Mum was an academic above everything else, the kind of person who could only escape the gravity of life by manipulating herself with art. Rothko was her thing. I hadn’t really ever got on with the abstractness of him. It didn’t make sense to me, having a painting of just four colours. ‘But isn’t that just the incredible thing about him, Xander? That a person using four colours and no representational effort can paint oblivion? Don’t you find that amazing?’

She was the kind of person who looked up to rarefied heights, but down was where I wanted to be, with my nose in the dirt and the physics.

‘And you’re sure that you want to read the sciences?’ she’d said once. ‘You’re not exactly your father, you know.’

‘I know.’ Then I wondered how she couldn’t see that that wasn’t what I wanted at all. I didn’t want to be him. Not in a million years. Even so, I slid into Cambridge with four As to read Mathematics. Not science exactly, nor a degree to capture the imagination, but at least it meant something to other people, even if it meant nothing to me.

‘Fuck out of my patch.’

I sit up so quickly that I bang my forehead on the underside of the slide and then there’s this sickening thud in my ears as a wet boot strikes my temple. I cry out and try to focus but all there is is searing pain. It pounds and beats, freezing me even though I need to get myself ready to fight. I claw through the pain, waiting for my firing synapses to create space for me. My eyes shut until the ache recedes a little, just enough for me to move.

I look at him through screwed eyes and see that he’s smaller than me. He in turn rolls his eyes up and down me until he realises the same thing. I have always been big. I’ve taken up a seat and a half since I was fifteen. Never fat, or even muscular. Just big. Bones like old iron.

People avoid me on the streets. There are pockets of men here or there, malignant in places, benign in others, but they react the same. Usually they circle around me, never getting too close, in case they fall all the way in and down into the drain. And I don’t mind the wary distance. I don’t want them near me anyway. I don’t need the company that they all seem to crave in one another. So they leave me alone and I leave them to their hot clusters – of drugs, alcohol and hacking laughter. And if I miss the chance for conversation, I remind myself that I wouldn’t seek it amongst them anyway.