As Tim watched, his dad glanced around himself at the grass, said ‘Ah!’ and then reached out and picked something up. He put his glasses back on and smiled at Tim once more.

‘It’s always good to keep up appearances,’ he said.

2

Tim’s earliest memories of his father were of the stories his dad used to tell him before bed.

Like many of the memories he had from that age – walking the dog with his mum; playing in the sandpit at nursery school with a red-haired boy whose name he could no longer recall; drawing with coloured crayons over the wallpaper of his bedroom after his mum sent him there for being naughty – Tim couldn’t remember the build-up or what happened after. It was as though his life from the time he was born until the age of around seven was a dark landscape, with only the occasional spotlight to shine down and light up random memories.

Brief, bright islands of time.

His first memories of his dad were like that.

Tim would be lying in his semi-dark bedroom, looking up at the glow-in-the-dark stars and planets his mum had stuck to his ceiling, and his dad would be sat at the end of his bed adjusting his glasses. In these memories his father looked exactly the same as he did now, as if he hadn’t aged. His dad would be perched at the end of his bed, sitting completely still like some large, skinny vulture, and Tim would know it was story time.

Tim’s dad never carried a book, because the stories were all in his mind. They were lessons, really.

In one – Tim thought of this one as The Boy Who Didn’t Fight Back– his father explained what happened to little boys who never stood up for themselves. As with most of the early memories he had of his father, Tim didn’t remember the build-up to this one, but he did remember having a slightly swollen, split lip that he probed with his tongue while his dad talked. It could easily have been a detail his mind had added later, but Tim didn’t think so.

In The Boy Who Didn’t Fight Back, Tim’s dad told him about a skinny little kid he’d known when he was younger who let the other children push him around at nursery school. The kid in the story didn’t have a name, but he was a lightweight and the other children used to take advantage – stealing his toys, pushing him over if he got in their way, that sort of thing.