00:00:00 (Unspeakable)

Oh no, not again! Arrived home this evening, well night as it is now – must have been driving round for longer than I realised - to discover your Mother shoehorned familiarly up against the doorjamb. Battened to the lintel of your bedroom. This simply cannot carry on. For all our sakes. I suppose only I have the wherewithal to bring it to an end. Or at least once I might have, but I let it slip through my fingers. The ones cupped over my mouth. Causing me to gag. Choking off my words. A verbal bulimia discharged elsewhere and out of earshot. How all too compliantly I went along with that particular policy. Abided by Lucy’s wishes, not just to mince my words, but to shred them. I ran with the idea of holding fast and standing stock still. But I’ll concede that suited me anyway. Dressing up cowardice as discretion. One of us playing dead, the other feigning ignorance. Neither of us exactly acting nobly.

Poor show. Pretty damn well poor show all round. Yet, in my transparently tenuous defence, the heartfelt calls for an entirely different process from that of the speeches I am obliged to compose for work. There I have the privilege of attacking my theme with pen and paper, or keyboard as it is now. Having composed my argument, next I would read out aloud to ensure how it sounds and establish the timing. Once satisfied as to the mechanics of its flow, then I get to commit all to memory and finally, rehearse the delivery until I am word perfect. By now of course, such polished words have lost their sparkle, but my professionalism, like that of the actor on stage night after night, will inject the vibrancy necessary to give them life.

However, each and every occasion of finding myself poised here, denies me the luxury of scripted performance. Sentiments worn on the sleeve, are ill-suited to off the cuff delivery. They have to be mined differently. The brain which commissions such an address, only does so by touchstoning certain key strata, leaving the suspension unquarried just below the surface of consciousness. It's dug in three dimensionality, destined to overwhelm speechifying’s inbuilt linearity the instant I essay ordering all the strands. Up and at ‘em trench warfare and they are massacred. Picked off and picked clean. For words are wont to get away from you. Becoming gabbled and swallowed up. Straggling out of file, or becoming omitted entirely. Bullet points unwittingly given the bullet, through the haste to deliver. Fluffing my throughline in the labyrinth, my thread would become unravelled. Rather than silky smooth, I would be stuttering and unconvincing even to myself. And these particular words were - are - far too important to have emerged flawed and unintelligible. The whole panoply of my verbal armoury, only capable of affording liquidation and erasure of meaning. Scant life to be had at all, only injury and hurt. In light of this, it was ever easier not to venture forth. To hold my peace. Of course my brilliant arguments remain flawless, because they are never challenged. Never exposed to scrutiny. Each window of opportunity summarily smashed in my wanton resignation.

Nonetheless, silence is the worst. The absolute rock bottom of the chasm of nothingness. Of extinction. Naught enters it and even less emerges. Except a plethora of your own ideas and notions bombarding you. Flashes, images, spurs and figments. All contending to light up the old grey matter. Bumping and boring for your migrainous attention. Assaulted and concussed, your ears ringing like a steam kettle with the pressure of the brainstorms. The mind under siege from its own outpourings running riot. Until the membranous dam can’t tamp the synaptic flood any longer. The threshold engulfed. Crystallised. Fulgurant. Stabbing me behind the eyes. Lining up all the rods and cones to form a prodding arrow “You are here”. Where you’ve always been. Stood by the tea stain on the carpet. Back at this bedroom. This tortuous chamber of horrors.

Spare the rod and spoil the child. A single stab wound. That’s all it was. That’s all it took to take him away. Only felt like a punch. No great spike of agony. No jag of presentiment. But a slow puncture of blood from the midriff. Apparently he thought a signet ring might have scalloped the skin. But he’d been breached minutely, invisibly. A self-occluding violation, but sadly not self-sealing. Pressure differentials. Scrabbling fingers among his own blood glaze, trying to verify the source of welling pigmentation. Merely served to separate the fresh weep from the encrusted patina. Daubing his own dissipation in his nonplussed anxiety. Still no polestar of pain. No neural sensation. Weltered under his panic override. And down he falls. To his knees or on to his side, witnesses fail to render. Slumped on the stony concrete, as the stone cold slayer skedaddles scot free. Further detail the onlookers contrive to overlook.

