9:32 PM (Non-Alignment Pact)

Still can’t believe I sold Rory that outrageous dummy. And went on to score the try to boot! I know it was only training, but I can dine – or more pertinently sup - off that one in the bar for yonks.  Let’s see if the feeling can survive a quiet evening at home. “Hello?” Eventually got the blasted key to bite in the tumbler. Seems you can’t fight subsidence with WD40. That whole door needs to come off, be shaved down, rehung – the works. But not tonight eh? It’s late and I’m blissfully weary. “Hell-lo-oo?”

Shutting the front door behind me, I find myself as usual corked within the glass vestibule. It never fails to wreak its grievous effect. The ominous associations dangling from clothes hooks. Lucy’s handbag and Mal’s puffa jacket, stabled there. Assuredly meaning that they are both in residence. Given that the house is deathly silent, I’ve a pretty good notion of where to find them. Embedded in Mal’s room, varnishing eggshells around another one of his lordship’s witless snits. Lucy insists it’s the early onset of adolescence. Flying full in his baby-smooth face, of a complete dearth of physical symptoms. To my lesser trained eye however, I reckon he’s revisiting his toddler tantruming stage. Merely, for reasons best known to himself, with the volume dial turned right down.

If they are indeed embroiled in mortal combat, (not the video game, but a domestic version with far more desultory arsenals), then I’ll be foraging for my own supper. Mind you, on the upside, they might be at it for hours so I could yet muster a tranquil evening to myself. I could even slip in a protracted soak in the bath. Or, I could, nay should, show willing and do my supportive husband/father bit. Not that it would particularly pave the way toward any resolution. First words from my mouth, irrefutably nails my colours to a mast and pinions me up to a rack. Always viewed to be taking sides that’s me. Having the casting vote, when I never cast my lot into this farrago in the first place. Can’t do right for doing wrong, that’s my node in any triangulation within this incorrigible family. Ah well, better go and prescribe/take my remedy. The self-medicating physic is nothing if not a gluttonous addict after all. Let’s go and see what ducking stool ordeal lies in wait. Over and above the quick midnight dip of my head under the low-pressure showerhead that I’ll doubtless be condemned to.

As I traipse along the hall carpet to my fate beyond the stairs, I weigh up the strategies likely to be open to me. In the normal course of arriving home, I would greet my wife with a peck on the cheek. Though a touch on the prosaic side, even this simple gesture, when transposed from the hallway, to the Master’s bedroom, could spark a conflagration. Given the combustibility likely to be saturating the air. Of course any public espousal of affection in the eyes of the prepubescent male is profane, but dash it all, we’re only establishing the most basic of adult interaction. The courtesy of acknowledgement, which we can assume won’t be forthcoming from the far side of the room. Languishing under its localised black cloud there. Had either of them returned my original cheery salutation, then I might not have to raise the stakes with such daring a gambit as a kiss. A pox on both of their heads! Far from me taking sides. I’d quite happily stroll over to him on the bed and do likewise, but that’s just never going to be allowed to happen now is it? Therefore, and through no fault of my own, any option of me displaying even-handedness has gone right out the window. Ruled out by him, before I’ve even crossed the threshold. Actually, I’d happily stride in and bang the pair of their noodles together, but, well that’s not in the tactics manual either.

His mother is a great believer in him only opening up, when he’s good and ready. She’ll do her utmost to facilitate that. Creating a safe, loving space for him to flop into and unwind that maelstrom of thoughts (zephyr more like), grazing at his pate. She is forever imploring me not to intrude and torpedo his anchorage. Yet for all her forbearance, she’ll simultaneously divulge to me that he’s still to volunteer anything of himself. Not really entered her airspace, thus still remaining somewhat of a closed book to her. Accordingly you see, I surmise a flaw in her logic. I think even if he were au fait with whatever it is that plagues him, he lacks the capacity to encapsulate it in language. Bolstering hugs and reassuring pets are all very well, but they are non-verbal and therefore can only go so far. Emollients for the body, which I’m not knocking, but as the father I’m charged with harnessing the positive drives of ambition and appetite. Naming the itches and the dissonances. My role is to galvanise and inspire, not soften and console. That’s not to say I can’t help signpost the gins and pitfalls of life. That to some extent I can provide a map of the minefield, but he’ll still have to navigate it by his own bearings. Of course he’ll come home after each unseen wire that he trips and his mother will dress the bloodied stump and nurse a wounded ego. But I’m the one saddled with dusting you down, getting you back on your feet and sending you out there with head held up high again. She shall stress your vulnerabilities. I will countervail with your assets. See, we make a good tag team me and your mother. We can each offer you different benefits, if only you’d submit yourself to these gifts.

On the other hand, you mustn’t think we are routinely in cahoots ganging up on you. I’m forever beseeching Lucy just to let you be. To have your strop and discharge it however you may. Sound off and get the whole thing out of your system, how much healthier would that be? For one and all. Radiators require the occasional bleeding do they not? Simply allow you to storm up here, alone. Slam the door and let rip. It’s amazing the psychological weight imparted to a closed portal. People believe they’ve shut out the world, so that they can’t be heard on their side of the discontinuity. This can engender all manner of disclosure. Of opening up behind the sealed hatch. Shouting down the well and then sowing it with stones. But of course, if you’re yelling and screaming, maybe smashing up your room for good, emphatic measure, then no flimsy timber is going to dampen that down now is it?

So I’ll own it is a wee bit disingenuous, since all Luce would have to do, is pad up under the tumult and put her ear to the other side of the porous membrane. Then she’d become acquainted with what he was thinking alright! But my logic falls on deaf ears (so you can see it runs in the family really). She claims he’d never go that far in unburdening himself and his true feelings (‘Gets that from me’ apparently). Well then I rejoinder that she’s just not hitting the right buttons, since everyone has a breaking point. ‘That’s not really a benign approach to take, to try and crack open one’s own son’ she tosses back at me. I of course, only meant it in the sense of reaching a threshold for tapping into catharsis. She counters intuitively, that his door shall never be sealed shut on us, nor the world. For he is too feckless to resort to its handle. Suited by the knowledge that the irregular fire regs door will, if not exactly snap itself shut, then at least trickle and drift towards latching. Consequently he would equally be all too aware, that he cannot trust its halting progress to form an infallible buffer against the exterior, so he will never risk his thoughts taking to the air. ‘Unlike our own spring-loaded bedroom entrée’, which it is true, gooses you in its recoiling ardour. Positively shovelling you inside like an overzealous bouncer. ‘When am I going to bring the two portals into some sort of reasonable equilibrium?’ I am chided. When indeed, if only life were as simple as taking a screwdriver and adjusting the relative torques. And that as they say is that. Discussion, or should I say discursion, elegantly parked in a cul de sac. Skewed across both lanes. 

