Who had a Ford Capri apart from Dad? There were some Polaroids somewhere – at Mum’s house maybe. In one or two of them, in overexposed orange light, Dad was leaning back against the wing or bonnet of a gold Capri. But the Dad in the Capri photos wasn’t the Dad I knew growing up. The one in the pictures was vibrant and mischievous. He wore a rakish grin and outlandish clothes with huge collars. But only in the photos. By the time I was ten, Dad was steadier. No flashes of danger in his eye. Just serenity. He was a man who was barely there.

On Sundays we went to the market in Chorley, just me and him. We sold cheese at the Sunday market. We didn’t make the cheese but we dressed it to look as if we had. Dad bought up a few wheels every month from a local dairy and we’d carve them at home and wrap them in waxed paper. I remember the round stickers that sealed the packets. Willow Farm, a made-up farm with a symbol of a tree on it, in green. The real-life dairy the cheese came from was poured cement and sluiced paths that smelled sour and metallic. It was just marketing Dad would say, but I disagreed. To me it felt dishonest.

‘Has Fry seen you yet?’ Alice leaned on her elbows, a pale oval face resting on a fist. For three years I’d come and gone as I pleased, but a new manager, Mark Fry, had been drafted in to chop away the dead wood. The later I got in, the more desiccated I became.

‘No,’ I said.

‘He’s so weird,’ she said and turned her attention back to the case she was working on. ‘Weirdy beardy. Weirdy beardy,’ she began singing quietly.

I returned to the memory of the market, turning over the car in my hand to reach it. There’d been a model-car stall – and there was a boy – the son of the stallholder. He never spoke to me. He simmered, mainly. Leaned against whatever thing he could find and drank Diet Coke.

One day, in the teeth of winter, ice biting my fingers, I’d gone red-cheeked to look at the cars. The old man wasn’t there, it was just the son.

‘Have you got a Ford Capri?’ A din of market noise rose from the background.

He leaned forward to hear and when I asked again he nodded and then reached under the table and pulled out a box. ‘Thirty,’ he said, carefully unboxing an orange car and handing it to me.

‘Thirty pounds?’ I said, shocked.

‘Fifty-four-B vintage Superfast,’ he said as if the words meant something to me. ‘Rare,’ he added when he saw that they didn’t.

I stood still for a few seconds. He waited, rubbing his chin. The muscles in his arm flexed a little as he did. He stared at me, blue-eyed.