A Quarter Past Seven (Parallel Parking)

On no, not again! We’ve been down this road once too often for my liking. Down this selfsame corridor. Along the well-trodden pile, with its fraying weft heaving all one-way. This time I am not going to let him abscond. I’m not going to stand for him cold shouldering me. Here and now, I categorically refuse to put up with any more silent treatment. I shall not be sent to Convent-try. Not within my own home. Today, there is to be no collaboration in any mulish, prepubescent autism. Especially as we've got friends who have to cope with that particular iniquity for real. I simply will not entertain another bruised silence. Not without verbal compress and emotional tourniquet to hand. To do so would be a dereliction. Tantamount to abuse. Neglecting to hear the abeyant scream. It's overly past time he learns to vocalise. In order to help usher that along, I am obliged to grab him by the shoulders, wheel him round and force him to look me in the eye. Then see if he can maintain such a façade of self-absorption, with some - my - ragingly beseeching humanity two inches from his nose.

I'm not even clear what this flap is about. One moment we’re in the kitchen, with me seeing to his dinner and the next he's deserted the table and heading for the hills upstairs. Twin prongs of elocution and deportment classes, have instructed me both to express myself elegantly and then, how to flounce out of a room if I'm not being listened to. So I fully recognise what a person's mode of vacating, is designed to draw someone out. To come repatriate them back into the forsaken bosom of social intercourse. And this isn't one of those. Can't even impute Craig in this, seeing as he's not actually home. So I'm Johnny, or Joanna, on the spot this evening. Actually it’s forever falling to me, since Craig fulfils his archetypical role to a 'T'. Always stomping off away from any ungrassed field of combat. Rugby rugged he maybe, yet dear, brittle Craig is anything but flinty. Mal however, mon petit, our pride and joy, jewel in the crown, apple of our eye over which we will not permit him to drape wool, acrylic, or any other kind of synthetic fibre, possesses his own unique, slow version of self-rendition. Designed as it is not to bring attention down on his head. It's kind of hard to pin down a way of describing it. Can you recollect that 'Slinky' toy ? Basically an oversized metal spring, that walked itself down inclines - goodness he must have watched that for all of ten unenthused minutes before becoming completely bored - anyway, Mal sort of extracts himself from a set-to like a rheumatic 'Slinky'.

It starts as a skewing away, his whole frame concertinaing to inch apart from flare-ups, until somehow he can reconstitute himself the other side of the door delineating the rift. This is not a segmental teleportation of bad sci-fi. Less doing a runner, more a slither. Mentally as much as physically. For there is no defiance in the act. Merely a defection. A slow-burn gunpowder trail, which just leads to a cartoon 'fizzle, fizzle, pop' at its expiration. Not unlike so many of the admixtures we domestic scientists attempted to brew up for him, vainly seeking to spark a any kind of curiosity some years back. We'd overlooked how, at far tenderer an age, he'd petitioned us to forgo our whiz-bang Guy Fawkes garden display. He just wasn't interested. Stoically unresponsive. That should have been a clue way back then. That we would forever be wasting our time. Banging our heads against - but I digress. Though fortunately, so does Mal.

For, once clear of the threshold of entanglement, he doesn't seize the opportunity to break for it at full tilt. But, as if he hasn't fully regained his body, merely shuffles and scuffs a weary path. Almost like he's wading through sludge. With the weight of the world pressing down on his shoulders. 'Not !!!' as the kids are wont to say today. Well leastways the voluble ones. The ones who might be sufficiently brazen to dare ask a loved one for assistance in shouldering the burden. All this is to say, that I find myself only in lukewarm pursuit. I am reminded from those nature films on TV of the chameleon. Not through its art of instant hued camouflage, since that entails interaction. Imposing the self on the environment. Contributing another layer, inserting one's being, neither of which conjunction could be laid at the feet of our boy's central nervous system. No, now that I have him in his bluntedly serrated slipstream, I mean more the chameleon's other tactical device of flattening itself. Of truncation. Of immateriality. Of non-being. Disarticulation in order to avoid confrontation. (we might be fearful of such a tendency towards anorexia, had we been blessed with a girl). And though Mal does have a lethal tongue, one that can whip out and adhere a flea in your ear, he rarely employs it, so I must allow that the chameleon comparison will only go so far. Resolutely one toned and fortunately, one paced, seeing as I am gaining on his receding shamble.

Just as long as I make it before his bedroom door is sealed shut on me. Not that he has a lock to barricade himself behind. All genuflect afore the societal trend to dumb down. As per the State sponsored dyspraxia of ‘Design Technology’ replacing traditional wood and metalworking in schools. Otherwise he could have fabricated even the simplest form of cotter to secure himself a redoubt, but which now must remain unfathomably beyond him. Notwithstanding how DT has empowered him to dissect any form of food packaging you may care to present, redesign it, and come up with a suitable marketing campaign. That, and how to weave wool around discarded ice-lolly sticks, so all hope for adroitness is not lost. Future generations will still be able to throw up low cost housing, or shoddily produced exorbitant cost domiciles like this one. Maybe I shouldn’t cavil quite so much, after all, would I really welcome him wielding his father’s hand-held drill ? All this is by the by, for if I am forced to rasp the bulbous door handle, which being out of kilter with its mortise consequently sticks, (so what benefit derives from his father owning a blessed drill in the first place ?), then somehow we both apprehend that I have surrendered the moral high ground. Since rightly or wrongly, we have always ascribed his room as his sacrosanct space. As inviolable as a personal diary ought to be. Hence, any adult presence would represent a breach rather than an intrusion. Unless like a vampire, I am invited across the threshold. But that will never happen in a garlicky month of Sundays.

I have one thing on my side. Two really. Firstly he is too tightly wound, too folded in on himself, to spare an arm to reach out and cast off the door behind him. That and the ineptitude of the housebuilders, who have managed to confound the fire/building regulations even as they lip served them. For despite having sprung hinges, the languid door is unable to heft itself shut, in any less time than it would take the whole edifice to burn down to the ground. Not that I have any idea as to what my next move would be, were I to reach the door in time to hold it open. What’s the inverse of an exit strategy ? Long lapsed are the days when I could hold my arms out until he capitulated and buried/bevelled his head into my abdomen. Then later my sternum, always pinching or crushing the tender breast tissue, but a price worth paying for such connection. A father may record incremental growth on a doorjamb, (in indelible marker pen that still projects ghostly outlined notches through the fresh coat of paint, now that we no longer take pains to whippersnap height), but a mother’s body knows inside and out. Not that any such docking could conceivably occur nowadays, but our dimensions are such that we’d likely clash heads and knock each other out in a feeble burlesque of rutting stags. There no longer being any fawning on show here. Only the locking of horns between the doe eyed and young buck. Like I say, stumped for what on earth I’m going to do, but just know I have to beat the portcullis drop. Outstretched arms may no longer erect any crossing between us, but somehow we have to span the gap. Or forever to remain islands to one another. The door’s in sight and it’s still ajar. The question remains though, is there any way in ?

