The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [15]
“Of course I have,” Father Lemuel said. “We can’t let our fears shape Sara’s life—no, cancel that, it’s precisely because we can that we have to take care. We shouldn’t let our fears shape Sara’s life. Of course we’re scared of being shown up as lousy parents. Even I’d have to live far longer with the shame of having messed it up than I could bear. But it’s not her business to calm our fears—it’s our business to calm hers, which we won’t do by coming down on her hard if she ever steps out of line. She’s only a child, granted—but she’s not an idiot. She knows she took a risk when she climbed up to the roof. If she’d fallen, she’d have hurt herself. But she watches TV. She rides robocabs. She knows full well that there are people who take much greater risks for the thrill of it, day by day. She knows that there are people sitting at this table who’ve been bikers, flyers, skiers...I don’t suppose she has any real notion of what each of us did for a living before we applied for our license, or what those of us who are still working do, but if she did she’d know that at least half of us have taken measurable risks on an everyday basis in the past, and that at least two of us are still taking measurable risks even now. Okay, we’re a boring bunch, on the whole—not a single extreme sportsperson among us—but not one of us would ever have refused on our own behalf the kind of risk that Sara took today, in the grounds of her own home, while half a dozen of her parents watched. So I say that if this is a test of some kind, Sara’s passed it; we’re the ones who are in danger of failing. If we over-react, we fail. Why not just tell her that she scared us—which she must have realized by now—and ask her to be careful, please, to think hard before she scares us like that again?”
Sara was tempted to applaud, but that would have been one impertinence too many. Mother Maryelle had the claw-hammer raised and ready, but this time she had to bring it down to stop three simultaneous protests. “This is obviously going to be harder than we thought,” she said, ominously. “Quilla.”
Sara immediately guessed what would happen next. She understood that Mother Maryelle’s comment had been a hint, which Mother Quilla was expected to take up. Mother Quilla did, immediately proposing a motion that the meeting should be held “in camera”—which meant, in simple terms, that Sara should be sent to bed while her parents got on with the serious business of tearing into one another without her inhibiting presence.
Father Stephen seconded the motion—but Father Lemuel was, for once, unstoppable. “No,” he said. “That’s the cowards’ way out. She’s old enough to hear us, now.”
For two or three minutes, Sara was immensely pleased by that compliment, and by the fact that in the hectic discussion that followed the original motion was eventually forgotten, and never even put to the vote. After two or three hours, however, she realized that no privilege came without penalties, and that that the privilege of listening to her parents argue about what they should and shouldn’t say and do in front of her—especially while she was alert to every word—was a very dubious one indeed.
Eventually, Sara decided that Father Lemuel hadn’t said the half of it when he’d observed that they were a boring bunch on the whole. Individually, there were only one or two who could have bored for England, but collectively....
The meeting went on for a very long time, and got nowhere. By the time Sara did get to her room, free to collapse on her bed, she felt that she had been more thoroughly and more imaginatively punished for her reckless adventure than she could ever have imagined possible. But that too, she eventually realized, was a far-from-insignificant milestone in her increasingly complicated life.
CHAPTER V
Although no punishment had actually been agreed by the committee of her parents once Father Lemuel had sown the seeds of deep dissent, Sara still expected to be put under house arrest for at least a month