Maybe he’s getting too old for that night-light now. The boy is nine, he’s stopped having the nightmares and wetting the bed. I suppose it’s still cute – rocket-shaped, spilling stars out across the walls – but he’s nine. He’s growing up.

 

And when he sleeps well he sleeps like a rock. Deep, cocooned and peaceful. There’ve been few restless nights, even as a baby. As I scoop him up, bringing the duvet with him, he’s impossibly warm and his eyes are gently flickering beneath their lids.

 

Dreaming. I remember when I used to dream.

​

He sleeps for another hour or so, through his mother kissing him goodbye, through the shock of the cold morning air, through the truck’s engine spluttering into life and rolling out of the driveway and away, into the desert.

 

We’re far across the flats when he wakes. Groggy, asking for water, and when I give him the bottle [it looks comically big in his small hands] he gulps it down, almost finishing it.

 

He gasps, smacking his lips, and blinks the last of the sleep-mist away. I smile, flicking the radio on. The station is poor, but the songs are old. Legendary. I watch him in the back seat. He doesn’t know the bands – yet – but one day he will, and he’ll listen to them and learn the words, and the chords, and think of me.

​

‘Look, Dad, a buzzard!’

​

I crane to see, the low sun throwing splinters into my eyes. Through the pillars of light come flashes of dark. Circling black shadow-bird, watching the desert. Watching the rocks and the sand and the twigs and the rusting blue truck sailing through them.

 

But we are not a threat. Not today; I think it senses that inside me [maybe it’s a father too]. So it dips its head and lets us pass and then it’s gone, swallowed by the horizon.

 

There is important work to be done.

​

The boy doesn’t question where we’re going or why. Such a wonderful age, a beautiful time to be alive. Every day the brain snaps open, wide and eager. It begins to suck everything in – all sights, sounds, and sensations. No judgment. No fear. To exist is to learn.

​

He studies the flats as they drift past. He drinks in the hazy mountains far beyond them. Through the dusty window is a whole world, and it’s his world. He will know it. Explore it. It will puzzle and reward him. It will beat him and hoist him up onto its shoulders. And, through all this, he will grow to love it.

​

We stop for lunch. The sun is high and hot. Mighty. I feel it mocks our jelly sandwiches and juice. Or maybe it envies them, saying nothing. I don’t care – the boy eats with gusto, cheeks full and heart happy. That’s all that matters.

 

I’m thinking about the first time we met. A blizzard, mid-December, tailbacks long as the mythic river. The hospital is on the other side of the world. I drive like a demon, burst purple-faced and panting into the room, rush to my wife's side, and –

 

'Thank god - I haven’t missed it.'

​

My wife likes to think he was waiting for me to arrive before the big moment - silly, but I also like to think it’s true. ‘C’mon, Dad, don’t know I’ve got a schedule to keep here and that time is precious?’

​

I’m thinking about feeling his weight in my arms for the first time. An impossible thing. Perfect. A masterpiece.

 

Time is precious.

 

Complete, crystallised clarity – that was his gift to me. College, failed romances, black-eyes, blank-eyes, night-shifts, and taxes. Beauty, beers, and a broken ankle. All the hairstyles I’d live to regret. Faulty fuses, motorbikes, lost phone numbers, and the Moon landings. That eternal girl in the sunshine-yellow dress. Morning coffee on the boil while we planted promises in an imagined future. All that had come before and everything that was yet to make itself known. It fitted together. It made sense.

​

A sense of purpose.

​

I drain the last of my juice and look to the boy. He’s thinking about school on Monday. Trading cards, gym-class, and starting guitar lessons.

 

Above us a lone cloud begins to break apart and two new ones are formed.

​

​

 

We keep driving, chasing the line where the heavens meet the earth. For all the hours that slip through us we never see another car, another soul. Just the rocks and the sky and the creatures that have made these places their home.

 

He rides shotgun this time. I made sure to pack his favourite action-figure and the silver spaceman does wild arcs in my peripheral vision. 