Behold him there. The putto as might be represented by Lucien Freud rather than Donatello. Braced hard against the bed’s headboard. Legs canted upwards towards his chest, elbows breasting kneecaps, fingers cornicing his jawline. Gaze riveted down into the hollow so created. Or the abyss. No possibility of any eye contact, with head bowed and cowled deep into his sweatshirt. (Cobras employ their hoods to inflate their stature; Mal utilises his to the opposite effect). Time to announce myself. To blazon my presence. To broadcast the guiding thought for the day. I purse my lips to the requisite dimension. Primed for breath to be pressed through the diameter of its vent. My pearly pellet of wisdom hooked up to its propulsive oxygen. Revving up towards escape velocity. All set on the launchpad of my tongue. But then a pause in which a lifetime of relationship teeters on the brink. All dozen years of it. Plus one for incubation. A baker’s dozen of fallowness. Has not a prior question been soundlessly demanded of me perhaps ? If so I am bound by our parental pledge of openness, to try and meet it. Rather than counterbid with a question of my own. Disclosure, defence or damnation. I’ve got to get this spot on. But what the heck’s being mutely asked of me, other than a stringent request to leave him alone ? The pause elongates. This reticence now a communication in itself. With its own static momentum. Have to order my thoughts. And so the occupation begins in earnest. 

Stand off, with him slump-seated. What do I hope to bring about here ? For him to come out and say ‘I was wrong. I was in the wrong’. No, it’ll likely be ‘I was wronged. I’m the wronged party in this’. I’ve got to get him to work on his emotional grammar. To bring about certain syntactical adjustments. A paradigm shift of the ‘I’ from subject to object. Reorder the essentials. Break the patterns. Induce him to cough up some furball of affective truth. Shouldn’t be too hard, to judge by the innumerable injustices seemingly accumulated under his skin. Therefore he must already be surfeited with suppurating wounds to lick. Actually, just getting him to mouth a single word would be a start.

Back to first principles then. Where the two of us stemmed from. The source of our relating. An Eden not coiled serpentine, couched in words. I never confided my adult secrets and dreams in you Mal, because that would be too unreasonable a millstone for your rickety young shoulders (are you getting enough vitamin D ? – Your father keeps comforting me that you have the same build as him at age twelve, though to look at him now …) So I don’t suppose I can reasonably expect you to confide in me. But I miss our communion. Forged when I trilled and you unfailingly burbled. At my susurrations, you reflexively gurgled. Squeaks shaped by volition and melded into ululations. And thence into the fricatives and sonance of speech. I laid language bare for you. Peeled and stripped it. Handed to you on a platter, or a plastic spoon at any rate. Til you discovered that the juicy, vermicular grub in your mouth wasn’t just another milk teat or dummy, nor a spittle-wrapped bolus of food, but something that could project and animate your being. Piping up, an additional sense to augment the visual and olfactory, in order to underscore your actuality. Another quill in your quivering existence as you sought out the vertical hold. You recall don’t you, all the funny physiognomy ? Like squeezing Playdough through your old Fun Factory press. Extruding strings of sounds ending in distinct words. Long worms of gabbled syllables, miraculously culminating in shared, understood meaning. And my, weren’t the responses they evoked in your audience magical ? Those adult crinkles and contortions, swollen right back at you with an endorsing grin from ear to ear. The countenances that stretched to accommodate universal smiles. Mine in particular at the head of them.

And do you know something ? For my part, I still lisped for a full five months after your first sentance ! I had so chopped and diced my own respiration so as to feed you sound morsels, that even now if I underestimate how much air to draw in, then I veer into sing-song per my oxygen debt. (You know, that tone that sets your teeth on edge, I’ve seen you clench out of the corner of my eye). But my, how it was worth those joyous interjections. Not like the monosyllables of today’s entity, all piped down. These were light and lustrous. Delivered smilingly. Call and response. Antiphonal. An enclosed whole, splicing back and forth. Repeated indefinitely, without purpose. Without aim. Without end. No demands and no judgements. Sheer, sonorous joy. A conjoining together in the ineffable, unending moment of now. That verbal umbilical, nourishing us both. When did you weary of it ? When did you tan it into becoming your unforgiving leash ?

When others intervened and jumped on the bandwagon I suppose. Since other aspects now peremptorily turned towards your face, to address you with vital viewpoints of their own. All too soon you began to glean how words come accompanied with extraneous wakes once they are borne upon the air. Is it the air itself, imparting such mutation ? Some distorting force certainly seems at play. For now it’s as if your speech upon entering the listener’s ear, entails the Fun Factory process that produced them has become reversed; your precisely cast formulation sails down the auditory canal, dragging its wormy thread behind it, until reaching the full stop of the receiving brain whereupon it concertinas up hard. Crushing all your finely spun gossamer breath back into a congealed, indeterminate glob. You are misunderstood. Misconceived. Disarticulated. Dumbstruck and struck dumb. So it’s incumbent on me to return you to your senses. Not the manner in which your father might go about it, of bludgeoning you into line with his cyclopic view of the world. That forged within the sixteen-man birthing circle, pushing against one another for all they’re worth. In order to deliver an egg between the legs of the hindmost. No, I will somehow gently unblock you, to allow all of your sensory faculties to thrive in their own right. To come into their own light. To coax back that glossal grub, from the subterranean floor where you interred it.

See, just look at him all shrouded there. An unbudded lotus. Casting heaven knows what runes, in his limb-vaulted cauldron. At least he’s not foetal, that’s a good sign. If he were depressed, truly afflicted, then it wouldn’t just be a hood pulled over his head. He’d be buried under the covers, irrespective of my attendance. Vicarious experience tells me it is so overwhelming a tsunami of despond, that all other existence recedes from view. But here he is obliterating me with a precise, laser excision. For there’s detached and then there’s in another postcode altogether. I daresay if I am in purdah, he gives the impression of girding himself up for suttee. That he would crave nothing less than self-immolation. For not only does he not want to be here in this room with me right now, his lifelong commitment seems to be towards a foreshortening altogether. That he doesn’t want to be on the planet. In any plane of existence. Not where he might have to coexist with other forms of life. Just as well then that Mrs Muggins here, is the one commissioned to be your sentinel, on the lookout for sentience. For vital signs of life. Just as the vulture’s gaze, even poised high up in the heavens, can pierce the true cadaver, from a beast at rest or one barely respiring, I will glean the slightest of animations to gainsay your soul death. Hmm, I really ought to stop anthropomorphising all and sundry. Actually I’m not am I ? I’m ascribing animal traits to human beings. I must keep my mind attuned on the task at hand. Making the lotus open. Fauna and flora.

So I am duty-bound to stand here, buffeted by an invisible seething wall. Lashed to the lintel, I radiate welter after welter of love. Gently lapping at the supine form plonked on the bed. Trying to unseat him. To roll him from his indifference. Oh for a momentary reprise of cherubic innocence, with those long, curly lashes flicking up to set off the perfect alabaster lids. A well-worn invocation, worthy of a Renaissance artist’s own allusive lexicon. Then we’ll know that deep down, all is right with the world. But no such uplift. These days they’re pouched behind the puffy folds of late night brooding. Towing the strict line of the hood enveloping his whole head. Seemingly gone too far and too far gone. So any punitive threat of “You’re grounded young man” will just not wash, since the child is to all intents and purposes, perfectly grounded in his own impermeable, pouting neurosis already. Steady on there old girl ! Doesn’t do to set the face to judgemental. Nor too pleased with itself. Have to consider the impression I wish to emit. That also begs the question of what to do with my arms. Must refrain from crossing them like a scold. Can’t hug my shoulders, either I’ll come over as vulnerable, or like an hour glass ticking down the seconds. If I just lean back here, then I can tuck my hands away, interceding between my derriere and the jamb. Relaxed. Insouciant even. That’s about the right tone. I am just after some complicity after all. That he is aware what I am about and why, and that will inevitably thaw him. No words need pass between us. Just recognition. That I am here. For you. Ever and always. Your bad luck. Not !!! 

