‘What was Dad like when you met him?’ I would sometimes ask, and she would say something vague. ‘Oh, you know, he had something about him,’ and then she would fiddle with her hearing aid as if I were cutting out. Invariably, I would remember then the afternoon, as a child, when I saw her walking past the schoolyard where I was playing. What was she doing there? And why didn’t she come over and say hello? I remember clinging to the wire fence and calling out, and how she did not turn around. But she must have heard me. She was carrying a colourful shopping bag. She kept walking. She crossed the road carelessly. I remember the back of her head that was suddenly unknown to me, her pale hair bright in the sun, and then she disappeared around a corner, and a teacher, who I did not like, carried me away.

3.

3.

Sylvie turned one. Then she was one and a half, and I still hadn’t spoken to any of my father’s old friends. I had other things on my mind, although, it’s true, I did sometimes go out of my way to drive past the old house in Byron Street, renovated beyond recognition, but still there, more or less. The big gumtree, gone. The fence with my name scrawled across it a thousand times, gone. The garden gone. The little glinting view through the front window into my parent’s bedroom still, technically, there. A few times I sat in the car out the front with the engine running until someone came out of the house, and then I’d drive off like a criminal. An amateur criminal. Speaking of amateur criminals, I would think, who was my father, the man who had stolen the materials to build so much of that house, and then built it? That dodgy gambler. That bastard. He had been dead twenty years, and I still had the sudden urge to get away from him.

But he was also perfect. A lovely giant. So kind and funny. So good with children, so generous. And such a good storyteller.

Other times he would be something else again, something far too close to be seen clearly. In which case he was not Vincent, not my father or my Dad, not even mine. He was me, somehow, or I was him. His body in my body, I would think, amazed, repulsed.

But what does it mean to live for a while and then kill yourself one Friday just because you feel like it? Or because you have gambling debts? Or because you’re depressed? Or because you want the insurance? Or maybe because you just like driving really fast? He drove up one of those yellow dividers that used to separate the tram-stops from the road, and flipped.