Journey VIII – Soul mates

The next few weeks were baffling but extraordinarily pleasurable. Mostly I just wanted as much sex as possible, and luckily Sophie was more than happy to oblige. We were both making up for lost time it turned out. As I looked around at this community of perpetual adolescent ennui and excess, our deliberate and intense sexuality stood in stark contrast to their absent-minded and passionless fornication. Whereas they just seemed to do it because they could and there didn’t seem to be anything better to do, we went at it with glee and gusto. I came to pity them, if this was what eternity was going to be like for them. I even felt smug.
A lot of the time I couldn’t understand why a sexy woman like Sophie would want to spend so much time with a sad old git like me. I was reassured when she told me she’d been very old when she died too (she wouldn’t tell me exactly how old) and I tried to remind myself what Andrea had said about not presuming to know what women want in a man but I couldn’t help being jealous and possessive sometimes – particularly when she insisted on chatting up absolutely everyone wherever we went and her natural manner was intimate and flirtatious. In truth, in the whole time we were together she never gave me one reason to doubt her and she accepted my insecurities as a compliment and was always reassuring. I know sometimes I was somewhat clingy and suspicious and frankly a bit of a drama queen, but in retrospect I think she must have genuinely liked me or she wouldn’t have put up with it.

‘I was married to the same man all my life’ she told me one morning. It was early that spring. We were in my room letting our coffees cool. I was sitting leaning against the window, feeling the cool glass on my skin. She had her head on my leg. ‘How boring is that?’ she added.
‘High school romance?’
‘Hardly. I went to a convent school, so no. We met at a family thing when I was about thirteen, started dating, and then as soon as we were eighteen we got married. We were big on going to church in our family.’
‘This place must seem a bit...wrong – if you believe in all that.’
‘Totally wrong. Oh everything was wrong.’ She gets up abruptly and wraps a sarong around herself. ‘Shan’t be a sec’ she says and heads along to the bathroom. When she gets back she hands me a plate with a jammy muffin on it. ‘They were doing them in the kitchen’ she says, licking her fingers. I think of her trotting along there with nothing but this thin piece of material around her – everyone eyeing her up. I feel proud and uncomfortable at the same time. Thankfully the discomfort is somehow erotic too and just makes me need to stake my claim again, which is always good.
After we’ve done that (just a quickie) I ask her about her married life.
‘Five kids would you believe...’
‘Bloody hell.’
‘Big house in Southampton – in jolly old Shirley – what a tip.’
‘Why did you stick with it? For the kids?’
‘Partly, but no, it was ok. He was good man. Not terribly bright...’
‘What did he do?’
‘Estate agent.’
‘Wow’ I say, surprised, but she thinks I’m impressed.
‘Don’t. It wasn’t me. I swear, if I ever go back my house will be a mass of random furniture and non-matching crockery and there’ll be stuff everywhere. And there will be one sweet child, and I shall dress like this...’ (She flashes her bottom.) ‘...all the time.’
‘Excellent. Where shall we meet?’
‘On the Palace Pier in Brighton. Midsummer’s day 2000, three in the afternoon.’
‘It’s a date. I’ll buy you a doughnut.’

Another day – an evening a few weeks later – we are in my room and she’s got out one of my magazines and is lying on her stomach, reading. I look at her back and wonder if Paul would have thought she was fat. Probably – she’s no stick insect. She has a very womanly belly and a nice plump bottom. I love looking at it. At the moment it’s got the pattern of the bedspread imprinted on it.
‘You’re in good shape for a mother of five’ I say, slapping her bum. It wobbles most satisfyingly.
‘Gardening’ she says and tenses and relaxes her buttocks at me a few times, making them wobble some more – tempting me to smack them again. ‘This is me just before I got married’ she adds, turning on her back, as if showing me a photograph from her family album. ‘Pretty wasn’t I?’
‘I think you’re very beautiful’ I say, stroking her belly.
‘Hmm...’ she says, smiling coyly and turning over again, but then adds, ‘I wasn’t very pretty later on.’
‘Well who ever is?’
‘Oh come of it. I bet you were quite a chiselled old dude in your later years.’
My turn to be bashful.