If I’m not to stare constantly at you and make you uncomfortable, well more uncomfortable, then where should my eyes alight ? Inclined within the frame of the door, I have little alternative but to range down over the purview of myself. I discern a ruck in my dress. I move to pat it flush, but catch myself. No sudden movements. I stare at it, willing it banished. The telepathy might not be functioning, but Fate is in my camp. I’m wearing one of my all time favourite frocks. How auspicious. Suddenly I feel buttressed for the encounter ahead. ‘Slinky’, an adjective any woman would appreciate being tagged with. Graced by. Whether it be her own sinuous way of moving, or a fantastic gown with flowing iteration to every one of her motions. And yet there it is, also appended to a piece of metal, something that might be found welded to some duct piping. Metal, hard and most unsinuous. A trademark. A kid’s toy. See in the final reckoning, us adults don’t have toys. Some may well play sports and pursue hobbies. Pastimes and diversions. Arid re-creations of youth. But in the main we don’t make play, with both imagination and props (amateur dramatic societies not withstanding – the politics and jealousies within them expunge any notion of fun). It’s clear toys have pretty much now disappeared from your life. But not play Mal, not play. You must preserve room to fritter and twiddle. Carry on joyriding through life for some time yet. Carefree not constrained. At the present moment in time, you seem stuck between surrendering up play and replacing it with what ? Not this pensiveness surely ?

You want to enlist for maturity ? To play with the grown ups. On equal terms. Okay then, first just ask yourself what do we adults resort to for our entertainment ? Why, words of course. Talking. Conversation. Gossip. The metre of our humdrum souls. The currency of commonality. We might garnish it over food, or especially drink. We may even garland it around films, TV shows, or newspapers and magazines. But all are mere scaffolding, stage flats with mounted backdrops, for us collecting together to dialogue. To bandy words. All women yearn to be called ‘slinky’, because it boosts their self-image. Or if we can’t land such a compliment, then maintaining an even keel, we do others down so we look better by comparison. A sliding scale of approbation and degradation. It’s called showing some human interest. Arming yourself with stories about others to parry their stories about you. We’re witty and catty, we goad and we coax … But only in the company of other grown ups. Where provoking exasperated silences are rated minor triumphs. You’ve got that part down pat at least. But there’s an unwritten rule, or rather an ironclad law of Nature, that mothers and sons ought not to be doing one another down.

Believe me, you don’t want to be in any great rush to plunge headlong into that. See, it’s all change yet again to ascend to the next level. You know, like on one of your video games. Since within any adult gathering, out spills and effuses raw verbiage. Bloodied and unbowed and unmediated. The mouth and brain scarcely talking to one another. Scant proofreading before reacting to others’ outpourings (and that includes those of your father). The reflex is simply to fill the empty air, recently vacated by someone’s fleeting vacuity, with some evanescent puff of your own. It matters not what shape this air is sculpted into, merely that it is given body. Words as landfill, or in this case, airfill. Is that what you covet ? Why ? When as your mother, I’m still offering you a special communion. Brimful with meaning. Our own unique discourse. An exclusive language belonging solely to the two of us. What do you say ? Our aegis against the world. Oh you can’t still be smarting at evolution’s arch sharping, can   you ? I don’t expect our full reincorporation, so why should you ? Nothing. Not a flicker. I’m fooling myself. Besides, didn’t I say he wasn’t foetal ?

I’m telling you Mal, we’ve got all the time in the world to resolve this. I’ve cancelled all my engagements ! Save for this greatest engagement of my life. That chronic commitment I made all that time ago. When I scioned on for life. So I can wait. I can mark your silence. I won’t jump in and wreck everything. You’ll find I’m the epitome of enduring love. When you’re ready. You can just catch my eye. It won’t be me pressing in on you. As you can see, I’ve left a judicious buffer between us, though by all means feel free to close it at any point simply by opening yourself up. It’s a receptive space bordered by my arms held out to you. See, for my part, it’s a given that I won’t approach any nearer than this. I never have and never will. To do so would be to destroy everything we’ve ever forged between us at one fell swoop. It would tear up all trust, thus you can be secure in me keeping my distance. The space is my surety. I give you my word.

Hand on heart, industriously plunging a palette knife into it all the while, I’m fully conscious that we are acting within the ambit of a defined canvas. An enclosed arena. That of rule breaking, pushing the boundaries. Rubbing up against one another like dodgems with outlandish vulcanised bumpers. God how we used to love the dodgems on Walton Beach’s pier. Have we all outgrown that now, or is it simply that you Mal, no longer gives us permission ? Gone the damp squib way of Guy Fawkes nights, with its head lopped off by your indifference. But I do believe you’re on the cusp of having outgrown the domestic theatre altogether. Girding up for bigger things. Greater challenges. That pell-mell rush to flaunt proscriptions on the activities, we adults reputedly lust after preserving for ourselves. But actually we pass you in the other direction on your way in, for our former relish has chiefly subsided. Let’s see, what have we got on the menu ? Your likely itinerary of delinquency. There’ll be underage storming of pubs, clubs, certificate 18 films. Probably a bit of shoplifting thrown in for good measure in this rank, consumer society. Though the impressively minimalist tenor of your room might spare us that perhaps. Then the whole fraught arena of girlfriends, goodness knows what else. (Rest assured, when the time was meet, I would let your girlfriend not only stay over, but permit her to share your bed, since at least I would know you were both safe under our roof. Needless to say your father takes the contrary view). I’m just a touch concerned that if you adopt the same passive attitude you do here, you’ll get devoured out in the scary big world. Where scale decrees the boundaries are beyond circumscription. I can only cross my fingers that in the fullness of time, you will come to see the inevitable. That this is just as much the real world in here. If you allow yourself to opt for it. If you make it your aim in life to establish your own dominion, no matter how unadorned. With your own wife and children. Your own house rules ha ! With all the concomitant arguments and arbitration that will entail. Once you are so established, the outside world retains far more of a modest pull on you, Believe me. Mundane comes from a word meaning ‘the world’ after all. It’s just a question of perspective. You’ll look back on these interludes and laugh. Or cry. But you won’t be without comment as now.

That’s why this can be so all-encompassing. I have to view your behaviour, as you dishing out tough love as ordained in our vocation. This is the purgative you have to dispense in order to force us to let you go from our grasp and find your way independently. There’s no real need for all this unpleasantness. Though I can’t speak for your father, I am all too prepared for when this actuality comes to pass. It won’t be me throwing myself around your ankles and trying to retard it. Friction burns don’t do either of us any favours. My sole lookout is with ensuring the timing is propitious. That you have the requisite thick skin for the adult world. And yet one porous enough to allow others to permeate you, with love, with concern, with a refuge. And at this point in time, I reckon your tortoise shell to possess neither. It’s peculiar, but I need to see you let fly, at me or your father, before I feel I can let you fly away. I’ll give you your head, as long as you return me your tongue. Whether in allegiance or rejection, it makes almost no odds to me. Just so long as you can stand up for yourself. And I have to say, try as you might to toy and trifle with our emotions, but here and now you are a million miles away !

