Food stuck in my throat and so did words. Sleep was like, it was like: trying to solve a puzzle without the comprehension that half the pieces were missing. Three, four, five in the morning, I would wake up with rage beating a hole in my wasted heart.

Your mother was given tablets to calm her nerves but they turned her to stone. I should have taken them too, but in those days men didn’t suffer from nerves.

The passing of the year didn’t end the grief but, as I’ve said, a man can get used to anything. You can learn to live on a few mouthfuls of bread and little sleep. You can interact with the world and yet still be separate from it. And we had your sister to consider. We had her, too.

Chemistry. This, at least, I could consume. The summer you died, your mother and sister left Stavanger to stay with your mother’s parents, and I was left alone to experiment with soft plastics in the kitchen oven. I baked glycerol and gelatin and corn starch, polyvinyl chloride and phthalate esters. I burned every pot and pan in the house, set the oven on fire and produced gallons of useless glue before I came up with anything useful. And the smell. It lived in my hair, on my clothes. It lived in the food. I could taste plastic when I brushed my teeth, and when I battled with sleep, my skin sweated plastic on to the bed sheets. Sometimes it addled my brain and I found it hard to concentrate, my thoughts coming apart atom by atom. I lost the cat. We had a cat and I lost him. I called your mother most days and I don’t remember what we spoke about, or if we said much at all. I may have only spoken to your sister.

The difficulty with making soft plastic was in the pouring of the liquid resin into the moulds, for which I was using metal ice trays, without creating air bubbles. And consistency was a problem. It didn’t seem to matter how vigorously I recorded measurements and procedure, I couldn’t replicate one batch to the next. I wanted to create a soft plastic with a smooth, impermeable finish. Easy to clean, durable plastic that would hold its shape with just the right amount of plushness to give the impression of life.

During this time, I swam every evening. This was an attempt to clear my head and rinse the smell of burnt plastic from my hair and skin. It’s dangerous to swim a long distance in the North Sea alone, or without someone on the beach waiting for you to return, so I kept close to the shore, never more than a hundred or so metres from land. The water temperature that summer never reached higher than sixteen or seventeen degrees and, because I wasn’t eating very much, I was thinner and less able to deal with the low temperatures. I swam for short bursts, lacking the energy to do more.