James felt his fists ball up tightly. He looked out at the sky. It was like a cocktail poorly mixed, with three distinct layers. Thin, almost translucent blue at the top. Then a bolder, deeper blue, broken up with narrow ribbons of cloud. Then, low down, over the castle and the Tattoo floodlights, was a stripe of butterscotch. The sunlight was off-yellow: it turned the solemn buildings of the Old Town a variety of golden-brown shades. Because it was impossible to reply, James made himself list the clouds. Wispy cirrus up high, taking on the brittle blue as if it were paint leaking onto them. Further down, layers of stratus like long breadsticks. James wanted his dad to nod approvingly, he wanted him to say, ‘Excellent work!’, though of course he hadn’t spoken the names out loud.

‘Well,’ James said, forcing brightness into his voice, ‘I don’t think we need to talk about it just yet!’

‘I don’t know how long it will be,’ said Dad, ‘but perhaps not all that long.’ He coughed, and James had the sensation that he’d been preparing this speech, something so out of character that it only added to the head-swim of this moment. Dad’s hand was on his shoulder. ‘But what it would mean, you see, is you could pop here and see me, in a manner of speaking. Keep me abreast of things. The wedding. Whatever’s happening in your job – and I know great things will happen for you.’

He raised his eyebrows: a human at the mercy of the march of events, a way James could not remember seeing him before. ‘Not quite the same as being here in the flesh. But, all the same. We’d be sort of meeting, wouldn’t we?’

James nodded, numb, and glanced to his left. The sunlight, fizzing like a firework before it died, beamed off the golden letters of the Scotsman building. It was at that instant James decided he would leave the flat he shared with Karl. Move in with Michaela. Focus less upon the driving, more upon helping with her new fitness business. Probably, with hindsight, it had not been a perfect time to make any sort of decision. But he’d had to do something. His brain had needed to put up some sort of shield against the way the moment was being crushed, as if in a big hand, between past and future. The past, so rich with small joys that weren’t theirs any more; and the future which, in six months, would require James and Sally to watch as a green curtain – closing bit by bit, inching around the rail – took their father away from them for the rest of time.