There just remains the landing left to traverse. ‘Landing’, not a propitious word I feel. It suggests something is either circling, or it’s actually in freefall. I guess I’m the emergency services, deploying in anticipation of the fallout. Ready to douse the flames. Now that I’m approaching the lion’s den, the leading edge of the door protruding past the ill-matched alcove wall, tells me my wife is probably at the doorsill holding it at bay. I reaffirm going with my original inclination. That of a relatively neutral skimming of lips with her. In order not to lose any momentum as I execute the sharp turn left, simultaneously I jut my lips and chin out in front of me, but contact only empty air. Sharks draw the lids down over their eyes at the moment of an attacking thrust, a fact I learned watching a TV Nature programme with my wife’s hand in my lap, and most humans seem to do the same when moving in for the kill kissing-wise as well. Though they seldom miss their target. So, somewhat thrown, my eyes jerk open to register Sonny Jim sitting ugly at his appointed post on the bed. Then they instinctively flick down, bird’s eye gawping at the greying roots of my wife’s thatch. She appears to be crammed into the frame of the door. She must have heard me lumbering to a screechless halt - heaven knows I nearly eclipsed her lights by toppling over on to her - yet she remains undistracted. Her attention riveted in place. 

Okay, this is a bit different. Reconfiguring, any mechanics of familiar exchange would necessarily involve me bowing to peck Lucy on her crown. That in itself is replete with all sorts of connotations, not raised by a modest petting of the cheek. Actually, I think the Mafia kiss-proclaimed death on the forehead, but that might be mythic. Or filmic, which probably amounts to much the same thing this day and age. Unaccustomed to quite this mutual disposition of our two frames, I gauge that if I plumped for a nuzzle of my face, I might just get my calculations off kilter and end up dispensing a lunging headbutt. She is an awfully long way down, way past my stable centre of gravity. Besides, I think any hair burrowing in public, is just a term of endearment too far, even for me. Let alone the light of the world over there, incandescently primed with his candlesnuffer. I settle on a not-too playful, none-too disruptive ruffle of her coiffured locks. By rights I should squeeze past her and go and muss Junior’s barnet too, but I demur. My wife still hasn’t responded, neither brushing away my hand at its moment of impact, nor reaching up to return the compliment with a vindicating caress. So, what exactly are we presented with here?

One of us sitting, one of us lying and one of us standing. That says it all in a nutshell. Irrespective of high grounds and horses, we are all contoured on different levels. With non-bisecting sightlines. I glean this is to be the order of the day. And probably has been for hours. He’s imposed a banning notice on self-expression and she’s rolled it out to include all speech. Interesting approach to establishing a shared understanding, an empathy, without predicating it on connection. Still, I’ll go with the flow. Not that there currently seems to be much in the way of that gathered here. His mother seems to have erected herself as a beaver dam. Another stratagem she probably rootled out, from the imaginary menagerie archive nestled inside her head. 

Nonetheless, I still have to hand it to my better half. For however long, she’s held the line admirably up til now. Unruffled as ever, not in full riot gear, beating on her shield all derisive. Patiently maintaining this watching brief. For all that though, we appear right royally stuck here. Deadlocked. The unmoving objectionable meets the resistible enforcer. Something has got to give, apart from my will to live I mean. An utterance, witty, or just pithy ought to do the trick. Break the frigidity with a clinical verbal ice pick. But somehow Lucy divines my intention shaping up unseen aft of her. For, shielded from Mal behind her back, she has snaked out a hand and nips my shin through the sock. Albeit with her nails drawn in like a considerate moggy. Seems we are to execute this tête å tête å tête entirely untrammelled by speech. I acknowledge receipt, by gingerly wedging my big toe under her buttock and flexing it a degree. For this is our clandestine semaphore. Seems I have assuaged her consternation, as now I feel her weight gently bearing back down. My foot as Morse Code key. Save our Son. Save our souls.

So I’m to avoid any action that clodhops over all her groundlaying. Mustn’t go in all guns blazing and blunderbuss all over the shop. That is self-evident. That is crucial. Got to penetrate the sinkhole without a flooding displacement. Bide my time. Look for traces of a clue. Uncoil that knotted ball of fury cradled on the bed. Can’t just shrug my shoulders and turn my back on it. On him. No throwing my arms up dramatically and stomping off. Proclaiming I’ve better things to do with my time, than wait for the great pronouncement of what afflicts Sir Sulkalot’s being. The edict iterating some prepubescent displeasure or other. No, eternally watchful as I have to be, (since it’s in my contract signed unseen on helping bring you into existence), therefore I’ve all the time in the world, in my small portion of it anyway, to lift this siege. To gain you egress. After all, us parents are always being exhorted to spend quality time with our offspring. I’ve got the time, will you inject the elements necessary to quality?
 
Okay, now I’ve got the protocols established, time for a changing of the guard. I lay a finger across the Missus’s shoulder. I feel the indelible contraction of her muscles. Off your kinesiology affirmation to relieve a relieved wife. She rises to her haunches somewhat unsteadily, persecuted no doubt by pins and needles. Painstakingly hoisting herself up the lintel of her own petard. Presumably she didn’t have to get into this, but, well she did. Dogged his umbrage, prohibiting him against stifling himself away in tenebrous shade. Wilfully trying to shine a motherly light into the recesses of his sensibilities. But what she fails to gather, is that the pair of them aren’t linked by orbital pull, more an elastic cord that yanks her along after him (naturally he’s grown out of toddler pull-toys, where the ducklings dutifully follow the mummy duck). In fact, I might go so far as to call it a bungee rope. So she can espouse all the gloss she likes. I maintain deep down, she’s just never cut the umbilical. Heaven alone knows how long she’s been camped here, laid low and brought down to his level. Entwined in mutual apathetic relentlessness, or should it be relentless apathy?

Maybe I should give some credence to the sidereal after all, since the pair certainly do seem to warp each other’s being. See her spine there, still crimped into the shape of the doorframe. Wonder what they dub that one in yoga class? ‘Descent by descendant’ or something equally transcendental. Talking of which, the old girl’s finally up and ceded me her berth. Seamlessly sliding down the pole greased with splinters - don’t want my bulk to intimidate nor inflame - I take up her station. Telamon for caryatid. Guardian statuary both. Defender of a sacred space. Our treasured son’s boudoir. Not in that sense of a sphere of concealed love nor of dressing and undressing, but back to its origin of a place to sulk or pout. A large, empty breadth within a relatively small room, of which I believe he is just – Luce gives my elbow a gentle squeeze as she skirts out the room, belated recognition at last – which I believe he is just imploring us to fill with protective love and parental albumen.

How do I know? Apart from being your father you mean? Being that person best placed to counsel and make you aware. Wherefore it redounds on me to establish precisely what’s been going on here. To map the situation. To compile the logbook. The last word. And if you’re not saying, if you’re not supplying any co-ordinates, then it’s a one-way appraisal. So I’ll have to consult elsewhere. Take some other soundings. Such as adjudging the mood and temper emanating from the four walls themselves. Their tenor must indubitably mirror yours. A mould of your personality. Given that we allowed you to put your stamp on it and decorate it yourself. The home within a home that Mal built. The enclave you retreat into, when chased by your mother.

