There is singing, singing, singing.

It is sweet and undulating, like a finger licked and drawn around the rim of a wine glass, like a whole chorus of glasses similarly molested. It’s rising from the street, fluting through the cracks of our ill-fitted window pane, diffusing about the living room. I remember the song. I learned it from mass as a boy, years and years and years ago. I shut my book, lean forward in the potbellied armchair and try to dredge the words from the stew of my memory and hook them together again, so I can sing along. What do I sound like? Like a toad trying to squeeze inside a song thrush? Out of tune, out of time.

You’re at your sentry. Back paws on the cushion of the low chair, front paws balanced on a book heap in the windowsill, eye to the sea. The wet of your nose smears against the glass in the spot where you’re pointing, and all around this spot, there are old spots with old nose smears, dried and crusted and yet still glimmering. Like the aimless trails of a night slug, like a whole posse of carousing night slugs. You’re watching the gaggle of singing children on the street, little girls in white dresses with white veils clipped into their hair. You’re tilting your head to the left, pulling your curious face. The little girl’s veils are almost translucent and they skitter in the wind like tiny ghosts. Some are carrying baskets filled with flower petals and the two at the front are holding a plastic arch between them and the arch is decked with artificial roses. Now come the mothers. They’re gaggling a few yards behind the girls, keeping guard. They’re muttering to each other beneath the singing, praising somebody else’s daughter so somebody else will praise theirs back. I peek around the curtain, careful not to lean too far into the window. I don’t want to be spotted by the gaggles. I’m just as afraid of mothers as I am of children, possibly even more so. Dominus tecum, they are singing. Benedict tattoo.

It’s the May Procession, the first Sunday in summer. I haven’t been to mass in almost one year and one half of a year now, I’d forgotten that. Not since the occasion upon which I stood up in the middle of the homily and pronounced the word HORNET. I pronounced it with less force than a shout but precisely enough force to be heard from the pulpit. And because the church was three quarters full and I was in a pew around the middle, I presume most of the other congregants heard it too, from the woman in the wheelchair at the front to the man who always stood beside the water font holding the collection plate.

I didn’t know those people, not really. I knew their mass faces and their mass clothes from decades of Sundays we’d worn down the kneelers together. I’d only ever spoken to a couple of neighbours and only then since my father’s been gone, only then in answer to the questions they asked about him. A nursing home in the city, I told them. And I didn’t mean anything by it, by HORNET. There was a man kneeling in front of me wearing a jacket with a label on the back, and the label read THE NORTHFACE, and I was making anagrams; that’s all it meant. Then I walked out. I cleared the churchyard and was through the gates and in the car before anyone had followed me, if anyone even tried. I didn’t stop to check, but I don’t expect so. And then I realised I didn’t have to go to mass on my own any more, that I’d only ever gone as my father’s companion and now that I’d made the old man’s excuses several times over, I didn’t have to go, and I felt suddenly very stupid for all the times I had.

When I was a boy, I used to sit here in this window and watch children with satchels and lunchboxes passing on their way to school. Back then, hard as it is to picture now, I was small, almost as small as you. Small enough to scrunch my whole body onto the sill. Back then, I didn’t care about being seen. I’d press my nose against the pane and draw snot trails, just like you. I knew every child by sight and I remember them all: the girl who wore her hair in jade ribbons, the boy with iron calipers up to his knees. I imagined the details of all the parts of their lives I couldn’t see, from the contents of their pencil cases to the exact number and colour of stars stuck in their copy books. Even though I’d stare at the crowns of their heads every morning, I never wanted to join them. I was too shy, too frightened. And besides, I didn’t really believe I was of the same species as the children I saw passing along the sea front, going to school. Back then, it never dawned on me that I should have the things they had too. I would have to be made again, I thought. I would have to be reborn.

I know you’re too short to see it, but the picture on our kitchen calendar is a donkey in a sand dune with ribbons fanning from its quadrilateral face like the tails of a kite. It’s summer here in the kitchen, even if, outside, it’s heartily raining. Outside, every porous thing is turning spongy, every un-porous thing is sluiced and dripping.

Still, people are mowing their lawns and dousing their barbeques with lighter fluid and standing under patio heaters nibbling black meat from toothpicks. I smell their cut grass in the day time, their charcoal smoke by night. Can you smell it too? The ice-cream van comes out of hibernation and drives in circles jingling You are my sunshine, my only sunshine and its fog lights through the gloom every dusk are indeed the sunshine, the only sunshine, as though it knew. People are performing the summer on the summer’s behalf, buying flip-flops and body-boards, tricking themselves into believing it’s the season inside their TV sets instead, the one from the Australian soap operas. They are pretending, as though pretending alone might a miracle make.

With such little sign of a change in season, how do the plants know it’s the right time to flower? Because plants are smart in a way people aren’t, never questioning the things they know nor searching for ways to disprove them. All along the road through the forest to the refinery, see how foxgloves split from their buds and tremble over the ditches. And when the weight of their waterlogged bonnets is too much, they keel into the road and their heads are crushed by cargo lorries to a pretty pink pulp.

On the beach, most days the mist is so thick that when we reach the mid-point and stop to look, neither end of the strand is visible, each taking its turn to be scarfed up by cloud. Now we must part a channel through the fog like a pair of tiny jets leaving a pair of reverse contrails in our wake.

Through the thick mist a honeycomb collie comes careering down the strand toward us, his great mane crimped by damp and billowing. He’s already too close before I see him, and there’s no chance to re-shackle you; you’re ahead by almost fifty feet. In a flash you’ve forsaken your football and clamped the collie’s muzzle. Now he’s yelping and flaying and trying desperately to hurl you off. But you don’t budge a hair’s width. You’re stuck as a mouse in a mousetrap, a fly to a flypaper. The collie looks like a prestige pet and the woman he belongs to looks like she prizes him for his placid face and handsome cantering, for his particular pedigree as opposed to his particular self. She’s speedy out of the clouds and to his rescue, speedier than me and my fifty feet. Now she’s clubbing your head with a golf umbrella, and all I can do is shout.

‘DROPPIT ONE EYE!’ I shout, ‘DROP!’

It’s happening so swiftly, too swiftly for my ordinary fears to keep up with. It’s as if the helmet of my spacesuit has been perforated and a flood of oxygen is crashing into my eyes, ears, mouth.

‘DROPPIT DROPPIT DROPPIT!’

But you don’t, and even though I’m pitching and clumping as fast as I’ve ever pitched and clumped, flailing like a plastic bag snagged on a thorn in a gale, for a split second, everything goes completely still. The waves stop and the sea turns to cement. A greater-black-backed gull mid-flight halts the smacking of his mammoth wings, lies rigid in the sky.

‘DROPPIT ONE EYE!’ I shout, ‘DROP!’

Now the woman manages to sever you from the collie’s muzzle. As I catch up, he scampers for his life and she beats after him waving her umbrella in the air and crying HENRY HENRY HENRY into the fog. Her voice is so high and sharp, it cleaves through me, and perhaps this is the most unsettling part of all, because people never use such an excited pitch in my presence. People always lower and deaden their tone when speaking to me, as though our conversation is immediately unbearable.

You go to chase them but I grab you. Now I feel as though I’ve left my stomach behind me, as though it dropped out several yards ago and is lying on the sand, quivering globulously. My hands are shaking as I smooth them across your face and neck and back and legs, as I pat you over to check for wounds. My palms come away blotched with red, but there’s no sign the blood belongs to you. You’re intact, and looking up at me with tongue lolling idiotically, tail skipping. With eye and tongue and tail, you’re begging a chocolate treat, expecting my approval.

I don’t know what to do with you. I don’t know whether I’m furious or frightened or a little of both.

I turn and hurry us back in the direction of the fields. I stop only to scoop up the football before reaching the brow of the hill. Now the beach has vanished again. The mist is sitting in the sky like the froth churned up by angry waves sits on the sea in stormy weather. I can’t see the car park on the opposite cliff and I can’t see Henry or his woman or the umbrella. But I notice the place where the sand’s been churned up by our dashing, hurling, thrashing feet. And the black smear of a gull’s wingspan. Flying again. Growing smaller, smaller, smaller.

My father had a golf umbrella. It was dark blue, as dark as blue can be before becoming black. And he brought it with him every time he left the house, his house, even if it wasn’t raining.

My father always left very early in the morning and arrived back travel-weary and infused with the scent of the pineapple air freshener that swung from his rearview mirror, and some nights he didn’t come back at all. When I was a boy, he’d bring me toys and clothes in crumpled carrier bags. The jumpers were usually bobbled with thumb-holes low down in the sleeves, and the jeans were patched in places with slightly brighter squares of denim. The teddy bears were pre-cuddled, the tyres of the dinky cars shorn to their hubcaps, and if anything ever needed batteries, they came either missing or flat. But I didn’t mind. The toys didn’t need to move; I made them move myself. And besides, I liked to imagine the children who played with them before me. I pictured their faces, made up their voices. Then I shifted my playmates into place around me. I included them in my games.

Oftentimes the carrier bag would be box-shaped and jagged. These were the ones I liked the best, they were filled with books. The pages were already dog-eared and finger-printed, sometimes there were even crumbs. But I didn’t mind. I thought then that nothing could ever be absolutely new. The world was so big and so full of people I was certain that every material thing must be used and reused to its zenith; this was the only way it could make sense.

Now I’m afraid to go take you out during the daytime. Now I’m afraid to go out alone.

‘Quiet now,’ I tell you, ‘quiet.’

You’re at the window, yapping. You yap with your whole body, as if each yap were a volt of electricity, cracking through you from whiskers to tail. Now the schools have closed for the summer holidays. I can tell from the arrival of the boys who congregate along the sea front in the evenings, who frolic around until after dark. They’re no smaller than twelve, no larger than sixteen. They number four at least and ten at most, but it changes. Maybe they’re the same boys as last year or maybe they’re the baby brothers of last year’s boys, I can’t tell. They all have the hoods of their tracksuit tops raised and the laces of their runners left undone. They all have the same shiftless way of holding themselves, as though their limbs are hinged into their torsos by a network of sagged bungee clips. Always, they’re an unsightly bunch, see how the silhouettes of their oversized adolescent heads block the bay out? From now until autumn, they’ll be there every warmish night irrespective of the pizzle, as if they’re immune to poor weather, as if the blaze of their hormones is keeping them consistently toasty inside. Their presence is the price paid for longer evenings, a reminder that lessened cold and added light is public property, and not ours alone, as I would like.

