1.
Avery: Waving his yellow spade unearthed from the toy box. I dig in the garden?
Me: It's raining and it's dark. So no.
Avery: I see? Flings back the curtain. Where's the garden gone?
Me: It's night time.
Avery: Is daaark! How you make it?
Me: Make what? The dark?
Avery: Yeah. The dark. How you make it?
Me: Shivers. Because we are up to that bit and I didn't even realise.
I am explaining about the earth and the sun – it all sounds very unlikely – when Avery tugs on my sleeve.
Avery: Mum? I have a problem.
His problem is he wants bread and butter.
2.
'Mum?' Avery says to me as I type this.
'Mm?'
He thinks for a moment, now he has my attention. 'I have a dinosaur?'
'You want a dinosaur? What sort of dinosaur?'
'A greeeen dinosaur.'
'Um,' I pat my pockets, glance around. 'I don't have a green dinosaur.'
'Oh. A yellow dinosaur?'
'I don't have a yellow dinosaur.'
'Where's the red dinosaur? Where's the blue dinosaur? There's the red dinosaur.' He points. I turn around and look. But there's no red dinosaur. He laughs.
3.
Even a month ago, Avery's conversational powers consisted of asking questions prefaced with 'Where's...'
'Where's Freddy?'
'Where's Una?'
'Where's Daddy?'
Lately he's been asking after some slightly more obscure people, like my niece Crystal who we saw at Easter, or my friend Kirsty's daughter Maddy, who joined us for coffee one morning when she had a doctor's appointment and wasn't at school.
But this is another leap again. Jokes and misdirections. Conceptual questions that shows he understands cause and effect. If the dark is here, who made it? He makes a theory, Mum made it. But how?
This is how I made the dark: I made the boy who opened the curtain and saw the light was gone.