‘So... was he any good in bed?’ I enquire nonchalantly.
‘Who?’
‘Hubby.’
‘Why?’ she says, grinning at me. ‘Do you think I’m comparing?’
‘Of course. You know me.’
‘I don’t know... He smelt funny. I never got used to that. I don’t think he washed enough really. I don’t know, he had that soapy sweaty Old Spice smell, you know?’
‘Didn’t you say anything?’
She turns and sits up in front of me, then picks up a pillow and hugs it to herself. We’ve got some chocolates from somewhere and she reaches over to get one. I hold the box for her. She sits and chews for a while.
‘What you’ve got to understand’ she says, ‘is that I didn’t know any different. When you marry that young, you’ve just got nothing to compare it with. It’s all just the way it is.’ And she shrugs and lies back, still covering herself with the pillow. I don’t think I’ve seen her want to cover herself before. It bothers me slightly. We sit silently for some time – me wondering what to say next.
‘I’m sorry’ I say eventually, ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’
‘It’s ok, really. It’s sad more than anything. I did love him.’ and she chucks the pillow away and reaches out and pulls me to her and kisses me and we fuck ferociously again.
‘For the record, he was nowhere near as good in bed as you are’ she tells me afterwards but I can’t help feeling there’s something like regret in her voice.

Over the next few months she tells me a little more about her life.
‘I was the eldest of six would you believe.’
‘Didn’t they believe in contraception?’
She shakes her head and looks away. ‘Sex is for making babies’ she says. ‘Contraception is irrelevant. That’s what they said. I don’t know. I was home-schooled until I was eleven then they sent me to the church school. I didn’t really know anything else.’
‘Didn’t the other girls tell you anything?’
‘A bit. It was pretty shocking. They had pictures from a men’s magazine. I didn’t know what to make of it. I was a bit of an outsider to be honest.’
‘I can sympathise.’
She smiles and rolls over and lays her head on my leg. I stroke her hair away from her face. She takes a bite out of a plum and says. ‘It was pretty crazy. I went straight from looking after my brothers and sisters, straight into looking after Doug and then our kids. I never did anything else.’
‘Didn’t you want to get out, do something different, get a job, travel?’
It seems impossible to believe that she wouldn’t have, the way she is now.
‘Honestly it just didn’t seem realistic to me. I couldn’t imagine it. It’s just not the sort of thing people like us did.’
‘But you’re bright, independent...’
‘Now I am. I wasn’t then. You wouldn’t have known me back then. I failed all my exams, left school at sixteen... I don’t know.’
‘But you weren’t thick, surely?’
‘No. I just didn’t think that way. Oh look can we talk about something else?’
‘Sure. Sorry.’
‘What do you make of Gina and Aaron?’

And so it was. We left it at that, for the time being at any rate. Later I learned more, by little clues and hints. I felt she wanted to talk about it but wasn’t ready, or didn’t want to bore me, or put me off her perhaps. I have this image of her in a frock that would not have looked out of place in The Depression – grey and shapeless and with varying quantities of insulating and obscuring layers beneath, depending on the season. Her parents were not insanely religious but very old and extremely traditional – hard and judgemental and anti everything about the sixties. As with my parents, there would have been no point in making a fuss. You just had to put up with it. Sophie never went to work or took any courses but at the same time it was quite obvious that she was very well read (much more so than me.) She told me she used to go to the public library during shopping trips, hide the books under the baby’s things and then sneak them out to the allotment shed. Like me she’d gone down to the shed for her illicit pleasures, but hers were coffee and literature. The allotment was her haven. She took the children down there to play in the mud while she tended the vegetables and read her book. Doug apparently didn’t like his shoes getting dirty so never found out. He came over as being a fairly harmless but obsessive individual.
‘Couldn’t you see what you were missing?’ I asked on more than one occasion. She just shrugged.

