Not so very long ago – though it feels like a lifetime away, tucked somewhere between youthful folly and the first stirrings of adulthood – I committed an act of such ridiculous misjudgement that it ought to belong to those halcyon days of childhood I so fondly recount. And yet, here I am, book in hand, sinking into the well-worn pages of something I devoured in those very years, only to be unceremoniously thrust back into a memory I might otherwise have left to gather dust.
I’m not often inclined to reminisce about my early adulthood. There are ghosts there I would rather not stir, echoes of missteps and misfortunes best left slumbering. But just this once, I shall pluck a little jewel from the wreckage and lay it before you.
Independence came to me early, not so much a gentle easing into self-sufficiency as a headlong dive into the deep end, with barely time to draw breath. By my late teens, I had my own home, a car, a cleaning lady – of all things – and the trappings of what some might call a promising future. The career, however, was not the one I had dreamt of, but life, as we well know, is less a carefully penned sonnet and more an inkblot splattered across the page. By the time I was barely twenty, I had also fathered a child – my son, my marvellous boy. The moment he came into the world, I clutched him to my chest and wept like a babe myself, undone by the sheer magnitude of it all. If I could step back through the corridors of time, I would relive that moment over and over, though for his mother’s sake, I would spare her the labour pains.
For a brief spell, between houses, I had to return to my parents’ home, a situation that did not sit well with me after tasting the sweet freedom of neglecting my bed, scattering crumbs at my leisure, and leaving socks to form small colonies wherever they pleased. Back under my mother’s watchful eye, I had to curb these indulgences. I could no longer drape my possessions haphazardly like an artist strewing paint upon a canvas.
It was a curious thing, to be back in my old bedroom – a room that had, in my absence, been stripped of its youthful defences. Gone were the posters that once plastered the walls, the stereo that had drowned out many a dull evening, the record collection, the guitar, even my cherished Star Wars action figures and my life-sized plastic lightsabre, as if my past had been neatly boxed away and filed under ‘childhood: concluded.’ Later, I would buy this very house, intending to turn that room into a sanctuary – a study, a retreat – but as with many good intentions, it never came to pass. Instead, I settled for a library and study in the old dining room, which, in truth, served me better.
At the time, the girl who would later become my wife visited me every evening after work. We dined, as was customary, with my parents, engaging in polite, if predictable, conversation before retreating upstairs to determine the course of our evening. If an outing was in order, a change of clothes was required. My mother, ever the sentinel of propriety, would not dream of letting me step foot outside in what she deemed my “scruffs.”
In those days, I was rather fond of a cigarette, though under no circumstances was I allowed to smoke upstairs. This rule, of course, was about as effective as King Canute’s command to hold back the tide. I spent many an evening half-dangling out of my bedroom window, exhaling plumes of smoke into the night air, followed by frantic bursts of air freshener in a futile attempt to erase the evidence. My parents were no fools, and lectures followed as surely as night follows day.
One evening, as I prepared to go out, my girlfriend’s friend arrived, as she often did, knocking lightly before peeking her grinning face around the door. The process of changing was, as always, a swift and unceremonious affair. Not one to relinquish my cigarette, I clamped it between my lips while crouching behind the bed to pull on a clean pair of trousers, half-concealed from view like some Dickensian urchin filching bread from a market stall. Squinting against the curling tendrils of smoke, I yanked at my trouser leg –
And sneezed.
The cigarette flew from my mouth in an arc of impending disaster. In a blind panic, I flailed, patting at the thing like a madman trying to smother an invisible flame, only to find – horror of horrors – a neat, perfectly round burn in the pristine carpet. It was the size of a small coaster, the very sort one might place a teacup upon, and in that moment, it might as well have been a gaping chasm leading straight to damnation.
The girls gasped in unison, their expressions a symphony of dismay. “Your mother’s going to skin you alive, Robert!” came the inevitable chorus, their voices a mix of schadenfreude and genuine alarm.
“Hang on,” I said, a dubious plan forming.
On hands and knees, I plucked at the surrounding carpet fibres, gathering a delicate pinch of fluff and gently pressing it into the hole. Miraculously, it blended in almost seamlessly. I patted it down with the reverence of a sculptor perfecting his masterpiece. The girls watched, dubious but impressed.
For two blissful days, the deception held. Then, one evening, as I stepped out of my car, my father was outside, casually swilling the pathway with a look of foreboding.
“Keep your head down if I were you,” he muttered darkly.
I frowned. “Oh? Who’s died now?”
“No one… yet,” came the ominous reply. “Your mother vacuumed your room this afternoon.”
A cold dread settled in my gut. I exhaled, my voice barely above a whisper. “Shit…”
My father shook his head, the faintest hint of amusement tugging at his lips. “You should have used glue.”
And thus, like Adam’s futile attempt to hide his nakedness with fig leaves, my patchwork deception had been laid bare.
Wording 