The summer boys come from housing estates built into the fields and hillsides stretching inland away from the village and the sea. The housing estate houses are as young as the boys and just as indistinguishable from one another. Venetian blinds and block-paved driveways, dormer windows and red-brick cladding. See that woman coming out of the takeaway? She’s the mother of a summer boy. I can tell from the way she has the face of a potato and the hair of a film star. See that man coming out of the pub? He’s the father of a summer boy, a neatly dressed but beleaguered version of his son, coat over tracksuit and laces neatly tied. These are the people who buy the tool belts and steam mops and magic knickers we see advertised between television programmes, and every day at dusk, their sons trail down-slope to the shore wall. They swagger and perch. Snigger and sigh out a language of abbreviated words and exaggerated gestures drawn from experiences exclusive to this itchy, nasty phase of their lives.

They wait until the grocer’s shutters are lowered and most of the curtains along the main street have been drawn. Now they produce cartons of cheap Czech lager and cigarettes stolen from the jacket pockets of their dads. The lit street lamps are casting a spooky pallor to the boy’s expressions, a hint of menace to suit their moonlit raillery. Sometimes there’s a football and I hear it very late and from my bed, pounding against the salon’s shutters like a leviathan crawled from the sea, knocking to be let in. And in the morning I’ll see scuffs on the sides of the car, perfect circles in the dust where the leather was kicked, struck. The suction cup prints of a colossal tentacle fastened and unfastened in a moment.

Come away from the glass. It’s the most dangerous thing in the world to draw attention to my father’s house. You don’t understand what those boys could do, how easy it is for them to destroy me, to destroy us. I’ve always regretted the way the living room window faces square onto their summer territory and can be faced square back into. This is why I always pull the curtains when it’s full bright, why we never get to watch the sun set behind the buildings across the harbour. I’m afraid the boys will look up and see me sitting pathetically in front of the television with my pathetic dinner on a plate on a cushion nestled between my pathetic knees. I know how cruel boys can be. Even the one with calipers, when we were both older, joined his friends to chase me, chanting, down the laneway, and I saw that what he really kept inside his pencil case were stones for chucking at my window. Now I’m afraid these new boys will come to know me. I’m afraid they’ll call out when they see me on the street. I’m afraid they’ll form a procession as I gambol to the shops and back. Can you picture it? All the summer boys pitching and flailing and clumping in unison behind me.

‘Come away from the window,’ I tell you, ‘away.’

The temperatures are rising, a little bit, I think. The toadflax swells and stretches. From the walls of the village, valerian pushes through the brick’s seams and points unsteadily upward, toward the rooftops. See the buttercups and birdsfoot trefoil. See the red clover which is not red, but pink, pink as the valerian. Now is the season of yellow and pink. The days are still grey, but the grey is lukewarm and airtight, like the village and the bay are sealed inside an enormous Tupperware tub.

You sit quietly on the windowsill. In the potbellied armchair, I read. Sometimes you’re up straight and looking away across the water, your thousand-mile stare. Sometimes you lie with your beard rested on your front paws, looking in, watching me. What are you thinking? I wish I could teach you how to read. I wish you could understand when I read to you.

When I was a boy, before my father brought me books, on my bedroom wall he hung a chart with the alphabet on it. Twenty-six squares with a letter and a picture in every one and sometimes with the picture over-spilling its designated square to intrude on its neighbour. The RAT was rudely flicking his tail in the face of the SNAKE, who was in turn shaking his rattle into the topmost leaves of the TREE. The only thing my father told me about the alphabet was that H was aitch and not haitch, Z was zed and not zee. He corrected mistakes I hadn’t even made yet.

It was the old neighbour whose name I can’t remember who, after she’d taught me to sew, taught me to read. I remember she lived above the grocer’s and I called her Aunt even though she wasn’t; she was just the woman my father enlisted to sit with me during the day. At the beginning, I read with the index finger of my right hand tracing each sentence word by word, and each word syllable by syllable. Aunt would sit in the rocking chair with her nose poked over my shoulder and shout the whole word every time I hit an unfamiliar sequence of syllables. Aunt’s eyes were sharp but her hearing was patchy and her limbs were quaky as a rabbit with myxomatosis. She only knew when I’d faltered because she’d see my index finger had stalled and was tremulously hovering. Then she’d shout it so loud that the ladies downstairs in the boutique could surely hear. ‘ENORMOUS!’ she’d shout, ‘TURNIP!’

Early in life I learned to look after myself as well as Aunt. I’d see how she was trying to do something: open a can, butter a slice of toast, reach the shelf where the biscuit tin sat, then I’d do it for her. ‘GOOD BOY!’ she’d shout, and a little more quietly but never quietly enough, ‘poor fool’, she’d mutter, ‘poor little fool.’

What was her name? I can’t remember. She looked like a peasant farmer’s wife from the nineteenth century, her breast bound in shawls with a puckered face in a gap at the top and the wrinkles in her skin eddying into the folds of her headscarf. It was Aunt who was responsible for the only other poster that hung upon my bedroom wall. It was headed ‘Emergency First Aid for Children’ and I suspect she intended it more for her own benefit than mine. Beneath the header there was a sequence of panels and each panel depicted a different scenario in which an adult person was in some way struggling for their life and a child person was doing their calm and measured best to rescue them, and now I remember how the persons from the poster used to abscond from their place on the wall at night and insinuate themselves into my dreams.

In the end, Aunt didn’t die on my watch. I didn’t even know she had and that I’d missed my opportunity to put any of the panels into practice until my father took me to the removal. The funeral home was full of people, there must have been an emissary from every household in the parish, but none of them looked particularly upset, nobody sighed or gulped or sobbed. Back again in my father’s house he asked me if I thought I was old enough now to take care of myself. I was nine. I could read fast as a firecracker. I knew First Aid inside out because every night I dreamed up a new emergency. I banked on this being all there was to know. Yes, I said. And in this way, the years passed and passed and passed, just the old man and me and then just me and then you, and now us.

Today, we are planting. I know it’s already too late in the season. My father’s shelf full of gardening manuals would shake their spines in reproach. But every year I plant according to my own unwritten and annually misremembered set of rules, and every year I accept the bounty however scant or sickly. I pick the slugs off and blast the greenfly down the plughole. Too light to sink, they walk on water like tiny green Jesuses.

On Tuesday, I go out alone and into town. The post office followed by the supermarket, and here I buy saplings and seedlings from the gardening section. Fruit, vegetables and herbs; I’ve never bothered with flowers. I’ve always thought it would seem like an insult to the wild ones which every summer arrive unbidden in my yard. Up from the lightless cold they thrust their heads through the compacted dirt and burst into petals amongst the gravel. As though, like the swallows, they’ve chosen me.

Today it’s raining in the yard and on the sea front and all across the bay, and so we’re gardening in the kitchen, right here atop the unclothed table at which my father died. Whereas then it was tidily laid for breakfast, now my packets and utensils are lost amidst the queeny frill ashtrays, marmalade jars packed with inkless biros and a whole squad of other stuff I never get around to throwing out. There’s half a dozen pea plants for transferring into a grow-bag, now a few trays of tomato saplings and a titsy raspberry bush to go into pots. The pots will allow their suckling tentacles to proliferate, and then they’ll stretch and fruit. You sit between the table legs as I work. You examine the trickles of compost. They hit the lino and scarper free in all directions. Under the fridge, the washing machine, the oven. What do you think my compost smells like? Like the kind of soil a man in a factory made, like moistened rootlings and flittered bark but with an aftertaste of chemicals?

I drag the grow-bag through the rain to the stone fence and clear a spot amongst the buoys and bits of buoy which should seize some sun, if ever the sun comes. The raspberry bush can go here too but the tomatoes stay where it’s snug on the kitchen windowsill. I clear the tabletop back to its original mess and roll a cigarette which tastes as though there are tiny pieces of compost entwined with the tobacco. Now I lean against the door frame with coffee cup in hand and you sitting on my shoes. Together we regard the backyard’s newest arrivals. Soon the pea shoots will be twice as long and their curly tendrils will be grappling for something to cling to. Then we’ll go to the forest and gather broken branches and I’ll push them into the grow-bag for the shoots to hoist themselves up and clasp the mini trees tight to their stalky breasts. The pea shoots need the pea sticks like the ivy needs a trellis, like the tickbird needs a rhino, like I need gingernuts and cigarettes and you at my feet, sitting to attention, sniffing the breeze.

You shift your weight to lean against my shin. You’re dry and warm and soft yet solid. I feel the bulge and fall of your ribcage as you sigh. You seem to do a lot of sighing. I find it strange because I always thought of a sigh as an expression of the sort of feeling which animals are not supposed to be capable of, and I wonder do you sigh because you have the smog inside you, my sapping smog. Does it build within your chest until your muscles spasm and push it out, away?

I don’t expect the rain will let up long enough for the plants to need watering. Standing beneath the door lintel regarding our sorry garden, a swallow swoops low, hesitates, flies on. And I wonder was it one of mine. I wonder are my swallows back.

Once my father was gone, I expected that someone would come for me. I expected them to lock me up somewhere I wouldn’t be able to impede the busy-bodies, the regular people. I expected to be institutionalised. I mistook the shrieking gulls for sirens and locked myself inside the bathroom to hide from flashing lights. But nobody came.

I summoned every last dot of valour I could scratch from my soul, I swallowed a shot glass of rescue remedy and went to the social welfare office. I filled out forms and ticked boxes. I found that continued survival came down to a simple matter of form-filling, a basic proficiency in the ticking of boxes. And because I managed never to miss a box or make an illiterate mark on the bottommost line instead of signing my name, nobody came.

And here I am still, and here you are.

We turn the page of the calendar, from the donkeys to a row of deckchairs in a leafy park with an opalescent pond, a commemorative bench, its inscription too small to read, and a solitary moorhen.

