I still lived at home with my parents, a fact that carried a constant, low-grade hum of shame. But it was the unspoken reality for most people my age now. The dream of renting your own place, especially anywhere near the city, had curdled into a bitter joke for our generation. Being a Uni student meant my entire income, a paltry student grant and the meagre wages from my weekly night shifts at the Seven-Eleven, wouldn't cover a single month's rent for a shoebox studio. This arrangement was a source of profound disappointment for my mother and father, a tangible failure they could point to. But then, I was their perpetual let-down; one more item on a long list of ways I hadn't turned out as expected.
My four older sisters were the gleaming counterpoints to my narrative. They were the success stories, happily married with growing broods of children, ensconced in homes with manicured lawns and good, stable jobs. They were chapters in my parents' lives that had closed neatly and satisfactorily. I was the problematic, unresolved epilogue.
As I turned the key in the lock, the familiar sound of the daytime television game show bled into the hallway. My mother's voice, flat and weary, called out without hope, "Simon? Is that you?"
I walked into the open doorway of the living room, a reluctant spectator. "Yes, Mum. It's me." I leaned against the frame, my backpack feeling like a bag of contraband. I took in the domestic tableau with a cold sense of foreboding. My mother was a permanent fixture in the worn floral armchair, a landmark in the stagnant landscape of the room. Was this my destiny? Could I, would I, ever end up like this?
She hadn't worked in years. The official diagnosis was depression, but in practice, it meant that since I was about ten, she had simply… stopped. She sat before the TV, a silent monarch holding court over a kingdom of dust and discontent, her primary activity being to complain about the state of her life and, more specifically, me. I genuinely could not remember the last time I had seen her out of that chair, or the last time she had initiated making an evening meal for the family. Her presence was a passive demand.
I was just about to turn and retreat upstairs, the silence stretching into something unbearable, when she started. "Your father's sleeping. Been down the pub all weekend… left me alone again." She didn't look at me, her eyes glued to the screeching host on the screen. "And you… where have you been all weekend? No one cares about me…" She trailed off, then sighed, a performance of self-pity. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to start again… Be a love and make me a cup of tea, Simon."
It was my chance for a tactical retreat. I ducked into the kitchen, the familiar scent of lemon-scented cleaner and lingering grease from last night's dinner meeting me. I put the kettle on, the click of the switch echoing in the quiet. The water seemed to take an age to boil, each second a reprieve from conversation. I just wanted to get away, to avoid any more talks with my mum or, worse, the inevitable confrontation with my father.
Just as the steam began to rise in a determined plume and the churning, bubbling noise promised a swift conclusion, my father walked into the kitchen. The atmosphere shifted instantly, growing dense and heavy. It felt as if the kettle's button switched off and my soul followed suit. I really couldn't handle another one-sided lecture on "real men" today.
"Ah, you're home," he grunted, his voice rough from sleep and drink. He eyed me with a forced, clumsy joviality that was more painful than outright anger. "Been out scoring girls, eh? When I was your age…" He launched into a well-worn anecdote I could have recited back to him. "Did you see the match? The ref was a fool, a bloody fool."
I switched off. My poor father, having had four girls, had been so glad to finally have a boy. Only, I had turned out to be more of a girl than all my siblings combined. I was small in stature, gentle by nature. I liked reading and art, things he viewed with benign confusion. None of these were the core values of a "real man" in his world. When I'd tentatively started exploring more feminine clothes as a teenager, their panic had been palpable, their conversations swiftly turning to gender-reassigning clinics as if it were a disease to be cured. So, I learned to hide that side of myself from them, to play the part of the son they thought they wanted. It was a role I was spectacularly bad at, and we all knew it. I was the last person in any room my father would ever call a real man. He was seventy-six years old; a man carved from a different era's timber. As he never tired of reminding me, he'd worked a proper job all his life, a welder in the shipyards until they closed, then a groundskeeper until his knees gave out. He'd used his hands "like you're meant to," his grip still strong, his fingers permanently stained with the ghost of oil and grit. He'd been retired for six years now, but you would never know it from his endless speeches. In his telling, he still went out and broke his back every day, a lone titan amidst a world gone soft, a world filled with "poofs and foreigners" who, in his eyes, had never done a real day's work in their lives.
"You want a tea, Dad? I'm making Mum one," I interjected, the question a well-practiced circuit-breaker.
It worked. The flow of his rhetoric halted. "Yeah, thanks. I'll take it in the living room with your mother," he said, the domestic instruction momentarily overriding his need to lecture.
I made those teas as fast as I could, my movements a study in frantic efficiency. The mugs clinked too loudly as I set them down on the coasters next to their respective chairs, his with two sugars, hers weak and milky. I stood for a moment, a silent servant, hoping beyond hope that I could escape back to the hallway without triggering another round of conversation.
I was in luck. Some fresh tragedy was unfolding on the news a flood, a political scandal, something suitably grim and it had them both glued, their faces bathed in the flickering blue light, their critiques of the world now conveniently directed at the screen instead of me. I used the opportunity to slip away, a shadow retreating from the stage of their discontent, and fled up the stairs to the fragile safety of my room.
I had barely closed my door, the silence a blessed relief, when my mother's voice, sharpened by need, pierced through the floorboards. "Simon? Can you do the shop for me?"
I sighed, my shoulders slumping.
"Only the shop around the corner has closed down," she continued, her tone implying this was a personal inconvenience I should have foreseen. "You'll have to go to the one on Church Lane."
Church Lane was a fifteen-minute walk. Of course. "Sure, Mum," I shouted back, the words tasting like ash.
"The list is in the kitchen!"
"OK, Mum," I called down, my voice flat.
Another errand, another small claw tying me to this house, another delay before I could lose myself in the pages of a book and dream of a different life. The silence of my room was a physical barrier, a fragile shield against the low murmur of the television and the heavy weight of the house. I fell onto my bed, grabbing a worn paperback from the nightstand, its dog-eared pages and broken spine a testament to how often it had been my escape pod. For a couple of hours, I didn't move. I let the words pull me into another world, one where conflicts had resolutions and heroes weren't judged by the calluses on their hands. The printed text was a clean, orderly universe, a stark contrast to the messy, emotional static from downstairs.
But reality, like my mother's voice, always found a way to intrude. The light outside my window began to soften into the long, golden hues of late afternoon, and I knew I couldn't put it off any longer. With a deep breath that did little to steady me, I marked my page, closed the book, and swung my legs off the bed. The journey back downstairs felt like a descent into a different realm.
The shopping list was waiting for me on the kitchen counter, scrawled in my mother's looping, anxious handwriting. I scanned it: white bread, semi-skimmed milk, digestives, pre-packaged sausages, a frozen lasagne. A list of bland sustenance, of conformity. I stuffed it into my pocket, the paper feeling like a summons.
The fifteen-minute walk to Church Lane was a study in quiet dissonance. I passed neighbours washing their cars, kids playing on tablets in front gardens, everything painted in the tranquil light of a Sunday evening. It all looked so peaceful, so normal. But to me, every perfectly manicured lawn felt like a surrender, every smiling family a carefully maintained fiction. I wasn't just going to the shops. I was a cog, however reluctant, in the great, grinding machine. I was walking to spend my father's pension and my own meagre wages on overpriced, plastic-wrapped conformity, to buy more food to prop up the very capitalist dream that my other family, my real family, was fighting to dismantle in the shadows. The irony was a bitter taste in my mouth, sharper than the cheap vodka from the night before. I was living a double life, and in this one, I was the villain, dutifully purchasing my own chains.