Yet there is someone who steps into the physical breach. A woman scoops up his torso and cleaves him to her. Tears off her glove between her teeth as she scrambles to compress the wound, even while screaming for someone to dial 999. Multitasking, women are superior at that you see. But his essence rivulets through the delta of her fingers, no matter how she clamps them. A surrogate mother, a mid to end-wife to deliver him lovingly into death. What a slap in the face for us, the true parents. The blood relatives sat unpierced at home and at work, blithely unaware of our closing moments of intactness. She’s busy extemporising on the hoof. What to do, though I suppose all mothers know instinctively. I say that, but how many are called upon to conduct a juvenile soul across Lethe? Just well, what would we have done?  We were deprived of the opportunity to ever know. Our distant love able to staunch nothing. While her impromptu love wept onto him, as he co-sanguined on to her. Anointed to one another in the final exchange, disinheriting us. Extreme unction. So extreme. The knife wielder expunged him, but she swiped him from us. So tell me, just how are we meant to be grateful for her on the spot tenderness?

It’s perhaps perverse that we resort to her for our bilious repository. Our human spittoon. Why crucify her for a display of compassion? Simply because we are acquainted with her face. We know so much about her, including what she got up to and did next in her life, when our son was no longer in a position to get up and do anything. She stands downstage, a coconut shy on the emotional rollercoaster amid our unfairground. But we have more than mere impression of her, we have her account. Without her we’d possess no possibility of a final narrative. Of the unfolding of events that wrapped up a life. For all our resentment, still we grilled her remorselessly for information upon more information. Caulked ourselves to her to a far greater degree, than to the police family liaison officer assigned us. We didn’t care for that lady’s fresh faced platitudes and third-rate textbook psychoburble. We wanted facts. We wanted the whole thing spelled out to us. In words of one syllable.

What remains shadowy, the penumbral absence within the tableau, billows around the murderer. The true expropriator. The silhouetted hooded skull. Done up like the Grim Reaper, with scaled down scythe. Sneeringly aping the unavailability of our own cowled and cowed son. We are forced to sketch him backwards. For he has no features. We can console ourselves that it wasn’t personal. That the light of our life, seemingly hadn’t a dark side disgorging fatal enemies. Since this was no onslaught of multiple stab wounds. No targeted thrusts of hate. The blade was not frenziedly sunk all the way in, mocking our son by wafting at each dying heave of breath.

Clearly there was a dispute of some kind. A steel-lined disagreement. A metallic gainsaying. When push came to shove, the assailant could back up his argument to the hilt. Marshal his cold, hard proofs. Dialectic fleetingly entered, then a flashing antithesis. A full-stop, gruffly punctuated. How kids express themselves today. Knives carried for protection, reflexively whipped out to make a point. To underscore a position. To affirm a negation. To recapitulate. (Just your luck that the single chink, left the lung filling up with blood and unable to air your point of view). Being backed into a corner and bereft of ideas as how to disengage. On the verbal ropes. The knife demonstrating a lugubrious bouncebackability. Rope a dope. More of a lunging non-sequitur. Retracting a retraction. “What you staring at? Move, get out my way. Get out my face. Don’t look at me. I wasn’t talking to you was I? You what? You and who’s army?” Any and all the categorical imperatives designed to seal off intercourse. Those practised countless times here at home in your daily dumb shows towards us. No, you were too smart and more significantly, too inuringly reticent, to have bad mouthed him. Of course it could cut the other way too. If he called out to you and you failed to respond. That habitual lack of respect at home, magnified tenfold to disrespecting out on the street. Instantaneously switchblade redeemable.

Daresay you might have unfailingly asked for it in other ways. By your gait. By your mien. By your brands. Your clothes. Your mobile phone. Silently imploring for the connection to be cut, since it goes entirely against the grain to imagine you blabbing into it in a conspicuous, upbeat, all’s right with the world way. More than likely, any and everything about you posed the seeds of your demise. The knife as reaper. As thresher. As harvester. A gathering that becomes inevitable. The permutations begin to crank all one way. Someone in the wrong place at the wrong time, slated for destruction amidst this sporadic, desultory cull. The ineluctable law of the streets decrees it. A sacrifice to the minotaur. This is the ineffable conclusion that presents itself. For well might your mother once have sat in place, merrily consuming documentaries of bonobo monkeys copulating with anything in range; of battling bull elephant seals and rutting stags establishing dominance; of black widows and funnel webs spinning their silky execution suites – actually no, strike that one, her arachnophobia would never allow her to glimpse an eight legger even in two dimensions let alone three, only right now I can’t think of a better example. Oh let’s just say some predator or other that plots a carefully laid killing field. Anyway the point is, the instant there’s a correlative study of human behaviour on screen, she was always up off that sofa and out the lounge faster than a cheetah, or a speeding bullet. So it devolved to me to garner intelligence on human zoology. To establish the realistic threat level. To tabulate the statistics informing probabilities. The likelihood of it actually coming down anywhere near our heads.

