32-33 Years Old

My family of badly wired lamps float past me, producing hot noises of exasperation. They curse my clumsiness, my half-blindness. My daughter furious because her child is unremarkable, and obsessed with a twin she failed to conceive. Of course she never says this. She just says

“Oh Jesus Dad, get out of the way!”

She titters out savage little remarks to infantilise me when I spill drink on my chin, clear the table one object at a time, covering an age across the kitchen.

We don’t talk about the fact that they have come to live here at my expense. I’m assuming there was a financial crisis of some kind, which would explain why they don’t talk to me much. They want to keep this news from me because I am unfit for work, because the banner which once said ‘Father’, my standard, has lost its flutter. Is wrapped around me now as an adult nappy.

“You’re still under my roof!”

I yell it when they’ve all gone out, or I am walking in the park. I go walking with Fronde telling him stories only he and I understand, about how he doesn’t actually exist. How none of it is real. He happily gurgles, mutters out boxes that will soon unfold as real words. He doesn’t realise they contain more meaning now than they will when he learns to articulate.

“And now they talk to me like this! Under my roof!”

“buh-hi-ah-nooninini”

“Exactly.”

People listen when you talk like a baby.

I haven’t said a single word in English for weeks, people take notice of me this way. When I’m perambulating across the house carrying a dirty fork,

“googooogooogooo”

I smile and I dribble, behaving as though I have aged as quickly as they all have, when of course I have not, I’ve had just one birthday since this all began. And they treat me like an old man!

I confront them, speaking clearly into the impenetrable glare of lights

“This is my home! I will not stand for it!” (googoogooo)

But it isn’t mine. It’s theirs. My daughter has taken her mother and I in. I am completely at their mercy. Must escape this.