‘By-ee.’ She feigns some kind of daughterly dotage, pushing out a chirpiness that doesn’t really exist in her. Because she can’t agree to dinner. She doesn’t want to lie to him anymore. She loves him too much for that.

He walks away.

And that is the last she will ever speak to her father.

The last time she would have seen him would have been to not see him at all.

He is a voice through a door. A concern in the distance.

The answer to a question she should ask.

17

232 – POET

Back under his duvet, avoiding the ink spot, he kneels and touches his head to his knees.

He grips his hair and squeezes hard, wringing it out as though it’s his mother’s neck. More displacement. More avoidance. His mother isn’t even the issue. He loves her so completely. It is not even himself that he despises. It’s the person he is never going to be. The poet he cannot become. Because he’s just not good enough.

There’s no talent show to enter for poetry where a panel of alleged experts deal out truths. He has had to discover it himself. That the gift he thought he possessed does not exist. That he is shit at the only thing he wants to do. Yet, still, he persists. Hoping things will change. He does not want his father to be right.

He should be twenty-two tomorrow.

He shouldn’t be living with his parents. He knows that. It’s his own fault that he allows himself to exist in such an infuriating way. He’s worse than those people on television who believe they can sing even when they are told they can’t. But he’s not deluded. He understands his limitations. Which is worse?

This is his choice.

This is every morning.

A moment of gratification followed by lingering torment.

He knows that he needs to take a breath and count and enter his thoughts into a diary to read at a later date, once he has calmed, to gain some perspective on how he feels; how irrational he can be. They are not against him. His mother is not against him.

The poet tells himself to snap out of it.

Get up. Just get the fuck up and out of the house.

He can hear the rattle of cutlery and crashing of plates as somebody empties the dishwasher. Undoubtedly his mother. She does the work while he sits in his chair and reads the newspaper.

Jeans, a plain white T-shirt, checked shirt and thin scarf that serves no function other than to look a bit like a poet, he snaps some oversized headphones around his neck, picks up a pen and notepad and opens his bedroom door to the stuffy old-fashionedness that awaits him downstairs.