He was on the floor, beside a fallen chair and half beneath the table. I took it all in as best I could, too much of it at first. A candle had burnt down to the surface of the mantel and charred it, though the fireplace below was cold and unused. And the filth—the indescribable squalor of the place—it took my breath away, the stench and the shock. My father had been living like this, again. I should have known, should have been here; I had allowed my own life to intervene. Not for long, but long enough for this to happen.

I kicked through a platoon of bottles, some standing, some fallen, to an outstretched hand. I felt his cheek: warm under the sharkskin of whiskers. In a surge of fright, I slapped him—an eye opened but saw nothing. A noise from his parched mouth, no more, but it denoted life.

I slid my fingers through the lank hair at the back of his head and tried to lift it. Stickiness: a wound between my fingers, blood congealed on the floorboards. The hair was matted by it, the collar of his old shirt stained brown. New horrors announced themselves: the powerful vapours of spilt booze and something worse. He had soiled himself, then. His trousers, normally secured by a length of cord that strung suspended between the points of his hips, were bunched around the tops of his thighs.

I kept a vision of this man in my mind, one that carried me through the glades of his decay. His dark hair swept back and oiled, his uniform, the firm jaw, the confident smile that creased his eyes. His hands that bore authority and tenderness on sculpted fingers. This was before his great losses, before he turned mad and volatile and unpredictable. Here now were those fine fingers, curled in the grime, stained by tobacco, scarred and blunted by life.

I hauled him up and onto a chair, a deep one with arms so he wouldn’t fall. I filled a bucket at the barrel under his eaves, cleared the hearth of its refuse and lit a fire. He dawned slowly, murmured something. I found bedding, clothing, unused and tolerably clean. I tore the clothes from his body and the sheets from the bed and threw them in the fire. It roared and consumed the vile things. Once the water was heated I ran a cloth, warm and wet, over his sickened body and he stirred a little but still could not speak.

The sins and insults ran off him with the clouded water. The wound in the back of his head was a split—most likely made when his head struck the floor—its edges swollen, the bruise already dark and proud. He had done it some days ago, then. I could do nothing with it, only make sure it was clean and work the crusts of old blood out of his hair.