He didn’t leave a letter, that’s the thing. Nothing, not even a note on the pad next to the phone: I just like driving really fast. Sorry. Back soon, unless I’m not. In which case, I love you all.

Which he did, for the record. He loved us all. Though love is terrible, as everybody knows.

I was talking to my mother over the computer one Sunday, with Sylvie on my lap. That night she read a story about three little owls whose mother disappears. She’ll be back soon, the little owls keep telling each other. Very soon, they say. And then, because I asked, my mother told me again how she and my father had met through a mutual friend, at a full-moon party one night in 1977. My father had just got back from Asia, ‘very dashing and tanned’, and he still had an aura about him, my mother said — ‘a terrific kind of radiation’ — that drew her to him. ‘He was a beautiful man,’ she said, and for a little while it felt like they could do just about anything in the world together.

Terrific radiation? Was she drunk? My mother hardly ever spoke about my father, even when prompted, and certainly not to tell me how terrific his radiation was. Terrific was a Bill word. I didn’t know where radiation came from.

‘What?’ I said. ‘Terrific what?’

‘Sure,’ she shrugged, ‘why not? They were both terrific, him and Abbie.’

‘Abbie?’ I was confused. I hadn’t heard about Abbie in twenty years. ‘Did Abbie set you guys up or something?’

‘No,’ my mother said. ‘I met them both at the same time. They were like a team, the two of them. They came back together.’ She fiddled with her hearing aid. ‘I’m not sure where they met,’ she said vaguely. ‘But look, Joe, what’s your heating situation down there? Because it looks awful, and those blow heaters are incredibly expensive to run.’ Now she had that look in her eyes that I recognised. She was disappearing again.

I could hear Bill Ventura clanking around somewhere off-screen. Terrific old Bill. He managed a car-hire company and took photos of sunsets on the weekend with a telescopic lens.

‘Do you have Abbie’s phone number?’ I asked.

‘Gosh, I don’t think so,’ my mother said, finishing her white wine in a way that signalled the end of the conversation. ‘I don’t know where that would be.’

Sylvie was clutching at the screen.

‘Goodnight, little owl,’ my mother said to her, squeezing up her face.

But my mother did have Abbie’s number, it turned out. She texted it to me the following night, without comment, and two days later I sent him a text of my own.

I waited, but I got nothing in return. And so, a week after that, I called. I didn’t expect him to answer. I thought he was probably dead.

4.

4.