One day, at the age of fifty-two, he will be found drunk on the top floor of the multi-storey car park, with one leg over the yellow rail, in the middle of the afternoon. Sadly, a member of the public will spot him in time and call the police and a negotiator will talk him down. After that, he’s just a blur, a grey blur.

*

The train has picked up speed and we are through the outskirts of Peterborough and out into the open countryside. In her small flat in Welwyn Garden City, my mum will be preparing for bed, brushing her teeth slowly and carefully as she does each night, combing back her hair. I always thought there was something so sweet about that – my mother combed her short curls each night before she got into bed, as well as in the morning. She wanted to be neat in her sleep. Just before she turns her light out, she will look at the framed photograph again.

Outside the windows of the train, it is pitch black now: night, in all its blankness. I have no reflection, of course, so all I see is black. Diagonally opposite me there is a young man of around nineteen or twenty, watching something on his phone with headphones in his ears, his mouth open as he rocks in his seat with silent laughter. In the seat behind him, a man in a business suit sips a ready-mixed gin and tonic straight from the can, staring straight ahead, his gaze vacant. Behind him is a woman who is talking to the person sitting next to her, who I can’t see. I watch all these people, and I know what I always knew, a knowledge that is a kind of bedrock beneath all the other layers of knowledge that I have. Love takes so many forms.

I loved my parents; I loved my friends. I loved my students, I really did – even the ones I didn’t like all that much. None of this precluded romantic love, of course – if I had had it, it could have led to children and a whole new world of love. I’m not dismissing that, any of it. I just wish that I had kept more sense of proportion.

And now I’m on a train. I’m going to Hertfordshire, to Welwyn Garden City. I’m going to find my mother. I have no poltergeist skills, nor will I ever, but somehow I will convince her – all the love she poured into me for all those years, all the times she loaded the washing machine and cut the crusts off sandwiches – none of it was wasted. I was not unhappy. I knew myself to be loved, and I loved. My life was short but it was a good life and I’m glad I lived it.