I lived downtown, in the basement level of a house. The three storeys above my head accommodated an indetermin­ate number of ­lead-­footed university students. I pretended to think about Caber’s offer. When I didn’t answer straight away he said, ‘I know this is obnoxious of me.’

‘It’s fine,’ I said, trying to sound casual. ‘I can do it. You don’t need to pay me anything.’

‘OK,’ he said, offering his hand to shake on the deal. When I took it, he said, ‘Seven hundred a week. I won’t take no for an answer.’

Back in the early sixties, my paternal grandfather, a man named Ivor Mullen from Crossmolina in Mayo Ireland, came here to work for the Canadian Pacific Railway company. He travelled all around the country, but it was in Alberta, of all places, that he met Brigit Cain, a seamstress from Gort. There, Brigit Mullen gave birth to my father. They returned to Ireland when he was still a baby. Perhaps it made a kind of sense, all those years later, for my father to flee to Edmonton after he burned our house down. Nobody runs away, so much as back.

I inherited Canadian citizenship through my father, which was how I was able to follow him over three years ago. My reactivated citizenship meant I could stay in Canada as long as I wanted, leave when I wanted, and so, emboldened by the prospect that failure was always an option, I bought a ­one-­way ticket to Toronto. Toronto was as close as I intended to get to him. I had no interest in confronting my father or intervening in any way in his life. My only goal, once I got here, was to finish writing my book. I had been writing it for years before I came to Toronto and, years later, I was still writing it. For money I got by on bits and pieces: sold cell phones in a mall kiosk, delivered takeout, did a stint as an elementary school crossing guard. I applied for grants and sometimes I got them. All the time I kept writing.