It’s two weeks since the clamping of the collie on Tawny Bay. Two weeks of sheltering in my father’s house. I can tell you’re growing listless. I’m listless too. If it was winter, I could accept the murky weather, the incarcerating walls. But with summer comes hope, and with hope comes disappointment. Now dawn is the only time we can safely walk, and every dawn breaks pale and ungleaming, and every stretch between dawns is ruthlessly long. I want to go out during the day but I’m afraid. I’m afraid of meeting HENRY HENRY HENRY and Henry’s woman again, of being screeched at and flogged in the street with a golf umbrella. I’m afraid of being stopped and asked for my name and our address, of being shown the bite marks in Henry’s princely face and the way in which the distance between them matches the exact distance separating your two pointiest teeth. I’m afraid, I think more than anything, of losing you.

From your sentry on the windowsill, you watch your unfettered fellows trotting the bird walk. You bark and bark yet they never seem to see you back. The living room is cast to darkness by the outside’s bright; you’re but a sparkle on the glass. Do you see the mullet suckling at the water’s surface, snatching for midges? And the old men with girlish fishing rods and packets of white sliced pan? They’re balling bread onto their hooks and floating it on the ripples, feet dangling over the shore wall like gnomes by a garden pond. I rarely see them catch a mullet. With or without reward, they fish. I’ve seen the bread balls snatched by greedy ducks and the hooks snap into their beaks as they try to fly. Only then do the old men reel their broken lines in and gather their gear, drop their feet to the path and shamble away.

And the snapped lines collect eelgrass and litter until the duck grows too weak to cart its monstrous load. Then it lies down in the ripples, its loyal mate forced to watch as it’s slowly drawn under.

See the shelducks and little egrets, the cygnets and swifts. You see every bird the local twitcher misses, although you can’t name a single one.

At dawn, all the places I thought I knew so well are different countries. Damp and rumpled as though rinsed and shook. Our early walks up the refinery road always follow your aimless course of indecipherable landmarks, from a pigeon feather to a smashed snail, from scent to shining scent.

Today, inside the tree tunnel at the end of the sea front, it’s exactly the stage of summer at which the leaves are such a yellow shade of green that they glow, or seem to be glowing. Today, you tow me through the glowing leaves to where there’s a slipway and a boathouse. This is the village rowing club. The boathouse is a prefab painted a coniferous shade of green to flush with the foliage. The slip is slimy concrete. While you are sniffing a spool of fox foul as delicately as though it were a fine cigar, I spy through the window to the wooden yawls laid out on racks, capsized, with their oars amputated and removed.

All winter, the prefab stays locked. The window clots with cobwebs, nobody comes. The yawls hibernate, like big brown bears with polished backs in dark dens. But now it’s summer, the season of regattas. The boathouse is garnished by bunting and every second Sunday, a marquee goes up, a loudspeaker is nailed to a post, a starter pistol is loaded with blank caps, and the rowers come.

My father used to have a shabby rowboat, have I mentioned it before? Have I already told you about the old man’s doorbox? It was roped to a rusted rung along the shore wall and it used to dash itself against the stones in wild weather almost as if it was trying to break itself, or perhaps to break away. After he died, I cut my father’s doorbox loose and I don’t know whether it drifted off or simply sunk into the mudflats.

From the window we watch the handsome boats skimming across the bay between their markers, the rower’s heads lined up as targets on a coconut shy, pumping time like synchronised pendulums. The markers are gallon drums, strung together into a bobbing boundary. The races tempt a straggle of revellers to the shore wall. I can tell the true enthusiasts from their wolf-whistles and binoculars, whereas most of them are wielding choc-ices and coke cans instead, more entertained by the sport of putting things into their mouths than the rowing.

Here in our aerial seat, we are ever uprooted and apart. We are ever looking down on life, at sun visors and bald pates and umbrellas. The rowing club marquee sends a perfume of pig meat coasting over the village and up to meet us. Can you smell it? Sausages blistering against barbeque coals. You lift your head to the opened crack, a crack just wide enough for smells and sounds and breeze but not quite so wide that you could dive-bomb an unsuspecting innocent on the street below. You are concentrating hard on the sausages. Your thousand-mile stare stops dead at the marquee. The drool falls, snares on your beard and swings. We can’t go out to join the revelling, I’m sorry. The regatta is for families. See the kids in miniature life-jackets all blown up like rubber bath toys? See the parents hanging onto a pudgy arm lest a sudden gust capture their balloon child and send them surfing to the trees? It’s for families, not for us. We can only hide here and watch the yawls and the pendulums, the gobblers and gawpers and gabbers.

As evening sneaks in, we go down to the kitchen. I clank the pan onto a hob and fetch a packet of sausages from the fridge. I can’t bear the fatty lumps which squeak against my teeth like polystyrene and I can’t bear the way each end puckers to an unfryable twist, but I like the ritual of Sunday sausage cooking. I like having a calf-high, furred and dribbling excuse to perform it for. I chop your share into easily swallowable cylindrical segments. I extract all the gristly bits from my own sausages with the filleting knife, drop them to your bowl. Now I lean beneath the lintel of the back door with my coffee cup in one hand, a cigarette in the other and you at my feet. Together we wait for the pan to cool.

The tomato plants are sleeping outside now. Perhaps they look a little hardened, fruitless but in flower. Against the stone fence in their sunless sun spot, the peas have yet to clasp their sticks and probably never will, not now. Their leaves are drab, their roots drowned dead in the gritty black scum of the bag. Why does everything either starve or drown? Always either too much or too little, always imbalance. From the doormat at dusk, we hear the race commentator still calling names and numbers and progress reports, still breathing too loudly into the microphone. I’ve never seen what he looks like but his disembodied voice is almost godlike in the way it booms from nowhere and reaches everyone, in the way it’s terribly indistinct but probably trying to tell us something.

Now the pan is cool, ready for you to slather. The steel scrapes against the lino as you lick, and the sound it makes is like tired boots dragging the last few yards home.

My father died of a sausage.

I haven’t told you before because it’s a stupid kind of death. It’s the death of fables told by over-protective parents to caution their children against things which seem humdrum and harmless, to teach them something of the complicated grown-up ways of fearing. There’s the fable of the little boy who had his head knocked off by a lamppost because he stuck it out the upstairs window of a double-decker bus. Then there’s the little girl who tried to pet a lion at the zoo and had her arm munched, right up to the shoulder. But death by sausage is the fable told by adult persons to their own discarded mums and dads, for whom choking is the only crummy kind of peril left to confront them on a daily basis.

My father is the man you can smell all over the house, his house, but never find. You’ll smell his dead skin cells in the leather bind of never-opened books and swept beneath the never-lifted rugs. You’ll smell his dead breath, sausage scented, through the cracks in the roof plaster and the draught from the keyhole of the shut-up-and-locked room. You’ll smell him most of all in the feet sweat pong of my slippers; here the stench is so strong I can smell it too. The slippers are excessively big for me, have you noticed? Even though my feet are uncommonly long and flat to balance the plundering mass of my limbs and pork of my gut, my father’s feet were longer and flatter still; they seemed to reach the full diameter of his unfolded umbrella. When I wear his slippers I must slide my heels along the carpet and grasp my toes to the tatty insoles. Still, I wear them, my incommunicable sense of superstition trumping comfort. Still, I hang two towels on the bathroom rack and stand two brushes in the toothbrush jar. I know the stagnated spit that festers at the bottom is juice of my gums alone, but still.

My father was eighty-three when the sausage segment stoppered his windpipe. I’d expected that having reached such an age, he’d die of some lazy, predictable thing, in a bed with last words and an emphatic rattle. But life never misses an opportunity to upscuttle us. Life likes to tell us it told us so. Even when we are so very old that nothing is alarming any more. So old we sit and watch, and whatever it is, we see it coming. My father had no last words, or at least his last words were spoken too long before the time he died to be remembered, to be cherished, and instead of rattling he banged his fist on the kitchen table, and with the bang still ringing, he raised his hands to clutch his throat.

My father’s name was the same word as for the small insectivorous passerine birds found most commonly photographed on Christmas cards, with orange-red blushed breasts as though they’ve been water-boarded by molten amber and stained for life. But my father’s name is just another strange sound sent from the mouths of men to confuse you, to distract from your vocabulary of commands. It doesn’t mean anything; it doesn’t matter.

Come here, I’ve something to show you.

I’ve kept this book close since I was a boy. As a boy, it helped me to work out certain of my uncertainties about the world. Fairy Tales from Across the Globe is what the cover title says, now let me show you the page I’ve visited most. See the mountain and the meadow. See the humpback footbridge. Now here are the three Billy Goats Gruff, and beneath the stone-clad arch down in the damp and gloom, here is the crouching troll. His nose is warty and his brow is bushy. His eyes have a flash of crazy in them. They are cast up to the elegantly skipping goats. When I was a boy and came to this page, I thought of the children passing on their way to school and felt a twinge of camaraderie with the crouching troll, as though I’d discovered my species. There’s only one picture, still sometimes I’m convinced that I see him crouching outside of the pages. On the living room windowsill, beneath the log tarp, low down in the kitchen nook.

Sometimes it makes me chuckle and sometimes it makes me queasy to see how closely I’ve grow to resemble this troll as an adult, as an old man.

You sit in the backyard, on the gravel in a scrap of sunshine, your ears ruffling in the breeze and all the rusted roots gleaming through your ragged coat.

I see your maggot nose twitching. I smell the day’s confections baking in the grocer’s kitchen. The sickly wafts of croissant and apple pie, two different continents together in one oven. What are the other smells, the ones too wispy for my inadequate human senses? Can you smell the compost toasting in the plant pots, the heated wax of the bike tarpaulin, the trace of a cat who passed in the night?

Maybe I was wrong about the seasons. Some sort of summer arrived during the early hours. We woke to the transcendent stillness of a fine day, the first fine day. Bright rays poured through the uncurtained bedroom window, triumphing over the toadflax. We tripped the stairs two at a time, pushed the back door, hopped over the welcome mat. We roused the garden spider who lives between the ropes of the rotary clothes-line and has a gold-flecked abdomen like a tiny amulet. She rose to find the dew already evaporated from the filaments of her flimsy home, a baby bluebottle freshly throttled by her silken entrapments. Dangling alongside the amulet spider, the load of washing I pegged up over a week ago and watched being re-washed by the elements several showers over, is finally dry.