Back then I’ll own, I was primarily moved by the desire to have you breeze back into the light. To cast off your hood from withering and diminishing your presence. From stymieing your true gifts. I knew you had more to offer than nihilism. That you didn’t have to walk in fear of these lesser creatures, or even be enticed into joining them. So yes, I wasn’t exactly objective. And let’s face it, given television executives’ own political slant, plus the inbuilt bias of the editorial process, I only ever consumed factual programmes with a large salt shaker within easy reach anyway. Paying closer heed as I do now, what I amass from such sources is the triumph of our social engineering. If by engineering, you actually mean laissez-faire. When we sow directly into the wind, then stand back and conjecture why nothing has taken root, as the spores just fly back and pelt us full in the face. Those nettles that have pullulated in the wake of untrammelled venality. For this is just how today’s youth conducts itself. These self-concerned little islands of costive fury and pent up aggression. Like you, they are not really contesting with life, but merely rubbing, chafing along its highways. Emitting fitful sparks of friction. Their minds broken by deleterious upbringings, they have no compunction about putting their bodies at risk. Toy soldiers, only without the discipline, nor any bent for survival. They are none too far removed from the depersonalised Khmer Rouge child fighters, orphaned from their families from an early age. (Save for nourishing on deep fried spud in one of its multifarious forms, rather than paddy field rice). Laid firmly at the door of those generations siring without responsibility or consequence. And now it comes back to bite us all in the rump. Or worse, the vital organs. With a visceral fear of these feral gangs.

You see, I twig the console thing now. The crimson tide and all that. Playing out imaginary revenge fantasies, on those troglodytes and behemoths who drove you back into here. Limiting your horizons, even as we struggled to expand them. An agoraphobia of solitary confinement, exposed to our airless regime of slow suffocation. But in retrospect, surely we must still present the lesser of two evils ? A constant but plodding admonishment, (albeit pressed only through love), rather than quicksilvered savagery. The penny’s dropped about hoodys too. See, I’m wearing mine right now. I used just to wear it as a warming up top to begin winter training sessions. Til I’d worked up enough of a sweat to get the old heart and lungs pounding. Then off it came over my head, having delivered me up raring to do pitched battle with the world. Obviously all that’s gone by the wayside now. Where I find myself presently, it’s more akin to how you sported yours. Undistinguished and indistinguishable. Withdrawal from the world rather than engagement. I can glean how the cloister of the hood is more than merely functional. It swaddles one in beaded, bobbly tepidity, when there is no warmth to be had without.   

It has crossed my mind that if indeed he did accost you verbally, maybe you didn’t hear him because you had your iPod on clotting your ears. Wreathing together a desolate triumvirate, with closed off mouth and faceless expression. We bought you that for your last birthday, since you hadn’t given us any indication, any clues as to what you desired. Playing it relatively safe or so we thought. Did we get it so badly amiss? Probably, since inadvertently you might have been killed by it. Or for it even. Perhaps he spotted it and took an instant liking to it, at your ultimate expense. That this was an economic crime, or at least started out as one. Maybe you fought back tooth and nail, to hang on to an uninformed and frankly slightly desperate token of your parents’ affection for you. No, that doesn’t quite ring true with the Mal we know and love. Knew and loved. Actually, just loved really. Albeit conditionally. I really ought to check if your iPod is still lodged somewhere here in your room, or if it has indeed gone awol. There again, the Police might have snaffled it for what they in all sincerity, termed an investigation. Through all their bustle, they couldn’t do enough for us, which amounted to absolutely nothing in the final, dead reckoning. One masterstroke they did manage to pull off, was to hand us back your bloodstained clothing. That in itself suggested to me there would never be a call for court case forensics. Apart from your signature trainers, no tongue and all convoluted laces, we didn’t really comprehend what we were looking at. The atramentous hue of the stain on both trouser and sweatshirt, didn’t seem to conform to blood. While somehow the hoody itself no longer resembled a piece of clothing, not even a smock you might put on when doing some painting. Couldn’t make out the logo, only not at your hand this time. But I still have to assume it was you who bought it originally, in keeping at that stage, with shunning any attire we might have furnished you. So ultimately it was you who’d opted for clothes that you were to be seen dead in. But not witnessed by us. We glimpsed you post autopsy, beneath a cere sheet. Lying in statelessness. Only your head on show to bid goodbye to. Now you’re in the ground, deliquescing out of sight, but your ruined clothes remain. Shrunken and amorphous, for being out of time and without place.

