Read Online The Full Ridiculous by Mark Lamprell - Free Book Online

instantly agreeing and then mercifully her phone rings and she’s busy dealing with a work matter until she drops you home. She kisses you on the cheek, still talking on the phone, and heads on to her office. You hobble into the house on your crutches to be greeted by Egg as if you’ve been curing cancer and negotiating world peace.
    You know you should be working on your book but you’d rather stick needles in your eyes so you construct a More Pressing and Important Task. Suddenly it becomes imperative that this very afternoon you learn to walk without your crutches.
    You decide to practise walking up and down the hallway where the walls are less than a metre apart which means you can stretch out your hands to steady yourself. You discard your crutches at the entrance to the kitchen and shuffle-clomp towards the bedrooms with your arms pushing against the walls, a perambulating crucifixion.
    You make it all the way to Declan’s bedroom without incident. You put your hand on his closed bedroom door. The metal tongue of the lock has not fully engaged with the doorjamb, so that when you lean on it, it swings open. You try to steady yourself, clutching at the retreating doorknob, but you plummet to the floor of Declan’s room, landing on your swollen left thigh. You roll over, groaning, as the pain buffets your body.
    Eventually you formulate a plan to get yourself upright. You muster the will to turn yourself onto your side and that’s when you see it: a small length of green garden hose protruding from the brown cotton valance surrounding the underworld of Declan’s bed. You flip back the valance to discover the garden hose is inserted at a forty-five degree angle into a large empty soft-drink bottle. You reach out and grab the makeshift bong and sniff the telltale perfume of marijuana. Your heart sinks: your son, at the tender age of seventeen, has a history with this drug.
    On his sixteenth birthday, Wendy found Declan sitting on a white plastic chair in the back garden with tears streaming down his face. She asked what was wrong and he said he didn’t know. He’d been smoking the occasional joint but you’d both viewed this as a rite-of-passage activity, nothing to be overly concerned about, until experimentation had become habit and you were dealing with a weeping son.
    With her usual thoroughness, Wendy researched the effects of heavy dope smoking and the dangers of hydroponically grown marijuana (up to twenty-five times stronger than naturally grown crops) and you both presented her findings to Declan. He agreed not to touch it again. You watched him carefully for a while and a marked improvement in mood and behaviour seemed to indicate that he had, indeed, given up.
    And now this.
    You drag yourself onto Declan’s bed and sit there feeling extremely pissed off; pissed off with yourself because you haven’t been more vigilant; pissed off with Declan for not taking care of himself; pissed off with Declan because you have your hands full with Rosie and Constable Johnstone and your own failing body; pissed off with yourself for being pissed off with Declan because he has as much right to your attention as any of those other calamities.
    You look around the room and try to think what a normal, high-functioning father would do in these circumstances. You decide not to decide what to do until you have armed yourself with as much information about Declanworld as you possibly can. You institute an intelligence-gathering search, limp-hopping from desk to drawers to cupboards, rifling through hidden secret places in pursuit of you’re not sure what exactly. As you do this, you reflect upon how radically your attitude towards your children’s privacy has changed.
    In their early teens you would never have dreamed of prying in their rooms without their knowledge or consent. You believed that raising trustworthy adults required you to trust them. Their rooms were sanctuaries; private places in which they might reflect