For the first time all summer, I carry our breakfast bowls out to the patio table and we eat to the noise of seagulls barking and night lorries roaring up refinery hill, reaching their destination. I lean back in the patio chair. The muscles of my face droop and my jaw cocks open. On the glass of the tabletop, there’s a bowl of inappropriately winterish porridge, a cup of pungent coffee, a packet of liquorice flavour papers stuck to the flap of a tobacco pouch, my Amber Leaf. The first time I smoked, I was fifty-five-and-three-quarters. Too old for beginning to experiment with injurious substances, but just the right age for taking up a habit that encourages death. I knew exactly how to assemble my first cigarette, I’d watched my father do it ten thousand times. A fat pinch of softly wizened shag, a roll between the middle fingers and thumbs of both hands in smooth co-ordination. I’d trouble getting the perfect turn. My father always made it look effortless. After a few attempts I managed to seal the paper, to pop the roach in, to light. Then I propped it in the ashtray to smoke itself out. Amber Leaf was my father’s brand; liquorice was his dubious choice of papers, and all I wanted was to breathe the companionable smoke. Yet with the smell, a certain dull gnawing inside me eased, and I stopped picking the tough skin around my fingernails. With the second cigarette I rolled, it wasn’t enough to inhale the air above as it smouldered itself to a stub. I lifted it to my lips. Sucked, swallowed. And then I felt a little rush, a little swimmy-headed, a little better.

It was only once I’d started smoking for myself that I realised I never found where my father tore his roaches from. When he was alive, I never came across a single piece of soft card with a tiny rectangle wrought from it, whereas I am forever looting the biscuit and cereal and tissue boxes, slowly smoking a trail through my paperback book jackets.

Now the sun’s full up and the backyard’s a-twinkle. A pigeon settles on the stone fence. Its feathers are palest mauve, the colour of forest fruit yoghurt. It has a plastic tag around its right ankle and seems to be watching, checking to see if I’m the human it knows, if this is the backyard where it left its coop. You don’t chase it; you never chase birds. I see how bewitched you are by furred things in the undergrowth and it always makes me wonder, why not birds? You’ll squeeze your head down a rabbit hole, convinced your body can be contracted to follow. Yet you seem to know instinctively that you can’t fly.

Look, the buoys seem polished again. The sunlight’s washed away their slime. Even my dried clothes, my moth-eaten wardrobe of black and brown and grey, even my faded bath towel, look beautiful this morning. The night lorries have arrived, the amulet spider is having baby bluebottle for her breakfast, the business of the salon commences for the day. How strange to think that a few yards through a wall and over a parquet floor people are being shampooed, tinted, plucked, waxed. This makes me remember my calluses, so I remove my socks, take out my penknife and set about the improbably enjoyable task of scissoring the dead yellow meat from my feet. You sniffle them up and chew as though they were chunks of squeak toy, and a child screeches, somewhere way off in the distance, and I wonder was it a screech of joy or a screech of panic, and I wonder how to tell the difference. I wonder if other people can tell the difference. I roll another cigarette, and you breathe deep the second-hand smoke, the croissants and apple pies, the absent cat.

And our pigeon coos, soulfully.

Have I told you about my birthday? I’ve only ever had one, but it happened around this time of year, during summer, on a day of storms which followed the first spell of proper sun. A Wednesday, I think. It wasn’t long after Aunt died, and so it must have been the year I turned ten.

My father didn’t go to work. He ate his bran flakes, his sausages. Then he told me it was my birthday and took me to the zoo, or was it a wildlife park? Maybe it was a wildlife park. At the zoo or wildlife park, he held his unfolded umbrella up. I could feel the raindrops seeping through my sleeves and even though it was summer, even though the rain was warm, the goosebumps rose on my arms like a cold rash.

There were hardly any other visitors. What few there were we saw over and over as we followed the recommended strolling routes from the aviary through the reptile house, past monkey island to the buffalo plains. All the playground rides were empty and my father told me I was allowed to play on any one I chose. But I wasn’t interested in the seasaws and slides and swings. All I wanted was to look at the birds, the lizards, the big cats and tiny, red pandas.

There’s nothing sadder than a rainy zoo, or wildlife park. All the creatures look either slightly dejected or slightly deranged. The big ones paced their enclosures. The small ones cowered under something and I couldn’t tell if they were sheltering from the downpour or trying to hide. I moved on reluctantly from each compound. I wanted to stay there forever amongst all the sad animals. As the rain grew heavier, my father coaxed me into the gorilla house, then left me to go and stand in the doorway and smoke. There was a gigantic silverback leaning against the window of his enclosure. His hands were so humanlike, his nails exquisitely kempt, much more so than my own. Slowly, slowly, he extended the index finger of his right hand and placed its tip against the glass. I lifted mine and laid it level on the other side. And we stayed like that a long while, until my father came back and told me it was time to go.

Once we were home again, my father went to his room to fetch something. At first I thought he was giving me a small cage with an assortment of plastic toys inside, but then I saw its inhabitant. Its eyes were spearing black, its cheek pouches lumpy with stashed seeds. It gripped a bar in either front paw and I remember thinking that all it needed was a stripy jumper to be a perfect cartoon convict.

‘It’s a Russian Dwarf,’ my father said. But it wasn’t. It was a hamster.

I can’t remember the exact date of my tenth birthday, but every Wednesday in summer for years and years after I looked out for it, I waited for it to be acknowledged again.

Little by little, the pothole tar remembers how to melt. The wind turbines on the further hills cease their impetuous whirling. Their white trunks vanish into the low mist; their blades against the blue sky look as though they’ve been drawn in Tipp-Ex. The sprat organise into torrents and storm into the bay, mackerel hot on their tail fins.

I watch as you eat the only raspberry on my bush. You smell its ripeness on the breeze and snuffle between the saw-toothed leaves, now nibble it clean to the core with bizarre delicacy, drupelet by drupelet. You’re so engrossed by the berry you don’t see me watching, behind you in the doorway beneath the lintel, coffee cup in hand, cigarette stuck behind my ear. You don’t hear as I let loose a soft snort of laughter.

My father had a laugh like a rainstick, like a thousand grains of raw rice bouncing about inside his throat. He’d blow his nostrils wide and crinkle his cheeks up, but the noise always remained lodged just below his mouth hole, like the sausage. When my father laughed it was mostly over re-runs of comedy shows from the 1970s. Sometimes I laughed with him and while my congenial laugh wasn’t exactly false, it was always on cue, it was always stiff.

I’m particularly fond of sitting in the sun, of basking. It’s a fondness which shows in the skin of my face, scorched over decades to a permanent tan, dappled by dubious freckles and shape-shifting blotches, no doubt the beginning of leisurely carcinomas. Still I cannot help myself. When I sit out to bask, I feel the sun suffusing my bloodstream and it’s like the effects of a tobacco which cannot be pouched. I am instantly revived, inspirited.

Now I see you’re a basker too. Together we sit out every fine day. In our concrete paddock, our yard-sized universe, we watch as the shadow of the roof steadily skulks across the gravel. I haul the patio chair in line with the shrinking light. You follow and lie at my feet. I haul it as far as the stone fence, to the point where the sun slips into next door, and is lost. Betrayed by the roof, now we bob about the yard, now we fidget like litter on the surface of the ocean. You are nibbling the leaves off a vine of poison ivy. There’s a mischievous tilt to your head, as though you’re consciously mocking death. I notice an ant, another ant; now I count the ants. See how they’re suddenly infinite, when just a moment ago there was only one.

I long to go to the beach, not just at dawn when the heat’s a little feeble. I long to go now, to walk to the end of the strand furthest from the car park where hardly anybody else ever bothers to walk, and to spread a rug there, to bask. But I’m afraid of being gawped at, and I’m afraid of leading you into a wonderland of things to clamp. Now everybody’s on their holidays and willing to travel from all over the green and concrete county to reach the open blue, the beach will be too busy, and a busy beach is a baited trap. I’m afraid of the fair-weather strangers, of their pets and children, of the trouble they make and how it might make trouble for us.

There must be, somewhere, a place left behind by the wearers of swimsuits and pitchers of windbreaks and preparers of picnics. The sun’s still high above the chimney pots, so let’s strike off and drive around, see if we can find some small piece of abandoned coastline. Into the car and out of the village, we turn down every overgrown boreen which looks as though it might eventually subside into horizon. Sometimes there are private residences and sometimes there are NO TRESSPASSING signs and sometimes there are bulls who mistake me for their farmer, pick themselves up and trundle toward the silage trough. See the butterflies in the road up ahead, their wings swatting the sunlight as they twirl. But I forget to ease my foot from the accelerator, and now the butterflies crash and split against our windscreen. Just for a second before they’re gone, I see they’re red admirals. They leave two tiny smears of gunk and a strange dust on the glass, a glittering dust. Did you see them? Did you see the red admirals?

At last, here’s the ghost of a track which tapers into an expanse of springy grass, and collapses away down the clifftop.

The clifftop is studded with scabious, chamomile, campion. Ladybirds hug the grass stalks. Hoverflies tread the air. Cuckoo spit slurs through your coat as you bound to the edge. Now here’s silverweed, its under-leaves gilded like the scales of a white-fleshed fish.

The track leads down slope. The earth and furze give way to sea pinks and lichen. It’s steep, but there’s a trawlerman’s blue rope bolted into the rock and strung between posts all the way to the bottom. People must have come this way before the undergrowth grew so dense, too dense to push through. I’m stamping it down; you’re tunnelling beneath. At the bottom, there’s a pebbled beach only as big as a disabled parking space, no good for sandcastles or windbreaks and submerged by several feet of sea at high tide, I’m guessing. It’s a beach hostile to holiday-makers, to day-trippers, to fair-weather strangers. My trouser legs are nicked from the furze’s tiny fangs, my wrists are nettled. Purple grass-seeds rest amongst your curls and you are sneezing, sneezing, sneezing from the pollen-clogged air. But it’s low tide, so it’s perfect.