She was good for me though. We mucked about and laughed a lot. She even laughed at my anxieties, but in a generous way, not in a cruel way and I didn’t mind. She told me I was gorgeous, and when we were alone, I almost believed her. She seemed to understand why I didn’t quite believe this could be happening to me.
‘I chose you, remember?’ she reminded me. ‘Don’t imagine I give that sort of performance every night. I knew you’d be worth it’.
I wondered sometimes how often she did ‘perform’ like that before she met me, but I sensed that it would not be a good thing to ask. She was with me, I told myself, and that’s what counted.

The spring slowly unfolds and the streets begin to wear the first tentative tendrils of their summer exuberance. The weather is still chilly but she comes with me on my explorations – usually dressed in jeans and tops like normal people but sometimes she surprises me – on one memorable occasion coming out in just a plastic mac and wellies. She loves to do it then and there, on the wet grass or bent over a wall. We’re not very discreet about it and we got caught a couple of times. But we never go into any of the houses. Sometimes I swear I see faces at the windows but I don’t let on.

We still go to quite a lot of parties too and, as I say, I spend a lot of time watching her. They’re a different sort of party to the ones I went to early on – more classy I suppose, more mature perhaps, and she wears somewhat more than she did the night we got together (underwear, for example), but there’s still a sense that she’s not really decent. I watch her being charming – everybody loves her and I can tell that when people talk to her she has a way of making them feel fascinating, and, as a result, they are. Plus they perhaps think they have a chance with her. I’m never entirely at ease at times like these, but then, from the middle of a conversation she’ll turn a little and, without directly looking at me or giving any obvious sign, she’ll let me know she is looking forward to coming over to me. Sometimes I go over and she introduces me and I join in the conversation. When they see we’re together you can see their disappointment, but it is always brief because she is just too lovely to be upset with and I feel very proud.
I ask her about the way she behaves one night in someone’s lounge. It’s been a session rather like that first time, except the lights are dimmed and nobody else in the room seems to be very awake. In retrospect our behaviour sounds appallingly decadent but we were far from being the only ones. Sometimes it seemed like no one was doing anything much else. In fact our monogamy came to be seen as rather sweet and old-fashioned.

She is still straddling my lap – I am softening inside her and, as usual, sitting in a puddle. She has no top on at all and her neat breasts catch the green light from the stereo. I ask her how she comes to be such an exhibitionist after such a blameless God-fearing life like hers.
‘Well, I just don’t have anything to worry about here do I? I mean – I can’t get pregnant. I can’t get AIDS. I can’t die of pneumonia from not wearing enough’ she adds with a wicked grin. ‘It’s just such a release. You weren’t married were you?’
‘No.’
She nods ‘I don’t blame you’ she says, pulling a shawl over her shoulders. ‘Oh don’t get me wrong’ she adds. ‘I’m glad I did it – got married I mean. I wouldn’t appreciate this half as much if I hadn’t, but I wouldn’t do it again. Been there, done that’ she says, and gets up to rearrange her skirt. She goes and gets us a drink to share, still topless, and then we snuggle down for the night on a huge cushion and covered in other people’s coats and things.
She tells me that her behaviour probably has something to do with the frustrations of sleeping with no one but the same boyish control freak all that time.
Later on I did get around to telling her that my single status had not been a matter of choice and that led on to me telling her a lot of other dreary crap about my life. I knew it was a risk but I wanted to be honest with her as much as possible. I was afraid perhaps her idea of me would be diminished by knowing about my failures but she just hugged me and kissed me and told me how impressed she was with how far I’d come since then and how great I was going to be next time around.