​

As I feel so often when we are together, I am content. Grounded. The constant bedrock upon which something incredible is beginning to happen. To grow.

​

he’s getting taller everyday – we buy him trousers and the next week they’re shorts

​

Ahead, the mountains are beginning to usher the sun down and into their stones. The boy – I feel it without seeing – is quizzical. He regards the empty jam-jars at his feet that have innocently rattled in their crate all this time. He is curious but, ultimately, accepting. He knows I put them there, this was something designed by my hand, and that is enough for him.

​

Sometimes it’s terrifying that something exists upon this earth that trusts you more than anything else.

​

I ruffle his hair and pin my eyes back onto the road. The moment is nearing. I feel it without seeing.

 

The sky becomes a richer blue. Someone has painted it with every star. Someone has shown it for the magnificent abyss that it is. And our watchman has arrived – a part of me wants to salute that moon for lighting our way this night.

 

It knows the important work to be done.

 

To the east I see the storm-clouds meeting, talking in low tones. They’re far, far away, but they are coming. Oh, yes, they are coming.

 

And we will meet them. Because there is important work to be done.

 

I think the boy has seen them too. He shifts, perhaps a little uncomfortably, so I open up the glove-compartment and pull out a packet of sweets. The candy helps, and I still feel his fear – and it is a real fear and in that moment I feel like spinning the truck around and going home for making that fear real for him and bringing him to it – but this is something that I can’t explain to him through words alone.

​

There are some things that must be shown, and understood not in your brain but in your bones.

 

I stop the truck by a fallen tree bleached white-smooth by a hundred years of desert-sun. The heat of the day has surrendered to a higher force. Getting out I look up and feel the chill of the universe descending. I bend to zip up the boy’s jacket and he pulls on his knitted hat.

​

‘It’s windy now, Dad,’ he says and he’s right. The hurried air is investigating us, sent by the clouds in the east (but not as eastern as they’d been – oh, yes, they are coming). Who are these things, in this place, at this time, tonight? It touches our hair, our clothes, enters our lungs, and rifles through our thoughts, searching.

​

I hope the winds understand what I’m doing here. This – it’s important.

 

I fetch the crate with the jars and then we walk. We needn’t lock the truck. We are quite alone here and that’s the point. It has to be this way. And we don’t need a flashlight, the moon is enough.

​

We're not walking long. It is the boy who sees it first. He knows it. He feels it, and he feels compelled to turn and widen his eyes and point up at it, tugging at my sleeve.

​

‘Dad, look.’

​

And when I turn even I am in awe.

 

There, having silently rolled up behind us, are the storm-clouds. No longer distant, they churn and bubble miles above us. Dark-bellied sky-water writhing in the updrafts, crackling with a furious excitement. All at once monstrous and exquisite. Up in the heart of that thing I think you’d find everything you ever wanted to know about order and chaos.

​

The boy moves closer to me, hugging into my side the way he used to. I place my hand on his shoulder and it surprises me how big I am. Huge spade-hands, belonging to a man and a husband and a father.

  

when did that happen?

​

You know, I can barely recall my youth now. It’s a flickering picture-reel falling further and further away from my mind’s eye. I find myself squinting to remember the details. When was the last time my father held me like this? How did that feel? Did it help me? Sometimes I forget what my father even looked like and it hurts me.

​

One day the boy’s head will fuzz too, oversaturated with information and experience. Like mine. One day it too will fray at the edges and then the faultlines will spread inland. Synapses will slow and break. Names and places and faces will be lost to the fog. One day he’ll forget me as he knows me now.

 

And that’s why this work is so important.

 

‘Don’t be scared,’ I hear myself say, moving forward, out beneath the cloud. It bulges and breathes deep-noise above me; I feel the hair on my head teased by the residue of electricity forged in its gut. The boy follows, tentatively, as though the very ground were made of eggshell.

 

The cloud brews something far within, working it with invisible hands - gilding it, charging it, preparing it for launch. I am expectant. A jar is in my hand.