Coming to think of it, I might be barking up the wrong tree about the iPod in any case. Because I credit you with more nous than that. You wouldn’t advertise yourself so readily and leave yourself with a key sense so unprimed. There again, in the kindred way you had that knack of detaching all eye contact and yet still maintain peripheral inspection, maybe your lugholes were finely attuned for sound beyond the localised prod of the earphones. Besides, with your hood up, would it even be noticeable? Wires carefully threaded up your torso, to re-emerge only within the hood’s shaded canopy? Same principle as bodyguards who talk into their cufflinks. No, that’s only something I’ve trumped up from TV. I can do better than that. I can actually quote chapter and verse hearsay on this one. For it’s more of a parallel with something one of the dads of a rugger team-mate told me in the club bar. Not that I go down there to swap anecdotes these days. Not that I play rugger anymore either.

See, you’ll like this Mal, it has so many elements you took to your heart. Convivial conversation and by that, I don’t just mean a discussion of the latest soap-opera plotlines. Or some reality contestant’s latest misdemeanour kicking against the pricks of the show’s stacked rules. It also evidences instruction from our elders and we know how deeply you esteemed that. And politics, let’s not forget the politics! You were always so enamoured … Anyway, my pal’s father had originally hailed from somewhere beyond the Iron Curtain – I forget which benighted State – but he relayed in rich detail the exigencies of resistance under the Totalitarian yoke. To get on in that society, to land a decent job, you had to be a Party member. An apparatchik. You probably wore an enamel lapel badge of the Soviet Red Star to promulgate your allegiance. With the not inconsiderable boon of providing a visual pinprick of fear to ordinary citizens while you were about it. Nonetheless, there were non-conformists even within the Party, but since any dissent was illegitimate, they couldn’t afford to renounce their status out of mere principle. They’d just be carted off to Siberia and effect nada. Any opposition had to be encrypted and done symbolically. So they cast their own little enamel badges of whatever allegiance they nailed their colours to. Yet they still couldn’t wear them openly. Thus they threaded the totem on the underside of the lapel, aligning it precisely along the inverse track of the Soviet badge. Including the pin, which could not be allowed to be seen to break the surface of the weft. Remembering also not to turn up their collar against the Arctic winds. Whatever their outer badge proclaimed, one submerged strata down, was what really made their heart beat. How much would you have to actively despise a regime, to risk your life for wearing something as meagre as a pin badge? Slight, but not insignificant. Far from it. That’s how to subvert the system from within. And what do we possess here in this country to throw into the subversive mix? Celebrity chefs. No wonder everybody’s carving each other up.   

Excuse me for wittering on. Just trying to fill a hole. Do you now begin to fathom silence’s malignancy? Nothing wrong with a thoughtful silence, but the voided silence that slices through the air is a different beast altogether. Speak up, I can’t hear you! Maybe I’ve got it horribly wrong. T’was ever thus in every generation. As each throws up and throws out their share of hooligans, n’er do wells, delinquents, bullies and predators right? Is it so much worse now? Of course it flaming is, in this neglectful, dumbed down world. Where discourse is no longer enunciated, but acted out in a dumb show. In which language is no longer permitted to construct reasoning. To formulate negotiation. Instead verdicts are instantaneously delivered. Whereupon ‘deliberate’ relinquishes its extra syllable, so as only to offer intent. Gone are the scales of balanced consideration. All that redundant phrasing pared down. The semantic garnish peeled away. A cohort of youth incoherently proud as punch, to accentuate their inarticulateness. Having literalised the unidirectional cut and thrust. Acute and to the point. Distilling only their drift. His master’s voice. Unabridged and unbridgeable. So their vehemence is communicated pointedly. Jabbing into your sternum, knocking you backwards. Taking your breath away with its staggering ferocity.

For I have witnessed with my own eyes, two youths walking on opposite sides of the street, when they clock each other. Pivoting sharply, the pair bear down on one another, hurling all sorts of the most foul invective as they close in. Once proximate enough, both thrust their face right into that of his counterpart. Features contorted and warped, with each verbal propulsion launched from their twisted mouth. Vocal torque, to heighten straining facial musculature. And then all of a sudden, as if on an invisible signal, they break into a broad smile and embrace with a massive mutual clump across their fellow’s shoulder blades. I kid you not. Just a greeting between friends! This wasn’t simulation, this was the habitual mode of encounter, merely one with a smiley face tacked on the end of it. No stretch at all to conceive the antipathetic version of such a vicious pantomime. You see him, he raises you. Ups the stakes. The ante. Antecedently. Unmediated by the brain. Acting purely at the level of motor responses. Trigger fingering, poking for the breaking point. In this catechism, there is neither caller, nor respondent as they bellow over one another. To my way of seeing, that casts both parties as antagonists. Getting your coercion in first. Ready at the hateful drop of an aitch to erupt at any moment. The bludgeoning words as much an attack as a parry. Sawn off syllables brandished, itching for a bloody discharge. Primed detonators as the short-burning fuse combusts down. The game is rigged. You call. He shows his hand. Something flashes in it. Conflagration. House rules of the streets, all-in and no one is permitted to fold.