Voyage XVI – Fantasies

I go back to my cabin and get out my drawing things. It’s getting dark now but the lighting in here is really good – like one of those daylight bulbs you can get. I lean back and look at what I’ve been doing lately. The fact is they’re mostly of Lucy, but not from life obviously – from my imagination.
Back home, when I was about thirteen I suppose, I started making my own pornography. I just started one day when I didn’t know what to do next and I was doodling and the lines of a woman’s body just emerged from the pen like magic. I suppose I’d spent so much time looking at the magazines they’d just got printed on my brain. So, I never could get hold of enough real porn, and most of it was pretty dreary to be honest, so I started making my own.
I didn’t have a type – I drew redheads with freckles and olive skinned women with black hair, slender women and voluptuous women, mature women and teenage girls, shaved women and hairy women, women undressing, women masturbating, women together. After a while I didn’t draw anything much else, and I think I got quite good at it, considering I’d never actually seen a real live naked woman in my life (and certainly not an actual vagina) and still haven’t to be honest.
God knows what would have happened if mum had found any of it.

I’ve been thinking about what Joe said, about being gay. It’s funny but I never really thought about it before. Freud said that everyone naturally has homosexual tendencies (and other tendencies too). I never really wanted to put men in my drawings at all. I’m not really sure why. I tried once or twice but it felt sort of, I don’t know, sort of ugly. If I think of men having sex it just seems sort of clumsy and a bit disgusting to be honest. I don’t know where that idea comes from. I try to think of Joe like that, sexually I mean. He’s a nice enough looking bloke I suppose. If I was going to handle someone else’s penis I suppose his’d be as good as anyone’s. I just don’t really fancy it. I suppose I should be a bit more broad-minded, in a ‘don’t knock it until you’ve tried it’ sort of way but I think I’d have some sort of sense even without trying it, that I’d like it, but I don’t. Margaret Mead said that extreme heterosexuality is actually a sort of perversion. Anyway, I just like looking at women. I think they’re absolutely fantastic, and if that makes me a pervert, well, so be it.

Sometimes I spent almost all night in the Wendy house, looking at porn, thinking about women. It was really dark and a bit dingey in there, damp and dusty, with the ivy coming in and the spiders and such like, but it did feel very peaceful, especially if the rain was really battering down outside and the trees were whipping about on the railway embankment or the fog-horn down at the harbour was going. I usually went down there in just my dressing gown and wellies so I could cover up immediately if anyone came, and I kept the drawings and photos in a sketchpad so I could close that up quickly too. Nobody ever did. My mum used to wonder why I was exhausted in the morning. Sometimes I couldn’t get up in the morning at all.
I used to think about women I knew – the one who ran the pet shop for example – she was a little weird looking (quite a long nose and big googly eyes) but you could tell she would be a good shape under her clothes, and then there was Amelia’s friend Katrina. She was fucking amazing. Really tight jeans – you could see the outline of her vagina when she sat down. And then there were some of the girls at school – Camille especially, and then later on there was Gill of course. She was the best. I used to imagine coming across her while I was out walking on the Downs in the wind and rain – her in just a plastic mac and boots after she’d been out riding. I imagined seeing her sit down on the wet grass, open her coat, letting the rain wash over her pale breasts and belly (not caring if anyone was looking), watching her slip her knickers down over her boots and throw them aside and then begin to touch herself. Or else I imagined her walking up the hill ahead of me – seeing her bare arse under her coat and watching those two fleshy folds between her legs squeeze and slip together as she walked. I don’t know why but it was always cold and drizzling, or else snowing in these fantasies. I always liked the feel of the cold air on my skin and the wet grass. I don’t know why.

Of course the actual girls at school thought I was a joke. I don’t think I ever actually made an appearance in my own fantasies – that would have been just too ridiculous. I was just forced to watch them, but that was ok.

