‘But you know,’ he said, when he had recovered, ‘I think there were some real issues with your father. Because he’d tried to neck himself already. He took some sleeping tablets and drank a couple of bottles of scotch. You know all this.’

‘No.’ I shook my head. I didn’t. This was news to me.

Denis shrugged. ‘Someone must have found him the next day with the blood supply cut off to his leg, which is why he had that dropped-foot all his life. His foot would catch on something and he’d be like: “Get that fucking thing outta the way!”’

This was something else I’d never realised. My father was always tripping over things and yelling at us, but I’d never known about this injury or the fact that he’d acquired it while trying to kill himself.

There was another thing Denis reminded me of. In 1991, he and my father went to America together, just the two of them — a strangely intimate experience, all things considered — to see Jeff Fenech fight Azumah Nelson in the open-air carpark of the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas.

I remembered that trip. My father had called us from his hotel room, to tell us what had happened. After twelve rounds, the fight had been declared a draw. It was unbelievable, my father said. He sounded drunk but not unhappy. ‘What time is it over there?’ he kept asking. Then Tara told him something irrelevant, and finally my mother took the phone again, said something I don’t remember, and hung up before I got a chance to say goodbye.

‘It was a travesty,’ Denis said. ‘Fenech won convincingly. It was called the worst decision of the year or something like that.’

Days later, still hungover, still heartbroken, Denis and my father stood beside each other and looked down into the Grand Canyon. For some reason, this was what my father had wanted to see above all else, my mother told me later, when he grew tired of all those bars and buffet breakfasts and Black Russians. And so I imagined him standing there, euphoric, at the edge of that cliff at last. Unable to resist, he dips his hand into his pocket and flicks a coin up and out into the gullet of the great chasm. Denis was talking about something else by that stage, but I was imagining this: an American coin, as if from the movies, turning in slow motion above the Grand Canyon. My father, a gambler, a vandal, measuring infinity with a dumb gesture of defiance. Heads or tails, he says to Denis.