He still sent birthday cards – glossy and expensive, depicting New Yorker magazine covers or Jackson Pollock paintings. They had cheques tucked neatly inside, and were always signed Patrick, never Dad. But they stopped arriving when I was in my early twenties. I suppose when I hit twenty-one, he figured his job was done.

Over the years, I could never escape the feeling that all this was my fault. I wasn’t good enough somehow. It was as if he could already tell, even at thirteen, that I was a failure: that I wasn’t worth bothering with. It sounds stupid, I know. But whenever things went wrong later in life, it never felt like a surprise, because I knew deep down that I was destined to become a screw-up, just as my dad had predicted.

I’m about thirty feet from him now. As I step towards the passenger side of the car, he finally looks up and spots me.

His face twitches with shock, and I realise that he hasn’t simply been staring downwards – he’s been crying.

I stand there for a second outside the car, my heart pumping as we watch each other through the glass. And then he scrubs a hand across his eyes, and reaches over to open the door.

I slide into the passenger seat. The car smells strongly of cigarettes and sharp, minty air freshener. It’s so powerful, so overwhelmingly familiar, that I’m instantly nine years old again, in the back seat of our Volvo, watching the road signs fly past as Mum and Dad hiss at each other up front.

This car smells of him. How can you recognise someone’s smell, but still feel like they’re a total stranger?

He coughs roughly into his fist, and then sniffs. ‘Ben.’ He blinks at me and shakes his head. ‘Jesus Christ. Look at you. You … you’ve changed.’ He gives a quiet, unhappy laugh. ‘Sorry, that’s …’ He tails off and turns his head to look straight ahead through the windscreen. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he mutters.

If he’s shocked by my appearance, I’m just as surprised at how different he looks.

Whenever I’ve seen his photo in magazines, he’s always been clean-shaven and smartly dressed. Right now, though, he’s sporting a greyish-black stubbly beard and a ragged-looking woolly jumper and jeans. His hair is much greyer, too, and he seems thinner, the skin hanging more loosely around his neck. He looks about a million miles from the grinning, confident world-beater I remember as a kid. He just seems … tired. Defeated.

The radio is burbling quietly between us, and he fiddles with it to switch it off. ‘I didn’t know whether to come in … whether I’d be welcome,’ he mumbles. I can hear the self-pity in his voice. ‘Christ, Ben. I’m so sorry.’