Actually though, don’t laugh, but I don’t think it was just about sex. I really wanted more than that. I suppose I’m a bit of a romantic too. Honestly, I really wanted to sit on a balcony by the sea with a girl and watch the sun go down and sip champagne or something, and pick flowers for her, and make her sloppy compilation tapes with people like Dusty Springfield and The Walker Brothers. I wanted to slow dance with her to Body Talk. I know, I know. It’s a ridiculous record. I can’t even remember who recorded it now, but every time I hear it I despair. I just wanted that, to do that – to hold onto her (whoever she was), moving together, lost in each other, oblivious, going round and round on the dance floor, breathing into her hair, my hands on her hips at the end of the evening, and her not embarrassed and wanting to get away but there with me, as relieved and amazed as I’d be. And when they turn the music off and the lights go on, to look shyly into each other’s eyes and hope that this was not all.
Jesus Christ I wanted that. I never asked any of them to dance, I admit. If they weren’t going to say yes in private they certainly weren’t going to say it in public.

Well anyway... I don’t know if any of the other blokes felt the same way – we never talked about it, but that was what I wanted – I wanted to be in love. I still do, more than anything in the world. I want a girl who will come to parties, and come for walks in the country, and most of all I want her to share my bed. I want someone to sleep with, and that’s not a euphemism. Ok, I admit I want her to be sitting there on the balcony watching the sunset with no knickers on, but I also want to bring her croissants and orange juice in the morning.
That’s what all this is really about. All that stuff Joe talks about – about careers and so on. I can’t tell him all this. Of course I’d love to earn a living doing something I like, and rent a nice room in Brighton or out in the country, go to university, maybe travel a bit. I’d love to do those things, for myself. But really, the main thing is, when I do those things, maybe I’ll meet her, and what’s more, maybe she’ll want to get to know me and I’ll have a proper relationship. I don’t feel very manly for admitting it, but that’s what I want.
And then we have the reality, as mum would have said.
I don’t know where all this comes from, this hope. Mostly my life has been fairly useless, but somewhere, part of me has always had this idea that, if only I could meet a girl and she got to know me properly, without all this shit about money and living with my parents in the way, that it would be alright, and I’d stand a chance.
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Joe IX – Mum

‘What is it about your parents? You don’t seem awfully keen to talk about them.’
I shrug and look away ‘dunno’ I say. ‘They were alright.’ Joe looks sceptical. ‘Really, I mean it. They were alright.’
‘You got on alright with them.’
‘Well, you know. Parents...’
‘I do actually. I was one.’
‘Oh’ I say. I’m surprised because A, he looks about 21 and B, he says he’s gay. I realise though that the first is misleading, and anyway he could legally have a five year old at 21. I ask about the other thing.
He thinks about it for a while, then says ‘Hey, I’m the one supposed to be asking the questions around here’ then goes on to tell me that he didn’t really admit what he was, even to himself until he was about thirty, which answers both points really. I ask about his children. ‘Just the one’ he says, ‘Kirsty’.
She was ten when he died apparently – he’s not sure what of – some weird thing where he just didn’t seem to be able to fight off infections any more. He died of pneumonia. I want to ask him what happened but sense it’s not my place. I want to say that if he needs someone to talk to... but that seems wrong too. Instead I have a brainwave and ask if his guide had been helpful, and if he could still talk to them now if he needed to. He smiles warmly at me. ‘I’m ok now, if that’s what you mean. Thanks.’ He sits and thinks for a moment. Then he looks up. ‘Anyway’ he says abruptly. ‘Your folks. What did your dad do?’
‘Various things’ I say vaguely. ‘Mum was the breadwinner really. She worked as a receptionist and secretary for a few years then got a job running a nursing agency in Brighton later on.’
‘That’s quite unusual.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘You know what I mean’ he says smiling. And I do. In some ways I respect them for it, my parents, not just doing the normal thing. Why do I feel weird about it?
‘It was alright.’
‘Fair enough. I wasn’t criticising.’
‘Mum was weird though. She just had to have things a certain way, sort of arbitrarily, unnecessarily difficult.’
‘Like what?’
I think for a moment. ‘Oh, I know – like she wouldn’t have a lock on the bathroom door, “in case there was an accident” she said, but then we had to keep the door closed all the time, “in case of visitors” or something, so we all had to knock on the door to see if anyone was in there, but if it was her in there she wouldn’t answer, so I was always barging in on her when I was little, getting told off for it.’
Joe smiles sympathetically at me. ‘Bit of an exhibitionist then, your mother?’
‘God no. Absolutely the opposite. She was too polite to shout she was on the loo, so if we needed to go, either we were going round the house checking to see where she was, or we were there outside the door for ages whispering “Are you in there mum? I’m going to come in.” and eventually you’d hear a little noise in there, toilet paper ripping along the perforations or something, and you’d know to come back later.’ I shake my head in wonder. Joe is chuckling. ‘We ended up peeing in the garden a lot of the time.’
I haven’t really thought about it much since I’ve been here. It all seems funny now, but it wasn’t at the time.
‘She was fucking mad’ I observe coolly. ‘She wouldn’t let my dad say things like “germination” or “pollination”. I remember once she had some friends round and he came in and said he’d had a good germination out in the greenhouse and she went berserk.’
Me and Joe are both having a good laugh by now.
‘Didn’t she know what the words meant?’ he asks.
‘I suppose so. I don’t know what she thought. She was just... barking.’
We sit and think about it for a while, giggling a little from time to time.
‘I don’t know why I keep saying “was”. It’s me that’s past tense isn’t it.’
‘Well... tenses are a little hard to pin down here – you could be future too.’
‘But right now we’re in each others past, aren’t we.’
He shrugs a little. ‘That’s the thing’ he says sadly.
I really want to ask him, if he does go back, if he’ll be able to change things, so Kirsty won’t have to have her dad die when she’s little, but I can’t find the right words.