Tomorrow, once our slanted slates have collided with the course of the sun, we’ll come back here, I promise. We’ll scramble the way of the blue rope. I’ll bring sandwiches and gingernuts, a rag rug to spread across the pebbles. I’ll wedge your water dish between stones, take my book out, find the page with its corner folded, and bask. The slope’s pocked by burrow holes, smattered with dehydrated droppings. Free of the leash, you disappear into the clay at the base of the cliff to exhume the rabbit subways. But the rabbits have long surrendered their old roads to the ravaging roots of the gorse thicket. You don’t get very far and now your face is caked in red dust, scrawled into markings like warpaint, like you are the African prince named on your tag. You settle beside me, maggot twitching and eyeball swivelling. Well, what do you think? Will we come back tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after again?

Today, I can’t see a soul. There’s a row of cottages on the road, about a quarter mile away. I see flowerboxes on the windowsills, swimsuits on the washing line, cars with city registration plates and unnecessarily wide axles squeezed into the cottage-sized driveways, and I wonder why nobody appears to bother with the blue rope. Don’t children go adventuring any more? Trampling the bracken in pursuit of secret caves and hidden coves, pebbled beaches at the bottom of puzzling blue ropes? But of course, I forgot how nowadays children are taught to plonk their rugs right at the start of a beach, right beside where the car is parked and all the other families are similarly plonking. These children never had the Famous Five because it has since transpired that Enid Blyton was ever-so-slightly racist, or so I heard on the radio. These are the sort of fair-weather strangers of whom we are thoroughly afraid, the sort who rank comradeship over compassion.

I’ve never read you any Famous Five. I should, I think you’d like it. I’m trying to remember whether Timmy ever scoffed lumps of shit or savaged guileless walkers. I don’t think so.

Every dawn, I expect the weather to have broken overnight. As though it will wait until I’m not watching to break. But it doesn’t. We walk the refinery road to Tawny Bay. We eat porridge in the yard. And when the tide is right, we drive to the steep cliff and scramble the way of the blue rope. Now the days are longer than ever before, but like never before, I’m grateful.

I bring a thermos flask to the pebbled beach and stand it on the flattest rock. It’s too hot, I know, but I’ve always wondered what it feels like to drink coffee on the beach. Are you too hot too? You’re pumping out short, fast puffs of breath. I tow you by the collar to a rockpool, hoist you up and lower you in, cup my hands to splash your chest and belly. As the water resettles, you stay as you are. You’re watching the shrimp around your feet, snapping at the water, coughing and spluttering it out your nostrils.

You always come back to me in your own time. Now you lean against my crossed ankles beside the thermos rock. Behind us and beyond the holiday cottages, see the fields. Remember how they seemed to be green as we drove past them? Now see how, from here, they are taupe and mint, emerald and lime.

Interrupting the fields, there’s a golf course and a purposeless dispersal of bungalows. Barns, cars, bales and trees. Cows moving as imperceptibly as the hands of a clock, getting there without ever seeming to go. Now look out and see the ocean; the ocean’s interruptions. There’s a hunk of grassy rock all covered in cormorants. A lobster buoy. Sail boats very far away. A blue gallon drum, presumably attached to something beneath the surface. And a cargoship passing a floating lighthouse on its way into harbour.

Whenever I look at a cargoship, I start to picture all the different things enclosed within each container, then all of the components which went into making the things, and then all of the component’s components, and so on, into perpetuity. Like the picture on the tin of Royal baking powder. When I was about as tall as the letter slot and riding in the back of my father’s car, we were passing through town one day, driving along the main street, and I remember seeing a woman through the window, standing in her doorway. After a moment, she turned and went back inside, closing the door behind her, and then of course I couldn’t see her any more. I know it sounds like nothing much, but it was the first time I realised that other people’s lives go on. All of the time, out of sight and without me. It was the first time I realised that everything just goes on and on and on. Regardless, relentless.

Don’t you ever wonder what exactly people do, all day long, every day? The regatta revellers, April and the Polish hairdresser, the summer boys’ mums and dads? We see them power-walking along the shore front, queuing in the supermarket, zipping through the village in their fat cars. Then they pull into driveways and vanish behind front doors. Secure inside their magnolia dens with the venetian blinds tilted, what do they do?

I can imagine; I do imagine, but my father and Aunt are the only people I’ve ever actually been shut behind a door with, before you. And of course you’re not a person, I always forget that. Now it’s forty-seven years since I was shut up with Aunt, and my father hardly counts either. For most of the days each week, for most of my life, he left the house in the morning and didn’t come back again until night, and only some nights, not even all of them.

Every morning, he put on an ironed white shirt, a pinstriped tie, suit trousers and sensible shoes. My father was employed by a factory which manufactured confectionary. He was on the production line, and so he must have changed as soon as he arrived at work, and changed back again as soon as he clocked off. He never brought me to the industrial estate in the city to show me his factory, and so the picture I have in my head of little orange men and chocolate rivers isn’t real.

My father wasn’t an educated or well-heeled man, even if he dressed as if he was. He saved enough money every year to go on holiday, once a year. And every year, once a year, on holiday, he bought a plate. He didn’t retire until he was seventy-six. One morning he got up as early as he always had and ate his bran flakes and sausages as usual. He was wearing his shirt and suit trousers, but I noticed he’d substituted slippers for tie. After he finished his post-breakfast cigarette, he went back into his bedroom and closed the door. He did the same thing the next day, and the next. Sometimes I’d stand outside and listen. I could hear pencil scratching, scissor squeaking, cardboard sawing and the tinkling of a paintbrush being rinsed in a jar. After a couple of weeks, he opened the door and showed me what he was making.

It was a board game, colourful and complicated, yet also crude and logistically flawed. It fell far short of what I’d always imagined to be my father’s standards of precision, but of course, I didn’t tell him that. He made ninety-eight board games in the years between retirement and death, and I never told him. Some of them were reinvented versions of the classics. Cluedo on a cruise liner with a crew’s mess instead of a dining room and a guy rope instead of a candlestick. Snakes & Ladders in three dimensions with footstools and waterslides instead. The games my father invented for himself all had names which ended in an exclamation mark and sounded like a fairground ride or an ice-lolly: Scaffold! Golly Whizz! Scramp! I spent thousands of evenings playing his disorientating games with him, losing to my father’s ridiculous rules. And for thousands of evenings, I longed to be left to my books instead, to be far away inside their worlds and protected from my own.

I’ve never really seen the point of board games. They always take too much time to reach the finishing line, and then you either win or lose and that’s it. Nothing new is known. The game goes back into its box. Books have always been another kind of safe space, though if I’m completely honest then most of the things I learned from reading I’ve forgotten anyway. At least by playing the games, by losing, I gave my father some small volt of victory, some sense of accomplishment. I made him feel better, for a while, and that’s all the point there is, really. I owed him that, at least.

Before he retired, I knew very little of my father other than what I witnessed for myself. He spoke to me in a practical way, he never really told me things. I knew he always took a conference pear and a packet of custard creams to work. I knew he sat with his right ankle rested against the lid of his left knee. I knew he didn’t like the taste of plastic from the new milk bottles. I knew a hundred mundane facts, but nothing of his longings, of his past. Now I wonder if he ate all of the custard creams himself or did he share them? And if he shared them, who did he share them with?

After he retired, my father transformed his bedroom into a workshop for tinkering the board games into existence. There he spent his days sawing sheets of corrugated card, carving counters from bricks of balsa and painting over everything with his soft-bristled brushes. My father’s tinkerings left their trace in tiny mountains of wood shavings and flakes of cut card which sat on the carpet or got picked up by the door, swept into the hall and trampled across the house. After he retired, sometimes he’d tell me throwaway things and I’d scrabble them up like a squirrel snatching winter’s nuts. Sometimes on the sherbet line, he told me, the sealer would malfunction, then the pressure made the packets explode. The whole length of the belt there’d be a sugar cloud and we’d all be hacking and gagging into our mopcaps. My father hadn’t liked his job. He always made this much clear to me.

In his bedroom-workshop, he ruined a square of wallpaper by using it to soak the excess water from his soft bristles. One day I noticed how it had been dabbed into an intricate pattern, like a coded message. In his latest years, I’d bring him cups of tea and marmalade on toast and I’d see how he’d added a new mark to his square, how it expanded every day. After he died, I locked my father’s window, I locked his door. I laid the draught snake out. Now there’s nothing more to add. The message is ended and means everything it’s ever going to mean. And I suppose I know now everything I’m ever going to know about my father.

Come here, I’ve something to show you.

There are ninety-seven homemade board games inside the shut-up-and-locked room, and the ninety-eighth is here in this box. This is the best one, the only one I still sometimes try to play. It’s a version of a real game called Discovering Europe, I think, only based upon a continent of my father’s creation. See how he outlined his landmass, then sliced it up between borderlines. See how the name of each country is borrowed from an obscurely titled village or town land or valley or river. Now see how my father gave each country a national anthem, a national costume, a national sport and flag as well as a particular landscape and export industry. Here’s Garrowdiff and the Isle of Spence, Moyastree and Ballyooagle. Here’s Palace and here’s Butts. See how Dyssert is mostly desert and Creggish is particularly craggy, how all the citizens of Elphin wear green tights and the flag of Lisfinny is covered in fish.

It’s a game of luck, so you can play it with me if I roll the dice for you, pick up your chance cards, push your counter on a round trip to nowhere. In the low chair on the opposite side of the gameboard, you’re sitting up straight, watching intently. Are you waiting to be fed one of the coloured pieces? I’m sorry, these aren’t for gobbling.

My father told me that after he died the games were to be destroyed without exception. I expect he was ashamed of the snot-nosed and sticky-fingered child who dwelt within him, who tinkered. He didn’t want people to weigh the worth of his life in puerile toys. But I didn’t preserve them out of malice; it’s just that I don’t have a knack for destruction. And besides, I had a hand in them too. He asked for my help, and I helped. I did all the dullest and finickiest and most repetitive jobs. I kicked down the days with mind-numbing tasks on my father’s instruction when I wanted nothing but to be reading instead. I know he only came back to remain in the salmon pink house on his retirement because he was old and spent and had nobody to care for him, nobody but me. When I needed him least, he suddenly needed me to sand his balsa and lose at his games. By his eightieth year, my father was scarcely the height of a silverback and he had exactly the same achromatic hair, slouchy gait and pouchy eye sockets. It was hard to hate him then, to treat him cruelly. It would have been like kicking a puppy; it would have made me the troll he’d always led me to believe I was.

