation. The point I kept emphasizing, every time I was given the opportunity, was that nothing Coco was accused of doing came from a place of malice. She does not have a mean bone in her body, my daughter. Nor do I believe she has any difficulty distinguishing fact from fantasy. She likes to entertain people, to make them laugh. The point I kept wanting to make is that she is a bloody clever kid. A lot cleverer than anyone else in that class. A lot cleverer than most of the people she is going to spend her childhood being taught by, if I am perfectly honest. A lot of the things they were describing were clearly jokes, obviously pranks. Like hiding her shoes and mixing up everyone else’s. Like swapping plates with the person next to her and pretending she was going to eat their lunch as well.