It feels like the last night of summer: the air is still warm when my wife and I get home from a night out. The sky is clear, the street is quiet, and there are 12 young people shrieking in our kitchen.
“Hello!” my wife says, striding into the room and extracting half a bottle of wine from the fridge. Some of the young people wave; others jump to attention, eyeing the nearest exits.
“You said eight people,” my wife says to the youngest, over the din.
“I know,” he says.
Beyond the open back door, I can see the glowing cigarette ends of at least five more guests. My wife pours a glass of wine for herself and one for me.
“This all needs to be cleared up by morning,” my wife says. “And lock the back door.”
“Oh my God,” one of the girls at the table says. “My mum would kill me.”
I pull the kitchen door shut. “How far do we have to move?” I say.
“I don’t know,” my wife. “Farther than this.”
In the sitting room, the middle one is watching TV with two of his friends. He is disgusted that my wife isn’t angrier. “If they were my friends, you’d have been furious,” he says.
“I can’t be bothered,” my wife says.
“It’s an outrage!” he shouts.
“Night,” my wife says.
The next morning, the youngest one is up at the crack of noon, looking dazed and bleary.
“You promised you’d clear everything up,” my wife says.
“We did!” he says. “Look! It’s clean!”
“I know,” she says. “I just finished cleaning it.”
The youngest recounts the series of misunderstandings and rash underestimations that led to his party being approximately double the approved size. Word spread of the gathering, he says, and acquaintances converged from various far-flung points, using the many public transport options available in this neck of the woods.
“They say they’re with people,” he says. “But they don’t say how many.”
“What’s this?” I ask, pointing to a photograph of my sister dressed as a horse lying on the worktop, a picture I dimly remember hanging in our old downstairs bathroom. The youngest one explains that at a previous unauthorised gathering, one of his friends had head-butted it, smashing the glass, and that he was so embarrassed he’d taken it home with him. Last night it was returned, reframed.
“It took him, like, a year,” he says. “But he did it.”
“That’s very sweet,” my wife says, propping up the picture on a ridge behind the hob. There is something about this example of the first stirrings of responsibility in a young person that makes me feel 100 years old. At least it wasn’t one of my children, I think.
That night, I retire early. The next day is the first day of school, the first day in 18 years that I’ve got no one to send. My children will all be in bed long past lunchtime, and because of the mess they make when they are upright and ambulatory, I will be quietly grateful for their sloth.
The end of summer falls like a curtain: when I wake up in the morning, the sky is a uniform felted grey. The radio says it’s raining and will continue to rain. The room is cold, and I realise I have no first-hand experience of the new house’s heating system. I know I have the ability to adjust the thermostat with my phone, although ability is perhaps the wrong word. Let’s just say “potential”.
My wife groans and sits up. “I’ve got the dentist today,” she says. “How do I get there?”
“The answer will surprise you,” I say.
“Why?” she says. “Where do I have to go?”
“She needed to go to the dentist,” I say. “What happened next will blow your mind.”
“Just tell me,” she says.
“Take the Overground to Highbury & Islington,” I say. “Then it’s two stops south on the Welwyn train.”
My wife thinks about this for a minute. “That’s not that difficult,” she says.
“No,” I say. “If anything, it’s too easy.”