Everything about this room is designed to augment your silent stance. Little betrayal to be found in its blankness. Nevertheless, when you are not alone, your imprint is subtly altered. Fresh, inadvertent harbingers offer up themselves. Ineffable percolations of you seep into the tiny cavities in the masonry, the blisters in the wallpaper and the cracks in the paintwork (over and above the endemic handiwork of the original contractors). I’m here to render all that. I’m a black belt in feng shui ! So, the – pentimento is it? Ha, where did I dredge that one up from ? Suggests not all of your mother’s civilising of me (aka bending me to her will), from our courting days has evaporated – anyway, it’s possible to discern the pentimento of outlines of earlier posters on your walls. Stratified murals, long since torn down and balled into oblivion. Lapsed heroes and withered cupidity. See, you’ve missed a trick there. Undone by a stain, a shadow, in your otherwise surgically sterile quarters. An unaccomodated insight into your accommodation. A slit in the tent canvas. A window into your world. Oh you’re begging us alright, to come in after you and haul you out of whatever private hell you’re currently confined in. Let’s see what key it’s in shall we?

(Long?) gone I note, are the pouting and moues of the female pop stars. Replaced by male versions of the same, only pointedly less inviting. Men with sneers and glowers rumbling them as rap singers. (C)rappers with potty mouths. Crapsters. Hip hopeless human beings. Socialised sociopaths. In what is a very crowded marketplace. I mean even my darling wife owns a T-Shirt with a skull and crossbones picked out in sequins. No footballers here anymore, gone the way of Fungus the Bogeyman and Thomas the Tank engine. For they too once held top spot, should he have neglected to recollect that fact. I don’t think it’s a case of his team being relegated by poor performance on the pitch (or even more germane, on the floor of the stock exchange). Rather I think that football itself has forfeited his patronage. Too oblique a sideswipe against my beloved rugby methinks. There again, it could possibly be due to it becoming too gauche even for him. What with footballers now being photographed on catwalks and bedecked in jewellery. But then the same disdain doesn’t seem to hold for the rapsters, wreathed in gold dripping straight out the ingots, more chaplet than mould. I don’t know, footballers yearning to be rap stars, rap stars who want to be athletes in their basketball vests and baseball caps. The iconography is abstruse. That, presumably, is the point. Looking around at present, I see sport hasn’t totally gone for a burton in his pantheon. Now we are seen to be paying homage towards overblown testosterone beasts on show in the guise of athletes. Panto dames and boo-hissable baddies. Those perfectly chiselled and choreographed wrestlers. Split second stuntmen, with stunted charisma. Bearing operatic scowls and histrionic rictuses. Either completely bald or bearing munificent manes, with nothing in between. I mean I didn’t expect brylcream and centre partings, but what exactly do such steroid-pumped, tattooed gorillas portend as to my son’s current predilections?

I‘m sure given your present propensity, I am held in poor regard. One notch down from a Second world War collaborator. But if you could just reconsider this as an indication of my love for you. The fact that I even took up temporary patronage of your beloved American wrestling only the other month didn’t I? Shelled out the transatlantically extortionate ticket prices (I imagined with a cheap dollar we ought to be quids in, but predictably enough it doesn’t quite convert like that). Sat you down for a crash course in what I needed to know to get me up to speed, to have any chance of deriving full value from the spectacle. Even with your exposition of the various back stories, legends, histories of grudges, bad blood, rivalries, feuds and other fine arts of the scriptwriter’s intrigue, I was out of my depth. The whole thing was as intricately overwoven as a Russian novel, wherein everyone also sports three variants of their name. You tried to fill me in on the mosaic of wrestlers and their consorts. Consorts could also be divas, or female wrestlers, but in addition they could be a male wrestler’s manager as well. All very convoluted, though you expounded manfully. With a burning passion in your eye. Well, that might be to overstate it a tad. Let’s settle for a twinkle at least. And I tried to reciprocate, transposing the wrestlers into warriors (some of them could pass for Vikings, were it not for the anachronistic tattoo designs), the divas into valkyries, there was even a dwarf I could throw into the mix apparently. Alas, I knew from thrum muffled but not modulated through quaking bedroom walls, that the prelude music would inevitably stymie my little conceit. Besides in all truth, no crib sheet was going to help me fumble my way through the semi-darkness on the night. I would just have to wing it. Resolved to observe my fellow audience, in trying to penetrate the deep mystery of the seduction. And having attended, I have to say I’m none the wiser.

I expected to discover a confederacy of put upon dads, each having phlegmatically chauffeured their young sons to the uninviting behemoth of a concrete arena, followed by escorting them through the event itself. But knock me down if the other begetters weren’t absolute devotees of the thing itself. Just too many homemade banners and signs, to be borne aloft only by the arms of their offspring. Patently these were intended for adult toting. They too, rose and applauded and screamed and whistled like banshees, when each faux gladiator strode in and rippled the gamut of their preening body-builder poses. Nonplussed, I was forced to redirect my focus back to the stage. Or at least to the backs of these fathers until they deigned to sit back down in their tip up seats. But I just didn’t get the dramaturgy. There seemed a great embellishment, ornate you might even say, with the entrance, the bombastic calling out of the opponent, the great stare off (is that where you get it from? Save it being adapted for gazing at the floor). Everything appeared set up grandly.

Then the wrestling began and seemed to me all impetus was frittered away. The story shucked along with the man’s robe, or his corseting title belt. It was like the flipping opera after all! A coarser version of it anyway, with bass profundo grunts. What place for nuance, when one 20 stone man jumps off a top rope across the primed torso of another? And, fake as it is on TV, it looks far worse live. Yes you can allow for a mic’d up floor, but you can clearly see them making sure their foot stamps on the ring canvas to percussive effect, rather than trusting to the report of a body’s accelerated fall through gravity. Punches are overtly slaps. The choreographed moves off ropes and counter turns and spins, are executed with the loving precision of two longtime lovers abed. I don’t know much about violence, but I know it is not smooth, with all the burrs and jags rounded off.

And these posters here, a paean to that. Approximations of being carried over the pain threshold, etched in play-acted grimaces. So, for all this passivity, there is violence implicit all around in this room. A violence which at some point, unless it can be channelled, must out. If only we could get you interested in a sport. A proper one. A participatory one. Outside, filling your lungs with fresh, rather than fetid air. Pushing against the wind. Cutting a wake through sheeting rain. Taking on the elements as well as your fellow man. Bring you out of yourself. Cultivating a healthy competitive spirit. Get the old adrenaline pumping, stirring the sump of bottled up energy. Kick this whole stagnancy into touch. But you will not submit. The fact that such brutishness is still pre-adolescent, in a way just makes it worse. Cartoonish. A far cry from reality. This is heads on poles like they used to do at the Tower of London – oh yes you loved those trips to the Bloody Tower and The London Dungeon, didn’t you just? A rare glimpse of filial ardour, long since sailed down the river. Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.