It’s too crude a device, this muffled and muddled battering ram, all sheathed in asbestos. You’ve a long way to go, until you distinguish a fine-haired calibration from a hair trigger one. I realise this is all part of the progression, but again you seem to have foundered. Whether you’ll use your influence as a force for good and helping people, or you’re aheaded down more Machiavellian forks, only time will tell. Obviously your father and I cherish hope of the former. If we’re to make a decent fist of our responsibilities that is. But either way, I think the missing link for you, is appreciating your effect on others. If you are not aware of people in the first place, how can you gauge your impact on them ? In the same way your father and I patiently modelled cause and effect in the physical world for you as an infant, now you are experimenting with plying verbal muscle. I think you’ve mastered the principles. Just haven’t wired it up to your conscience as yet. You represent a dynamo, a battery leaking charge and potentia all over the shop as you seek to flex some power. Bereft of the cortical wiring, linking to the lightbulb in your head that would signal illumination. Condemning us to keep getting drawn up short, frazzled by bare wired and short circuited shocks. You are the fuse that gets tripped, thereby proceeding to shut down all voltage. All galvanism. Whereupon we each find ourselves bumping around in the unlit opacity.

I accept that in all likelihood, me as mummy bird regurgitating gobbets to you my chick, failed to pass along much in the way of any wisdom.  But everything I did was with the aim of aiding you to take to the wing fully equipped to fly the coop. But you just immured those gifts. Built a wall within a wall, with you as the mortar between the two. A wall of silence shrouding you. Any and all self-expression put beyond reach behind a further layer of insulation. We are regressed into mangled communicability once again, only with you leading this time and electing not to pilot. Your father would of course not brook any of this. Bull in a china shop that he is, he would tear down all such partitioning. He can’t stand for there to be empty space between him and other people. Can’t abide a vacuum. Something from his upbringing I surmise. It equates to an admission of failure. Of being unable to relate. And that leaves him hanging high and dry and not very handsome. He can’t cope with being adrift. You should observe him crossing a room. You wouldn’t believe it to see him in social mode, not when reared on his persona back home. Hearty and bluff. Though like a barrage balloon, he does not seek real engagement. Merely the affirmation of mooring. Whereas I am far more likely to buttonhole some poor parleyer, for a protracted dissection of their soul and hoard them greedily to my bosom til the party breaks up. But, ultimately, your father can’t sustain the true intimacy of relating. Can’t penetrate the mysteries of rapport. One to ones, heart to hearts, baffle him. He’ll want to compress the cavity til the hollow disappears. Til there is a lack of lack. Defibrillate so the lifelessness has life squeezed back into it. Til he hears the pips squeak. Ordinarily, he would barrel in and give it you both barrels. So thank your lucky stars I’m the one on watch here and now. I’m more resilient. Nevertheless, blessed with the patience of a saint as I reputedly am, but I can tell you, I've no real appetite for martyrdom.

As I observe you here nailing up the shutters to keep me out, there must be one heck of an inner monologue chuntering away inside. But I can glean no evidence of it. No smirk or purse of the lips. The nose unwrinkled, nostrils unflared. No movement behind the heavily lidded eyes. No steam emitted from the ears, as room temperature remains evenly ambient. The visage, what of it is exposed to view, is glassy. I can't see any of myself reflected in it. And not much of your father's aspect either. So, on the one hand, we have achieved the holy grail of assisting you to true independence of being. On the other, we have forced you to shutdown. Catatonia. Remote and controlled. Such self-control in a near thirteen year old, could be seen to hold out a beacon of hope. That you bear a capacity for restraint. Forbearance. And from forbearance it is not too much of a leap to tolerance. But there is informed tolerance and that tolerance through indifference. You are self-contained, but not I fear, self-possessed. You are akin to an old sofa with the sympathy springs having gone and the emotional upholstery jutting out at all angles, barely accommodated by the nap. Okay, so as the female of the species in situ here, compassion is most likely to fall under my remit rather than yours. Yet surely it must weigh something on you to have me, or any other warm-blooded mammal so close and entreating you with their eyes, their whole face, and yet to remain cold to it ? To disregard it so unabashedly. So singularly. Therefore this is far, far, removed from an ability to weigh up appropriateness in social situations. There is no mutuality whatsoever. You and I, we ought both be monitoring each other’s breathing. Eavesdropping for a heaped intake of breath, an immanence. That final ascension of the tension, presaging one of us might be about to break the clenched silence. But the invigilation is one-sided. I am reduced to the monstrous role of inspector. Overseer. Parent.

Of course I may have this entirely wrong. Being a bit behind the times and all that. It wouldn’t be the first instance. This isn’t just a gestation period for you, armed to the pullulating wisdom teeth with all the linguistic tools just going moldy on the branch. Until you’re ready to unleash the overripe, bitter, bilious fruit of despair. Inducted into  the serried adult ranks as just another prickly, nay truculent being. Seething with put downs and razor-wired brickbats. No, doubtless there is already an innumerable cache of words, not just bottled, but actually brewing in your crucible (your retort – ha!). Primed for when I depart, to be decanted behind my back and served up to your correspondents on the internet. Virtual matricide in chatrooms and a dagger to the heart delivered by Messenger. Wouldn’t surprise me if you committed yourself to a daily or weekly sluice of words on a blog of your own. Safe from our prying eyes, not that we would anyway. But my concern is not just with how we might come across in such a medium, for as I say, we’re unlikely ever to encounter any of its recipients who could mark our cards for us. No, it’s more of a higher aspiration. That I can only hope you also find room to air your personal views on pop music and films. Books even, since one can always dream. (Or in fact hallucinate, as his head is bowed in just such a way, that I can with a suspension of disbelief, envision him with a book propped down there between his thighs). Having some opinions on the world in general as seen from your own blossoming outlook. Please don’t let it be just a constant tirade, bad mouthing all and sundry closest to you. I couldn’t bear to think that was your primary address to the world. That’s all which was driving you to express yourself. To resort finally to words.

Oh dear, now that - I’m not sure I can feasibly keep this up for much longer. Today’s resolve is diminishing somewhat. No, I cannot permit the conditioning of my reflexes in such a vacuum tube of home. When my hearth should be warm and inviting. Son, talk me through what’s bothering you. Or, failing that, just talk. Don’t freeze me out of your life. Not at age twelve. Not so wholeheartedly, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. Day after day after day after day we – I, find myself wedged here. Playing out the same mime. Nothing changes. No end in sight. No let up even. Chock full of the same devastating cocktail of emotions. Ire and frustration and guilt and emptiness. And sorrow of course. Each one on its own a potential convulsion to my system, but steeped together they just vitiate me. They succeed in mirroring, nay perpetuating the silence.

As a species, I really think we could do with synthesizing some new emotions if we are not to stagnate. Ones with less broad range, encapsulating all manner of tributary affects. Introduce some layer and depth to proceedings, over and above the happy/sad icons paradigmed in phone text. It would also entail procuring a whole new set of physiological responses. I mean after each gala of swimming through emotional quicksand, I steel myself against any display of crying in front of either male of the household. Yet it remains the only reflex to offer itself up to me within the privacy of my pillow at the dead of night. My emotional font is otherwise dried up. I can wail, I can sob, I can well up, I can sniffle, I can moisten at the corner of the eye, but all have somewhat indistinct borders from merging one into another. At least, short of a handy hydrometer to measure lachrymosity by volume they do. In any case, what does any one of them really impart about my feeling state ? If I am only whimpering rather than beating my breast and tearing my hair, do I feel any less unglued ? I think the sophisticated gradation of our humble friend the chameleon is called for once again. Granted that it is only in response to its environmental hue, rather than a demonstrable emotionality, but if we could somehow exhibit the subtle diversity of mood written on our skin in pigmentation, then we could convey a wide spectrum of feeling. We need to refine our means of expression so as to express what we mean. Otherwise everything is babbling silence. Course, the same does not apply with daughters, not that I bear any direct experience myself. But there, all too readily can the evidence be writ large on the skin. Transparent proofs of emotional states clearly transcribed on the flesh of the female, as she attempts to reach herself by gouging, or by contracting her whole body in order to decoct the beleaguered self. But boys being so wholly unconversant with their bodies, their legibility remains insensible. Which is worse I wonder ? Not being able to manage the tribulation, or not being able to descry it in the first place ?

