A Description of An Incident While Bowling With Two of Two

Another pre-Christmas event that I'm only just getting around to describing.

There is a shopping mall not far from the school which owes its continued profitability, I'm sure, to its proximity to two international schools. The mall, a dark place of little imagination, is inhabited mostly by international women, as being the nearest port of call where they can spend money/drink coffee/get their nails quaffed, while waiting for their kids. Equally, it's the place to go with your kids after school, if you're looking to keep them amused for half an hour for some reason.

I, like many international women, inhabit this shopping mall on a regular basis. I have my own parking spot, and just like Roger Miller in King of the Road, I know all of the security guards on all of the lanes, all of their children and all of their names. On the top floor there is a children's play area for the purposes of plundering the parental purse. In the last week of school before the Christmas holidays, Two of Two and I went there to go bowling. I limited him to half an hour, as he tends to get bored after that and starts doing little boy things like whinging and walking off and trying to stick the bowling balls up his nostril.

When we arrived there were only another couple of occupied lanes out of twelve, and we set up in lane 6 for our thirty minutes of father/son ten-pin bonding experience. After about five minutes or so, the other lanes finished their games and suddenly we were alone, the only players at the alley. This suited us both perfectly, he and I being of the type of character which prefers solitude than a crowd.

Our solitude did not last long, however.

About twelve minutes in and everything seemed normal. We were zipping through our first game and already getting towards the end. Neither of us was playing like a god-king of the lanes, but we were having fun and there was quality bonding all round. It was the kind of moment that would make up about three seconds of a Hollywood montage scene from the point in the film when the father and son were getting on really well. But, of course, those montages arrive just before the gloom, just before the dream crashes and the zombies march onscreen from stage left.

And so it happened.

The noise levels increased, and suddenly we realised that we were no longer alone. A group of teenagers had arrived, to occupy all the other lanes. At least a hundred of them, possibly upwards of a hundred and fifty. They swept in, like a plague of locusts, like a swarm of demonic bees, like a zombie horde, a-chomping and a-munching. They quickly took up residence in the other eleven lanes, nine or ten youths to a lane. This was an instance of mass bowling on an unprecedented level.

Two of Two started giving me the eye, the look of a small boy who is no longer comfortable. I reassured him. Then two of the horde came and sat down in the curved comfy sofa by our lane, and dumped their bags and coats on top of our bags and coats. I looked at them, the two youths looked back at me. No words were said. I presume they thought we were with them. After all, I'm forty-three and Two of Two is seven, it's perfectly understandable why they would think we were with a group of teenagers.

I kept on bowling. Two of Two had started to vocalise his desire to flee to the safety of the coffee shop.

'Stand firm!' I said. 'We'll be fine.' He didn't look convinced.

We played on while the two glaikit youths sat watching our every move. Our bowling, hardly top-notch to begin with, began to deteriorate under the intense gaze of an audience. I wondered if they were trying to intimidate us out of there, but then they didn't look even remotely intimidating. They looked more like Muppets. No one was ever intimidated by a Muppet.

Nevertheless, with one ball left of our first game, I was contemplating heading for the doors. Whatever weird thing was going on with this post-pubescent collective, I didn't really want to be in the middle of it. Two of Two stopped me as I reached for the bowling ball and once more implored me to get him out of Dodge. I noticed that Bert and Ernie had moved to join the giant swarm of gangly kids at the neighbouring lane - lane 5 - who were happily bowling away with no notion of who was scoring what. I once again spurned Two of Two's advances to get out of there, and turned to bowl the final ball. And there was Bert, of Bert and Ernie - who had, less than twenty seconds earlier, been sitting staring at us like we were the weird ones - clutching a ball in our lane. And before I could say anything, he'd let it rip. Six pins to Bert!

I still didn't consider that there was anything intimidatory about it, I just thought he was being stupid. I marched up and started gesticulating wildly, pointing to Two of Two and myself, saying things like, 'Our lane, me and him, us, him and me, this is our lane!' I probably sounded like Shrek.

Bert looked as if he didn't quite understand the concept, then without a change in expression he minced off to stand eleventh in the queue next door. It hadn't been pleasant, but I had fought off the zombie.

'Come on, Dad,' said Two of Two, 'let's get out of here.'

Having been considering it before, now there was no way I was going anywhere. 'Two of Two,' I said, 'we're flippin' well staying. We will not be chased out of here by this mob. We're staying until our time runs out, and not a second before! I see you stand there like a greyhound in the slips, straining to leave. The game's afoot; Follow your spirit, and, upon this charge, Cry God for Two of Two! Scotland and St Andrew!'

'What?' he said.

'You know, Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war, all that stuff.'

'You're mixing up your plays, dad,' he said.

'Whatever, we're just not flippin' leaving.'

I invoked Dunkirk, Rourke's Drift and Winston Churchill and he reluctantly agreed that there was nothing he could do about it if I wasn't going to take him. I turned, ball in hand, and sure enough, bugger me, but if there wasn't another of the zombie horde standing in our lane lining up her ball. Two of Two gave me that, 'see, there's nothing we can do about it, it's like Day of Dead' look. I ran full pelt and dived in front of her before she could get her ball off. If my gesticulations had been wild before, now there were excessive.

'Our lane!' I cried again. 'Me and him. Our lane.' I indicated the lane, myself and Two of Two repeatedly with wild, exaggerated movements.

She at least had the decency to look a bit embarrassed. This caused me to suddenly come over all British, so that I felt a little embarrassed too, and I thought that maybe I should just have coughed quietly at her shoulder, like Jeeves, and politely pointed out that she was encroaching into territory that was rightly, by all UN conventions, ours for the next fifteen minutes.

'You're embarrassing me,' said Two of Two when he spoke to me next, confirming that everyone was now embarrassed.

The game continued, and thereafter we were mostly left alone, despite still being surrounded. I had to hire a full machine gun emplacement from the bar staff to keep the status quo, but the rest of the bowling passed without incident. A girl from the lane next door did fire one of her balls down our lane, but she was bowling from two yards behind the line and I think the ball just came out at a bit of an inappropriate angle.

We bowled on until our time was up, and then we left. The father-son bonding had been shattered, fundamental damage had been done to the id of Two of Two, but we did at least, and we can be thankful for this, get out of there with our lives...