Yet these posters cannot be with the sole purpose of rankling me like the footballers of old. I believe your pin-up patronage is sincere. Though I can’t buy into these ham-fisted hammy horrors, with their shank and chuck muscles and sausage fingers, flanked by tenderloin stooges and rump troupers, I’m pretty sure you do. You enjoyed that evening’s entertainment sure enough. Rough hewed me a seal of approval. A tight verbal nod. A coy thumbs up phonetics. Ungilded with any emotion. Still, infinitely preferable to the disarticulation of a middle digit wafted in one’s direction (less effort involved than the homegrown two-fingered salute). Or the all fingers and thumbs, arthritic shorthand of ‘Loser’/ ‘Minger’/ ‘Whatever’. Regardless, all entirely grist to my mill, however glyphic. Since one might suppose pleasure to get the pulses racing, or at least impart a gentle squeeze on the biorhythmic throttle. That if not an out and out ebullience, at least feeling good ought ostensibly to invoke a modicum of gusto. I waited and I waited, during that interminable trudge back to the car, for the rat-a-tat-tat of excited chatter. Of comment and commentary on what had just been viewed. But none was forthcoming. I know, for I kept throwing you sly glances to check. The only feedback I was privy to, was the ringing in my ears courtesy of the blaring PA at the event.

Neither was there trace of any spring in the step. No discernible uplift in his stride. Actually, no stride at all, as his gait remained uninflected. Shoulders de rigueur hunched of course, yet the blades were turned in towards one another to angle his skeleton into the vanishing point deep within his hood. Counterpointed by his splayed feet in those ridiculous clown shoe trainers, complete with squelch-fart footfall. If ‘fall’ can be used to describe a movement when the sole barely leaves the pavement’s surface. You know, one might even have stomached the disaffected mooch, since it is his constant refrain when out in public, if only he hadn’t kept blowing that fatuous kisscurl blinkering his right eye. A futile reflex, since the press of his hood maintained it resolutely flopping back in place across his line of vision. It completely drove me to distraction, him elevating it to the perpendicular every five seconds. Like some perpetual forelock tug of obeisance before an imaginary liege. Thankfully in today’s present bout, since he is supine on the bed, the lock seems as set firm as his jaw. No, everything about the father-son shared experience that night, characterised the current cleft between us. A want of mutuality. Therefore scant moral relationship. No view. No standpoint. No opinion. ‘What does any of it matter?’ I imagine I can hear you silently intone. At least you recognised the polite thing was to engage with me momentarily by way of a nodded thank you. Ought to be grateful for small affirmations I suppose. Not that’s why I bought the tickets. Perish the thought!

All said and done, these walls tell me diddly squat. Flat, two-dimensional opacity. Cliché. Like most architecture. Neglecting to utilise the third dimension of the ceiling. What’s missing are the tangled vines hanging from above. His own creation, not one rent from a magazine. For at his age, my own bedroom whirled with scale model aircraft. WWII fighters and bombers, recreating the battle for the skies over my bed. Protecting me from nighttime terrors and persecutions. My dogfight mobile, the progression of choice from teddy bears and chicks, (save us from the voguish dreamcatcher broached by your mother!) But I suppose his generation is too far removed from that era. That cohort finally released from any imperative for attending annual memorial parades to honour a surviving family member. Is it still even taught in schools today? No, we probably don’t want to upset the EU. Are there even model kits still being sold of Spitfires and Hurricanes? Or is it all stealth bombers and Blackhawk helicopters? Why bother if you can play the game authentically on your computer, rather than hold the thing by its fuselage and utter spirited machine gun noises? Are you aware how they’ve belittled some of the great campaigns of World War Two, by transposing them to your games console? What’s the point of that? To inculcate history? Don’t make me laugh. How can it be a recreation, if they have to offer you several scenarios to prevent you getting bored quickly? Maybe the Nazis get to win this time? It’s an outrage. An obscenity. It demeans the memories of real heroes. Is that what they fought the war for? Is that the inheritance they imagined to be passing on? What would they think, were they to come back and view the state of affairs now? I dread to imagine. 

Doing things with the hands see. Manual dexterity, making things, rather than joystick manipulations. Joystick, there’s a misnomer if ever there was one. If not wracked with the contortions of twisted frustration, then the game face is as flatly blank as the screen it gapes into. I’ve tried to play your joyless designs. With pixelated cataracts of chromatic red, pouring from painless wounds and insensate agonies. I would say that they were actually the most callous of consoles. Anything but consoling. Moreover, my fingers are too stubby, my visual sense too compromised by living in three-dimensions, to compete. While your suppressed hair trigger is seemingly ideally calibrated to unleash your fulgurant indignation.

So I’ve relinquished you your terrain there. Willingly let you exclude me from that activity. I am morally and dexterously debarred from such a domain. Occasionally panged by guilt that I should be trying to substitute some other endeavour, one in which we can both participate in. But I know I am forever on a losing wicket on that front. For this is what passes for toys and games these days. Even your discs that don’t involve daubing plasmatic crimson have me flummoxed. Why would anyone prefer to act out so called real life, with all its attendant decisions, on a console? Where fun and aspiration, are manipulated according to dancing calibration bars of computer graphics. That’s how you favour any exploration of existence? That’s the arena in which you opt to venture forth and make choices? I’m not sure if it’s a demonstration of gutlessness, or merely indolence. Either one could be you to a ‘T’. Presumably the one the game designers have expunged from their title ‘Simulation’.

I actually feel sorry for you. Be that as it may, if I were of a mind to, I could provoke you. Get a rise out of you and get you up off that bed. Render you that facility at least. But would you fly at me? Would I be confronting murderous eyes? (I see them in almost every opponent on the rugby pitch and I know it spurs me on). Then we’ll know you have moved from this prepubescent nullity. Left gormlessness behind. It would burst through your expression like an acne eruption. Rip the scales from your eyes. A dose of reality, this time not cushioned within a home made child-safe. Then we can finally be shot of all this smoke and mirrors barratry. No longer underpinned by scuttling behind mummy’s pleated skirts if it looks like getting a mite too savage. But I’ll stick with the game plan. Still keep my powder dry. For now.         

But, home truth slot now. A little sociological insight I gleaned about family dynamics. There is a sliding scale, directly mensurable against your parents, from conformity through to full-blown dissent, by which you plot your own constitution. Yes I acknowledge school also wreaks an influence, but there it’s all about the pack, motility within the group and having to find your tier within it. The parental register is more individualising, more essentially you. Closer to home. Ultimately, you derive your own values from some place along its spectrum. Your own identity. Are you at ease with broadly falling in with your parents’ way of life, so seeking to replicate it when older? Or do you reject most of it out of hand as utterly invalid and unacceptable? Plotting for co-ordinates as diametrically removed as possible. Sure, at the moment you don’t seem drawn towards us all that much, but there again you’re a bit of a rebel without a clue too. So it’s hard to pinpoint quite where you’ll fit on to this scale in the long run.

Possibly, in the same way as I cherished my grandfather over my dad, you might well spurn me and sidle up to my father as your confidant and crony. That’s how we males seem to do it in our family. We skip a generation. We kick against what has gone before, what is on offer. We cut off our noses to spite our faces. Then shove off on our separate ways, without much in the way of a gyroscope to orient ourselves. That’s possibly why we keep drifting into these doldrums. Getting snagged on the surface sargassum. Our unexpressed motivations bloating our air sacs, holding us in place when we should be whistling up a wind. On my scale, to rebel against a rebel is to dovetail right back into conventionality.