A violent posturing, in order to relay an indomitable mien. So then, it’s all about attitude, this street poker. Facing up and not backing down. A stonewall of intimidation. I can comprehend that. Same as in team sports. I’ve observed the Haka at Twickenham. But this is hierarchical. Ultimately there’s only one top dog who won’t turn away from anyone. The one who sets the bar into limbo, determining the unvarying principle of punishment, together with its arbitrary scale of penalties. Which means the whole thing is a pyramid of fear and subjugation. Traditionally such edifices are always relatively stable, as only those on the immediate strata below can plot for promotion at the expense of he who they would challenge. But now, with instruments of maiming and death so readily accessible, every rung is armed to the teeth. Resulting in all segments crediting that they are equal in threat and menace. Maturity and strength are depleted attributes. Busted flushes before the ace up the sleeve. The trumping ace in the hole in your belly. The entry stakes are hopelessly lowered. Anyone can come to this table, when the whole deck is stacked. Answerable to the fissile knife, or heaven forbid, the gun even. Now it is no longer mere aggressive display, but lurches into actual, grievous bodily harm. Once the knife has leapt up into your hand, it siren calls you to use it. Stepping up a notch. There can be no discernible fear within a life and death poker face. While the weapon further enhances the sense of invulnerability, yawing over into a spur for using it. Far from dread, these kids are encased head to foot in a prophylactic of unconscionable unconcern. Therefore I do aver, it is far, far worse than it has ever been. Innumerable, rapid turns of the ratchet till we are all squeezed out of life. Til there is no threshold left to cross.

What? I’m haranguing again? I’m sorry for banging on. For bringing down the mood. For profaning this sacred space with mealy-mouthed fault-finding. No actually, I’m not contrite in the slightest. Maybe if we hadn’t displayed such reverential, protective silence on each occasion we found ourselves congregated here, we wouldn’t have been brought down to our knees like this. How can I be expected to be anything other than maudlin? Of course it would be infinitely preferable to have my words drape themselves to address your development and burgeoning handsomeness. But that overflowing cup has been dashed from my lips. For my sins, I only seem capable of appending them to horror and violence. For which I am discovering a natural bent. A convergent ugliness. But also, let’s not delude ourselves for one minute here. Were you still with us, it would be quite hard to affix any poetry to your living spirit, as presented to us at home on a daily basis. Language wasn’t really much of a tradeable currency round here now was it? A well fallen into disrepair. So forgive me if I’m not yet back up to scratch with it. But do you know something? What used really to rankle your mother and I, was we imagined you having all sorts of animated, vivacious fun when you were around your peers, but that the moment you came home and crossed our verge, you unplugged yourself and went into your cocoon. We took it as a personal affront. The literal smack to the chops that the word implies. But now I can see how wide of the mark we were. How myopically selfish. But you must understand where we were coming from. Since it’s incumbent on us as parents, amongst other things, to provide you security and shelter. The stable, loving home environment from which you can confidently fledge in your own time. At your own pace. At least that’s the guidance passed on to us by our parents.

We always imagine it is the women who want to keep you all to themselves and insulate you from the hard knock world. That one part of them forever yearns to swaddle and press you to her bosom and keep you close. Though your mother was sufficiently realistic and magnanimous enough, to know she had to give you your head. Otherwise she’d be gelding you. Apron strings as jesses and all that palaver. Yet in fact, now it’s us men who locate ourselves impaled on the horns of the same dilemma. Part of our paternal brief has always been to mark your card for all the sharks, dissemblers, traducers, quislings and deceivers out there. The brutes and the Brutuses. To make you savvy regarding your fellow man, without painting a world so parlous, that you’d never dare step out of your room. But this whole new breed drawn from your own rareripe ranks, be they those that tyrannise the playground, or those who choose to erect their fiefdoms beyond the school gates, we have no means of grasping the scale of their depravity. “Ain’t dat I be wantin’ any a dem tings. Jis dun see why you shud ‘ave ‘em is all”. (I got that word for word off a TV real crime documentary. ‘If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this programme …’)

