It annoyed me that he hadn’t told me how bad it was and I didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had to bury one of your parents, Jack, but if you haven’t, let me tell you it’s not much fun. You’ve got to track down people you haven’t seen for years, and you don’t know where to find them. You’ve got to book the funeral home and put a notice in the newspaper, so a bunch of people you’ve never met can come and eat the sandwiches you’ve paid for. And the funeral home that Dad wanted to use carried on like it was McDonald’s, trying to get me to upsize everything: are you interested in brass handles for the coffin, or just the cheap and nasty ones? Would you like flowers at the end of every pew or only on the coffin? Would you like hot food served afterwards, or just the tea and sandwiches?

I told them: ‘It’s just me. There are no other children, no grandchildren, no other kin.’ They said, ‘Oh, you never know, people come out of the woodwork.’ And do they ever: there was a crowd of at least fifty at the service, blokes long-retired from the railways, old ducks who used to get their toasters from old Jim at Olarenshaw Electrics, blokes from the Station Hotel, a couple of geeks from some computer group he must have been involved with, all chewing away on the egg-and-lettuce sandwiches and helping themselves to cups of tea.

I’d booked the funeral home for an hour, which was the shortest time you could book it for. A few of the old-timers looked like they might have stayed all day but I wasn’t interested in hanging around at Tobin Brothers. I wanted to go back to the old house at Deer Park for one last look around, because the first thing I was going to do once the probate on Dad’s will went through was sell it.

Everyone says this, but I was never able to walk into that old house as a grown-up without thinking about how small it was. Even my room, which had seemed huge when I was a kid, you couldn’t actually swing a cat in.

I poked my head into a couple of Dad’s old cupboards but there was nothing interesting to see. I got a jumbo garbage bag from his kitchen drawer and made a bit of an effort to sort through the piles of Yakka trousers and the cardigans. Then I thought, ‘To hell with it, I’ll get the Salvos to take what they want and the tip can have the rest.’

I opened the fridge in the hope of finding something to eat, but everything was rotten and the birds that Dad used to feed were parked in the trees outside, screaming, so I went out with a broom and waved it around, saying, ‘Get out!’ And, ‘Go, you won’t be getting any food from me!’ I looked around for a few things I might be able to sell on eBay: the TV, the DVD player and that kind of thing, and then I went to sleep in my old single bed.