25-26 Years Old

May has turned into a sub-sentient replica of her fat arsed boyfriend. Between the two of them I feel as though they have almost ruined something I spent my life (a couple of months) nurturing. May's mother won't even sit down with him, he is so patronising to women. Laughs at his own jokes, a rank, cavernous chuckle that happens somewhere inside his own throat. I keep imagining that he is somehow controlling her with his bottom, which has its own gravity, which he must rest on her at night and crush oxygen from her body until she is as senseless, mawkish and bigoted as he is.

“You’re bound not to like your daughter’s lovers. It’s natural but you have to let her make her own mistakes.”

I have recorded another self help video. I may have stolen the scarecrow again. Is there a video of me setting fire to a large straw bottom? Is that the same warehouse as before? I only watch it once, but I don’t seem convincing. I really think I hate him.

All the things she used to think are dead, and now she is a vessel for all his fatuous opinions and dull notions. I ask

“How are you?”

“Oh we’re fine. We’re nesting.”

Nesting means they are putting on weight and becoming stupid. They enjoy a great deal of television programmes. They have learnt the schedules, they eat takeaways only. He enjoys watching programmes about cars. Now my daughter is obsessed with cars.

She tells me all about the kinds of car they want to buy. She tells me all about this programme she enjoys about makeovers. They makeover someone’s body, face, car and house all in one go. For the purposes of television they turn someone into someone else completely.

When they think about food and their favourite programme they both silently wriggle and vibrate their heads. They giggle and call each other ridiculous names. Once they came to stay and everything in our house was dismissed as weird. The food was compared unfavourably to their local Chinese restaurant.

“We love Chinese food”

They mean Chinese takeaway. They mean TV. They mean silence. They are talking marriage.

24-25 Years Old

Graduation and a visit to May’s house at university, it was a strained affair. We sat in her living room. I sat on a huge brown arm-chair that was badly misshapen and full of dangerous springs. I drank tea that was cold and flavourless because the kettle they had is so broken it fails to reach boiling point, but switches itself off somewhere around 70.

“At 71 it just gives up.” May announces, badly arranged smile on her invincible face.

Seventy one. I look at May’s kettle to see if I can fix it, to stop everything ending at 71, but I have no power over the kettle. I have a screwdriver the wrong size, a hammer and a socket-wrench. All useless. I cannot stop everything ending at 71.

I was distracted by the kettle, why didn’t they get a new one? May’s mother understands, but has distractions of her own. For the first time in years she wears no makeup. She really isn’t supposed to do this, it is a mark of abject subservience. Today for her daughter’s graduation, she is herself. I still can’t see her face because of bad light. I settle instead for an ancient, familiar touch on the back of the hand, which makes me gasp a little. Reminds me of death.

I listened to speeches made by academics that were tributes to themselves and their scholastic powerhouse, not about May. I counted easily 34 faculty and relatives who were aged over seventy one: Unfair.

I thought constantly about death.

I asked May how she could cope with drinking tea from a kettle that only ever made it to 71.

“You just have to imagine the last nineteen.”

This depressed me: She is doing everything too late. She’s going to stop at 71.

We took May home for a few days, before it was time for her to settle down (boyfriend). The students performed for us. Sang heroic legends in our house that opens out now into a huge stage.

They seemed to be singing “What now?”

May graduated with a 2:1 and no idea what’s now.

“Good for you! There’s still plenty of time!”

There is hardly any time.

23-24 Years Old

360 days in complete darkness. I was sick for much of the time. Locked in the rictus of the parent inactive. Bent double by the radio, blind in the cobwebs of the kitchen and drunk already in the infinite dawn in which nothing will open and no one will ever go to work. I learnt nothing. In the distant sound of memory is the echo of my voice, telephoning everybody I know one at a time to listen to them talking about a life I no longer have a picture of. I laugh an hour after something was said. And then there is a postcard. From Fiji. I am coming home.

I blinked and with five days left of the year I was surrounded by the new students, eight of them, of the mother of my daughter, who have all come to be schooled as warriors in the ancient art of Kabuki theatre. My home is being rebuilt around me, in huge elaborate colours and ornamented with flawless calligraphic words.

In the post is a thank you letter from May, six months before, in the pale smoke of my kitchen wilderness I managed again to bail her out of some financial difficulty. It was at the expense again of the electricity bill, hence the darkness. She tries hard to get by but I have realised in the fog of my time sitting still that my flaw as a parent may have been to fail in passing on a sense of thrift to May. I have failed to pass this on because I don’t have it. You can’t pass on what you don’t have. Entropy.

So that’s ok. A secret wish for things to be simple again has been granted. She is bad with money. So am I. But she can always have money at the expense of my light.

Good. Keep spending. You’ll never starve. We’ll never starve. Hu-rrah!

And from now on there will always be light, thanks to the ingenuity of the students and May’s mother who have created a small theatre of timber with gardens of ornate topiary.

I have no idea what happened to all the rabbits, or my exercise equipment.