Adam
reads toddler Charlotte to sleep
Originally
Prince was to be older, and could therefore
remember when Charlotte was a little girl.
It made more sense for him to be younger though,
so this scene had to go:
A
memory. My first night with the Hunters, ten
human years ago. I was young and naïve,
but I still knew enough about my duty. So
I was keeping guard by Charlotte’s bed
as Adam read her favourite story. The one
where the talking dog takes the little boy
to every continent of the world in a single
night. The bit she liked the best was when
they were in a boat on the River Nile and
the dog exchanged a few words with the Sphinx
as they passed the pyramids, causing the Sphinx
to reach forward and pick up the boat. Then
on the next page, there was a picture of the
Sphinx standing up on its hind legs, boat
in paw, with the whole of Africa laid out
for the dog and the little boy to see. From
my sentry post I could view it all.
Charlotte
clapped her hand down on this page. She did
not want her father to read on. She wanted
to take it all in, the view from the Sphinx’s
paw. Her eyes zigzagged across the continent,
from north to south, widening with every animal
they reached. Snakes, lions, giraffes, hippos,
elephants, zebras, tigers, camels. Throughout
the whole of Africa only one human was visible:
a man serenading a sleepy-looking snake as
it rose from its basket. The man looked uncomfortable,
as if he had been sitting in the same position,
wearing that same costume, for far too long.
‘“Look
out there, Billy, what do you see?”’
This was not Adam’s real voice. When
he was speaking as Patch, Adam always tried
to throw himself into the role. For added
dramatic effect he tried to say the dog’s
lines without moving his mouth because this,
after all, was how dogs talk.
‘“I
see Africa.”’ Adam’s Billy
voice was equally inventive. High-pitched,
with every syllable stretched to its limit,
‘Africa’ was pronounced as three
separate words.
Charlotte
liked his voices, and greeted them with a
respectful ‘Siweedaddy’ and a
dribbly giggle. With his free hand Adam rubbed
his eyes and traced the shadow lines beneath
with his thumb and point-finger. He paused
as he heard Kate’s feet shuffle outside
Charlotte’s bedroom door, then took
a deep breath.
‘“And
what animals can you see, Billy?”’
He looked up from the book and spoke directly
to Charlotte in that same dog voice. ‘And
what animals can you see, Charlotte?’
She loved this so much, Billy talking directly
to her, that her head fell back under the
weight of amusement before answering the question.
‘Dodu,’
she said to the sound of her finger landing
on one of the camels.
‘No,’
said Adam as the wind whistled its night tune
outside. ‘Camel. Come on Charlotte,
say Camel. Ca. Mel. Camel.’
‘Dodu.’
Adam’s
arm reached over his daughter’s tiny
shoulder and pointed to the sleepy looking
snake.
‘Okay,
what’s that? What’s that one called.
Ssss - ?’
‘Dodu.’
‘No.
Snake. Suh. Nah. Ake.’
‘Dodu.’
‘Come
on Charlotte. We went through all the names
yesterday, didn’t we? You know the different
names of animals. What’s this one?’
‘Dodu.’
‘No.
Elephant. Not Dodu.’ Adam stabs his
finger in my direction. ‘That’s
Dodu, Charlotte. He’s Dodu.’
‘Dodu.’
‘Yes.
Dodu. Doggy. But that,’ he pointed back
at the book, ‘is elephant. El. E. Phant.’
But
it was no use. The whole of Charlotte’s
world was still shaped in my image.
Charlotte
turned to look at her father and, in a carefully
engineered display of cuteness, silently mouthed
her new favourite word. With his defences
down, Adam surrendered to her Doducentric
worldview and turned over the page.
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