Okay, I have regathered myself. Moreover, now I realise it rests on my shoulders to break the impasse. To make the next move. To give ground ? Can’t just turn my back and leave. That settles nothing. Sets this up for the next occasion. And the next after that. Ad infinitum til you get a bed of your own to slump on to (futon or mattress on the floor, I know which my money would be on). Gives carte blanche for endless repetitions. Also gives off the wrong signals. Either I just don’t care enough to go in after you and reach out. Or I’m just not strong enough. No, walking away can never be an option. So I need to do something unexpected, in order to wrench your attention. Something to acknowledge my actuality. Something to trip yours. I could ring you on your mobile. Wistfully admire the reflex with which you scrabble to consult it, anticipating some friend on the other end. In full contrast to me being ten foot away from you. Passing me over with alacrity. Flouting your erasure of me. Rubbing it in my face. But no, I’d have to leave the room to go and retrieve my mobile and make the call from beyond here. That would doubtless tip you the wink. Besides, even if it didn’t, you’re sure to recognise my number in caller ID and refrain from reacting. I suppose that’s rather presuming you have my number actually listed. Unless I opt for performing it as a deliberate act, so it’s in your face. Paging my son to talk to his Mum. The only way to get through to you, being down some fibre optics, bouncing signals off a distant mast. Even you would have to infer that as a farcical way to relate.

Actually, musing further on it, I could box clever and appear to cede you this ground after all. Withdraw to the periphery. Plant little homilies inscribed on strips of paper in your trainers say, (symbolically replacing the tongues which you have cut out like an irrational potentate, or as a forlorn gesture of the daunted). I could always conceal them under your pillow, perhaps taped to your mobile. Secreted any and everywhere you hold dear. Or the places you brush up against at least. How much would that miff you ? No way in the world would you be able to curb yourself in the face of such incitement, it would have to drag you back to the negotiating table. Even ear-poppingly would be a result (though to date you lack the prominent forehead vein that conducts so much of the discourse of your gender). A ruse less Trojan Horse, more returning you to that time of mittens on elastic, sown into the sleeves of your coat. For this is what you have reduced me to. Infantile behaviour, fighting fire with fire, or in this case, actively getting you to spit the dummy. Toys out the pram (not that anyone has prams these days, it’s all strollers and buggies whence the ground level emotional jetsam will in all likelihood escape the notice of your chauffeur). Hmm, maybe I don’t quite relish being dragged down to your level. Maybe as the adult, I ought to invest in a strategy designed to elevate you. Both of us.

I could always sketch you. I mean I’ve been considering taking painting back up for a while. What better subject ? With pride of place in the lounge. Naturally, being practically the only representation of you that would be in existence. Course, I’d have to nip off up to the attic and rummage around. Blow the dust off and pray the mice haven’t returned. Such an interval would inevitably bring the curtain down on this little dramaturgy. I couldn’t in all conscience return twenty minutes hence, suitably armed with easel and brushes to roust you. That would be a touch too gratuitous on my part. But I’m sure we’ll reconvene this rigmarole, with this selfsame trigonometry sometime soon. Tomorrow in all probability. Even then, were I to turn up so equipped, it would still come across a touch premeditated. That I was the one spoiling for a fight and that’s not a position I can let myself be manoeuvred into. So looks like I’ll have to contrive something else. 

What about tidying your room around you ? Bring a bit of bustle to this standstill. Set the vacuum to blow rather than suck, see if we can inject some agitation into the settled dander in here. Ruffle the duck down under your head. Drive you from your perpetual layover and thrust us both in a new direction. The noise alone ought to be enough, though for good measure I could always thwack it a few times against your bedstead as I accidentally on purpose misjudge the clearance. Conceivably I suppose I might not be able to hear you above the din were you finally to pipe up. That split second window when I can see your lips moving, but fumble away valuable moments trying to silence the mechanical salvo. And in that moment, my calculation is tumbled and you clam up once again. But in all honesty, this room’s clean enough already. Not quite sure how mind. Never observed you hoover in hand. But there again, I can’t remember the last time I took you shopping for clothes either, yet you seem freshly turned out right enough. Naught I recollect buying you, or would even dare to make so bold. Nothing I recall washing or ironing for you either. Therefore you are not inert. Since you are possessed of a notion of how you want to present yourself. Seemingly you are moved by some passion then. The desire to shop. Even if only to blend in. Not to stand out like a sore thumb. I guess you do these things on the quiet. You wait til I’ve gone out before grooming and ordering your room. Either that, or you cling on as jealously to your pared skin, as you do to your thoughts and words.

Wait a minute, what does that say about what sparked all this in the first instance ? This latest hoo-ha has arisen courtesy of a request to wash up your own dinner plate ? Yet apparently you are perfectly content to spruce up your own space. So mark that one most definitely down in the ‘won’t rather than the ‘can’t’ column. Evincing the conclusion that I have brought this down upon my own head. Simply because I asked you. No, not a lashing out against me personally, so much as against my authority. It’s the presumption that anyone could dare tell you what to do. To proscribe your freedom of action. That’s what you’re striking against. Asserting your will. Imposing it over mine. Got to draw a line in the sand some time. Pick our battles I’m always cautioning your father. Well here and now I’ve decided. I can countenance no further faint-heartedness – I’m sticking up for both of us here in his absence – where is he anyway, he should be home by now ? - We’re doing this for all parents ! No, only for you obviously. We’ve got to maintain some sway over you Mal, you’ve not even officially attained the surly teenage stage yet. You’ve to comprehend you can’t ride roughshod over people and get your own way all the time. There is hope, for if we had this selfsame argument a couple of years further down the line, I’m certain you’d move to resolve it by flinging the plate across the room, smashing it to smithereens. Thereby undercutting the need for washing it in the first place. And yes we could ground you, dock your - our - pocket money to recompense the act of wanton vandalism. But we’d have to concede that as being a pyrrhic victory of the highest order. If I could nip this in the bud, we may make great strides for the future. And I wouldn’t be faced with the prospect of having to scour high and low in antiquey shops, to bring our wedding gift dinner service back up to its full complement.

So, okay now, let’s consider all the ramifications. What’s a quick swish around with the vacuum actually going to achieve ? Might be better off taking down your curtains and popping them in the washing machine. Expose you to view. Remove a layer of cocooning wrap. That’s more of a grand gesture. A rayon gauntlet thrown down. It might be all very well you staring into nothing, a glassy eyed angel with blotted out features, but then do I really want to come on the harridan with feather duster, furniture polish and face flannel ? What’s the best I could hope for, that you might critique my technique ? Point out a spot I'd missed. Practitioner to practitioner. Houseboy to char. Incendiary to wet blanket. Mrs Mop and Master Mope. But that would suit fine. That would represent a defrosting. A jokey collusion. A gentle swapping of capacities. An acknowledgement of our former roles, to be sloughed like moults. Handing over of the torch. A tacit redrawing of new responsibilities and new status. I could live with that.    

