The Immaculate Family

There’s one on every street. Their house is bigger than yours, better, cleaner, nothing out of place. It may as well be a show home. Surely no one can live like this you start thinking as images of your organised mess take over, then you take a look at the family occupying said show home. The accountant dad with his knitted pullover and pressed chinos, he sits in his designated armchair chair perfectly angled for the tv he can’t see over the broadsheet he’s reading. His forgettable face permanently smiling with fake cheerfulness to the point where you wonder for a second if he could be a serial killer on a day off.

The step-ford wife moves silently around the shining kitchen in her house slippers and floral apron looking just as suspicious. Underneath the mumsie apron lies a sensible cardigan, not quite the same shade of boring as her husbands, revealing nothing but repressed regret. Perhaps in her heyday she was a rebel desperate not to be the contemporary version of her mother, alas she failed and now spends her days sucking the real joy out of every room she enters.

You look to the youngest of the nuclear family in the hopes of seeing something resembling your own. A little devil of a boy but no what you see is a perfectly behaved young man in the making, he gives you one creepy glance and goes back to his homework. Is his name Damien? Everything looks right but feel wrong but whatever the wrong is it’s a view reserved for the peeping tom of the street. And you start to imagine what secrets are being held in this utopian house; adultery, abuse, ferocious whispered arguments not even the neighbours can hear? Drugs seem the most likely because no one this boring can be this happy.

Then you turn to your quiet friend, the smart one of your group whose school uniform is always immaculate and realise that their whole life is that squeaky clean. The only chaos injected by you and your friends imprisoned within school.