The problem was that I did not want to write a book about my father. Elimination of the father as subject was the single compositional rule I had imposed upon myself. But because the book was not about him, it had ended up threatening to become about everything else. At various points the book resembled a ­dirty-­realist Bildungsroman about an inexplicably fatherless young man in ­small-­town Ireland, a picaresque historical romance about an Irish expat working on the North American railroads in the middle of the twentieth century, a splenetic ­Bernhard-­style monologue about a malevolent cipher travelling around a fictional country burning down houses . . . I had written several books and no book and was still writing the book; I had written a thousand or so pages around an absented centre I did not want to acknowledge or approach.

Caber, of course, told me to stop fucking around and just write about my father.

‘Everyone’s already written about their fathers,’ I told him with exasperation. ‘You’ve written about your father. It’s done, it’s done a million times over. No one wants to read that shit any more.’

‘There’s a million books about fathers, sure,’ Caber conceded. ‘So what’s one more?’

A few days after the call from the hospital my father rang again. I was on the patio in Caber’s back garden, dishing out food for the dogs. The garden was at the bottom of the hill, the house above it a floating elaboration of concrete, stone and glass descending like a river arrested magically in place.

‘Tonight’s the night,’ my father told me, meaning the colonoscopy. ‘They’re going to stick a camera up there and see what they can see.’

‘Lovely,’ I said, scraping out the last of a ­25-­dollar tub of ­grass-­fed beef into the dog bowls.

‘I know it’s a tumour, I can feel it,’ he said, sounding almost excited.

Last year my father told me he was forgetting things. He told me he kept getting confused about what day it was, and more and more found himself standing in the supermarket aisle with no idea what he was looking for. One of his brothers had had Alzheimer’s and my father told me he was worried he might have it too. I told him to go to his doctor, that there were tests he could take if he was worried. I have no idea if he did so. At a certain point he simply stopped bringing up the memory thing.

Another time he rang from the hospital, not in withdrawal, but with some kind of small fracture in a bone in his back. I asked if he had fallen while drunk, sure that he had, but he wouldn’t admit it. He kept speculating about osteoporosis and then, as abruptly as the Alzheimer’s, never mentioned it again.