It should be plain by now why I didn’t choose to visit my father. We were travelling in different directions. He was taking life by the scruff of the neck these days, whereas I – well let’s just say that I wasn’t. And I didn’t want his eye on me. He had always thought I was a bit on the indulgent side with women as it was. I know for a fact that he had never been able to understand why I had returned home after my last fight with Sharon with no money and my ear hanging off. ‘So just how badly hurt is she?’ he kept asking me. True, he was now a lover himself, but I was convinced that he was the hammer not the anvil, and that it was Rabika Flatman who was black and blue. It was even possible that he had already taken to muttering other women’s names in his sleep, prior to forgetting hers entirely. Who knows? – he might have been addressing her as Rachel for weeks. Such ironies lurk in acts of supersession. Was it not the fate of Hardy’s second wife to watch in misery as the aged poet crawled across the landscape in crazed obeisance to the memory of the first? Well, no one was going to suffer in that fashion at my hands; there was no chance of my forgetting for one minute of the day who Camilla Marteline was, or Gertrude Bugler come to that.

I rang my father, instead of paying him a visit, and got Rabika Flatman. ‘Why don’t you come and see us?’ she asked.

‘I’d love to,’ I said, ‘but I’m going away for a while. Are you happy?’

‘Deliriously.’

I’ll bet, I thought. But I merely asked if they were comfortable.

‘Oh very. It’s not what we’re used to, of course.’

‘Have you got a garden?’

She seemed taken aback by my question. ‘A small one, yes.’

‘Has it got a hammock in it?’

‘A hammock? No. As a matter of fact it hasn’t. Why?’

‘I’ll come and see you when I get back,’ I said. I was pleased they were going without a hammock. I didn’t want my father to have it all his own way. I liked the idea that there was something Rabika Flatman had done for me that she would never do for him. I don’t think that was unreasonably Oedipal of me.