Every week I have to leave the Saturday-morning sky-view from my flat in the grand Georgian crescent of the Paragon, which faces the wide green flatland of Blackheath. The sky is the mother of all shape-shifters, but, whether tumultuous with rain and storms, washed out with cold or reflecting the brilliance of an imaginary blue, if I look long enough, I can attach my worries to an itinerant cloud and watch it drift away.

Every week, as I descend into the tunnel’s arched, prowling depths, headlights dipped, windows closed because of the damned fumes, I dread the moment when I’m finally pushed out, noiselessly screaming, tiny fists clenched, eyes all screwed up and gummy, face blue and bruised like a little boxer, into the thundering traffic and toxic air of the Isle of Dogs, and from there, it’s a short drive to the house where my father rots like a carcass of rancid beef.

I park outside the only house in the street visibly subsiding, switch off the engine and prepare in a moment’s silence. It’s like sitting on the ocean bed and looking out on to a long-forgotten shipwreck.

Sandwiched between identical one-storey terraces, all of which have gleaming windows and neatly pruned hedges, is my father’s roof with its mosaic of ill-matched tiles. Quartered window-panes, frames black and fissured, are streaked with the greasy residue of the tar of cigarettes. A pile of bricks taken from the crumbling street wall is stuck in the middle of his garden, rising like a triumphant ruin out of weeds and tall grass. The path to the front door has missing slabs, and my way is blocked, as usual, by a tall green wheelie-bin, standing where the dustmen left it the week before.

I climb the three steps, which are cracked and sink at a right angle, ring the bell and look through the letter-box. The stench of warm urine hits my nostrils, but thankfully not the aroma of a dead body, which I suspect I would recognize.

I turn the key in the lock, and let myself in.

My father moved here twelve years ago, but the top floor hasn’t been used at all and the ceilings are caving in. This is the house he bought because the ghost of Pearline was everywhere in our family home:

Pearline

whose voice still greeted him when he returned home at midnight from the Working Men’s Club

Oh! Yu remember yu have a yard?

Pearline

whose cooking aromas still filled the kitchen, fried garlic and onions hissing in a pan, curried goat in a pot on the stove, and his favourite – rum-soaked fruit cake baking in the oven

A likkle somet’ing for later, sweetie-pie

Pearline

whose antique cook’s knife, with its smooth ivory handle, gathered dust in a draw because when he used it he could feel her strong hands sawing deep into hundreds of succulent hams, the Sunday roast, gammon

Pearline