‘Your father and I were the larrikins,’ Denis had told me when I called to ask if I could come see him. ‘We had a lot of fun.’ He wasn’t having a lot of fun when he opened the door that day, though. He had a toothache and had recently broken his back, or so he claimed, lifting an old television out onto the nature strip.

‘I’m still here, mate,’ he said, when I asked how he was. I followed his painful shuffle down the hallway and into a bare consultation room, where we sat facing one another across an empty desk, across the two decades since we’d last had a conversation.

I didn’t remember the last time I’d seen Denis, but I knew, more or less as a fact, that our last conversation had been about boxing. When I was a teenager, I often went with my father to watch the boxing on television at Denis’s place, although my mother always pleaded with me not to. There were usually four or five other men and two women at these events, Denis’s second wife, Conchitina, and another woman, called Ophelia. I remember Ophelia in particular, because of the way she screamed at the television in an alarming high-pitched voice. ‘Fucking kill him!’ she would scream, and a tiny pug would yap in agreement from the kitchen. That enduring cry throws into relief, now, the quietness of the men. The women were loud, funny, irreverent, violent. They bustled in and out of the room, chatting, laughing, carrying food, paying only intermittent attention to the fight. The men on the other hand barely moved, united by an aura of nervousness and respect. They made soft exclamations and swallowed their own grunts. They flinched noticeably. It was as if, in some not-too-distant reality, it was they themselves who were taking the blows. Beside me on the couch, my father would sway to avoid a punch thrown by the image of a boxer on the television, and our arms would touch.