Whatever my course of action, I have to do something. For this isn’t working. This let it be, has shut us both down. Prostrated us both. For all my solicitude not to strike the wrong note, I actually think right now I’m failing to transmit on any wavelength. So, what am I going to do ? I’m going to ape him that’s what. Play a good old fashioned game of ‘Simon Says’, albeit subvocally. Throwback to a more rudimentary time in our relationship. We’ll mirror one another and see whose simple emotional range implodes first. I’m just going to plop myself down in the doorway, adopting exactly his disposition. A sort of parallel parking. If he wants egress, he’s going to have to negotiate my frame. To acknowledge my contiguity. So here goes, if I just lever myself down. Drape myself across the yawning gap like police crime scene tape. Study exactly how he’s positioned. Uh, I don’t – when did he move ? How come I never- oh he’s a crafty one. Took advantage of my readjustment to unfurl some of his own creases. Also displaced the secrets of his cupped cauldron. Kicked over to infuse the carpet with their slow release. Okay then, all change it is. Now have to brace my back against the door’s lintel, pleat my arms across the chest just so, hands furrowed beneath the armpits. Oh god, that reverberating click’s a bit of a giveaway. The imposture of my posture, pointed up by my complaining joints. They probably heard that all the way down at my neglected yoga class (why is it that I performed more classes with you inside my belly, than the whole time since you’ve bailed out ?) Middle aged anatomies aren’t supposed to fold themselves in half. Lord knows, the evidence from the marital bed is testament enough to that. But out of the one supple part of me I do retain, the corner of my eye, registers not even a corresponding bat of any eyelid from him. Still, it means I’m lodged here for the duration. My body endows me no other choice.

Hmm, at this level I’ve got an untrammelled view of the soles of his shoes, rather than his face. I might have miscalculated this gambit, as it puts me in the position of supplication of the Pasha reclining up there on his Ottoman. No change there then. Perhaps I should go and get some figs and drop them in his mouth. Not that we have any of course. Will cranberries do ? Good source of antioxidants. Help prevent ulcers too. And you mi laddo, even though you almost certainly are unaware of it, must be seeding a real peach of one. I prescribe a talking cure to diminish the inimical pressure build up. Omnis by mouth ?

Oh dear, that’s gone and torn it ! Started my own gustatory juices churning now, being more than a tad peckish. Should have stocked up properly before instigating a siege. Of course, no such worries for him, since before decamping to here, we had been in the kitchen. Where naturally I had relegated catering for myself, behind first administering to his needs. But for all that, you’ve still shown yourself to be human and not a Zen Master in suspended animation, so I rather welcome this tableau. For you to block me out so absolutely, must mean you are totally engaged with yourself. Even if I am not seen to exist, your body still resides in this room, hefting down there on its mattress. It still metes out all its menial summonses. Can you maintain your equilibrium under such a homespun tyranny ? Not giving me the time of day might well have stopped up time in this space between you and I, but now thrown back on your own senses to fill the void, out they must exude in sharp relief. I am intrigued to see which of your involuntary perturbations provoke a response and which you can resist. What I wonder, will unsettle your obdurate poise ? For example, will an itch engender you to scratch, or will you manage to override its nagging ? What happens when your foot goes to sleep, or the skin of your crossed ankles starts to chafe ? Is it possible to thwart their fretful insistence, as you do my external one ? Then the tables become inverted, as you have to confront which is the greater nuisance. My presence, or the persistence of small mutinies, which would in normal circumstances, pose you no inconvenience. Everything is a bated breath and you’re simply going to have to exhale at some point.

Furthermore, are you able to fathom any connection ? Since it’s glaringly transparent to me, that the tiny gesture of you drawing in your bottom lip there, is you essaying to suck back your words. To blot them all up and stave off any escaping across the labial threshold into auditory range. (It just occurs to me the irony of the term ’expressing milk’ as squeezing out for another to imbibe - which I palpably failed to do for you - and here now is your own failure to express yourself clearly and unambiguously to me in turn. See even though no exchange has passed between us, I have unearthed a link. A link, though not necessarily a root cause). So I maintain my being a human thrombus is a merited ploy, by dint of compelling you to be fully involved with yourself. Experiencing intensely what it is like to be you, that can only be progressive. You’ll start to divine your resting tensions and your tipping points. Initiating a conscious calibration of your neural rheostat. I don’t imagine that you’ll quite attain sufficient knowledge of your chakras so as to go on and practise shiatsu, but it still represents a move in the right direction ! And the same applies to emotional fluctuations. Your mind must be ruminating on something. Far be it for me to doubt the aptitude of my own son, but I don’t intuit you being disposed to adopt a Buddhist meditative approach to still all mental whirring. Let alone halfway mastering it. Incontrovertibly, where there’s thoughts, affects lie banked up behind them. At what point do you buckle and surpass the critical point of unbuttoning ? You see I don’t quite know if your lip chewing, reins in your words because you don’t want to acknowledge me and my insinuating pull on you, or because you are protecting me from your wrath. Which of these two forces has the upper hand, I’ll only know if you let loose on me. And so I’m hanging on in here purely and simply to ascertain which it may be. 

For my part, such tenacity poses me no trial, since I’ve endured both perspectives. Before I met your father, I did some life modelling. Draped, I hasten to add. So I know all about the mechanics of staying still. Of fleshy statuary. Though to all intents and purposes we remain static, we are not inert. Little matter how arranged by the artist who commands our carriage, we are still imbued with character. Our own, human personality. This is what speaks to the artist. In communion. Unlike you, the portraitist cannot afford to bleed us of our humanity. This is what we have over and above the contours and play of light within still lives. I said I’d experienced both aspects, since I also had a stint as art student sat facing the canvas. My sitting was simply in order to enable me to afford my own materials. So I am fully cognizant of the geometry of this situation. Of when an apparent blink, is in fact a slyly curtained glance. I can survey the fluctuations in the ambience shaped between us. I am familiar with all the intimacies of our mutual silence, for after all, we compose it together. We are in conjunction. A partnership of sorts, however you seek to disown it.

While I might further add, our present mutual disposition puts me in mind of that moment, when the two trajectories of subject and object merged for me. When on one of my modelling assignments, I had been similarly bent and rucked as this. Yet though I was posing for others, my own contemplation was soon swept up in studying my elbow and its intricate construction. Since it was being forcibly presented to me in close up, all the detailed brush strokes of the skin were in full perlustration for me. As a hinged joint, the dermis necessarily has to have give in it to permit a wide range of movement. From flexing and extending, through to rolling and turning. Mother Nature has solved this by providing for cross-hatched segmented skin cells for maximal pliability. They can both stretch, or wrinkle up close to their knobbly neighbour as they shuffle along. Working, well not exactly seamlessly, but collectively passing on the right amount of slack or tautness. With its resemblance to reptilian scales, the elbow along with the knee has to be the old man of the body. Which is apposite, as maybe it is the most oft commissioned of the skeleton’s flexible functionaries. Any workload produces a wonderful lividity in the elbow’s integument. Yet it is forever uncomplaining, unlike the workshy wrist or the lily livered shoulder. Nowhere else on the surface of the body, are we presented with such a miniature of how we are both constructed and conducted by cell architectonics. Look again, how the differentiation of each cell is apparent. Again I say it is the most wonderful geometry. Is this what you are musing on now ? Are you even alive to the wondrousness of what you are gawping at ? I doubt it somehow, for you have not yet been sufficiently trained to see. Of course when along wormed your father and marriage, I surrendered up my painting. In time I was to devote all my observation to you. Incremental growth, not aesthetics. Empiricism rather than immaculacy. I didn’t marvel enough in you in the abstract. Indeed I absolutely should take it up once again, now I have more time on my hands. Now that you yourself have become so totally receded from my mind’s eye. It is no longer to be thought of as a tactic. I have to restore it as a calling. Especially given that you have called me off.

