I think it was the black fishnet tights that finished me.
I have always had a weakness for that item of clothing, but it is one thing to see a film star wearing it and quite another to behold your fourteen-year-old daughter in it. The black leather jacket, and the purple lipstick smeared in commercial quantities over what was once the delicate face of my princess, completed a deliberate and calculated effort to induce a heart attack in me well before retirement.
You are not keen on this, dad, are you? diagnosed the teenager with a touch of malice.
Ah. No, I muttered.
Deal with it, she spat, and strode confidently to her room, where her boyfriend awaited her — a rocker who looked like a bad crossbreed between a heavy metal album and a production line for acne.
The door slammed. Through it I could hear my daughter growing up.
The whispering voices beyond the door boded ill. Go in? Knock? I remembered the great explosion six months earlier, whose closing dialogue was roared in the shriek of a furious girl: respect my privacy for once!
And now I stood there like an idiot, shamed outside a door, and did something I had not done in twenty years. I ground my teeth. I ground them until—
Daddy, get up, you are making a horrible noise with your teeth. A small angelic hand pinched me. I opened my eyes. The princess was looking at me with charming reproach, still with her round cheeks, still six years old, thank goodness.
Saved, I thought, and hugged her hard. At least for a few more years.
Have you ever seen a zombie film? Heaps of unsettling creatures, half human and half not. Not yet dead, but not exactly alive, wandering the streets with a swaying step and disturbing the neighbours' peace.
To a degree, adolescence presents the psychological equivalent — herds of young people in a tense intermediate state. No longer children, but a considerable distance from being fully adult, and thoroughly capable of imposing a charged unease on everything around them.
The truth is that until about a hundred years ago, the transition from childhood to adulthood was brief and mostly ceremonial. It has since stretched into a decade, for reasons that are economic rather than biological — the skills required to earn a living now take that long to acquire.
Which produces a genuinely strange situation, and it is worth stating plainly because it explains almost everything about adolescent behaviour.
You have a person who is biologically an adult, sexually mature, physically capable and intellectually sharp, who is required to spend years in a condition of enforced dependence, taking instructions, with no meaningful authority over anything.
Almost every irritating thing they do is a response to that. The philosophising, the contempt, the sudden fierce assertion over trivialities — these are the available forms of autonomy for somebody who has been given a fully functioning adult apparatus and nowhere to use it.