All, that is, except Josh. He kept his own counsel. He had returned home, having dropped out of Manchester University during his first year, and had immediately set about making himself a stranger to his own family. He found himself a job stacking shelves in Tesco’s and then spent every bit of money that he made in the ear-shattering depths of Horace’s Inferno, one of Brixton’s more notorious clubs. Dan was inwardly enraged that his son should have given up on an opportunity in life that he himself had never been afforded. Yet he’d never sought confrontation over the issue, thinking that it might quite easily result in his son’s leaving home and setting himself up in some dive of a flat where he would be completely without parental control.

Always, when morning came and Dan had been woken from his fitful slumber on the kitchen sofa by the sounds of Jackie moving around upstairs, neither one scene from the film nor one equation from the Open University course had ever registered in his brain. There had always been too many other things flying around in his head.

5

Dan attempted to open the door of Josh’s bedroom once more, this time with a dunt of his shoulder, but there appeared to be some object on the other side that only allowed it to open a mere six inches. He got down on his knees and put a hand through the gap, and at a full arm’s length, managed to extract a battered Nike trainer, its toe caved in where it had been acting successfully as a wedge against his entry. He stood up and opened the door fully, and the strong, fusty odour of a youth’s unventilated lair made him physically reel back. He took a deep inhalation of untainted air before entering, then stepped as gingerly as he would in a minefield over the disordered piles of clothing that were strewn across every spare inch of the darkened interior of the room. Having made it across the floor space without coming into contact with the prostrate body of any one of Josh’s friends, who dossed down with him on an all too regular basis, Dan drew back the curtains and pushed up the window as wide as it would go. He then turned to survey the living quarters of his firstborn.