You spend all Sunday roasting a leg of lamb with all the trimmings because your daughter is bringing by her new boyfriend. The house has been vacuumed, the glass polished and the table looks fantastic with a subtle bowl of African violets in the middle - even the napkins have been folded neatly underneath the cutlery set out at each place. The family sit down at the table but the boyfriend is a bit late - you decide to say grace and just hope the silly bugger shows up before the desert (apple crumble, old school with vanilla ice cream).
The doorbell goes and your youngest son leaps up to answer the door - he's full of energy having finished his junior footy game in the early afternoon with a win. It's the new boyfriend (just in time), he's wearing a suit and tie (God bless him) and he apologises quietly before taking his place at the table. The family is speechless - he's not a big fella (by any stretch of the imagination), quiet, almost shy - but his black and blue face has a series of ugly gashes crudely sutured up down the whole left side of his face. The Betadine staining around each wound oddly intensifies the puckered dark red gashes with an eerie yellow stain at odds with the swollen deep blue bruising that almost dominates one side of his head. Instantly you recognise that the gashes are geometrically spaced apart in the shape of a size 10 New Balance footy boot. You ask your daughter to pass the spuds and broccoli to the kid but everyone around the table is frozen, transfixed on his ugly face. No one moves, no one says anything and you can hear the mantle clock ticking quietly in the sitting room and the muffled sound of traffic three streets over. It is painfully still, so you break the silence and say 'So tell us Luke, what do you do for a living?'.