She left quietly, like the spirit of the contented life that I never got to have. It’s important to have memories like these when there’s a war unfolding around you. Dad cried at the funeral over his “dear little wife,” calmly and without drama: “And what if Mum dies? I couldn’t bear it.” But he’d changed his tune a few days later. On the way home from the shop, the bottles of beer tinkling in the carrier bag, he kicked stones and groused: “How much must I endure? There is so much I could do if you all weren’t around. A magnificent novel, a seminal play! I’d move to Moscow and become famous.” I quietly walked alongside carrying the groceries. Grandma’s pension was barely enough to cover food bills. He had no job. The country no longer had any need for tales of heroic miners.

And yet he’s a good man. Was a good man. Just as he found it so hard to imagine how a man and a woman could love one another unconditionally and sincerely, I now find it hard to understand how a child can sincerely love a parent. Still I respected him. I could never have done what he did. Grandma outlived Mum. She had another stroke and stopped talking. Her furious penetrating gaze was all that remained. Dad developed an immunity for her hatred. There was something strange and not wholly human, or maybe all too human, about the nine years of attention this nerve-racked, insecure old man heaped on this capricious, paralysed old woman, who had tormented him all his life. He spoon-fed her, wiped her clean, exercised her legs and arms when the atrophied muscles and joints caused her pain, he stroked her grey hair, laid icons on her pillow and spoke to her even when she couldn’t answer. Day in, day out. Day in, day out. No sense of duty and self-regard, no amount of admiration from neighbours and friends would be enough to put up with this for nine years. It was something else. Love, real love. Watching this, you could forgive him anything: the narcissism and self-pity, the attempts to humiliate me, the apathy, and the binges, and the addiction to slot machines. I forgot to tell you about his gambling habit: if he ever made any money off reselling medical alcohol or the drugs for Grandma that he’d got from some contact at the clinic, he’d go out at night to gamble it away.

“Because there is no fucking intellectual,” those were his exact words, “that could take care of a houseplant as long as I’ve been looking after your grandmother!”

“Mum could have,” I thought, staring at my feet.