After that, he asked me what part of Ireland I came ­from – he had been there many times and loved the ­place – and I told him the sorry tale of how my father had ended up living out in Alberta, and Caber told me about Alberta, and the sorry tale of his father.

Like Charlie Furey, the teenage protagonist of his debut novel, The World Exists for the First Time, Caber grew up in a tiny rural Albertan town described, in that book, as a ‘Canuck Hillbilly skidmark in the middle of the middle of nowhere’. Caber’s father, like Charlie Furey’s father, was a drunk who beat him up. In the novel the father deploys the end of a ­snapped-­off antique chair leg recovered on one of his regular scavenging expeditions to the local junkyard. Quoting Charlie Furey: ‘The chair leg looked sort of like a dog’s leg, curved to a dainty little claw shape. Cabriole, I believe the style is called. It was made of a heavy, solid wood and left what looked like paw prints all up my back.’

My father drank all my life. The drinking, as drinking tends to do, got worse and worse, though he never laid a finger on us, physically. After he finally lost his job, and my mother finally kicked him out, he returned one morning, stinking of whiskey, to set the house on fire, though he did, to be fair, make sure neither of us was in it before striking the match. Then he skipped the country. We didn’t hear anything from him, and could not be sure where he even was until word came back, through the whisper network of the diaspora, that he was in Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada. The radio silence continued on his part until I moved here. When word of my emigration made its way to him, presumably through that same whisper network, he did get in touch, sang all the right songs about his remorse, his regret and his misery. His plan, he told me, had been to burn the house down for the insurance, which would come through to my mother. She could then have used that payout to get herself a smaller place and live off the rest as a kind of supplementary pension. A lunatic scheme, if it was even true. In any case, the insurance company quickly deduced that the fire was not an accident and gave my mother nothing.