I did however adopt one thing from my father. Which was all he had to offer, seeing as he was a single-issue man, other than betting on the grey nag in any horse race that is. His political touchstone was education. He always voted for the party who were committed to preserving the right to private education. (That’s the Conservative Party by the way, in case you didn’t know. Also known as the Tories. Ring any bells? How could it possibly, when your ears perpetually ping with tinnitus. The white noise you jam the world’s signals with). Like you, I was afforded that high standard of education, which ought to set one up for the best possible start in life. But that was the full extent to which he was prepared to devise any bequest. The political impulse to knobble the public schools, was coupled with mealy-mouthed taxing of inheritances to high heaven, yet that caused him far less perturbation. Since he was not minded to hand over a ready-made standard of living to me after I’d reached the legal age of majority. (Maybe that’s why he squandered most of his money on the gee-gees). He just wanted to present all the options, as I stood at the threshold of my adult life and the rest would be up/down to me. He was lavishing a huge freedom on me. Freedom to fail as well as freedom to succeed, but either way, entirely delivered by my own hand. And do you know what ? The moment I finished my secondary education, graduating from secluded bedroom to social dormitory, he stopped voting altogether. Wholly ceased being a political animal. The fact that I was at that time engaged in tertiary education was no issue, as it hadn’t yet become a political football as to who should fund it. In fact, that bygone system was played wholly to our boon, when with barely a backward glance, my father proceeded to walk out on my mother at the start of my second academic year. Suddenly my minimum grant was inflated to that of the maximum grant, as merited by me residing with an unemployed single mother after he’d left home. (Not quite as bromidic a status as today). I can tell you, the drinks were on me all of the time down the student bar! Drowning my felicitous sorrows. But looking back on it now, I’d hope that it had been my excision from the family home revealing to my parents the complete lack of commonality between them, which defined the break up. Rather than mere opportunistic tax advantage. But the point remains. I respect him for that one covenant, even amongst the ruins loosed by its enactment.

I suppose it would all just be ancient history to you anyway. But that’s where you come from all the same. When you stare into a mirror, well it would have to be in the bathroom as there doesn’t appear to be one in here, what I wonder do you gaze upon? Are you presently content with the countenance that stares back, the one that doesn’t have to blink you back into existence? Or are you at all able to penetrate further, into descrying the lines of maturation? Can you contemplate, as to your possible future development, the outline of either or both, the faces of your mother and I, still within the integrity of your own features? Regard the cheeks and around the eyes, indisputably mine, yet the colour and shape of the orbs within are those of your mum. (Genetics, try go model that on your console!) The chin resembles hers. And though I’ve had my nose broken so many times it’s bent out of all recognition, you take after me in that particular department. Only the mouth, ironically, seems made up of recessive genes that have skipped generations and resemble neither of ours. That’s all your own work! Your unique stamp of self, yet you choose to shutter it off apologetically. All of which to say, is can you live with yourself, as modelled by such seeming unworthies as your mother and I? Because we are your lot and your fate is largely sealed across the board through us. Now it’s apparent why you might not have shifted a mirror inside here.

Lucy materialises at my elbow with a cup of tea. Unbidden but not unwelcome. My legs are aching from being locked in place, but I cannot yield. From another room in the house entirely, she instinctively divines I need sustenance. We are a good fit. She doesn’t have one for the boy. Doesn’t inquire whether he requires anything. He’s harder to read. Opaque. I don’t even recollect if he’s started drinking tea yet. That might be considered somewhat of a major lacuna. I just haven’t noticed. Too young perhaps. Maybe he’s still under the tea age of majority. How old was I when I started? Though back then, we didn’t have to run the vegan leather gauntlet of all those dietary doom merchants. Mind you, it’s no bad thing to delay the benign addiction for as long as possible. Same quandary over curry. What age do we expose him? I really don’t have the foggiest. Don’t want to put him off for life, that would be a major detriment. A form of abuse.

See Mal, if you could only just appreciate it, how that one small gesture there encapsulates everything about partnership, as an antidote to isolation. You had my full focus, so I was completely oblivious of her advent. She still moves, sashays in fact, with that feline grace from when I first met her. So I was thoroughly unaware of her approach, aided and abetted by the thick hall shag. Additionally, while not quite going the whole hog of a chanoyu, I do insist on my libation being served in a china cup, not a mug. So to avoid any telltale tinkle of spoon against saucer, her step had also to remain true. Put those elements together and there is no presaging, to the sudden pressure of a hand on my shoulder surfacing from nowhere. Out of the ordinarily, when you’re not expecting it, ought to make you jump right out of your skin and send the teacup flying contents and all. But I wasn’t spooked in the slightest. I am so familiar with that exact appulse of force, pinpointed at precisely the same node on my shoulder blade, that in an instant, a heartbeat not missed at all, I was fully oriented before even my brain could gather up all the signals. Emotionally oriented, aligned and conjoined. We operate faster than neural networks your mother and I. The communication is contained entirely in the caress. A modest jolt, immediately enveloped by a warm, tender recognition. And I happen to know for a fact, she’s got one tailored exactly to suit your anatomy. Custom-made, don’t ask me how she does it without you ever letting her get within range, but she knows.

Aha wait a minute, I hear you interject - well in a parallel world in which you are more of one to espouse I would – the waft of her perfume subconsciously tipped me off prior to her arrival. You know the uncanny thing about that? In the same way that any of us is effectively immune to our own particular odours, your mother and I are so melded, that her personal scent is equally unremarkable to me. Unless she makes an abrupt change in her choice of fragrance - and she really isn’t the impulsive kind as her eternal patience with you suggests - she will continue to be undetectable and move without trace. So that’s one part of what you’re up against. A compassion ninja. You ought to chuck the towel in now.

And what of the other limb of the parental pincer? What you have failed to appreciate is that you cannot outlast me either. For you have my blood coursing through you. My stubborn, obstinate, limpet blood. In time you may bloom and develop your own facets, but for now you remain very much the chip, while I represent the block. Undifferentiated. So you may as well throw your hand in and say something. Get it over with. Aspirate. Blow some breath over me as I blow over my hot tea, and words will inevitably follow. Tag along. Give me some eye contact you so and so! Engage me just for an instant. A minute of your attention and that would suffice. Not cos it would be a staring match and I’d win, but because you’d realise the ridiculousness of all this. Though you might well try and stifle it, or transmute it into a harrumph, but a laugh would still irrevocably issue from the gash of your mouth. At the asininity of this pickle we find ourselves enmeshed in. At it’s baseless nullity. Then we could call it quits and each go about our preferential business. Address the things that we really want to devote our free time to, like some food and a nice hot bath. Unless you really are fascinated by whatever it is has your attention so lumpishly gripped there. Can’t quite deduce what your pinprick of focus is actually fixed on. If I just jiggle my angles here - See my neck still moves, still swivels atop its spinal cord. Hasn’t atrophied like yours, which monitors absolutely nothing.

