Dalmar closes his eyes, then, resting his head back against the wall, and lets the memories play through his head like an old cine film that is wearing out, the movements of the people in it starting to be jerky and the landscape of heat and sun becoming progressively bleached of colour. One day, he thinks, it won’t be there at all. That was the trouble with looking. If you looked too hard, you either saw things for what they were – or made them go away altogether. Dalmar begins to fall asleep where he lies, even though he is still wearing his coat and shoes and hasn’t even closed the curtains.

It makes me feel sad, to see him drift off so carelessly. I hope that before he is in deep sleep, he will get up and undress and close the curtains, then go to bed properly. I hate the thought of him dozing fitfully for an hour or two fully clothed and waking to find himself alone. If he were with someone like Angela, she would say, ‘Don’t fall asleep there, you nelly, you’ll feel dreadful later. Take your shoes off and get into bed.’

And here is the thing – when we have someone to say that, we feel annoyed with them. We grumble back. We have no idea how much we would miss having someone who has a bit of a go at us if they weren’t there – irritation is a form of love and love the seedbed in which it flourishes. If we didn’t care, we wouldn’t be irritated.

I would give the world to be sitting at my parents’ kitchen table listening to them using the same maddening phrases they had used for decades, inwardly rolling my eyes – Lord, they used to get on my nerves – and as I watch Dalmar falling asleep and think about how much my parents used to annoy me, it comes back to me, through him, my life that is, fully formed: my parents, my friends, my job, my flat – everything.

*

Where to begin? I will begin where I began.

PART FOUR

10

There is a photograph of me and my parents, the three of us together on some holiday: I don’t know where, and I’m not sure how old I was at the time. I look as if I am in that middle place between baby and toddler, a great slug of a child who will soon learn to walk but for now has cylinders of uncooked dough on her limbs and rolls of it around her neck. I’ve held a few infants like that in my time. They are pillow-soft yet weighty as boulders.