I think about setting fire to the house. I have no fuel. I imagine going into the garden and siphoning petrol from the car. I have in fact siphoned petrol before, as a child, with my father when he ran out of it for the lawnmower. Oh the memory, the taste of money.

I go out into the front garden and I look at the car and I imagine myself down on my hunkers sucking fuel and I realize that it is an impossible task. And there is a loud awful wail and the sound is guttural and brutal and it takes me a moment to realize that the sound is coming from my own body. I take the sweeping brush that is beside the porch that Jenny never took in after I asked her to, even though it was me that had used it to wash the car at the weekend. And I begin to bang the bin with the sweeping brush, a beat like a crazed drummer keeping in time with the band, no, leading it, and I am shaking and I am violently cold and I look around the small garden and it is a frantic movement of the eyes and I look up and I can see my neighbour, the light is on in his bedroom window and he is watching me.

I am pacing up and down and I am jumping from one foot to the other foot in much the same way that tennis players do in the moments before the umpire flicks the coin to decide who will serve, only my movements are exaggerated. I am a natural server. I decide to run now, anywhere, even though it is dark and I am screaming. It seems like I should just go, but before I run down the road I pull the black bin to the front of the footpath, so it will be obvious to the bin men that it is indeed ready and waiting to be collected in the morning. When it comes to the smallest of things, of duty, I remain a good father.

Epilogue