It all represents a criminal waste of criminal energies if you ask me (though nobody ever does, despite my recent direct experience at the sharp end. On the cutting edge, yet I've seen neither hide nor hair of a politician). How can we be certain that they’re simply criminal and not actively dissenting? Because they are mute. There is no language attendant on any exploration on their part. They pursue no fresh means of self-expression, no radical schism with the prevalent idiom of the culture. They prefer to limn in blood, rather than sinewy words and brawny metaphors. The very same mumness you exhibited, cupped in your mattress there. And just like you, there is no real mutiny or revolt against their circumstances. How can you possibly revolt against a void? What’s to push against? At root, this is still an active choice believe me. For them, this is more about a lifestyle aggressively opted for, not a muddling through. It’s how they get their kicks when everything else that money or endless credit can buy, has left them jaded of palate. I’m telling you, they do not operate out of deprivation. It is not class war being propounded at the end of their blade. So don’t be misled by any larceny. That’s just trophyism. Provision of a salivatory memento mori. Your life boiled down to some mass-produced keepsake or other, probably just tossed into their sock drawer.

Seeing as the Authorities are powerless to rein them in, what hope for us parents and so called guardians, to provide you with the gen you need to combat them? Analogous to a mother’s hankering we men too, clutch a taper to light our pipe dream of keeping you pure and unsullied by the Pandemonium. Preserving you intact within the turbulence. But in reality we abandon you adrift behind enemy lines, having to fend and fend off for yourselves. To take things into your own hands. Or up your own sleeves. The tinpot Police spent an age panhandling down the blind alley, of trying to establish whether you had a knife of your own. Even though I must have told them a thousand times, that my son was not the type of boy to arm himself. More’s the pity. A fatal oversight on my part perhaps. For it is our greatest anxiety that strikes at our very own core of being, of purpose, that we are not up to the job. That our defensive shield is flawed. Chinks in our chain mail. That the bricks and mortar battlements of home are not impermeable. I’ve been party walled to the screaming matches from neighbouring bedroom windows out on to the street. I’ve clocked the percussion of stones and bricks and kicks aimed at those same front doors. The tinkling sonatas of shivered windows. Witnessed the aftermath of graffitied threats and unregistered deliveries through the letterbox and charred welcome mats. Fortified to the best of ability as we might, our little realm counts for naught, when plague is afoot. Now it is us men who want to keep you under our wing as we step out the front door. It fully weighs on us, not to offer you freedom as my father did with me, but somehow to protect you from the depredations of your peers. To shore up your vulnerabilities, buttress your defences and anneal you with a thick armour just in order to go out and tackle the world. You can no longer afford to make your own mistakes, such are the potentially dire consequences. The meek don't have a cat in hell's chance of inheriting the earth. No, these days it is our duty to direct you pinpointly and determine your choices to the utmost. And hang any notion of freedom.

To tell the truth, it is more rudimentary than that even. As with the women folk, some part of us doesn’t want you to grow up either. That way somehow you’ll remain safe. Below the age limit of predation, but of course in the animal kingdom, it’s the lagging pup, the dilatory cub which gets devoured. Perhaps that underlies the anxiety to grow up prematurely across all your generation. Childhood now as a degenerative condition. Rapidly accelerating you into febrile adulthood, well in advance of being morally and emotionally equipped for it. Hell bent on fleeing stripling shackles, to plunge headbutt-first into the world of contestation and combat. Strife rather than striving. These men-children, whose bodies keep developing, but whose mental aptitudes have stagnated at around age ten. Inveterate puerility. I’m sorry if all this still comes across as a touch didactic, but I know I’m right you see. I’ve done my research. My fieldwork sat slumped in front of the TV.

