My father wanted what every alcoholic who cannot quit wants: exoneration. To die of something other than drink would, by his sodden logic, exonerate him. Could you have been that chronic an alcoholic if you didn’t even die of it?

‘They putting you under?’ I asked.

‘All the way. Have you ever been under? It’s the funniest feeling. They hook the needle into your arm and tell you count backwards from ten, and you think sure, no problem. By seven your head starts swimming and before you know it you’re gone. You wake up feeling like you’ve slept for a thousand years. It’s bliss.’

We must have been about eight minutes into the call because I felt a familiar tightness gathering in my jaw. Buddy and Linus were pacing nearby, disciplined enough to wait for my signal before they attacked their respective bowls. They were watching me with their mouths agog and dripping, like I was the meal.

‘Good luck with your arsehole,’ I told my father. ‘I have to go.’

Caber rang most weekends because weekends in the cottage were crushingly boring, he admitted, once you had enough of the view. He would make me put the dogs on. He talked to them and they crooned to the sound of his voice.

‘You’re making them crazy,’ I told him.

‘There’s a little torturer inside all of us,’ he said. ‘Listen to this.’ The line was faint, compressed. Caber’s voice sounded as if it was being squeezed through a long, tight tube. He really was in the middle of nowhere. ‘This is me writing a friend in Manhattan this morning: “I see it reported that the case numbers are plateauing down there and that things are beginning to stabilise, good news for you.” God Almighty. Did you ever think we would end up here, exchanging such evocative ­sci-­fi prose?’

‘I want to ask how the writing’s going,’ I said.

‘Now, now. Do that and I’ll have to ask you.’

‘You said that’s why you’re up there.’

Caber sighed, or affected to.

‘You think ­after – what, thirteen books? – I’d know what I was doing. But this one is just like all the others. I’ll get there. I always do. But for now, it’s just debris I’m crawling around in.’

‘Debris?’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘Now that feeling, I know,’ I said.

June arrived. I was sitting at one of Caber’s desks just inside the double doors that opened out on to the garden patio. I was back in the ­debris – writing. Buddy was warming himself on the flagstones. Linus was tacking back and forth at the bottom of the garden, alertly following the movement of birds or squirrels in the trees on the other side of the fence.

My phone rang. A number I didn’t know, but I knew the area code. Alberta. I picked up.

‘Is that Mr Mullen?’