I often think about my mother. She was a beautiful woman, elegant, always so. I remember that her nails were often painted beautiful colours, crimson or coral or mauve. And even then, much like Maeve does now, I recall her shaking glitter over her freshly painted nails, as decoration. I remember as a young boy that she sat alongside me as I was reading or doing a jigsaw and rubbed my head. I laugh now thinking about how I made her list all the colours of nail varnish that she possessed and other colours that she could only imagine. The memory of laughing so much that I felt like I was going to puke, the same way I feel when I drink two cups of black tea straight in the morning, one after the other.

I remember how she claimed that she had always longed for a son because she herself had grown up in a house full of sisters and all they did was fight bitterly all day long, over hairclips, tights, makeup, records, and which boy loved which sister in school. I know that because I was the youngest she doted on me and that’s what made it so hard for me when Brian was killed. I know well that my mother was devastated but was thankful that it wasn’t me who had perished. When you’re seventeen and you lose your brother you feel like you can never overcome something like it. You lose some emotional ability and you gain something else. You can sense other things more acutely. Things like pain and relief. Like the feeling of being blind, I imagine, and your other senses rising to the challenge, to block out your darkness. And your fear.

I know that my father wasn’t an easy man to live with, that sometimes he gave our mother a slight slap if things weren’t up to scratch after checking the condition of the house in the evenings, looking to see if the two toilets had been cleaned while he was working in the shop. I wonder how my mother put up with him, watching, as he removed his shoes and his wool socks from his jaded feet as soon as he closed the front door with a firm slam, the procurement of a beer, the nature programmes on television, the sighing and rubbing of his bare feet, massaging them, trying to absorb the tiredness into his fingers.

Whenever I hear David Attenborough’s deep voice today, I remember my father and I think of how he quelled his disappointments in life by drowning them out with Attenborough’s authority. To this day I find it hard to reconcile the two disparate parts of my father, the solid strong man who could hurt my mother and the gentler more passive man who could only marvel at the love exhibited between any two animals, no matter how insignificant they were.