Your foot? You’re flipping well squinting at your flipper? That just about takes the biscuit. And young man, while we’re about it, did your Mother really raise you to have your shoes up on the bedding like that? No, she’s probably storing that lesser bone of contention for another day. Couched in those ludicrous cut off towelling socks. Very street. Very strasse. Can you buy them like that, or did you take the shearing scissors to them yourself? I bet Nike or Adidas or whoever, are thrilled at that particular development. Trepanning their logo. No, such action would suggest avidity. Purpose. Whereas here, you have rather adroitly deflected any importuning to ‘Pull your socks up’. Metaphorical and real. Whoever taught you to tie laces should be taken out and shot. Maybe it was me. Or was it Lucy? No, I bet it was Velcro all the way til even you were roused to declaim it too embarrassing. Looking at that plate of spaghetti tickling your trainers, either you’re self-taught, or the function of today’s shoelace is ironic. To liberate the foot from the sheath of the shoe. Prometheus bound, but his instep fancy free. Eyelets are for what? Certainly not rollocking. More likely to be an abacus of code in themselves I’d wager. Knots and codes, the cub-scout movement will never know what it missed out on. Not for my want of trying to fire your imagination and get you to enlist. But then we all know you can’t be moved to try your hand at something suggested by your parents. We should have petitioned Hercules to knock back Prometheus and come deliver us instead.

Do you ever stop to ponder anything about the world just outside of your bedroom window? I mean I know it’s dreadfully unfashionable these days to express even a shred of interest in your fellow man, let alone any concern for him. That, despite a deep imprint of entitlement, together with a yen for contesting its transgression, your entire generation are born without a political bone in their body. Body not just impolitic, but downright bloody rude, tactless and importunate. Don’t get me started on unruly children. In that respect and that respect only, we should be grateful for how you opt to conduct your resistance. But you should appreciate, even a modicum of political education can assist the individual. For politics is the art of the possible. Very apposite in this particular scenario we have here. You mightn’t have to grope so dimly towards it, if you actually apprehended what ‘autonomy’ meant. While the principle of consent can only function, if you open your mouth when canvassed for your view. We can’t simply hang around marking time, til you ascend to the Martin Luther moment and nail a list of grievances (can you stretch to 95 Theses in your current listlessness – I doubt it, but we could count up tenfold of your indulgences upon this household to date) up to the progenitorial front door. Albeit affixed from the inside. And the reformation of the boy into a monster begins.

Everything is protested. Indiscriminately. All is up for dispute. Because we are wrong. Everything about us is questionable. What we do, what we say. Simply by dint of it issuing from us, when palpably we are of the old school. Fuddy duddy anachronisms. Out of touch by definition of being parents. While we are still charged by our vocation to stick out our chests and stiffen our spines and take it all on the chin. We are effigies of straw, bayonetable dummies on the drill range. For like the original firebrand himself, you don’t really desire to bring us into line and up to date, set in our ways as we are. You just long to break away for yourself. Fair enough. But there are ways of proceeding which preserves the dignity of everyone involved. What could be more risible than a turf war in the home? You want your own space and that’s all it can ever be. For dress it up as you may, that’s all it this is about. For us to leave you alone, except when you require something material from us. Never mind all that Freudian bilge about Oedipal struggle, you’re as contemptuous of your mother’s mores as you are of mine. Carry this palaver on beyond a reasonable interval and you’ll be turfed out of your home entirely, then see how far you get! Out in the real world, the world of making a living, nobody cares a jot about these domestic spats. So just keep it in proportion won’t you? The only people left for your mother and I to defend your shortcomings from, are each other. The age of endearment appears to have come to an abrupt end.

For we are only beholden by misguided loyalty. Is that a mite too strong? Then it reveals the depth of my – our dejected estrangement from you when you are like this. You have ceased to be the mesmerising child. Your vulnerabilities are no longer delightful, they just defy reason. What do you expect to achieve through such trenchant taciturnity? You’re imploring us to come in after you, but that’s as far as your Mum’s and my isotopic telepathy can reach into your lead-lined cranium. Not only do we lack a shared lingua franca between us, we seem totally bereft of incentives too. We have absolutely no hold over you. No, now I’m beginning to lose it. Got to rein myself in a bit. Can’t let myself be gubbed by a twelve year old. Even if you are more of an old hand at this than I am. Abstention and deferral. No different from sandbagging in poker. Keep telling myself that. Sure it’s a fine line, but Lucy gives a good impression of being able to traverse it like a funambulist alright. Very clever your Mum. Very Zen. She’s quick to adapt to what you throw at us. For now, she’s settled on this watch and wait policy, but only after you steered her there initially. So maybe she’s not quite as smart as you are. Let’s not forget even at a precociously early stage, how the incipient mutineer in you demonstrated you could not be imposed upon.

Do you recollect, how we signed you up to play a musical instrument on getting into your prep school ? Without consulting you. More fool us, as we fell hook, line and sinker for the clarion to achievement of the school’s mission statement. For we misconstrued their rubric, as embodying a compulsory insistence on extra-curricular enlisting in the fine arts. The real cultural accessories of civilisation, rather than pop idol and air guitar through a console. With her passion for opera, I let your mother pluck which particular box of wind, or strung catgut would best match your constitution. Tacet would have hit the mark more accurately. For you resolved from day one never to attend a single lesson didn’t you? On orientation day, a quick raised arm count and you calculated that only a smattering of your new peers had been suckered by the school’s lettered legerdemain and you were not disposed to join their ranks of speciousness. When quizzed why we never saw you with tommy gun case for the purpose of practice at home, you smartly rejoindered that you hadn’t much taken to the viola, but had swapped over to the cello. Even embroidering that the school deemed it too unwieldy to be transported to and from school on a weekly basis. We took this on trust and vaguely dreamed ahead to solo recitals given in school halls. You, sat on a lone chair among the polished wooden floorboards, spotlighted sawing back and forth.

And what of the school’s attitude? Surely they would pick up on the hiatus in their timetabled regimen. Yet, you’d uncannily trained right in on the institutional inertia. As a new boy, you were afforded time and space to find your feet. You’d turn up when you were ready. When you’d navigated your way over to the music block. When they finally did deign to launch a search party, a Prefect approached you in the playground and you misdirected him effortlessly, pointing him in the direction of that ‘other’ Malcolm Bridges. What a coincidence, two Malcolm Bridges at the same exclusive public school. Who would have thought? Apart from a dim-witted, eleven year old eager-to-please, take everything on trust, nincompoop that is. Head boy material undoubtedly. Where did you conjure such an artifice up from? You’re a natural dissimulator. So we know you can master words. Proof positive that an arch mental acuity lurks beneath the surface presentation of obtuseness. Back then, maybe you just looked into yourself and offered them up the obedient, willing to please Malcolm. The one who we are forever trying to winkle out from inside there. The one who you are equally keen to cast off. He who you have sought to bury in quicklime.

