‘But see, I met with him, Uncle Donald. He was there and I was there. And I didn’t feel anything. He looked a bit like a man I knew once, that was it. There wasn’t even that shock you get from recognising a face. I mean, I’ve felt more about seeing, like, random people off TV in the street than I did about this man. I sat there and he was there, and I realised we just didn’t have enough in the bank to make it worth anything. I could tell he didn’t feel that. He cried. It meant something to him. And I could tell he didn’t have long to go, even though he said he was fine, so I just let him have it. But he wasn’t what I’ve been looking for. You know what I think? I reckon if you go on missing something for long enough, you just learn to grow around the space. So I’ve grown up with a huge chunk of me absent and that’s who I am now. It was too late for him to try and put himself back in there. The space is all different-shaped. I haven’t got room for him in my life because I learned not to need him. I don’t know if I’m making sense. I don’t. I’ve had a few drinks, Uncle Donald; I’m not gonna lie to you. Anyway, I was sitting there and I was angry with him, and he was trying to give me all this advice like he thought he knew me, or like he had any right to have a say on how I lived my life. I last saw him when I was eleven fucking years old and twenty-six years later, he’s all telling me not to waste my time on things that have defined my life? I grew up with one parent and that was fucking Eileen for God’s sake, but at least she was there until she bloody wasn’t. And then there was you. There was you, Uncle Donald. And that’s who my family is. And he wasn’t. So I won’t come to this funeral and shake hands with people I’ve never met before and put up a façade of grief so as not to offend anybody, because I won’t be feeling anything. If I go there as his daughter people who really did love him will want to see me in him; they’ll want to see me distraught. It will become this big deal if I’m not. That becomes the story. You can’t go to a funeral and not be sad. You can’t go to your fucking biological father’s funeral and not be sad. So I’m not going to. I spent so long hanging on to an idea of who my father was, and I loved that idea, but I buried it last month. I had all this anger that he just didn’t understand. He has spent all that time, almost thirty years, absolving himself of any wrongdoing for leaving his daughter, for just dropping out of her life, because of how much he hated his ex-wife. It was like, any time in his life that he might have needed to think about that, he’s just looked away and blamed Eileen instead. So, I’m asking him, Uncle Donald, I’m asking him where were you? How come I just didn’t hear from you. Where did you go. And he looks over my head and he tells me, well, what you’ve got to understand is your mother did this and that and the other. I’m no fan of bloody Eileen’s and I actually started feeling sorry for her. For Eileen. That’s the power of that man’s denial. Never mind me trying to say, being nice about it, well, you should have dealt with that because I’m your daughter. He might have known that at some point, but he’s built a wall and painted Eileen’s big face all over it, and now he’ll never have to look behind it because he’s dead. And nobody ever called him on that, did they?