‘Tell me what it felt like, to be there, in the house, with your family’ he says at the beginning of another session.
I think for quite a long time. ‘Like I was a nuisance? Like I was always in the way?’ I say finally.
‘In the way of what, do you think?’
‘Them getting on with life I suppose – stuff they needed to do – normal stuff.’
‘You felt that they didn’t want you around.’
‘Maybe they wanted someone easier, more normal.’
‘You’re talking as if you can just submit your requirements and take delivery of a child of your choice. It’s not like that.’
‘No, I know that, obviously, it’s just...’
‘What?’
‘Maybe I could have tried harder – been more, I don’t know, less individual – less awkward. It’s like, for instance, just before I... just before I ended up here we had this ridiculous fight because I didn’t want to drink instant coffee any more. I always said I’d rather have a glass of water. I didn’t mean it as a criticism but they always took it that way. I just didn’t like instant coffee.
Anyway, there was this old metal coffee pot in the larder. I think it was a present from Spain from somebody. Anyway mum said fresh coffee was too expensive so I said I’d pay the difference, but then she said she wouldn’t have me paying for food and drink all the while I lived in her house. Then she said she was worried the coffee pot might explode, so I ended up brewing up on a camping stove down in the Wendy house like it was some illegal drug fix or something. Then they found out what I was doing and took it away because they thought I might start a fire...’
Telling this now it all seems so ridiculous. Maybe I should have just let it go, for a quiet life, as dad used to say, but I couldn’t. I don’t know why. I just couldn’t.
‘Whenever mum made herself a coffee she’d make one for me too and then announce “Oh I’m so sorry. I forgot you won’t drink our coffee any more” and pour it down the sink.’
‘Sounds like something of a power struggle going on’ says Joe, clearly amused at my petty drama.
‘It’s not funny.’
‘I know.’ He looks around the room, for inspiration I suppose.
‘Maybe if I could just have...’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know – just given in – let them have it their way.’
‘Why do you think they were so intent on stopping you working out your own way? I mean, you don’t seem to have been a bad kid. You weren’t taking drugs or doing anything dangerous. You were never rude or even particularly naughty from what I can see. You were creative, busy, intelligent... You did well enough at school, up until you’re A levels anyway. What do you think was going on?’
‘I don’t know. I just think.... I just think I was too... different. Maybe if I’d just been more...’
‘Maybe if you’d just been someone else?’
‘Maybe... You know what I mean.’
‘No. Sorry Gabriel, but no. The trouble seems to be they didn’t want you, and it doesn’t matter how hard you try Gabriel, you’ll never be someone else – not and stay sane. Look...’ he leans forward and takes my hands in his. Oddly enough this doesn’t feel uncomfortable.
‘When you have children, you have them for better or for worse. There should be vows at the christening except that’d be too late. It should be on the bedstead, on the condom packet, over the damn pub door.
If you have sex, even if you use contraception, you have to take responsibility for the child that may result, and you can’t just look at it later and say “This is not quite what I had in mind.”
It seems to me you think it’s your fault that you were not the type of boy your parents wanted, or even that it’s your fault you were born at all, but it’s not. When you have a child you have to go with what comes along, make the most of it, as it is. Teach it, play with it, guide it, protect it by all means, but it’s not a little custom-made mini version of yourself, or a do-it-yourself buddy. And it’s not up to the child to make everything alright for you – to give your life meaning. It’s not there for the parent’s benefit.’ He sits back, hooks his thumbs in his pockets. ‘Or not any more anyway. It used to make economic sense to have children simply so you could look forward to a relatively comfortable old age, but not any more. Now it’s a choice people make and have to take responsibility for, and yes, even when it’s an accident. I hate these absent fathers who won’t even pay maintenance more than almost anyone. Like I say the adult must accept responsibility that there may be a child, or I guess pay for an abortion at any rate.’
‘Mum would never have done that.’
‘But she’d bring a child into the world and then make it apologise for its very existence? Think about it Gabriel – I’m not convinced you owe them anything.’

