The Perspex Family
By: Ethan Burke
Tags: Prose, Life Lessons, Fathers, Creative Writing, Family

Image by the author.

We’re sitting in a family-oriented restaurant in East Maitland waiting for the drinks to come out, before the already ordered food. At each side of the table there is a large perspex screen on a black frame and stand, in order to stop the transmission of germs across tables, across patrons.

I mention to Alice, across from me, of the novelty of having these screens or windows at either side of the table while dining. It’s almost like being in a car and looking through the glass at the surroundings, safe from the outside world, except every now and then the waiter is allowed in to take the orders or place down the plates of food.

There’s almost a heightened element of voyeurism having these perspex windows — smudged with staff fingerprints — to look out at the public with.

Some people are devoted fans of “people watching”. They love it so much it borders on passion. I have a feeling these clear public barriers would tickle their fancy in a new and fresh way.

Our drinks arrive. Alice’s a Pina Colada, mine a Bacardi with soda and lemon (no limes at this basic family-friendly establishment, just the lime’s slightly inferior but versatile brother: the lemon).

We take a keen sip of our fresh drinks and I can’t help but overhear the conversation from the family of four at the setting through the screen to my left. A familiar little family of four, spat out of the typical societal blue-collar cookie-cutter. Parents — one of each gender — approximately early 40s, and children — both girls — mid to late teens. This family unit so immediate to us is even the most wholesome or “Christian standard” for a lack of other definitions. They’ve got Mum. They’ve got Dad. They’ve got two kids.

That’s in comparison to my own assumptions of what I can also view in the restaurant, other families:

1. In a booth at the front window, there is a lesbian couple, late 30s, with a boy — approx. five.

2. Over Alice’s shoulder, across the way, there is a couple of grandparents with two little kids — a boy and a girl. (The parents are most likely at home trying to get a good fuck in while the spawn can’t interrupt.)

3. Next to them (screen in between), a group of four. All male. Dad is about sixty and grey and bald on top. The sons range from approximately 25 to 21 to 16. Looks like Dad’s night with the kids.

Back to our cookie-cutter family; the ones practically spewed out of the factory with the innocent normalcy of a can of Sprite. The ones with the slightly too aggressive father and the submissive Mum. Their food hasn’t arrived yet. Dad is intermittently sucking on a beer while all three females have glasses of water.

I catch the audio mid-conversation because Dad is unnecessarily raising his voice: ‘And what have you paid for lately?’ His aggression is directed at one of the girls, the eldest. ‘Did you pay for anything over the weekend? No, ya didn’t.’ And he takes a slobbish gulp of his beer.

He’s got himself all frustrated over nothing and he can’t wait for his sirloin steak and chips to come out so he can plough through that without sufficiently chewing it, to follow on to getting the fuck back home to sit on the lounge and drink Extra Drys until his brain goes fuzzy enough to forget that he hates not only his job he has to go to the next day, but also himself.

Though, his biggest short-coming is not that he hates himself or that he’s too selfish to satisfy his wife (she hits the gym daily and just wants to be fucked like the good old days). His biggest short-coming is that he feels the need to spray his spiteful hate onto his innocent and beautiful daughters. He thinks his words will coerce them to take action, get a job and pay rent even though Mum & Dad can easily afford everything. He maybe thinks his own children’s upbringing needs to be just as hard as his own.

Why should they deserve better?

Only, the best way he can try and do it these days is by spouting slices of verbal abuse at them. Not anything close to how his own Dad would whip him with an old pair of suspenders, stinging with the metal clips at the ends. Modern day Dad couldn’t get away with that shit. His only tools for “discipline” lied within verbal and psychological warfare.

The daughters would soak it all in too. Every drop of it. They would never forget the Chief of Arseholes they had to call a household family member.

And that seed of not forgetting would flourish into one or both of the girls unknowingly getting back at Dad — in a kind of rebellion — by going out and getting fertilised by a piece of shit broheim with cheap tattoos, at a friend’s house party. The male kid, Broseph McLazyface wouldn’t have anything planned for the future other than playing video games and getting high, but now he would be faced with the prospect of a soon-to-be-coming child.

He would be the one that would have to get a job.

Nice work, Arsehole Dad; you were practically the crux of getting your own daughter pregnant. Have another beer, congratulate yourself, and get used to the idea of being a grandfather. Or, if you choose not to change your ways, you can be: “Arsehole Grandad”.

Our food arrives at the table and before picking up my cutlery my last thought is of getting up and going around the perspex screen to the table where the family sits. The family of good potential in a perfect world.

I’m grabbing the father by the collar of his faded football jersey, and I’m showing him my best version of a mad-man who means business. I’m getting right up in his face and scrunching his collar in my fists, and I’m telling him to respect his daughters and to tell them he loves them.

Respect them and nurture their interests, because one day… One day they just might change the world.