​

The boy feels what is coming and steps back. I suppose he thinks I will follow. I don’t.

 

I smell copper, burning oil. My mouth is dry, tasting salt. I can feel all my blood. Yet I am not scared, because I can see what I came for, and it is coming for me.

​

It twists through the cloud’s rumbling skin, erratic - a superpowered thing, growing and growling. This moment spans half a second, and in the next half there is only light and sound. It is absolute.

​

Here is that brilliant, colourless flash I’ve been anticipating. A snap like the world cracking apart; it makes your stomach lurch. In that one second I have held out my hands.

​

The lightning bolt finds the jam jar. My arms quake as my heart detonates in my chest. All about me pebbles lift from the floor. My eyes are begging to close [watering] but my soul demands I fix that lightning with my stare, because I am defiant – of Nature and its laws, in this singular moment – and to break that stare now will kill me.

​

'i think we should start a family' 

 

If I turned to cinder out here, on the flats, the boy would be doomed. He’d wander and thirst and curl up in the high, hot sun. The buzzard would not be so kind then. So I must survive this, and I must conquer the storm. For him.

 

'it’s a boy'

​

I’m not a man who’s often thought of God. He has, for the most part, showed little interest in me and I, likewise, have shown about as much in him. But in that instance, as the sky threw fire into my hands, I felt I was fighting something. Not out of conflict, nor with fists and gnashing teeth. Not out of opinion or defiance or malice.

​

It is a good fight. I am fighting to earn something. Something precious, not usually given.

​

And, if there is some sort of god - whether humble or wrathful, and if I was with it then- I think it understood. Perhaps it understood better than anything else.

​

I know this because I could feel it letting go. I know this because it gave me what I came for.

​

'and he’s your son'

 

I bring down the lid and screw it tight.

​

 

​

The clouds receded, eaten by the same silent stones that had taken the sun hours before. The storm goes, but the lightning remains. Trapped in the glass jar in my hand. Buzzing and spitting, trying to escape. It is mine now, though I will not own it for long.

​

‘Come here. Don’t be afraid.’ I beckon him over, smiling through the exhaustion. My forehead is sweating, my ribcage still shakes. The boy is wary at first, but then he runs to me, embracing me and nearly knocking the jar out of my hand. I keep my grip, and then loosen it, as I pass it to him.

​

He takes it and I watch the white-light dance in his eyes. I think it knows him. It recognises the boy, and realises. It stops spitting and buzzing, becoming still, ebbing softly into a ball and floating there. It is patient. It knows its purpose.

​

I explain to the boy that this is his now. This impossible, beautiful, brilliantly precious thing – so small and yet so full of potential – is his. It is his responsibility. He will protect it and nurture it, and it will, in time, protect and nurture him.

​

He nods. Like the lightning in his hands, like the thing in the clouds, like me when I held him first, he now understands.

​

We walk back to the truck as the stars come out again. I wrap him tight in his duvet and set him in the back seat. He keeps the jar close, hugging it to him, for the whole journey back. This thing, it's important.

​

You see, my boy will keep growing. I cannot stop that, nor do I want to. Days will pass and he will learn and explore and meet someone he loves, and maybe they'll start a perfect family of their own. He will continue to marvel at all things.

​

On one of those days I will falter and stop working. Soon after that I’ll turn to dust.

 

But the lightning will always remain.

 

Secure. Constant.

 

Silent and unspeakably powerful as a father’s love.

​

​

THUNDER MAN was written for my Dad. It's about family, faith, the passage of Time, and what we pass through our generations. We learn so much from our ancestors, and our descendants will learn so much from us. But we also learn from each other - the dialogue works both ways. Teachers often learn more from their pupils. So being part of a family - any family - it's one hell of a responsibility. We must try our best to love, to nurture, and to understand.

​

More than anything, this story about what kind of father my Dad is to me, and what kind of a father I hope I can one day be.

 

I've certainly had an excellent teacher.

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