Abbie was an unhurried, handsome American, with greying blonde hair and eyes like bright water. That’s how I remembered him. An exceptionally handsome man, actually, despite the nose that had been bashed in years ago. In America he’d been in movies, though none of them very good, apparently, and it was impossible to find them in the video store. According to Dad, he was friendly with the actor Terence Stamp, who played an evil alien in an old Superman movie. Tara, I think, fell in love straight away. Or at any rate, she quickly switched her allegiance from whoever she was obsessed with at the time, to him. What he had been doing up north was never clear. And what did that even mean, up north? Abbie chuckled when I asked. I guess I liked him, too, if for no other reason than because we were allowed to watch The Simpsons when he was around. He loved The Simpsons. During the next two years, until my father died, Abbie was always at our place. He spent Christmases and birthdays with us, and occasionally I would come home to find him reading my Phantom comics, lying on my bed with his dirty feet. Don’t mind me, he’d say, but he wouldn’t get up. Maybe he flirted with my mother. Maybe there was something conspiratorial about his friendship with my father. I imagine them plotting something mildly illegal. In any event, Abbie’s presence brought a holiday atmosphere to those last years, just as the beginning of summer charges the air with expectation. One day he arrived on a motorbike, which I never saw again. The rest of the time he drove a golden BMW with a cracked windscreen. Unlike my father, though, he was never in a hurry. Behind the wheel he was somehow disinterested, as if he had more important things on his mind than the road itself. Unlike my father, he never yelled at the other drivers, or veered violently from lane to lane, or picked fights in my company. He never leapt from the car with the steering-lock in his hand. And yet Abbie had been wronged somehow — this I gathered gradually — and he held grudges against a long list of people I’d never heard of.

Also, it was Abbie who came to tell me what had happened to my father. That he’d rolled his car up a tram stop. That he was in hospital. That he was dead. I was in my final year at high school. My name was called over the loudspeaker. I came out of the classroom, and saw Abbie standing in the middle of the hallway, near the office. A crowd of students was trying to get past him. He didn’t move. I couldn’t figure out why he looked so weird. He tried to smile, but there was something wrong with him.