Everyone went out.

My father donned a navy suit and licked what is left of his hair over his forehead. He leaves the house with one eye partly obscured. And a bow-tie. He went out wearing a bow-tie. A spotted blue bow-tie. The parental unit has a busier social life than I do at the moment. (It hurts to say that.) Tonight they are at the ball. Next week my father is sashaying over to Europe in search of his ancestral wooden plaque. Mami is meeting her ancient Oxford Poly lecturer in London, or maybe Kaffe Fassett, I forget which. I may be making my own birthday cake.

Len gets back from Being Out and reads through old sent messages on the home phone, a new-fangled multi-tasking machine which, from time to time, emits ear-piercing angry beeps combined with the flashing of a small LED, like a miniature police car light. Only red. It is a very high-maintenance machine, a bit like having a sixth pet. (Not counting the poor neglected fish. Maud died a long time ago, and Harold eventually floated to a fishy upside-down death after an accident with the filter.)

Sitting in the balmy dark of the garden, recovering from an onslaught of emotionally harmful undertakings, i.e. the watching of a heart-rending ripping apart of two people impaled together on a metal pole, followed too closely by the making of a list of everything I have to do over the weekend, and then the two weeks following this weekend followed by everything until the sixth week from now has finished, which is the exact amount of time I still have to get out of bed every morning. It was a very long list. Cue blind gaspy ambling into the fridge door. I never got the whole brown paper bag thing.

On the other side of the garden fence, Nicky the Neighbour is murmuring softly to her new boyfriend through a fog of candle smoke and flickers, surrounded by lolloping bunny rabbits with inordinately long, trip-hazard ears. I watched them frolicking from my attic window earlier, these impromptu honeymoon acquisitions. The combination of barely audible sweet nothings and the ba-thump ba-thump of rabbits tripping over themselves and their ears is almost soothing.

Len wanders out. I read your old sent mails, he informs me, and sits down, topless. I tell him to work on it. His aversion to shirts may become a problem in later life. Naw, he says, and explains the concept behind Being Out. At some stage someone should maybe start worrying about him. I tell him kicking over garden fences of the elderly is not nice, and that running from police will never catch on as a team sport. He shrugs.

Sup, anyway??! he asks, the intonation of voice an invasion of question marks and exclamation marks shaken about in a little green cloth scrabble bag, pulled out at random and laid down haphazardly. Is it him?? Want me to beat him up? !?!? You love him? He love you??????!?? The remainder of this barrage of questions is neatly drowned out by the sound of a garden hoover. Who hoovers their garden at midnight? Who hoovers gardens full stop, other than professional garden hooverers? We listen for a while, Len throws a cigarette butt into the devastated shrubbery of our overgrown garden, in the vague direction the dying avocado tree, and I quench a bubble of panic.

Pushing his pesto and mozzarella pizza into the oven, I think, right now, the parental unit is drinking their smuggled-in alcohol and devouring cheesy party nibbles. Possibly dancing. For my father’s sake, I hope not.

I am bad at living alone. I know that without having to try it out.