Men & fatherhood · Manuscript excerpt
The man outside his own home
What is it like to be the man everyone can depend on?
From chapter one · The Tamed Man · An illustrative scene. A selection from the working manuscript; the final edition may change.
Imagine a man sitting in his car outside his own home.
The engine is off. He has taken the key out, but he has not opened the door. There is a bag on the seat beside him and something in it that he was meant to bring home. Bread, perhaps. A form that needs signing. One of the small things by which a household keeps going.
He can see a light through the window.
Nothing terrible has happened. That is partly why he does not know what to call this. He has had a day much like the one before it. There were messages to answer and things to remember. He was useful. Somebody thanked him. He laughed at the appropriate moment. He has brought himself back to the correct address.
Still, he sits.
In a minute, he will go inside. There will be another version of himself to become: a father, a partner, the person who knows whether the payment went through. He loves the people waiting for him. If you asked what matters most to him, their names would come quickly.
Love is not what is missing from this picture.
It is harder to say what is.
He rubs a thumb along the edge of the key. For a little while there is nobody asking him anything. No answer is required. He can sit without arranging his face.
There are men who will recognise the car. Others will recognise a bathroom with the door locked, a walk taken slowly from the gate to the office, the few minutes after everyone else has gone to bed. The place changes. It is the interval that matters. A little patch of time in which the next request has not yet arrived.
We do not need to diagnose the man. A pause outside a house can be nothing more than a pause outside a house. He might be tired. He might like the song that was playing. I would be suspicious of a book that found a damaged soul in every parked car.
But stay with the possibility for a moment.
What if the few minutes in which he is asked to be nobody have become the only minutes in which he feels like somebody?
The ordinary effort of keeping everything going can conceal the person who has become difficult to find inside it.