Tara fought him. She was stronger than me, in that sense. She stood her ground and growled back at him. Or screamed. She slammed more doors than me. He never hit her. He never hit any of us, not really, though I think he came very close many times. Like the day he ripped out the rangehood from above the stove with his bare hands while my mother was cooking. Like the day he put an axe through the fridge. ‘You got shit for brains?’ he would say, smashing something against something else. ‘Don’t you understand anything?’ But he was right. We didn’t understand. Afterwards, he would pretend that nothing had happened. He would become cheerful, patient, kind. A loving father. He would put things back together again, which was a bit annoying for him, of course. Our silence seemed to mystify him. In the case of the fridge, for instance, or the television, he went out and bought another one.

My mother wanted to be a singer, but instead she became an Arts student, and then a nurse, and then, after my father died, a property manager. But in the very early seventies, she was a backing singer, briefly, for a band called The Acapulco Astronauts. They released one record, Sounds from Beyond and Beyond the Beyond, which I can remember listening to as a child, sitting in afternoon light on the green carpet in our back room. It was hard to know which voice was my mother’s, and I didn’t like the music much — its faux sentimentality confused me — but I liked the album cover, or, at least, I often used to stare at it, wanting to like it, because my mother was on it and she looked beautiful to me and disturbing. She was dressed in red, and she was gripping a cigar in her teeth and leaning on a Tommy gun, as if it were an umbrella. In the days of the Astronauts, as she occasionally referred to them — the pre-me days, in other words — my father seemed to know people: musicians, artists, filmmakers, record producers, none of them very good, it turned out, or very influential, but maybe these connections were part of his appeal. Maybe our mother thought he could help her career. In any case, he didn’t, and nothing came of any of it, I suppose. Our mother let it go in the end, that dream she had of stardom. That world disappeared into another, into the world of the family, though sometimes, when she had been drinking, she would sing in a high, clear, sad voice that I loved and was also ashamed of. It sounded to me as if she were trying too hard. There was something desperate about it. But then she began to go deaf and stopped singing altogether.