I never meant for what happened to happen. I’ve no more knack for concealment than I do destruction. Please understand, I never meant it.

Who were they? The people my father thought were going to come for his sloppy games and pass judgement on his life? Were they the people who asked me questions after mass, the people he shared his custard creams with, the people alongside whom he inhaled exploded sherbet? Whoever they were, or whoever he thought they were, they never came.

Your counter is in Bunraffy when you give in, curl up and sleep, and I play on alone. I steer thoughtlessly through the game for an hour or two, and after the finishing line is crossed, I feel a little better, for a while.

Sometimes, when I was a boy, my father tore sheets of paper from his graphed pad and gave them to me to draw pictures. But instead of trying to replicate items and aspects of my world, I turned the sheet onto its blank side and re-drew the pattern of the graph, meticulously. Hundreds of teeny-tiny squares, without picking up a ruler. Every now and again I’d make an attempt at forms, but curves and shading always straightened and slimmed and led me back inexorably to the grid. It made some kind of sense to me then. It helped to hold the smog at bay. I don’t know what happened to those drawings. I think my father threw them all away.

I’ve never looked through his stuff and I can’t explain exactly why it is I’m so incurious. I suppose there are clues about his life there in the shut-up-and-locked room, perhaps even some traces of my mother, but better to be content with ignorance, I’ve always thought, than haunted by the truth.

The sea relaxes into summer, turns from slate to teal to crystalline. The white horses fall back into ripples and until they recommence their watery gallivanting, there’ll be no sea-wrecked buoys to find on the rocks and beaches, no stir and shake to smash them, no lob and volley to run their broken pieces aground. It’s the season of scantiest harvest for my backyard collection of sea junk. Where the waves have most recently touched, now there are jellyfish instead. No smaller than coins, no larger than coasters. Even though they are beached, traces of poison remain in their floppy tails. Even though they are dead, they can still sting. And there are pinecones. There are always pinecones.

Now let me show you my junk-treasures. Here are my crabs. Not the severed claws you like to crunch but the shells of their backs, their elegant exoskeletons. I find them knotted into bladderwrack, crisping in the sun on the banks of rock-pools. I bring them home, rinse the stringy meat out, apply a lick of varnish to shield against the bleaching light. The edible crabs are smooth and curved like the red wood of a string instrument. The velvet crabs are fiddly to varnish; my soft bristles get stuck in the down of their carpeted backs. The common crabs have spots and spiked edges, like a pinking shears. Although brown-green under water, once dismembered and risen to the surface, their shells are baked to the colour of marmalade, Seville marmalade. The colour reminds me of Aunt’s open casket in the funeral home. Her cheeks had been bronzed by some blundering undertaker and the tanned head on the coffin pillow was a stranger to me, creepy as a ventriloquist’s dummy, only without the ventriloquist to make it seem harmless, even funny.

Here’s my driftwood. I prefer the pieces with swatches of crackled paint. I bring them home and nail them to the yellow walls, each abutting the next, joining the swatches. I think of it as a colossal jigsaw, an abstract assemblage of infinite proportions, and sometimes I wonder if, along with his overlong feet, my father bestowed me his restless compulsion for remaking.

Now here are my bass lures. They look like fish-shaped toys except for the evil little hooks. Their plastic backs are psychedelic and their plastic bellies rattle like matchboxes. I cut them from great nests of weed wound up with cat-gut and threaded through with tiny, luminous beads. There’s something especially wretched about the washed-up lures. It’s like the plastic fish have been garrotted by their own line, poisoned by the lead of their own weight.

Best of all treasures, here are my glass pebbles. They’re descended from old bottles, shattered and frosted by millions of the water’s worker particles. They are mostly wine-bottle green, milk-bottle white and beer-bottle brown. Sometimes they are medicine-bottle blue, but the blues grow rarer by the year. At dawn I sit on the stones of Tawny Bay and sift the shale while you’re playing football. And on every afternoon the tide grants us our pebbled beach, I sit and sift again. At home, I fill my jars and stand them in the windows. When the sun shines through, it throws sea-coloured mosaics onto the sill, the walls, the floor. I know what you’re rolling about between your teeth. Come here, spit it out.

Now everything holds a diaphanous kind of potential. Now everything is so quiet and so nice and I feel ever so faintly less strange, less horrible. It makes me uneasy. It reminds me how I must remember to be distrustful of good fortune.

There is a little boy.

He has frilly hair, apricot skin, symmetrical features. He reminds me of the people in my picture frames, of the posing boys with sweet, smiling faces and a posing parent either side. Only this sweet face is snarled and gulping. This boy is staggering in distress, struggling to reach for his shih tzu and pressing, pressing, pressing his heartbeat into my outstretched palm. We are on the bird walk at last light, and I never meant to touch. I never wanted to touch. I’m only holding him back, with the front of my hand flat to the front of the boy’s red T-shirt. Red: the colour of warning, of admonition. But I’m only holding him. My other hand is on your mouth, my fingers pressed into your gums trying to lever your canine teeth from the tender skin of the shih tzu’s neck. And there is blood now. On me, on you. But mostly on the shih tzu, because it’s mostly the shih tzu’s blood.

The boy’s mother must have been all the way back as far as the power station. It takes her forever to catch up with her son. She is fat, too fat for hurrying, and her voice is fat too. A torrent of verbal abuse bulges and rolls from her bulges and rolls. Now she screams and sledgehammers a fist between animals. Her graceless karate chop does the trick. In an instant, I wrench you from your quarry and the little boy scoops his shih tzu back.

I stride away. With you under my arm, I walk as fast as I can without blatantly running. My hips are swinging like a woman’s, my bad leg is being left behind. My hands are trembling and the trembles travel through my elbows and shoulders, into my chest. The sighted side of your head is twisted back and you’re digging your claws deep into the flesh of my waist, the pork of my gut. Now I lose my grip and drop half of you to the ground. Your front feet are dangling, so I must drag. And as I drag, I stutter angry whispers at the back of your satiny head. ‘Ssssstop.’ I stutter, ‘sssstop ssstop ssstop.’

But you can’t hear me, and you don’t stop. You’re braying, braying, braying a bloodthirsty bray. It seems to come out through every pore of your bandy body. So this is your kill noise, I’ve heard it only in murmurs before but now here it is at its furious zenith. Perhaps in a different situation I’d appreciate its eerie melodiousness, its piercing resonance. I’d notice how it’s like some hopeless, haunted, strangulated form of singing, singing, singing. Out of tune, out of time.

Now the boy’s mother is gaining on us. She’s just a few paces behind, puce-faced and perspiring. She buys the low fat cheese, I think. She has a treadmill which stands immoveable as a marble bust in the corner of the spare room. She decides things for her husband and is not worth disagreeing with. Now a sweat mark has appeared at the neckline of her blouse and is creeping down toward the crevasse of her mountainous breasts. The things she shouts, the things she threatens, are clearer now. No longer slurred by shock but whetted by rage.

‘VET’S BILLS!’ she shouts, ‘DOG WARDEN! MUZZLE! PUT TO SLEEEEEEP!’

We pull well ahead, pass the information board and cross the road.

‘I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE!’ she shouts, ‘I KNOW, I KNOW!’

And even if she is lying it doesn’t matter now, for she’s about to see us disappear behind the blue metal gate, our gate. The last of her shrilling is carried off on the wind, quenched by bigger noises. By the refinery siren, a passing cargo lorry full of freshly filled cylinders, a curlew calling his buddies to roost.

We fall into the laneway. I slam the gate. Even though you’ve stopped singing, your song’s still reverberating in my head. I bend down to remove the harness. You wag your tail in expectation of approval. You lick your chops in request of a treat, just like before. And I smack you hard across the muzzle, so hard that the bone at the back of my palm makes a sharp, clicking sound as it strikes.

Your eye waters. You shy away. You crumple like a tin can stamped beneath a hobnail boot.

I should never have adopted you. You bring trouble and then just when I think the trouble has passed, you bring trouble again. Caring for you is like keeping a nettle in a pretty porcelain flowerpot, watering its roots and pruning its vicious needles no matter how cruelly it stings my skin, until I’m pink and puffy all over yet still worrying the old welts back to life.

I find the key and open the front door. I step into the hall, but you don’t follow. You stay where you are. You cringe into the coarse brush of the mat.

And now I think of how I was my father’s nettle. His big lump of an embarrassing son. A son with no life of his own, no apparent trace of intelligence, of personality. A son fit only to be kept indoors, away from people and from light. Where there’s nothing to sting but himself.

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Come in and let me clean the blood from your beard. It’s almost time for supper.

At certain stages of the summer, the bay is fringed by a phlegm of dirty white weed. The top gets crusted by the sun, but underneath, it’s soup. Parsnip, no, cream of mushroom soup. On hot days at low tide, the soup smell steeps the village. Do you get it? Of course you do, you can smell everything. You can smell feelings; you can smell time.

Now we sit behind the window. You on the sill, me in the armchair. Outside it’s dark. The tide’s coming in and all the birds are gone; gone wherever it is they go at night-time and high tide. Out to sea, the bird book says, as though ‘Out To Sea’ were some immense country unfastened and cast off to drift alone between continents. In the mud still barely visible below the wall, see the traffic cone buried to its third luminous band. See the golf umbrella wasted to its contorted joints. That’s my father’s golf umbrella; there’s the spot where I threw it. See what is maybe the blunt bow of his doorbox and maybe just a bow-shaped hump of bedrock. See the concrete cavity block. Inside it’s brimming with common crabs preparing to shed their softened shells. And across the bay, see the lights of a livestock ship pulling out of harbour. Inside there are hundreds of individual crates, and inside each crate, there’s a calf. I picture the calves are tan, white, black, mottled, and the ones with window cabins are staring out across the bay. But they can’t see as far as the bird walk. They didn’t notice what went on while they were watching. They don’t understand what’s happening to them and they are mooing, even though we can’t hear them from here, they are mooing tragically for their mothers, for solid earth beneath their hooves.

