Fight night.

On a Saturday nights Mankind, as a concerted collective, is expected to be frivolous. The television channels, with the exception of Channel 4, understand this. The local pubs start to fill up with gold and perfume about seven o’clock. And my friends have organised a night out without me. I expect they thought I wouldn’t appreciate it. I’m not supposed to like laughing for a while yet.

In the afternoon I came out of the study and heard an argument somewhere in the house. Samuel had gone off in his battered Volvo, to follow up on a rumour he’s heard about.

I ignored the strained voices for half an hour, but Angela’s voice in particular became an invasive backing vocal, and Norman’s voice a rhythmless bass. Outside the living room door, I could listen to Norman’s nay-saying without being seen. I don’t know how they began, but now Norman was arguing that-
“You can’t ignore the law. It’s above people.”
“That’s like saying it’s better than people.”
“People break laws.”
“And laws break people.” Said Angela.
“That’s just trite. People break the law, because it’s an ideal. It’s stronger than us. It’s what we aspire to be, it doesn’t tie us up like all what you’re talking about.”
“That’s – aspiration is – God! What a limited idea of ambition you’ve got for yourself. Aspiration is your dreams, it should be limitless. The law is our aspiration for others, if anything – to stop them messing up our lives, but we’re our own personal laws – we know ourselves what’s right and wrong.”
“So it’s no law for you, and all laws for the others. Typical.”
“Who of? White girls with dreadlocks?”
“Crusty hippies like you, who don’t pay taxes, but are happy to use the doctors and everything else we pay for. You think the system’s a cash machine, you’ve got to work out how to swindle it, but conveniently forget that before there was a system there wasn’t anything, and people like you used to starve.”
“Who’s people like me?” Asked Angela.
“Who treat the country like a rich man’s game that's not for you, instead of getting on with it.”
“Well now you’re talking about something else entirely, when really you don’t know a thing about me or what I’ve done. We were talking about the law.”
“And people like you think they’re for other people.”
“I don’t think the law is there to protect you from yourself.”
“But if you live in a country then you live by their law.” Said Norman.
“You’re not a child, obeying school rules. The law in any country exists by consent – it’s a social contract – and like any contract it’s open to negotiation, yeah? You can opt out of certain clauses if they don’t apply to you.”
“Opt out? Opt out of a social contract, because it’s open to negotiations? That’s what nine years of Tony Blair gets you – even the hippies talk in corporate spin.”

It was at this point that Angela’s powers of obscenity eclipsed her powers of reason. I went back into the kitchen and tried to drown them out.

When I saw Norman later he told me, out of nothing, that he liked being in the house. He never liked being amongst strangers, always wondering what they thought of him. In public he would always feel like he’d looked at people badly. If a mixed race couple walked past he’d feel like he’d given them a funny look, as if he disapproved.
"And I don't." He assured me.

I don’t know why he doesn’t think he’s amongst strangers here.

After tea I returned to the study. I’ve come to consider the journals as a mirror to what I myself am doing now – they chart my father’s labours to understand the powers he could wield. The books are like an echo.