We Own the Sky(23)

“Well, it started close to here, just around the corner, and in the olden days lots of the houses were made out of wood.”

“And they build all the houses again?”

“Yes.”

“That’s cool.”

Jack tried to peep over the barrier again. Cool.  Ever since he had started school, everything was cool.

“Do you want to go up in the air?” I asked. “That way you can see

something.”

“I’m not too big now?”

“You’re big but not that big,” I said, lifting him onto my shoulders. I could feel him turn his head, moving his little hips, his heels on my chest.

We moved closer to the edge and looked east down the river. Amid the gray, there were just a few dashes of color: a smudge of green trees along the river; a red asphalt children’s playground squeezed between two buildings.

“Look, Daddy, I can see Tower Bridge.”

“Wow, yeah, you can. Do you want to take some pictures?”

He nodded solemnly, and I could feel him tug at his bag and carefully take out the camera.

Jack started to take photos, and I could feel him swiveling his hips, trying to get the best possible view. He liked to take photos from up high, and we printed out some of his best ones to add to the collection around his bed. The morning sun taken from his bedroom window. A weekend in Dorset, a white lighthouse against a purple sky. Raindrops against the windowpane taken from the top of Canary Wharf.

Jack had stopped moving and sat motionless on my shoulders, and I thought something might be wrong so I looked up at him but he was just still, staring out over the city, like an old yeoman surveying his land.

London was all Jack had ever known. His dragons were Tube trains, and he

knew the bears would eat him if he stepped on the cracks in the pavement. He went to Chinatown for dim sum when he was two, and he could name all the bridges that crossed the Thames. He loved it all. Watching the summer sunset from the South Bank. Jumping the fishy puddles in his rain boots at Billingsgate.

The throaty warm wind at the entrance to the Tube. The grime that feels a part of you.

We stood like that for a while, a four-armed giant, listening to the police sirens in the distance, the gray hum of traffic, the static of the city, a sound you would only notice when it was gone.

  *

Jack was quiet on the Tube on the way back. I knew he was counting the stops, a trait he had inherited from Anna. She still did it, every time she got on. A quick little glance up at the map, and then the gentlest quiver of her lips as she ran through all the stations in her mind.

She memorized all of her journeys when she got to London. I used to test her, give her a little quiz. Without pause, she could tell me how to get from Piccadilly Circus to Camden Town or the fastest route from Lancaster Gate to Regent’s Park. Sometimes it was easier to consult Anna than a map.

It was still raining when we stepped out of the Tube. We were going to the play center in Hampstead, the one that offered mother-and-baby yoga where you could only get organic bhajis and Sumatra-roast coffee. As Jack headed toward the ball pit, I found a table and ordered an Americano. I listened to two women at the next table talking about another mother, whose child refused to eat, who had her wrapped around her little finger. That was what happened, they agreed, if you bottle-fed and gave them all that processed rubbish.

I drank my coffee and checked email on my phone. There were pitches for

start-up investments, some paperwork from our accountant. I had been asked to speak at a tech-incubator event, something about nurturing a new way of thinking in virtual reality.

Jack had come out of the ball pit and was now charging through a plastic tube with another boy, I thought someone he might know from school. The two women were still talking, about their depressed nannies and how it must be a Slavic thing, and I knew why Anna couldn’t stand it here. It was better if you were a man. They left you alone.

My phone chirped. It was Scott.

I thought you were sending me that code

At play center can we talk later?

A pause, a thinking pause. Then I could see that he was writing again.

Rob please call me I’m getting pissed off now

Will do later no probs.

I wasn’t going to write that code. The Chinese company was huge, flush with cash, and would snap us up. They had their own people, their own infrastructure.

Simtech would be dead as we knew it—and with it my chance of launching my drones.

I looked for Jack. With another boy, he was trying to get inside a plastic car through the windows, Dukes of Hazzard-style. I put down my phone and watched him. Since he had been small, I loved to see him play with other children, his first fumbling efforts at making friends: how he would cautiously smile and raise his eyebrows, his attempt at an opening; how he would try to woo his suitor by showing them all of his things, his colored pencils, his toys, the picture on his T-shirt.

I felt in my pocket for the shopping list Anna had given me. Her lists always made me laugh. Their neatness, their specificity, how she would state the particular brand of cherry tomatoes, her starred annotations, instructions on precisely which asparagus tips to choose. I used to keep her old shopping lists in my wallet and read them on the train, the bus, whenever I was sat somewhere waiting for her to arrive.

“Please turn over,” she wrote once, “for the cheeses to buy if they don’t have Gruyère.” On the back of the paper, there was a neat numbered list of seven cheeses, with a parenthetical note to say that they were in descending order of importance.