Sitting by the fireplace and surrounded by his extensive library, Dr Henry Jenkins frisbeed the book he’d been reading into the flames. The airport-quality cover went blue before escaping up the chimney. “Coping with teenage rebellion: A modern, no-nonsense guide – by Dr John Seward MD”. All these books were the same. Listen to your child, don’t micromanage, trust. He recited them in his sleep. Child? In their ever-sparser interactions, his daughter took pains to remind him she was anything but. The screaming matches, the disappearing for days, the not-so-thinly veiled threats of violence against him or herself. Sleeping all day. Out all night. A translucent pallor accentuated by black lipstick. And God knows what hormonal tumult brought on his daughters sudden revulsion for all things containing garlic. It was never meant to be this hard, but who could blame her? Mina had died and left him a hand-wringing single parent. Once, Henry would see his daughter’s bedroom left open on the grounds of nothing-to-hide, now it was barred like a mausoleum, the threshold of which no respectful or indeed self-respecting father would cross.
Dr Henry Jenkins sighed and ran a moistened hand through his whiter than ever beard. Where was Lucy now? With Vlad no doubt, that clichéd image of late teenage badness worshipping at its own misguided altar. The motorbike and the leather jacket. The cigarette and whatever else. The sneer and the scar beneath his eye. Henry had never spoken to Vlad, just seen him through the curtains as he whisked his Lucy away helmetless into the dark on the throbbing death-trap that Vlad saw, almost undoubtedly, as the outward manifestation of his own inner constitution. Dr Henry Jenkins, an academic titan in his own field, respected to the point of what at times was cringing deference, felt utterly powerless and alone. Subsumed by a force of a nature immune to the conceits of rational argument, the ritual immolation of successive help guides to understanding your teenager, testament to a man at wits’ end.
Jenkins was not a drinker but he did keep a few bottles of high-quality liquor around for the purpose of lubricating this or that visiting scholar or university donor who, once seated beside Jenkins’ legendary fireplace, couldn’t resist the urge to adopt the drink-swirling affectations of one assured in both social standing and intellectual clout. Jenkins himself saw this natural aptitude for wheedling money out of the self-important as a necessary evil. Normally, Henry viewed drinking alone as a practice reserved for the truly hopeless, but tonight, all-things considered, it was permitted. One drink. Henry rose from his armchair and went to the cabinet to find precisely one third of his modestly sized-but-not-priced collection missing. The unopened bottle of ‘Carpathia’ vodka had vanished and his heart went dull. Please just be careful. The two remaining bottles, a rare release of ‘Rosslyn 16yr-old Single-Malt’ and the bottle of ‘Whitby-Demeter Gin’, stood unmolested. That at least, was something. Jenkins took a tumbler and poured himself a liberal serving of ONE, which he downed with the furtive haste of the amateur drinker.
The burning abated the enfolding dread. Maybe just one more. Jenkins was in the process of returning to his armchair, glass refreshed, when the temporary peace was bisected by the bright, scalpel of the telephone. The caller ID said LUCY JENKINS and the feeling of nameless (named Vlad) horror returned. “Lucy?” The sound of tears and barely repressed hysteria. “Dad… it’s Vlad. He’s. You need to get over here now”. Was it the whiskey or was it being called Dad for the first time in post-Mina memory that gave Dr Henry Jenkins the sense of steely resolve that moments later found him behind the wheel of his silver Volvo V40, speeding through emptied and sulphur-lit suburbia to a less well-to-do and unfamiliar part of town?
Vlad’s motorbike was parked on the lawn of a dilapidated, cream-coloured bungalow and Dr Jenkins, rightly assuming parental absence by a lack of four-wheeled transport, helped himself to the driveway. Jaundiced light spilled out of the windows onto the mottled grass. The front door, unnervingly ajar. Inside to his left, a nicotine-stained and unkempt television room. Dr Jenkins made several unflattering assessments as to the general mental acuity of the absentee parents. White trash. Another phrase that in polite, fireplace-company, would never be uttered, only implied. “Lucy?” he bellowed with what he hoped was paternal authority. Down the thinly carpeted hall, Jenkins ran toward the sound of his sobbing daughter, bursting into a dimly-lit room adorned with the posters of variously studded, leering musicians. Henry found his daughter perched, kneeling over Vlad who was black-clad as usual and at that moment, eerily still for a potential rapist. The bottle of ‘Carpathia’ was two-thirds empty. Lying on its side at the base of Vlad’s futon, it encroached on a small wooden bowl of what one could safely assume was marijuana. Lucy looked up, tear-streaked and sober. “Dad, I don’t know. I just… We were kissing and then”… Lucy, for the first time in weeks was looking flushed. Colour had returned to her face and her eyes shone with what in the dim light looked a purple glow. Lucy’s eyes betrayed something else, a knowing, a guilt that failed to conceal itself beneath the assumption of loving, parental blindness. As a part-time student of human nature, Dr Jenkins sensed something was wrong. Something more than the immediate situation would divulge. Lucy sprang to her feet and threw her arms around her dad, crying. She was cold.
