Baby I've Got My Eye On You

He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He wouldn’t look any of us in the eye for that matter, not even Beth as she attempted to shake him out of his dismal trance. My dad had barely muttered a coherent sentence since he had collapsed through the kitchen door and as we attempted to sober him up a little, he began to cry. They were long drawn out sobs that seemed so emotionally charged that he couldn’t focus on anything else. I’d never seen a grown man cry, it wasn’t something I quite knew how to deal with, especially when the barely recognisable person was my father. Beth was muttering things under her breath as she hastily made cups of coffee, which one by one he split down his clothes. Fortunately, Zacky and Syn had left by this point, though the thought of Brian seeing my father in such a humiliated state scarred my confidence in our relationship.

“Me and Zack are gonna take off” he said, sympathetically I suppose, yet inside I was petrified about what he thought, “Unless, you um… really want us to stay”
With that comment, Zacky’s face contorted into one filled with hopes and prayers that we’d say no.
“No” I said, as both guitarists appeared on the brink of bursting with worry, “It’s best if you go.”
Zacky nodded, walking over to Beth and giving her a quick kiss on the lips before taking the lead; I grabbed Syn’s hand as he tried to go. For a moment, I felt like my soul flew out of me, able to look down critically at the situation and laugh at how desperate the image of my arm reaching out to Brian’s hand looked at that very moment.
“…Will you call tomorrow?” My anxiety-ridden voice said without my consent as the pathetic words slithered past my lips.
“Of course I will…” he said surprised, his eyes narrowing into a knot of curiosity, but by my own pessimistic nature, I didn’t believe him, or that he didn’t understand what I meant.
“Bullshit” I whispered, “You’re… you’re put off…aren’t you?”
“Don’t be stupid, Rosie.”
“That’s not an answer” I could hear my voice cracking under the pressure.
“Roz” he said taking hold of both my hands tightly, “I’ll call you tomorrow, I promise.”
And with that, he left. Left me with brewing thoughts of a revived insecurity and a half comatose parent, who seemed to have little recollection of where he’d been or why he was like this.

“I bet he’s been like this for weeks” Beth said bitterly as she joined me on the sofa, having managed to persuade our drunken father to sit down in a chair, “I knew this bloody ‘marriage counselling’ bullshit would do more harm than good. Just wait Roz, we should be expecting Mother dearest through the door any second now, with the pupils the size of fucking Alaska and her veins packed full of smack.”
“Beth” I said, trying to shut her up as our damaged dad stared vapidly at us with watery eyes.
After a dull second worth of silent staring, he threw out two words as if they were vomit, then looked down at his scuffed shoes.
“She left” were those words. Beth and I just looked at each other, before she took the job of asking him why.
“The course” he sighed, “the worst idea she’s ever had. Wish I’d left the second we got there. Save me all this…embarrassment.”
“Dad…what happened? I thought you were fixing things?” I asked like a dumb child.
He let out a soured laugh.
“Fixing. That’s a good word Rosie. But it wasn’t our ‘marriage’ that needed fixing. It was that selfish bitch’s fucking head. Fucking mentalist”
“Dad-”
“She ran off with him girls. The bloody shrink. Richard. That was his name. I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it when she first started going on about him. It’s all she used to do you know!? Richard says we should be doing this! Richard says we should be doing that! And then I found them in his bloody office…”

We sat, unable to comfort him, and in the short time it took him to pour his broken heart out, I realised how much I truly hated my mother.
“We’re so sorry, Dad” Beth said quietly, but he didn’t even blink. He just got up and we followed him as he staggered back in to the kitchen, braking open a bottle of gin that was sat by the microwave.
“They’re in Paris now” he laughed bitterly, “with his rotten boy, Simian or Simba or some ridiculous name whatever he’s called”
I looked at Beth and she stared back at me, sharing the same thoughts. Our mother had abandoned us all, like a lost cause. Did she even care? Was she happy acting as a mother to “Richard’s” son whist we were sat here, picking up the pieces?

“Do you… want to talk about it, Dad?” I asked, as a dutiful daughter should do in these situations, but he just shook his head, picking up the remote and flicked aimlessly through channels.
“No Elizabeth, it’s fine” he said eventually.
“I’m Rosie, dad” I said, but he just nodded, continuing to stare at the screen yet not absorb what was on it at all. Beth left seconds later, without saying goodbye and with no notification of where she was going. She was gone for hours.

Anger surged through me as I realised I was truly going to end up alone: my mother blatantly didn’t give a shit anymore, and my father seemed barely human. Beth showed a rapid indication through the course of the hellish evening that she’d be going back to her usual routine or appearing and disappearing as she pleased, yet how could I blame her? As for Brian, enough said. After that night, and my blatant desperation that followed, I thought I’d be lucky if he even dumped me properly, face to face. That was of course until one minute past midnight, when I heard the familiar sound of my phone, ringing in my jeans pocket.
“What do you want, Syn?” I said through a yawn, and his reply did wonders in soothing my boiling blood.
“I promised you I’d call you tomorrow” He said, “It’s now officially tomorrow.”