I had a sleep and called Phyllis later from the hotel room, to ask about Titch’s funeral. She thought I was phoning from London. For once she didn’t give me too many details, except to say that Titch’s mum was so deep in grief that she had seemed not to be fully there.

His mum had brought along Titch’s brand new puffa jacket which they had bought together in the city centre the week before he died. She stood at the graveside clutching it tight as he was buried. Phyllis said it almost looked as if Titch’s mother was holding the warm jacket for him because she thought he might need it again later on the way back to the house, but of course no one mentioned that, they just tried to make sure she got through it. The da turned up half-cut with an enormous floral wreath that said SON and made an exhibition of himself caterwauling and crying my poor boy, my poor son, again and again until everyone wished he would give over and go home.

23

It felt like a relief to be back in London. The air was dirtier, but the life was cleaner and easier. Work was a pleasure in its simplicity: you did this thing, washing glasses and mixing drinks, and people gave you money and left you alone. I somehow felt as if, just by having made it out of the cellar without killing McGee, I had been handed a new lease of life. The day I came back there was a sympathy card on the bar, signed by my fellow workers – including Francis, in his loopy, flamboyant hand – to say they were sorry for the loss of my mother. I felt briefly guilty, but then I told myself it had just arrived post-dated by decades.

‘Thanks,’ I said to them quietly, still a wee bit bruised and downcast.

Mrs Wharton, who knew nothing of this lie, nonetheless met me with tear-filled eyes. She broke the news to me that Rollo had been ‘put to sleep’ while I was away. He’d been irritable and walking strangely, and then he’d finally gone berserk one night and buried his teeth in Mr Wharton’s left leg. Tests had discovered a large growth pressing on the dog’s brain. ‘It was the kindest thing,’ Mrs Wharton kept repeating of the euthanasia, as though she wasn’t at all sure that it was. The house felt calmer without him but different. Even a small, malign presence punches a hole in the air when it leaves.

There were times, though, when I woke up in the dead of night and couldn’t get back to sleep, when my anxieties sprouted claws and destroyed any possibility of rest. The loss of Titch, the heartbreak of his mother, and that weird circus with McGee in the basement all wheeled around my head in some nightmarish mix.