The livestock ship sails from the harbour every Wednesday. It’s bound for Italy, I think.

Thursday passes, Friday, now Saturday. We don’t walk to Tawny Bay. Not even at dawn. We don’t scramble the way of the blue rope. We venture no further than the backyard. We can’t. We have to stay here, out of sight.

In the backyard, I rake the gravel. I’m careful to rake around the tufts of grass you like to nibble. And the weeds, the weeds which chose me, which chose us. I uproot the poison ivy, chuck it away. Next spring, I’m going to scatter grass-seeds. I’m going to see how much of a lawn I can plant before the pigeon eats it, our soulful pigeon.

A bee is circling the buoys, trying to figure out what sort of flowers they are. It isn’t one of the chubby bumbles which everyone loves. It’s a wasp-like honey bee instead; it carries baskets of pollen hooked around its backmost legs. I stop raking to watch. You’re chewing a piece of gravel. Even though I’ve told you ten times not to, still you are chewing. Now you swallow and watch with me. The honey bee chooses a blue float and touches down for just a second before flying on again, indignantly. I read in the newspaper that they can see blue and lavender, but none of the other colours. None of your greys and yellows, none of my everything. And they are dying, so the newspaper said, the bees. Perhaps next spring, I’ll plant flowers as well. Every open bud is a bee fed, I’d forgotten that.

Avoiding the weeds and tufts and buoys, the rotary line, the patio table, I’m trying to rake the gravel into smooth lines. I want it to look like a Zen garden, like the picture in my library book, remember? A floor of stones in a swirling pattern of perfectly parallel ridges. But it doesn’t. There are so many obstructions it’s just a mess. Now one of the jackdaws from the chimney pot hops down to the gutter, peers over the edge of the roof and croaks, as though it is taunting me, taunting my dismal attempt to impose order.

Now I kick your football against the stone fence, against the wall. It smacks into buoys, upsets pots, desolates my ridges. You try to prance behind it but the yard is too small. You lose interest, bit by bit. You cock your leg to piss against the tarp of the log pile and I pick your shit off the gravel before it gets levelled by the ball. I handle it in the way butchers handle raw meat at the deli counter, a plastic bag tied in a knot around my wrist. But I don’t mind because the weather is hot, the turds shrivel into liquorice sticks.

I’m guessing by Wednesday the calves have arrived in Italy. Would it take three days, or not that long, or longer? Is it only three days since we ventured out? It feels like a lifetime, like the lifetime of a creature which lives extremely long, like an ornamental carp in a Japanese Zen garden.

You on the sill. Me in the armchair. Facing the bay.

We see a car with four bicycles strapped above the tow bar, a kayak straddled across the roof rack and a caravan bumping along behind. It jostles up like a shiny-shelled beetle bent out of shape by its alien attachments. Now it jerks to a stop and gobs a family out. The mother takes photographs of the horizon. The children sit along the shore wall tossing fairy bun crumbs to the gulls. And the father adjusts his strappings, bends his attachments back into shape. See the summer whose arrival we waited for so patiently; it doesn’t belong to us. It never belonged to us.

The salon’s shuttered and locked. The hairdresser’s gone on her holidays and taken the hum of hood dryers with her, the tap of high heels, the tittle-tattle of female voices. I’d always thought these noises irritating, now it suddenly seems they were a kind of comfort. The phone in the salon is ringing, ringing, ringing through the floorboards, jingling like a giant wind-chime suspended in a draught. I try to drown it out by talking, by telling you about the dreary things we do and the blandest of changes beyond the window. I used to tell my father things like this, later when he chose to remain mute and it was left to me to chip away at the surface of our shared silences. Even though I knew he wasn’t listening, it was still hard, it was a bit like stinging myself, over and over. After he died, I continued to ramble. I’d point my face to the ceiling and address him, but it was easier because I knew he couldn’t really hear. And now it’s easiest of all with you. Now there’s no need for the weighing and measuring of words, no need to listen to the way they stand in the air after my voice has finished. I tell you of the new rib tied to a rusted rung, the tower crane raised over refinery hill, the man who practices casting his lead off the pier at high tide. I tell you anything, so long as it staves the smog off, so long as it gags the sentence that shrills in my brain. I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE it shrills, I KNOW, I KNOW.

What do you suppose she meant by that? What form of fear was she determining to instil, and am I fearing it as I should be? I’m fearing a poisoned sausage posted through the letter slot, catapulted over the stone fence into the backyard. I’m fearing the piiing-ponnng of the doorbell and a uniformed official standing on the coarse brush, wielding a pole with a modifiable collar sticking out the lowered end. I’m afraid of losing you, I never expected I could be so stupidly afraid of losing you. I see the fat woman on the undersides of my eyelids, her spittle and her sweat. Her words circle inside my skull like a sock trapped in a washing machine, the knob jammed on spin cycle.

Now see the slim skids of shit down the side of our house, below the roof cranny. Even though I can’t see through the flaky mud, it must mean my swallows, that they’ve chosen me. They’ve chosen us.

In the yard, I gather all the dead things. Each hummock of solidified earth falls from its pot like a sandcastle, peaked into imperfect turrets. I make a row of earth castles along the stone fence. I stick a few square-ish pieces of gravel into their facades, as windows. I stab a pigeon feather into the centre top of the tallest. Now I realise a castle would never be laid out like this, with its towers all in a tidy row. I should push them together, into a cluster, a fortress. But I don’t. I turn the tap on and unspool the garden hose. I spray my castles down, and as I spray, you snarl and snap at the jet of water, as though it were a living thing. A hostile thing. An assailant.

She knows where I live, yet I’ve no idea where she lives. But then everybody knows where I live. You’ve seen how they’re always perfectly polite, but this is a pretence; they are pretending. They’ve long since marked me down as strange, a strange man, I am a strange man. And it’s because of my strangeness that they make a special point of knowing where I live. And they wait, and have been waiting all the time I’ve been in this house in this village, all my life, for strange things to happen for which they can finger me, for which they can have me and my threatening strangeness removed.

Her words are spinning in my brain. Spinning, spinning, spinning without ever making it to the end of the cycle, without ever reaching the stage at which everything goes still, and the door can be opened again. And now the castles are demolished, you dig a shallow hole for yourself in the yard, a wallowing pool. And you lie in the wet mud. You wallow.

I’m going out. I won’t be long, not even an hour, I promise.

It’s Sunday and my father used to bring me to mass on Sundays, have I mentioned this already? In the later years, I used to bring him, and in the latest years he’d place his palm over the back of my hand as we crossed the churchyard and lean down hard as if I was a walking stick. My father was raised a Catholic, I presume, but he didn’t abstain from meat on Fridays or put up a crib at Christmas. He didn’t have Jesus in a picture frame with a tiny red bulb for a sacred heart, as Aunt did, and he didn’t stop what he was doing at six o’clock and bow his head for the Angelus bells. I don’t believe he believed. He only went to mass on Sundays because he liked to grumble and smoke by the gates after the communion notices. I’d leave him with the neighbours and sit in the car. I’d wait, and always, he made his own way back.

I don’t believe either. It takes all of my energy just to have faith in people. I went to mass and knelt on the cold lumber beside my father every Sunday only because he expected me to. During the service, I’d bow my head and un-tether my thoughts. And if there happened to be somebody sitting in the pew in front with a visible coat label, I’d reconfigure the letters into anagrams, as many as I could think of, until it was time to get up again, to go again to the car and wait.

Have I told you about HORNET? I think I already told you. Hornets are enormous wasps, you know. They eat bees because bees taste like honey. The church is beside the post office and I must have passed its gates a hundred times since then, one year and one half of a year ago. I’ve seen the church-going neighbours, my father’s fellow grumblers who asked me questions after he was gone, in other places around the village and in town. They always seem somehow incongruous; they always catch me unaware. And even though I know who they are and they know who I am, I’ve never spoken or saluted and not one of them has ever acknowledged me either, not even a nod. It seems that outside the church gates, we are strangers again.

I’m going to put your chair in the bedroom and close the living room door so no-one can see you at the window. I’m going to lock the metal gate so no-one can reach the letter slot.

‘Back in a minute,’ I say, and you are a good boy, and so I tell you.

‘Good boy,’ I tell you, ‘good.’

I get stuck in the mass traffic. I’d forgotten there’s mass traffic. The hedges are covered in red blackberries and amongst the berries, here’s willowherb, wild mint, meadowsweet.

I can’t bear the prospect of having to retell the nursing home story and so I let everybody else file in before me. From the woman in the wheelchair to the man who holds the collection plate, all wearing their mass clothes and pulling their mass faces.

The interior walls have been repainted. Now they are limp green, the colour of central embankments in winter. The statue of St Joseph is missing several of his digits, as if St Joseph were once the victim of a ransom that took too long to be paid. The plastic posies above the tabernacle are caked with dust, the Jesus face on the Eucharistic tapestry is a redhead, and the altar carpet is flattened along the pathway of the altar boys’ duties, as though they move on tiny steamrollers beneath their gowns. It’s odd I don’t remember these details, I must have looked at them Sunday in Sunday out for decades and decades. I must have scrutinised them clean out of existence.

I’m kneeling at the back with three rows between me and the closest congregant. All the things I’ve forgotten, yet I remember the words of the prayers and responses. But I don’t join in. I’m not here to cut bargains. I’m not here to make anagrams. So why am I here? I can’t remember why I came. It seems suddenly rash, stupid. Maybe I just wanted to have a spy at them, at all of these people who think I am a strange man, and know where I live. Every now and again someone glances around and shoots me a look of misgiving. Now it’s the kiss of peace and there’s nobody nearby enough for me to shake hands with, to wish peace upon. I stand with my wrists at my sides and chin rested against chest, pretending it is some kind of contemplation.

Come communion everybody gets up and queues toward the priest. I stay as I am, as still as I can, as though I might be invisible just as long as I don’t move. The procession kinks around so people can walk back down the aisle and return to their seats. Christ is melted to a wafery gloop on the roof of their mouths and their faces are pointing in my direction. Now I see the fat woman and her little boy. She is marching. He is scurrying behind. His fingers are pressed together and pointed to the rafters. His photo frame smile is demurely pursed.