For as you could confirm, well perhaps if you’d evidenced a passing smidgeon of interest in the lives of the other people closest to you, I used to be rather partial to those American forensic dramas. Vegging out in front of a vegetative corpse, as it microscopically lays bare its current disposition. The trouble was, the broadcasters were wont to show them on the eve of my rugger matches, when it doesn’t do much for the old martial spirit, for girding up your loins with a jockstrap, to have played out for you all the susceptibilities and vulnerabilities of the human body. So I was in the habit of taping it, in order to watch at a more seasonable time. Now, I know that it is only fictionalised drama, but the science behind it must be basically sound right? General principles and the like. So I gradually digested how the human skeleton alters in its morphology, as it develops and matures into adulthood. How the foramens fuse and close in the baby’s skull and all about maturing through epiphysial ossification. Veritable generation gaps. What better expression, what clearer metaphor, for the necessary span of time and evolution, before bridging the steep slope into majority? Yet today’s youth can’t wait to seal these apertures, these gaping perforations. To blend and merge with adults. To pass for fully grown. But the truth will out. The misconceptions exposed, when the youthful body is laid out on the mortuary slab, before the professional, seconding blade of the pathologist. Revealing them for self-willed anachronisms. Malignant teratologies. Contemporaneously out of their time, what with their foreshortened life cycle. Permanently disjunctured, forever to feel hollow. Cutting down a tree in order to count its rings, thereby finalising its life by the very process.

So, in point of fact, the greatest disservice we could wreak on you, is to keep you innocent of the realities. We have to inoculate you, but with live culture when it’s so easy to brew up wrong. Or err in dispensing it. Push too hard and we risk alienating you altogether. For our part at least, we instituted the precaution of electronically tagging you with mobile phone and personal e-mail address, but you never bothered to check in with us. Therefore realistically, what else were we to do? Obviously there comes a time when a fifty foot garden, swing and sandpit, can no longer contain your rising sap. The sharing of a precious Saturday afternoon sabbatical from school, sat on the sofa viewing Premiership rugby has no appeal I can see that. Nor any post-homework parole into curfewed twilight, marked out watching David Attenborough’s nocturnal creatures with your Mum. We lacked anything tangible to offer you in the way of companionship. Not if you wouldn’t open the hatch to let us into your world.

So to all intents and purposes you were already beyond the home. Where, whether we like it or not, such susceptibilities are also institutionally heightened. Does not the law of the land still baldly state you must attend school, where local ordinance forbids us chaperoning to and from the gates? So you have to resort to the open season of public transport. Or should that be an open sewer? Thanks to the Mayor who still upholds a definitive age of minority, you may not need to purchase a ticket, but there are revenue collectors aplenty lurking along the route. Never mind the stripes on your school blazer, may as well have large concentric circles printed on its back. The exigencies of life, of providing materially for you, mean we simply are not present to fight these battles for you.

All this is to say, that what I have finally come to understand, an epiphany delivered at the bloodstained tip of a weapon, is that you were no more animated amongst your peers, than the shutdown state you manifested at home. You feared them and did all in your impotence, actually to shrink yourself from their presence and their awareness. A stealth bomber without any ordnance. A pilotless drone. That was the height of your ambition. To dodge street radar. Never mind the velleities of me and your mother tugging at your sleeve, you wanted to shroud yourself far more profoundly. Hooded effacement, ideally off the face of the earth. Such wholesale self-enervation, can’t be switched on and off at the shunting of the odd synapse or two. It requires more than a camouflage coating. No mere method acting, but a lifestyle. A full-time occupation. A state of non-being. A non-stop tour of passive duty. A paralysis. Of love, of life. You were so inured with it, you couldn’t unshackle your way out of its cloying stranglehold. This is what we were encountering day after day under our own roof and we didn’t even realise it. Though we railed against its conspicuous symptom. You fought so shy of confrontation, you wouldn’t even take us on, here in a relatively controlled environment. Never flew off the handle, despite innumerable provocations. Never lost your rag with us. See, I wish you had been the mouthy type. To always answer back. Calling us all the names under the sun. Well, maybe not to your mother, I’m not sure she could have withstood that. But if you’d blown a gasket with me, I could have put you back together again. We could have thrashed out the issues. Benefiting both sides. What was troubling you, what perturbed me. And I thought it was maybe because you were still a bit too callow to dare square up to my bulk. But when have you ever known me to raise my hand against you, or anybody for that matter? So in fact I was the least baleful of your persecutors. I had dimensionality and cast a shadow. I could never take you by surprise. Never catch you off guard, not when you were so guarded.

Where I might be wrong, where my empiricism may be flawed, is on the exact age of stuntedness. When the flaw that inevitably yields tragic consequences for others kicks in. Maybe it is nearer to twelve or thirteen. Conceivably you yourself hadn’t actually passed over into it yet, despite all outward appearances. That your brain was still avidly devouring all this input and sifting for its nuggets. I’m convinced that deep down, you knew this is not how you relate to people, cold shouldering and freezing them out. That the penumbra of dimness in which you perched, was still raked by the flashlight of your brooding intelligence. The mere fact that you adopted this subfusc form of camouflage only further attests this. Simply inconceivable that your aura could be contained within a hood. You were far too logical and reasonable, not to be able to find shade and elasticity of meaning. Or if that was beyond you, and you too were consumed by such extremity of language, perhaps that’s why when you were at home you could only stay mute. That you would not unleash such lopsided brutality upon us, your parents. You could sustain the imperviousness, but not the piquing. You were protecting us from yourself. Did such a soft core ultimately do for you in the outside world?