But hold on ! It does lead me to consider a possible future vocation for you. You could follow in your mother’s footsteps and sit for artists. Doing nothing and getting paid for it to boot, that sounds right up your alley. Ah, did my eyes deceive me, or did you just abort an infinitesimally tiny flush in your face ? That will teach me not to be so snippy, for the silence between us is permeable both ways. With any and all signals therefore being legible. Or a reveal, as your father might be wont to say. We are engaged in a mime show after all. Where everything is heightened. Exhibit ‘A’, I give you your eunuch mute shoes. Besides, there’s not much future in professional posing I suspect. Since these days in the artworld, it’s all digital video and animal dung rather than portraiture. But I do often wonder what you envisage doing with your life. Not that you’re obliged to have set ideas at this tender juncture. But do you own any dreams at all ? Do you look forward in any way, shape or form ? I hope and pray you’ve got an inkling of which direction you might want to go. Since it’s all too apparent you have set your sail away from our altitude. Sorry, what was that ? No, as you were then.

In actuality, I think you’re very wise to hold your peace. Little point in talking just for the sake of it. Filling up a hole, Overlaying negative space merely for the purpose of occluding the blankness within. Just like that obscenity of a painting, that abomination, of Myra Hindley’s image emerging out of the superimposition of children’s stencilled handprints. Formulaic Op Art technique, without a scintilla of moral scruple. Like I say, the way of all art these days, deriving meaning purely from context, rather than the artist’s emotional subjectivity. Arid, perceptual exercises, fleshed out with cultural resonances. But no, I’m more – I took more of an old fashioned approach to painting. Like you, I prefer to remain still and observe. Reflect on what my eye was viewing.  Delving fully inside an object, to do it emotional and moral justice. I was never one of these conceptual artists, nitpicking at our idea of seeing. Nor was I of the kinetic type, desperate just to channel the press of my own energies and portray it externally. Splurging paint in order to relieve the build-up of unbearable pressure. So I say, if you take after me, no let me rephrase that, if coincidentally you happen to share this trait, such impassive mien of yours is not saturninity. Rather it is some observational vantage. That your imagination is beetling away. With a most vibrant inner life, as it sets about framing the world. If you are content to spend more time in your imagination than conversing with us, that is fine by me. (Though it’s a shame to hide your light under a bushel. Even a smattering of words here and there would give us a glimpse of your poetic soul). Maybe it’s something to do with being an only child and not having another stripling looking glass in which to view oneself proportionally. No one to conspire with against the skew-whiff perspective of your parents and the obtuse angles so engendered.

Geometry. See, here’s the rub. I don’t actually have to cross into the divide in order to deform it. It is not empty space at all. It is a nexus of intention. I don’t actually have to give voice, for me still to be nipping and pinching at the remove between us. For example, I wonder what you’d be doing were I not inserted here. I’m certain staring at your elbow wouldn’t be high up on your list. We were at loggerheads in the kitchen, before you attempted to make yourself scarce, so it’s not like you came here with any definite purpose. That I disturbed you in the course of something. Thus my attendance here has irrevocably alter(cat)ed your behaviour. Failing to react to me, does not make me disappear. The determination with which you deny me, only ratifies my presence in the final reckoning. Were we bifurcated, with me in another room and you in here on your computer say, then you would not be acknowledging me, nor denying me for that matter. I simply wouldn’t be entering your thoughts. Although chances are some small part of my unconscious would still be taken up with you. So until you leave home for good, you remain a satellite orbiting around my, and your father’s provisioning for you. And when we’re actively in each other’s presence, or even passively for that matter, then there is no scission. You can’t employ space as a shield. It’s all too porous. We are as coterminous as the curvilinearity within the yin-yang symbol. We are fully bounded, by one another. Within this particular agglomeration of bricks and mortar, you and I are forever confluent. A continuum. This tableau may break up sometime later this evening, but it will reform tomorrow or the next day. Just as any epic painting hanging in a gallery bears the same arrangement, irrespective of how many times you view it afresh. We are related in space and that space conjoins us. And one day in the future, you may eventually decide to make changes to your domestic setup. Far reaching ones. And I’ll be prepared. Of course, you might just leave home still unreconciled, but if that’s the way of things then so be it, I’ll just have to learn to come to terms with it. Until that day dawns, I’m staying put on your tail. To all intents and purposes, staying my side of the line so as not to alarm you of course.

See, as a parent I’ve always had to look ahead. To get some notion of what’s likely to be involved. So now I can appreciate that it’s just a succession of stages of detachment like the Apollo moonshots of old. Til you are left with the recoverable module splashing down. It’s a push me-pull me of dependence and independence. The most difficult of balancing acts, nary impossible if you ask me. Every time you might make the grand gesture away, back you come hurtling to embrace, albeit willfully a shade off-kilter. Each time you wrench yourself asunder, with a terrible rending of fearful flesh on life’s briers, it’s me who sutures you back integral with my own skin grafts. But it is inevitable. I suppose it’s just the process of finding out who you are. Where you can draw the boundaries around yourself. It started with weening, followed by being evicted from our bed. (I know, I know, it should have been the other way round, but doesn’t seem to have fostered any lingering over-attachment now does it ?) Who could forget that shattering rupture of the first day at school ? Taken from me for the salient hours of the day. Those when the sun lavishes the back garden, so our Eden becomes eclipsed when you are absent. Still to come are the teenage self-assertion years, that hormonal insurgency that takes you off under its own auspices. Then away at college, where maybe we’re granted limited visiting rights, if we cough up some funds or perhaps take back a tithe bag of dirty laundry with us. Hark at me, presuming you’d even want to go to college. To improve yourself. To learn how to learn. So as to be able to cope with anything that life throws at you. But there again, in truth that requires an emotional breadth and that has very little to do with scholasticism. No, I think you’re sensible enough. For all this current - ooh I dunno, imbroglio – I’m confident you’ve got your head on straight. Even if the weight of the localised world’s bearing down your neck, so you can’t quite hold it up high yet.

Thus where to next after graduation ? Will you make good and come back regularly to share with us your providence ? Any inkling to spend time with us, might infer a gratitude towards our modest part in furnishing you a stable bedrock to ascend from. Maybe in time you came to enjoy our company. Or perhaps you will only return in order to gloat. To waft some gauche wealth in our faces. Lord knows your father paid weekly visits to his mother for nigh on twenty years, always full of loathing for her extravagance of expectation and thriftiness of warmth. Condemned on each occasion to return with his tail between his legs, no matter how distended his wallet. Now there’s a hold to have over your child. Something I will strive with every sinew in my body to avoid casting over you. I will let you free - not that I have any choice for as I averred, for you’re not ‘mine’ to release - probably to the extent you’re actually more likely to stagger back from college under a weight of imprudent, sybaritic debt and plant yourself back here. A black thunder cloud of resentments and inculpation, ratcheted further by your reliance on us to keep you afloat ? No, more than likely you won’t return back here at all. Not to this emotional desert, however pecuniarily prejudiced. Not to the proverbial teat. The maternal vinculum. Not at any cost. How far from home will you encamp ? Far enough to dissuade us from visiting ? There isn’t such a place on earth Sonny Jim ! Look at me projecting far off into the future, with you not even thirteen yet. But that’s what Mothers do. They dream for their children. It commences when you are in the womb and couldn’t yet dream for yourself, so I incubated it for you. We hold out hope against hopes. We are tirelessly engulfed in the long view. And what about you ? Has any such thought crossed your languorous brow ? No and long may you remain unwrinkled. But the occasional purse might be nice. Nothing on the scale of a fully fledged furrow, but maybe if your eyebrows could raise inquisitively once in a while ? Knit one, purl one. Dropped one ! I’ve got darned pins and needles in my foot. 

