And about Mikey. Speaking about Mikey was the closest she came to revealing herself. Not exactly pouring her heart out, but hinting at what was in there, the anxiety eating away at her calm exterior. She was always asking Silas to ‘intervene’, to take an active interest in his son. Hadn't he noticed how Mikey had changed, how he was no longer the easygoing kid they once knew?

‘We all grow up, Lyd, and suddenly the going's not that easy!’

Words he would love to say, but dare not.

‘Try and speak to him, Silas, try and find out whether he's got any problems, you know, a girl, drugs, things happen to young people.’

Meaning he doesn't speak to you, is that it?

Someone loomed above Silas, shutting out the sun. Served him right for falling asleep in a public park in the heart of Berea. Steal your shoes off your feet, people say.

‘Dad?’

He opened his eyes and sat up. Mikey was smiling at him in that condescending way he seemed to reserve for his father's drunkenness.

‘Dad, we have to be at Jackson and Mam Agnes's by three.’

This was Lydia's doing, sending Mikey out to find him, to humiliate him in public, lead him home, steering him by the elbow. Well, that hadn't happened for a long time. Silas imagined Lydia telling Mikey that his grandmother would be frantic. Mam Agnes was relying on Mikey to drive her to this wedding in Lenasia, because Jackson wouldn't go with her. Mikey's grandfather is strange, the way men can be. He doesn't like Mam Agnes's Lenasia friends, not because they're Indian, but because they gossip. More likely because they don't booze, and, in any case, Jackson was probably in his ‘high nines’ by now.

All of this would have been said in motherly tones, full of nagging intimacy. Mikey would have been reading, or listening to music, or sitting at the back staring into God knows what kind of nothingness. He would have looked at his mother, not pleadingly, simply to convey his annoyance, and then he would have strode out of the house to come and find Silas.

The way he looks at me, Lydia says. As if he were the adult and I the child.

Mikey extended a hand and helped Silas to his feet. It was a comradely gesture, Silas knew, a warning to expect nothing but cold scorn from Lydia when they got home. He farted loudly as he rose to his feet.

‘Christ, Dad!’ Mikey said, and walked away.

Silas didn't mind this anger. It brought the kind of understanding he needed and knew Lydia would not offer, a recognition of his ordinariness, his capacity for weakness, it drove the anger out of him, replaced it with a sense of fulfilment that was light, somehow, even if it was accompanied by a mortal belching and the sly emission of pungent farts.