I can feel myself float above myself, surveying the scene from a safe distance, allowing for perspective. Don your cape and fly the fuck away. Is this recovery in action? My old version would’ve flown into a white rage at this point, lost all ability to focus on the bigger objective of the scene: to get my boys back.

‘Good idea. Marmie and I will go home and settle in together first.’ Allowing my father to untangle from the hook.

David offers his hand. ‘A pleasure to meet you, Mr Smythe.’

Is that his business card Father is slipping to him? They shake on it. Jesus. Wept.

‘Sonya. You know where to find me.’ David nods at me, keeping a professional distance. I don’t watch him leave.

My father breathes out, as if his body has been hostage to a held-breath dread. He holds the car door open. I climb inside, settling Marmie’s purring warmth on my lap, and press my cheek against the cold window. Close my eyes, wait until I feel my father is seated and hear the click of the belt buckle, before I speak: ‘I’m grateful to you for coming, Dad. Means the world to me.’

Those words are both insincere and the truest thing I’ve ever said.

26

My father drives deliriously slowly. He’s being beeped by drivers behind us and I wonder was it this bad on our outward journey – or was I just so off my head I didn’t notice? His hands are gripping the steering wheel, his body bent close to it, allowing him to peer myopically through the windscreen, a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

‘Did you forget your glasses, Dad?’

He doesn’t answer. I shift my head at an angle that allows him to be observed without him realising. His skin is mottled grey and red, spots of high colour on his cheeks, a raised dark stain of pigmentation on his forehead, disappearing under his receding hairline into his scalp. I wonder at the circumference of the thing. Has he had it checked? His large frame seems diminished by his hunched posture, his hands suddenly an elderly person’s hands: brown-splotched, high-veined, knuckles protruding. A blast of one of Mahler’s symphonies in a minor key. My thoughts are suitably pitched: how much of Tommy’s growing have I missed? Has he lost all his miraculous toddler pudge?

The drive back home is stretched and strained and the view is shit ugly: long expanses of three-lane motorways, both directions, flanked by industrial warehouses selling electrical appliances and second-hand cars, giant traffic lights looming overhead, pointing in seemingly endless different directions. All I want to do is run back to Sister Anne and beg to be reinstated in my nylon bedroom.

It doesn’t help that my father seems as bewildered as I am. For once we share the same fogged-up outlook. The grey sky starts to spit. The kitten meows, her little body tense, as if she might pounce.

‘Shut that thing up,’ my father snaps. ‘Having a hard enough time concentrating here as it is.’