Sharp at on the hoof ploys you may be, but I find the inexperienced tend to fall down on the long-game. The follow-through of knock-on effects. Did you honestly imagine you could perpetuate the illusion indefinitely? That someone wouldn’t have caught up to you in the end? Perhaps it was because you were all too aware of the consequences, that you just shut your eyes to having to face them. (Now you opt for the inverse, sealing your verbal organ and keeping the eyes primed). I wonder who you feared more, your teacher or your parents? Fobbing us off when we inquired what new tunes you had mastered. Is it even possible to render “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” on a cello? That should have clued us in, your complete and utter lack of exposure to any musical sophistication beyond a nursery rhyme. But it didn’t. We wanted to believe almost as much as that Prefect. Two years was a heck of a period to eke out the shadowplay, I’ll grant. But at the final reckoning, whatever the pique and disappointment of your music teacher, nothing could match my outrage. Nonetheless, in stepped your mother nimbly to whip you away from the immanent conflagration. Swiftly assimilating the lessons to be drawn, she did not linger over the episode any more than you did and a veil was hastily draped over your tenderfoot musical career. Yet I could not let it go. I was like a dog with a bone. Only there’s no marrow left to be had.

For I didn’t just fix on you as the mainspring, but raged at all agents in this extortion. Since I had paid for two years of empty-handed tuition, dutifully appended to each term’s bill. I wasn't entitled to any kind of rebate, since the music master had made himself available to teach you and hadn’t reallocated his time to another student. Well bully for Mr C. Sharp-Practice! I challenged him as to how he had spent the duration. Presumably with his feet up on a desk, since it beggared belief and my wallet, that at no stage had he himself ventured out to track down his errant pupil. The sum total of effort devoted to the reclamation task, was to depute a snot-nosed proxy fetch, with all the wit and charisma of someone commended to display their name and job title on a badge. My eight year old outflanked a boy three years his senior without breaking sweat. A misplaced sense of pride on my part? More a case of having co-opted accomplices in incompetence, whom I was so busy railing at, I pretty much let you off the hook by default. Yet further misdirection. Smart, smart boy. A virtuoso after all. 

I venture that within your hollowed out concavity there on the bed, inwardly you are positively lapping this up. This stalest of stalemates. For indeed, I do contend you think this is a game. Like chess. You know, that strategy game I patiently adumbrated until you grasped how to play? Which we thereafter played religiously. In the dim and distant past when we used to partake of the odd pastime together. Til it got past time and like everything you just let it lapse. Unobtrusively subsided from our consciousness. Why? Cos I beat you all the time, is that it? That’s how you improve, by tilting upwards at every opportunity. You might have progressed and got really good if you’d stuck with it. Fat chance of that ever happening now. I don’t know how I let you prise it away from us. I don’t know how I declined to notice how it had been clipped from our father-son roster. Our mutually invented inventory of things we imagined we both liked to do. Mutual preferences that brought us together in fair approximation of a relationship.

So now, seems we are to enter the phase where games have just stepped up a degree. They’re still contests however. But what is so frustrating to me, a man who cherishes his sport, the genuine pitting of abilities and prowess, is that you opt for such a vapid format to compete by. It’s so damned passive. A war of attrition. Okay fair enough. If that’s what you want. Let’s see what you’re really made of. No point in holding back. I’ll wipe the floor with you. I will prevail and then I will delight in rubbing your nose in it.

Yet in the name of fairness, you ought to know that before you jumped ship, or rather scuttled it, I had a whole raft of pursuits and pastimes for your edification that would have definitely stood you in good stead. Set you up for life. Not just to hone your competitive instincts, but to develop your maths, memory, mental dexterity and your Machiavellianism. The ‘M-m-m-m-‘ words of fatherhood. Of maleness. It is a dog eat dog world out there after all and what better environment for preparing you, for you to sharpen your gnashers, than a bit of local rivalry? A spot of in-house striving. Close to home emulation. I mean, competitiveness today is credited as who has the most peers registered as ‘friends’ on a networking site. Have you actually met any of them in the flesh? Where’s the real cut and thrust in that? Not holed up here encrypted in your crypt that’s for certain. Boxed up behind your gated community of one. It’s solitary confinement, actual not virtual, so what can you know of interaction? See it’s a service I’m trying to provide you with. Top notch. ‘A’ grade. Pucker.

Poker was one of the slew of games on the itinerary. Do you remember my Friday game evenings? Gone west long since all those round the table cashed in their chips for small fry, but that’s by the by. You helped host the evenings, you must recall? Recharging the nibble dishes, changing up or adding on the chips values. You loved it, couldn’t get enough of it. If you end up going bald in later life, it won’t be genetic – we don’t do glabrous in my family – it will be from all that tousling as you passed from one player to the next. But do you know something? That goodwill was only on display to you, because they knew you were innocently oblivious. That you didn’t have the faintest clue what was transpiring before your unreflective wide-eyes. That it simply wasn’t possible for you to give anything away. Your expression being unwaveringly blank. Much as now, though somewhat less artlessly. Don’t think I didn’t know how you sneaked back into the lounge the next day while I was out playing my Old Boy rugger. Ferreted out the chips and even grappled with the hinged card table to set it up. Wanting to sustain the ambience, the thrill of the night before. And why not? You would have still reeked of stale cigar smoke after all. But what exactly could you replicate all on your tod? I bet you made your own games up with the chips. Treated them as shiny baubles, rather than a silvered lens into a man’s soul. I reckon you tiddled them as winks, or tossed them as jacks, or just shoved them across the felt. Skimmed stones across the green baize sea. Any and every manner of infantilising them.

If that had been me, if I had been granted that opportunity, to have the chance to learn to read each in a diverse hand of humanity, I would have grabbed it with both fists. Every aspect of character was on parade for you to inspect. To divine what makes people tick. How they operate. For with money at stake, it brings out the very worst in folk, even in a so-called friendly game. I would have done my homework. I would have gone away and looked up what it was they were playing. Got to grips with the rules and thereby catch on to the nuances involved and subsequent involuntary reveals on show. What equivalent collocation could your generation possibly muster, from which to study the human animal so close up? But back then, you didn’t possess the drive, wistful or otherwise. Too locked into yourself even at that age. Bluff and front, twin poles of what it means to be male, you just blithely allowed to sail on right past you. How important must they seem now? Let me spell it out for you plain and simple. I’m not the one bluffing here. 

