An hour later though, propped up with cushions in the chair my mother vacated – I was now the one with the livid colouring and the rolling eyes – I did allow myself to be drawn into the crude farce of explicitness. ‘How?’ I demanded to be told. ‘When? Where? Why?’ The answers themselves – by taxi, first thing this morning, to the other end of London, because they’re mamzarim that’s why – were not in the slightest bit interesting to me; what I was greedy for was not information but the relief that comes with the articulation of amazement. ‘What!’ I said. ‘No! Never! Really!’ The more I marvelled the better I felt. And they, who had been over the same ground a thousand times and had, what’s more, been expecting it for almost thirty years, they were just as eager to use dramatic punctuation as I was. We shared a little confederacy of exclamatory resentment that night, my mother, Rabika Flatman’s husband, and I. After all, we’d all been betrayed, hadn’t we, all three of us? She’d been made a fool of (!), he’d been made a fool of (!), and I – I was a poor fatherless child! (!!)