Now can you credit why silence is so annihilating? Because we have nothing else to preserve you. Your shrine is bare. Even when you lodged here, it had the feel of a guest room. Your Mum tells me she no longer can determine your scent in here either. Sods’ law, while the street cleaning crew were flushing your blood from the pavement, she had finally braved your wrath and stripped your bed and washed the linen. Inadvertently sluiced you right out of our lives as it turned out. Nor are we blessed with pictures of any worth. Nothing meriting of a frame, over which she could shed her smeary tears on to the glass and reconstitute you afresh each evening with a wipe of cloth and some loving polish. Due entirely to your dislike of being shuttered in a lens of any sort. What with your instinctive urge to privacy, you seemed to have that preternatural sense of when a camera was snaking in your direction, no matter how surreptitiously. And if you couldn’t wholly deflect the photographic lunge, you could still undermine it with a cock of your head or a ridiculous moue. Supplemented with an unerring ability to command double the range for prompting ‘red-eye’. A diabolic, scornful rebuffing of our paltry attempts to ensnare you. So impermeable to light, that it just recoiled leaving you untouched. Unlimned. Spectral. Us remaining empty handed as you eluded our grasp once again. See, you’ve always had a well-developed aversion of exposure. It’s innate, part of who you are, or who you may be. Or who you may have become had you been granted the opportunity. It just wasn’t developed quite sharply enough in the final reckoning. 

We have nothing left with which to hold you in our minds. No conversations of note that made us stop short or burst out into guffaws. We can’t extrapolate out from the blue-eyed baby pictures (when even you were too young and uncoordinated to resist our impositions), for we have no way of knowing what you would have grown up into. The only social rite of passage we were granted attendance on, has been your funeral. No celebrating exam results. No graduation ceremony. No first job to toast with champagne. No trip to buy the used car for the learner driver. No having your first girlfriend (or boyfriend for that matter), brought round to meet us. No wedding to plan, obviously. Now you remain twelve years old in perpetuity. Forever on the cusp. At the lip of the threshold, but never crossing it. Like your mother and I, clinging rigidly to what we imagined were our posts. Conscientiously and stupidly never venturing to move over on to your side. Did you at least appreciate that you were always the centre of our existence? Even as a black hole sucking in all our energies. But a knife has now prodded us over the event horizon. Where none of us are coming back from. What scraps we are left with, represent an outline. A rough draught. A sketch. A work in progress. A vignette before the fruit died on the vine. Plucked from us. Erased and smudged. The composite picture the police have issued of the boy they want to question has more detail, than the faint clump of overlapping lines we have to depict you.

Given the sparsity of physical prompts bequeathed us, of material mnemonics you wilfully disinherited us from, do you know how your mother spends part of her day now? Sketching you from memory. Hazy memory. Of our own boy. Such a portrait is destined to hang over the lounge fireplace, though whether a finished product will ever see the light of day is beyond my ken. For you see she wastes most of the time prevaricating. Over the propriety of her finally being motivated to take up the easel once more, only in such iniquitous circumstances. But even when she does draught a line, what does she have to draw on? Although you were the perennial sitter, always reclined and unmoving, you eluded any framing. You were as much an apparition in life as you have been fully exorcised in death. Always an essential layer behind. Forever receding. An immaterial witness. And we feel conned. Your mother, who knows all about spatial dynamics, clued up on everything to do with ordinate and abscissa, yet she is totally at a loss. And for my part, I play it over and over endlessly. All that I ought to have said out loud. Trying to make sense. Rather than making you see, turning the lens back on myself for once. So now both your mother and I discover ourselves possessed of a void, rather than a mere absence. We are truly spaceless within these confines. All the self-serving, self-defining warmth we could and did, derive from our predicaments, with you sat in this room radiating out whatever repulse waves you could muster, well now they have corkscrewed into the abyss along with you. Or maybe pile driven might be more fitting, as I stare up at your posters now bleached by the sun (seeing as the curtains are now perpetually tied back open). We were accustomed to empty. But this is crushing, disorienting nullity. There is no geometry where negation is concerned. No triangulation of this particular family to be had for love nor money. Especially not love.