She said, ‘Honestly, Snow, it was like Muldoon’s picnic, what with the butcher and the green grocer next door. They said, “You fainted,” and I reached up and there was a bump the size of an egg on my forehead. They insisted on calling an ambulance and just as well because when I got to hospital they ran the tests, and they found the cancer.’

She told me she’d booked in to see her doctor while I was there so I went with her to see her doctor and it was all pretty straightforward: Mum would get treated, and then she’d probably have a few good years. Not that Dad wanted to believe that. All through the chemo and for a few months afterwards, he was saying, ‘She’s still clear, Snow! Doing great in remission! I think we’ve got this beat!’

They didn’t have it beat because about a year after the Olympics, Dad phoned up, saying, ‘You have to come, Snow,’ and I didn’t want to go because of the whole fiasco with Mark and the woman he brought home from the pub not that long before, but I could tell from Dad’s voice that Mum’s cancer was back. So I asked my boss if I could go and see her and they were absolute bastards about it, saying: ‘You don’t have leave, you can’t go indefinitely.’

I said, ‘My mother’s dying,’ and one of the managers actually had the hide to say, ‘But you can’t tell me how long that’s going to take, can you? And we can’t cover you forever, you know.’ So I quit on the spot.

It was September 2001, and I remember that because it was only a week or so after those attacks in New York and there were a lot of cheap flights around. Dad picked me up from Deer Park railway station. He would have been eighty by then, still wearing those Yakka pants with the crease down the front, the ones he wore every day of his life at Olarenshaw Electrics.

I said, ‘How is she?’

He said, ‘Not good.’

When we pulled in to the drive at Deer Park, he said, ‘I don’t want you to get a shock.’

It takes a lot to shock me, Jack. I’ve worked on cancer wards, remember, so I knew what to expect. My mother was lying in the lounge room in a hospital bed that my father had rented so she could be propped up to eat. The two metal sides were up and my mother was lying flat under a blanket, so thin she hardly made a mound. She was either deeply medicated or sound asleep, because she didn’t stir.

I looked at the clipboard hanging from the base of the bed: blood pressure, temperature and medications, none of it looked good. I said, ‘What does the doctor say?’

Dad said, ‘He doesn’t say much, Snow! That’s one of the problems. He won’t give me any idea as to when your mum might be better!’