“Useless. Nothing will change,” he sighed old man-style. “Talents have been quashed and will continue to be quashed. Nobody will write decent books. Except me.”

That this weak and haggard man was still convinced he had so much to offer lent his wrinkled face a tinge of farce. He hovered over me, frowning, thin, stripped to the waist in just sweatpants, nervously tapping dry knuckles on the table. And he hiccupped.

You couldn’t look at him. He was pathetic. But it was impossible to turn away either. He got angry if I did. He raised his voice when he thought I wasn’t listening. I looked at my nails and wondered if I might be able to find a half-decent salon. This ghastly city. They needed to be painted black, to suit the occasion.

“I forgave your grandmother for everything,” he said, talking louder. “You’re lucky you didn’t know her when you were young.”

“What do you mean, when I was young? I’m still young.”

“She was an obnoxious, domineering woman who controlled me my whole life,” he continued. “There have been times in my life when she literally haunted me. Even once I’d grown up, she drove me mad with her constant interfering. She didn’t approve of any of the women I saw. And she hated your mother by the way.”

Tactless monster. I almost slapped him when he mentioned Mum.

“She didn’t want for anything. Doctors, masseurs, chocolates, oranges, even though we didn’t have a penny,” he whined. “Nine, long fucking years. The prime of my life, thrown away for the sake of duty!”

“Dad,” I said finally, “can’t you see you’d do the same to me if you got half a chance.”

He pretended not to hear. I scraped some ice off the side of the freezer with a kitchen knife and threw it into a glass of whiskey.

“At least we used to get Grandma’s disability benefits, but now there’s going to be nothing for food. Pension’s a joke. She left me this flat, she wrote her will when you were born. So generous! As if she had anybody else. Her value system was a mystery known only to herself. And nobody met her standards.”

I said nothing and just stirred the tea, without ever letting the spoon hit the inside of the mug. When I was about seven years old, he gave me a hiding for scraping the spoon. So I started only letting the spoon touch the bottom of the mug, but he didn’t like that either. “You trying to dig through?” he’d say. Since then, I have mastered the skill of stirring without a noise. Thanks to him, I do it perfectly.

He opened a kitchen cabinet and fished a five-millilitre syringe and an ampoule out the medicine box. He snapped the neck of the ampoule with a blade, primed the syringe, lowered his trousers and, without missing a beat, injected himself in a buttock. He didn’t look too competent, but it did the job.