Free Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys by Will Self

can't have been so. The cherry trees could only have blossomed for a couple of weeks each year, and yet that's what had stayed with him: the clutches of petals pushed and then burst by the wind, creating a warm, fragrant snowfall. He couldn't face meeting with Bocklin and Schiele at the Frankfurter Hof. He'd rather have a few glasses of stuff somewhere, loosen this damn tie . . . Zweijärig’s hand went to his neck without him noticing, and shaking fingers tugged at the knot.
    On her way back from the water-cooler Frau Schelling saw her boss's face half-framed by one of the glass panels siding his office. He looked, she thought, old, very old for a man of sixty-one. And in the past few days he seemed unable to concentrate on anything much. Herr Doktor Zweijärig, who was always the very epitome of correctness, of efficiency. She wondered whether he might have suffered a minor stroke. She had heard of such things happening – and the person concerned not even noticing, not even being able to notice; the part of the brain that should be doing such noticing suffused with blood. It would be uncomfortable for Frau Schelling to call Frau Doktor Zweijärig and voice her anxieties – but worse if she did nothing. She entered the office quietly and placed the glass of water by his elbow, then silently footed out.
    Miriam placed the feeding cup by Humpy's cot and paused for a moment looking down at him. It was such a cliché to say that children looked angelic when they slept, and in Humpy's case it was metaphoric understatement. Humpy appeared angelic when awake; asleep he was like a cherry blossom lodged in the empyrean, a fragment of the divinity. Miriam sighed heavily and clawed a hank of her dark corkscrew curls back from her brow. She'd brought the feeding cup full of apple juice in to forestall Humpy calling for her immediately on awaking. He could get out of his cot easily enough by himself, but she knew he wouldn't until he'd finished the juice.
    Miriam silently footed out of Humpy's room. She just needed five more minutes to herself, to summon herself. It had been an agonised night on Humpy's account. Not that he'd kept Miriam and Daniel up personally – he never did that – but it had been a night of reckoning, of debating and of finally deciding that they should keep the appointment with the child psychologist that Dr Peppard had made for them for the following day.
    Daniel had gone off to work just after dawn, giving the half-asleep Miriam a snuffly kiss on the back of her neck. ‘I'll meet you at the clinic,’ he said.
    ‘You be there,’ Miriam grunted in reply.
    Dr Peppard had shared their misgivings about consulting the child psychologist, their worries that, even at two and a half, Humpy might apprehend the institutional atmosphere of the clinic and feel stigmatised, pathologised, mysteriously different to other toddlers. But more than that, she worried that the Greens were losing their grip on reality; she had seldom seen a happier, better-adjusted child than Humpy. Dr Peppard had great confidence in Philip Weston – he was as good at divining adult malaises as he was those of children. If anyone could help the Greens to deal with their overweening affection for their child – which Dr Peppard thought privately was the beginning of an extreme, hot-housing tendency – then it would be Philip Weston.
    Miriam now lay, face crushed into pillow, one ear registering the Today Programme – John Humphreys withering at some junior commissioner in Brussels – the other cocked for Humpy's awakening, his juice-slurping, his agglutinative wake-Miriam-up call.
    This came soon enough. ’Bemess-bemess-bemess – !’ he cried, shaking the side of his cot so that it squeaked and creaked. ‘ Bemessungsgrundlage ,‘ he garbled.
    ‘All right, Humpy,’ Miriam called out to him. ‘All right, Humpy love, I'm coming!’ then buried her head still further in the pillow. But she couldn't shut it out: ‘