Backgammon was another undertaking I’d lined up for you. Right down your Appian Way I’d imagined that to have been. Heads on stakes and swinging gibbets allegorized in benign form. Roman soldiers may well have rolled dead man’s bones, in simple games of chance at the foot of the Cross. But those in Arabia used chequers as proxy armies to eliminate the probability factor. The dice’s skewering click, as they land in the sepulchre of the board. Very popular in the Levant, backgammon. Where both Jew and Moslem lay great emphasis on ritualised slaughter for their nourishment. For whereas poker is all about holding your nerve and not blinking, backgammon is an enterprise for those with no nerve at all. A brutal game. A game for cold-hearted assassins. They lure you in, these spiders spinning their unforgiving webs of deceit. For you may believe, as your last chequer charges around seeking the comfort of home, that you are well placed to triumph. But they have set a trap and unfailingly pick off this straggler. The runt. The blot. Even though it bears the same circumference, the same mass and the same hue as its fraternal brethren, somehow it still broadcasts its weakness. And in like Flint they send it spinning to the bar, where you are entombed behind their priming game. An unbroken prison wall of his pigmented chequers. They have cut your throat and bled you out. Exsanguinated, all the blood flees from your face as you look across to the doubling die. The one you had tumbled so freely during your sweep to seeming victory. The march towards coronation of your triumph. Though you expected to clean up, he hadn’t abdicated the game, far from it. He calmly accepted and beavered you back, thus retaining control of the intaglioed ingot. Something unerring in his utter self-belief began to eat away at you unconsciously. Began to corrode you then and there. And just prior to plundering your blot, he offers the fateful ivory back to you, to the next power of two. The pacemaker cube, a pulmonary accelerator, pumping you dry. Hanging you out to dry. He’s nearly fully beared off now and you’re still a long way from home. Gammoned. A filleted cut of carrion. Double, double, toil and trouble. Double bubble burst. Hemorrhagic. Never mind the lifeless husk – you’re doing a passable imitation of that already, down pat in fact - are you destined in life to be the poor little lonesome blot? The straggler who always gets caught out and caught up with? There are human invertebrates who are a jellied, sebaceous mess and then there are those human invertebrates who would look you squarely in the eye before ripping your heart right out through the breast. It’s all very well keeping your head down, entrenched within the recesses of your hood. But then events slide right by you. You also have to be able to look the world in the face. It’s a tricky balancing act I grant. But are you forever to remain outgunned, because you have not permitted me to equip you for what lies ahead? I’m telling you, you ought to have taken up my challenge.    

But you know what the real problem here is don’t you? Me. My reasonably successful trek through life to date. More than meeting my responsibilities of providing for your welfare. Resulting in you not wanting for anything, though this room does a good job of disguising that felicitous state. I fear it has only served to engender the malaise of affluence. No ambition see. No fire burning in the belly. No hunger goading you onwards. I mean, just where are your appetites? Glutted already, at such a callow age. Everything laid on a salver. Not so much silver spoon as plated steel, but no burrs to rub up against all the same. No scratching post for your unnameable itch of identity. Everything featherbedded. Quilted paper to wipe your backside. Physical comfort, mental turmoil. You may yearn to kick against the pricks, but you can’t locate any. You possess the urge to resist, to define yourself through contrast, but you haven’t an inkling as to how. I mean is this spartan room the best you can do? Long and short of it, still not entirely shorn of consumer durables though is it?

I’m no advocate of unnecessary hardship, but without a touch of adversity, the odd privation, what we used to call character building – til the bleeding hearts took a gander and pronounced it character demolition – Without it, you only have petty trivialities to fixate on. Getting everything out of all proportion. And we end up in lamentable morasses like this. We all need something to compel us to raise our heads above the parapet. To have a dekko at the whole ensemble. Even getting smacked back down, only musters for redoubling our efforts to get back up there. I encountered my limits, physical, mental and moral. The point past which I would forge no further, but only through running hard slap up against an unyielding brick wall. I don’t mean literally, for there is no-one on a rugger field, no matter what kind of outsized physical specimen, who I shy away from tackling. There I just have to trust to my hard-earned technique. No, this was an education handed to me by a master, a mentor, who slapped me down and made me reconsider my whole being as I reconstructed myself from the vestiges of my former, inadequate self.

We were on holiday in the Cote d’Azur, having saved and scrimped to give your mother a snatch of the high life. Before we were knee-deep in nappies and weighed down by the joys of parenthood. Basking by the swimming pool, as you know not really my thing to keep still for any length of time, and I was idling with a travel backgammon set. Playing against myself as, through having to adopt the perspective of both players, it meant I might see if there were any new number patterns to divine. This French guy approaches me and in lilting English asks if I want a game. I didn’t, I was quite content doing what I was doing, but the social propriety meter kicks in and I gesture him to sit down with me. Starts off innocently enough, we exchange a few victories. Then money stakes get interpolated to take us up a level. Again, there’s nothing significant to the outcomes. Nor can I discern any overt proficiency in him above that of mine. The doubling die gets rattled over by each of us smiling apologetically. His play gets more and more sweeping, more outlandishly chancy. Sometimes he pulls off the resurrections, sometimes he falls flat on his face. And before I know, he’s staked the hotel we are staying in, since turns out he’s the owner, against my fistful of travellers’ cheques. Imagine that, I could be an hotelier in a posh resort and you could have grown up speaking French! Or being sullenly silent in it at least. Anyway, now it’s deadly serious stuff. Zeroing in, he destroys me in that poolside killing field. Cleans us out for the holiday, your mother barely speaking to me for the rest of her dream vacation turned nightmare. Back to Blighty, tail between my legs, but like Dunkirk we live to fight another day. Dust myself down and ready myself for fatherhood, having very nearly blown your birthright before you were even hatched. But if I hadn’t raised my head from my navel, I never would have profited from such mishap. For now, I have all things in moderation. My rough burs rasped off. Nice and child-centred. Now I truly am conversant with the fitting value of things in life.

Speaking of which, I think it’s time to bring the curtain down on this evening’s mirth and jollification. No doubt there will be opportunity aplenty for an encore in ensuing nights. But for now, it’s reached that stage where my resolve is being assailed from within. My body dropping a plethora of pendulous cues. The stomach for one, tapping on the internal wristwatch of my ribcage. While my leg muscles simply will not countenance further delay to anticipated soothing immersion in the bath. Having depressed their own knurled chronometry towards its countdown by starting to tingle. Time to uncoil and extricate myself from this no score draw. In keeping with the intonelessness of the evening, I know I’m in possession of the single word that will guillotine further silent filibustering and abort the ongoing pregnant pause. ‘Bedtime’. We are still distinguished adult from child, through our relative circadian rhythms. You yawning your head off there, sorry if I’m boring you. But at least if you are finding it tough going to keep your eyes open, you’re less likely to quibble, (well why start at this late hour into proceedings?)

All that’s necessary for me to decide, is the manner of my departure. How we sign off from here. The punctuation engendered. I could leave it open ended, an adjournment suggestive of reconvening tomorrow, by parroting his indifference and just get up and exiting. Leaving the laggardly door to draw down the curtain in its own sweet time. The only drawback I foresee with this gambit, is that it could be interpreted as me leaving in such a huff, that I neglect even to close the door behind me. The other option, a more peremptory pronouncement of lights out, involves me invoking the closedown word, then clicking the door definitively shut behind me. Except that in this scenario, the blasted door now functions as tripwire. For in order to pull it seamlessly, across a carpet warp hungry to wrench the handle from your grasp, you have to drag-lift it at various points along its arc. Before dipping it back down posthaste, so as to sit flush with the latch. Plenty of room for things to go badly awry and to sunder the sought after impact. Still, I think it’s worth the risk.

I unfurl my tongue and gingerly heft the weight of the word. My mouth is dry from disuse, so I let the word gently play dodgems with the papillae, til I can summon up enough moisture to marinate it. Loaded into the barrel now, the glottis cocked. “Bedtime!” as I rise and extinguish the light with one fricative, followed on by the satisfying plosive of the door clicking into place. I stand outside the room, paw still on the handle. My wife would be impressed with the quiet authority duly demonstrated. How I never even said a word. Well, just the one.