‘I’m not just here to blame other people for what happened’ I say, very quietly. I’m close to tears again. ‘I’m really not just saying it’s everyone else’s fault.’ I rummage around in my pockets trying to find a tissue. Joe picks up the box and hands me one.
‘I never said you were’ he says.
‘I know you can’t do that’ I say, too loudly now. I try to lower my voice. ‘You can’t just blame your upbringing or whatever... It’s just... I just can’t stand it being all my fault... everything... They can’t blame me for everything can they?’
‘Of course not.’
‘But it does seem like that.’
Joe nods, mulling it over.
I wipe my eyes and blow my nose and hide the evidence in my pocket. (Can’t have the others seeing me like this.)
He puts the tissues next to me and we sit in silence a while longer. It’s getting late.
‘The thing is Joe, I’m not a child any more. I should be able to...’
‘Gabriel, that’s irrelevant and you know it is. Children don’t just become adults, wham, like that, on their sixteenth birthday, or their eighteenth or twenty-first or their fiftieth for that matter. The way you are as a child – the way you were with your parents all those years... It stays with you your whole life. It might work for you or it might not or you may be able to change parts of it if you really try, but what happens when you’re a child... You can’t just alter that by force of will, because you think you aught to or because you think it’s about time. Most adults never do and teenagers certainly can’t be expected to. It’s never the children’s fault or even fifty-fifty.’
‘But what’s the point blaming them? What are they going to do about it?’
‘In your parents’ case, I suspect, nothing. Unfortunately I don’t think you can expect anything much of them Gabriel. I doubt they’ll be prepared to really think about it and they certainly won’t admit to anything. I’m afraid it becomes your unavoidable responsibility as an adult to make the best of it and try not to make the same mistakes with your own kids. That’s probably the best you can do.’
‘So I can blame my parents all I like but I still have to take responsibility for sorting out the mess myself.’
‘That’s about it, yes.’
Oddly enough that makes me feel a lot better. Strange.
To continue reading, either go to Lulu to buy or download the book, or let me know when you want to read the next bit and I'll post it on the blog.