You know, the more I dwell on this, looking back right from the outset I wonder whether you’ve ever actually manifested any downswing of dependence ? I mean you wouldn’t even accede to my breast. Lord knows, at the time I didn’t take it as a personal rejection. Far from it, I was glad to be released from the shackles – not of your demands my love - but from those sonorous sisters, stridently proclaiming any mother’s right, obligation in fact, to whip out her bosoms in public. In restaurants, while out in the supermarket, or heaven forfend during the opera, that would put the castrati off their stroke (or induce one). Come to think of it, no babe in arms would be in surrogate attendance at the ENO would they ? Not at those ticket prices. Though I must confess I did play my box sets to you in the womb, simultaneously to soothe and soar beauteously. What a start in life I imagined that to be imbuing you for. Were such notions quite so outlandish, when your father sat on the end of your bed at age seven and eight and read Hardy and Dickens to you “Just for the language”. Well that worked a treat didn’t it Craig ? Commends mine as nebulously benign and less target driven. But you have repudiated me in that love as well as the rest. The first note of any aria and I can see your hackles rise. I’m too apprehensive to play my music if you’re at home. If either male of the house is in residence for that matter. No need to drive another wedge between us, not that you’d show me reciprocal consideration. I don’t know, somehow I expected all that passion, all that full-lunged ardour, to cross the membrane that separated us and seep into you. But seems like it’s had the opposite effect. Liebestod. Oh god, too much lamentation. What the heck did those ideologically driven women think they were trying to achieve ? Who ever has time to dine out with a whelp in tow ? I suppose that was the point they were trying to make, that it shouldn’t cramp your life. Says the women scrunched up in the doorway.

So, no mother’s milk for Junior, (but have my clamorous hormones ever settled ?) And the calmness with which you also terminated bottle feeding. It almost just slipped out of our routine. You didn’t draw any attention to the fact. No proud heralding of a new, milk-free maturity on your part. No insouciance of returning to provider, ‘no delivery today or for eternity thank you’. We just sort of forgot about milk. Well I say forgot, you obviously didn’t, since you shun it even on your cereals at breakfast. To this day you still eat the flakes dry, how anomalous is that ? Goodness knows what it does to your insides ? They must take a mortar and pestle to deal with it – urgh, doesn’t bear thinking about. And it’s been thus ever since. An understated – no, the very purpose is absolutely to state, to declaim albeit whisperingly – my strophe to your antistrophe, if I remember my Classical Greek correctly. It’s like the most desultory of garden tennis, or swingball games played between you and I in the dim and distant past. When I, yet again, pared myself down and stopped up all my shots. Shrivelled myself to your shrunken level, so as to try and engender some sort of slewed parity. I used to play tennis for my school you know ? I’ve probably got some old photos to prove it. Would you like me to show you them ? Thought as much.   

Your father would show you no such consideration. There would be no chivalrous downplaying of his competitive instincts. He had this notion – well I say it was his, but actually we were both pretty much in accord as to the broad principle – of inculcating an understanding of money and an appreciation of its value in you from an early age. What agonised deliberations that ensued, (in those balmy days when we still sat down to discuss parenting strategies and our mouths didn’t just gape uselessly, infected with the muteness we’ve contracted from you), occurred around the methodology. The plan of attack. The invisible guiding hand. You were to be given regular pocket money, but then we assume no further responsibility for buying you any toys or games outside of birthday and Christmas. Save for books, which as with Value Added Tax, were deserving of special exemption. An allowance, incidentally, you have scarcely bothered to dip into. Nor were you expected to pay for your own clothes, Child Benefit supposedly went to defray that. Ha ! Have you seen the price of trainers these days ? And I don’t mean the ones from Supermarkets that fall apart within six weeks. Well what am I saying, obviously you’re fully au fait, since I didn’t buy you those. How exactly did you come by the sizeable finances required to obtain them yourself ? And then to go and denature them with scissors ? No, that’s an inquest for another occasion. Sticking with this one, back at that time, I registered my disquiet over the possible subversion of your carefully regulated dietary thresholds. Should you elect to augment the weekly treat trove of one fizzy drink, one chocolate bar and one packet of crisps sanctioned by the household shopping budget. Wasn’t that in of itself, enough of a disciplined self-management in action ? Delayed gratification and the like. Craig remained unswayed and calmly shot me down in flames. Positing that this formed an integral part of the very learning process itself. If you wanted to dissipate your finances on such fripperies, then your toy fighting fund would never amount to much. The carrot and cattle prod of the free market. In such a way he postulated, you would not be indulged and spoiled like so many of your peers. And the clincher, if you truly had to scrimp, how much more treasured would be the purchases you finally elected to invest in ?

Or so went the theory at least. Since what we failed to account for, was that we were also buying into other nefarious aspects of the free market. That the culmination could never quite match the expectation. The contents of a box perennially failed to live up to the overweening aggrandizement of its cover. Whereby the dark arts of the graphics department, had been lavished on the surface depiction, rather than the features contained within. Toy helicopters never bested gravity. Fire-engine hoses failed to stream jets of water. The blue shag sea beneath a pirate ship Plank, contained no salt to sustain a hovering shark. Lukewarm ribena approximations of boiling oil, poured over the castle battlements, could only kindle an ogress’ shrill reproach against staining her carpet. And try manfully (childfully ?) as you might, your fertile imagination was further thwarted by human anatomy. Though blessed with reversible thumbs, we still only possess two of them. So unless you had a friend round to play – something else that seems to have been extirpated and consigned to history, long before we tear off each unmarked month from the calendar – being an only child you were forced to enact both parties in a duel, or mobilise each of the bodies in a pursuit. Either you were forced to hold them rigidly in their ramrod pose, or put one of the antagonists down, in order to manipulate the other’s cutlass-bearing arm; to seat the rider on his motorcycle; or hitch legs to straddle some rigging. It made for a very stilted joust. Any and every chase was more akin to a three-legged race. Time-lapse in place of speed cam. Your misfortune, to be born both with fully functioning and the correct quantity of limbs. The more drastic birthright, was to be born to a father far too busy earning a crust seeding you this toy fund and then seeking release from the stress of his labours, for him to muck in and play. Added to a mother who also shirked getting down on the floor and help play your boy toys, with their bewilderingly implicit violence. Well, I’m on the floor now aren’t I ?

If a parent delivers such a deficit of unfulfilled promise, it is just another mark against us in the column of shrinkage. That we are no longer all-powerful demigods. (A stretch at the best of times, right from the outset of your birth). But when the child is forced to confront such disenchantment at their own hand, their own miscarriage of the moral law, a paradigm of the way of the world is rammed home alright. I reckon you drew your conclusions pretty sharpish – or bluntish as the case was. For I eventually observed you crashing, rather than racing miniature cars. Solving the incapacitating laws of physics, by hurling the deformable object right at the immaterial force. You smashed your helicopter into the Medieval castle walls and didn’t even scramble your emergency rescue team, which you faithfully used to do with great tenderness. And who can blame you ? For in all that time, I never discerned you wide eyed on opening up any packaging. Gradually your eyes became slits, narrower even than the embrasures in your model castle and they were too small to fire your toy archers’ arrows out from in the first place. In disillusion, you backed away from such fraught investment decisions. You renounced toys and games entirely, as part of your self-annealing. Covering up against exposure. Opting instead for the interinactivity of computer games that spoon feeds the imagination. Or ladles might be more fitting.