My name is Daniel Tucker and I am twenty-nine years old. I have a seven year old son, Martin. His mother, Susan, left us four months ago and I don’t know where she is. I miss her but I can’t tell if my son does. He is the reason she left.

“Can I have some Weetabix please, Tranny Fucker?”

The request is from my son. He is looking at me with a face he was not born with – a face I hated when I was growing up: the face of my school bully, Rocco Lavender.

“We don’t have any. I’ve got some on the next Tesco order.”

“Okay, Tranny Fucker. Got any cornflakes?”

Tranny Fucker is what John Lavender used to call me at school. Danny Tucker=Tranny Fucker. Hilarious.

I retrieve the box of Kellogg’s from the cupboard. Martin is smiling at me but with Rocco Lavender’s sneering, yellow-toothed mouth. I look at him but Rocco’s insane brown eyes stare back. Martin’s eyes used to be blue.

Martin appeared altogether different to my wife. When she looked at him she saw the face of her first boss, Maude Taylor. When she worked for a scaffolding company, Taylor intimidated and belittled my wife. Susan was only seventeen at the time. Taylor was in her forties and hated younger women – probably because her husband had left her for a newer model.

Taylor called my wife Snoozan.

For four years.

My wife eventually had a breakdown and hit Taylor round the head with her coffee mug, scolding and mutilating her tormentor in the process. Susan was charged but nothing came of it in the end. Bigger problems soon arrived for the police and authorities to deal with.

Snoozan.

When Martin used to talk to Susan she said he would say things like, “I’m hungry, Snoozan. What the fuck have you been doing all day?”

She lasted longer than I hoped and longer than most. Mothers seemed to handle the change the worst.

Maude Taylor, however, now sees my wife’s vengeful face whenever she passes a child. They taunt her, pointing to her disfigured face and reminding her that she’s too ugly to ever have a man love her again.

My neighbour, Chen, has a daughter who regales him with a playground rhyme from his teenage years.

“I eat dog, I eat frog. I’m a Chinaman.

“I eat cat, I eat bat. I’m a Chinaman.”

I don’t hear it. To me, his daughter looks and sounds like Rocco Lavender. To Chen, my son resembles his childhood tormentors.

The authorities suspect it is a form of mass hysteria brought on by an accumulation of social stresses. No solution has been uncovered. Sterilisation rates are up. Pregnancies are down. Many children have been killed. 

Which leads me to my sister, Dani. She is being hung for the murder of her son. Yet she has no regrets.

Staring at the cruel, violent face of our father every day would’ve made me wish for death as well.