I flee. I don’t stop to genuflect. I don’t stop to drop coppers into the collection plate or dip my fingers into the floating dust of the font. I clear the churchyard’s paving slabs, pass through the iron gates and rush to the car. No one catches up with me; no one tries, just like last time. I leave the church door open, and inside the car I can still hear the communion hymn. I can still hear all those ladies in shoulder-padded jackets with purple perms, and they are singing, singing, singing.

You’re waiting inside the front door. ‘It’s okay,’ I tell you, ‘I’m home again now.’

You’re grunting your greeting grunt, wagging your tail ecstatically as though we’d been separated for forever. I know it’s too early for supper, but let’s have sausages anyway. I know it’s too late for dawn, but let’s go out and walk. Up the road past the refinery, over the fields to the beach, to our beach, to Tawny Bay.

As we approach the edge of the slope, sandmartins lift into the sky. It’s as though someone’s standing below the line of the cliff, holding the birds scrunched in their palms, now flinging them upwards, fast, their wings only opening once they are high in the air. I remember finding a stunned sparrow, as a boy, and doing just that, holding and flinging, watching for its wings to open. Only they didn’t, of course, it fell straight back.

And once we’re over the edge, we are running. Because it is too steep, because we cannot help but run.

Do you hear it? The piiing-ponnng of the doorbell.

Now you have to follow me. I have to leave you here and go downstairs. You have to be quiet. You have to wait. ‘Quiet,’ I tell you, ‘wait.’

There’s a uniform standing in my laneway. Inside the uniform, there’s a woman. A smallish, oldish woman. I hadn’t expected that. She has the look of a John Dory about her, moon-eyed and frowny. There are dark speckles of stubble either side of her upper lip. Leathern patches encircle her elbow bones and her hair thins from the crown exposing a kippah of vanilla skin. For what feels like a long time, the woman just stands there and says nothing. As though she knows I know exactly why she’s here, exactly what she’s going to say. And even though I do, it takes me some time to register the thing she is carrying, the pole. Only now do I see the modifiable collar sticking out its lowered end.

I do not imagine the contents of her breadbin or the providence of her Christian name. I have only a second to think, and in that second, I think: things are never so immense when they happen as they were in my head. And so the woman warden asks me if I am who I am.

‘Yes.’ I say. I’m ready.

‘I’m afraid I’ve received a complaint,’ she says, but she doesn’t sound very afraid. She sounds like she’s tired of being at work. She sounds like she just wants to go home for the day. ‘I believe you were involved in an incident last week, along the village bird walk …’

Now she hesitates, perhaps giving me a chance to chip in, but I don’t. Behind me in the hallway, I picture the clutter of fallen coats, wellington boots, cockle shells, driftwood, plastic bags, woollen scarves. I wonder has she noticed your muddy paw prints on the flat-weave rug. I wonder if she thinks I’m the strange man the fat woman told her I’d be.

‘… in which a local boy and his pet were both injured …’ she finishes.

Now my fists jump to a white knuckle grip on the door frame. I register at once the gravity of the thing she has just said. For perhaps the first time in my life, my internal metronome is not several beats behind. It is on beat; I am unbeaten. My heels dig into the welcome mat, the not-actually-welcome-at-all mat. ‘HE DID NOT BITE THE BOY.’ I say, and she sighs. She sighs with all the unstilted force of several years of dwindling job satisfaction. And I say it again.

‘He did not bite the little boy,’ I say, but already the strength is gone from my voice. Because maybe you did bite the boy. I can’t remember. Maybe your teeth grazed his hand in the scuffle, even if you didn’t mean it. Maybe I can’t remember because I don’t want to.

Life never misses an opportunity to upscuttle us, I think. Life likes to tell us it told us so.

‘I’m charged with the authority to seize your animal,’ the woman warden says, ‘and to detain it until such a time as a decision’s reached on its behalf.’

‘He isn’t here.’ I tell her. ‘He’s with a friend.’ I’m ready. I’ve had five days to fear this, to prepare. I’ve learned my lines by heart. I’ve locked you in the bedroom wardrobe and turned the radio up loud to muffle your discombobulated hollering. Now she’s thinking, so I go on.

‘I haven’t been well,’ I say, ‘I’ve been bed-ridden all weekend. So I haven’t been able to walk him and he’s staying with a friend until I’m back on my feet.’

She’s still thinking. Is she thinking she can hear a smothered sort of woofing? Is she trying to make out whether it’s coming from inside the house or somewhere in the distance, down the street, an adjacent building?

‘He didn’t bite the boy.’ I say again, quietly, I implore. If I straightened my spine to its fullest, I’d be half the height of the pole taller than the woman warden, or thereabouts. But because I’m bent like a man in a pillory, we are standing almost exactly eye to eye.

‘Okay.’ She says, clearly, carefully. ‘Here’s what’s going to happen. You’ll collect him tonight and I’ll come back first thing tomorrow. I’ll take a full statement, your version of events.’ I’m nodding, nodding, nodding.

‘If you don’t hand him over to me without fuss, I’ll have a warrant to search the premises.’

She turns to go. The gate swings. I expect she’ll leave it to bang, but she doesn’t. She stops and turns around. She fiddles with the faulty handle until she’s solved its knack. Now the latch clicks softly into place and the sound of the woman warden’s footsteps become the sound of her growling engine. And I stand on the coarse brush of the not-actually-welcome-at-all mat, and wait. I wait until her engine has dissolved into the day. Now there’s only your muffled barking, the radio pealing diddly-eye music, the dinging of a metal rung against the village flagpole, the soft rap and roar of the restive sea.

White sliced pan, I think, and a name like Orla or Grainne or Margaret.

As I open the wardrobe door, you topple out head first and I catch you up. You seem to have forgotten it was me who locked you in there. You grunt your greeting grunt. Gratefully you beat your stumpy tail against the carpet.

Tonight, I do not dream. I sleep in spells, waking every few hours at different stages of the night, as if there were different stages of the night as there are the day, as if for a meal or a walk or a radio programme. But in the dark, there’s nothing. I go to the bathroom and stand on the tiles to cool my feet. I stand over the toilet bowl and try to piss. But I don’t need to piss, and so it only makes my bladder ache. You get up too. You lie in the hall outside the beaded curtain. You wait for me. I wait for the morning.

And as we wait we listen to my father’s house, and as we wait and listen, I realise that the rats are gone. I cannot remember them going or say whether it exactly coincided with you, but I realise I haven’t seen them scurrying the perimeter of the yard, whiskers brushing the stone fence, or heard their scratching against the skirting boards, their affrays inside the roof, not for weeks and weeks and weeks. Standing on the cold tiles in the middle of the night, I realise my spate of rats is ended.

At last, it’s morning enough to get up. I cast the bed covers off. I put my clothes and shoes on.

It’s Tuesday. But there’ll be no trip to town today, no post office.

Instead I’m walking from room to room, slow but purposeful. I’m surveying all the flaccid things which fill my rooms. They churn up pictures in my head but the pictures only smudge together, intermingle into brown. If you take more than two colours and blend them, they always make brown, a hundred different yet similar shades. Now I pick up thing after thing after thing. A margarine tub full of incense sticks, a pottery zeppelin, a lamp without a lampshade. These are my father’s things. I’ve never used, never needed them.

Now I draw two columns in my mind. On the right, there is Everything That Doesn’t Matter. On the left, there is Everything That Does. Now I start to divvy up all of this stuff which isn’t mine but for which I am responsible. And you follow my slow steps, look each way I look, sit at my feet every time I stop. There’s a flake of something pale stuck to the wet of your nose. It looks like a infinitesimal communion wafer. It mocks the seriousness of your face, the worried tilt of your head. I knock it off.

‘It’s okay,’ I tell you, ‘it’ll be okay.’

In the kitchen, I set the switch on the kettle to boil. I lean against the work-top. Already there’s such a compendium of items bulging against my temples. The right column’s an abstract smush, whereas the left is almost empty. I try to remember item by item, but before the kettle has tripped its switch, I realise there’s hardly anything worth crouching down to lift. Hardly anything worth lugging the length of the laneway. Hardly anything worth its weight in expended petrol as we drive. I realise that all these particles of matter don’t matter, that not one is capable of expressing grief as I abandon it. Down the blue rope, from our sit-spot amongst the pebbles, do you remember the lichens, limpets, barnacles, periwinkles, anemones? The sea pinks and chamomile? Do you remember the rocks? Now remember how everything clings to them, how every surrounding life-form must hold fast to the nearest solid thing in the modest hope it will sustain them. Like the pea tendrils to their dead sticks, like me and my unfeeling objects.

We’re back in the bedroom when the first smidges of dawn illumine the toadflax. See how its leaves and flowers have dried up and died back, as if overnight. Now it’s discoloured into umber, wilted into paper. I sit in the rocking chair beside the fireplace. The grate is empty but for some twigs lost from the jackdaw’s nest. I rock.

To the right of my mind, there’re the draught snake and the board games, the ash stump and the rag rugs. There’s the souvenir plates; the stupid plates from places the world over but not one place I’ve ever been and not one plate I’ve ever carried home with me. They follow the trail of a life lived before I was born. The only places I’ve ever been are in the books I can’t bring either. To the right, it’s just card and wood and wool, and the house is just plaster and brick and board, and it’s a sad place, don’t you think it’s sad? And it didn’t give birth to me and it isn’t my mother. It is inert, immoveable. Whereas I am alive, unbound. We are alive, unbound.

My mother is dead. I always knew from the twist in my father’s face, from his fundamental coldness, that she had died and bequeathed him a tragedy with which to define himself for the rest of his years. And me, of course. I was paramount to his tragedy. Now I go to the door of the shut-up-and-locked room and I stand outside fingering the handle. I look down to the draught snake and I look up to the cracks in the ceiling plaster. I feel as though there’s something I was going to say, but it escapes me. And so, I go back to the rocking chair.

To the left of my brain compendium, there are a few practical items: underpants and the camping cooker, kibble and gas, my father’s slippers, a pebble jar, the low chair and the football, your precious food bowl. To the left, there is you. Of course there is you.

Now you hop into my lap. And together, we rock.

‘It’s okay,’ I tell you, ‘it’ll be okay.’