Dad was comfortable having Mum around but I never recall him showing her any affection. He was a dour and distant man with a foul temper and, I’ll be honest, I was scared of him. He never hit me, largely I suspect because he never needed to. One angry look from him was all that was required to make me comply. I never saw him hit Mum, but if I had to guess I would say that he probably did. I remember an incident from when I was about ten years old. The hotel was a four-storey white stucco Victorian house in a crescent of similar imposing buildings. It had twelve guest bedrooms on the first and second floors. The ground floor housed a kitchen, a dining room and a residents’ lounge with ill-matched comfy chairs and a TV. My parents and I lived on the third floor. We didn’t have a TV. Between 5pm and 9pm I was required to be out of sight and out of mind while my parents cooked and served dinner for the guests. One of the guest bedrooms on the first floor was immediately above the dining room. If it was unoccupied, I would sometimes take the master key from the cupboard in our hallway and sneak into this room to listen to the chitchat from the dining room below.

On this occasion I was lying on a pillow on the floor of the small en suite bathroom with my ear pressed against the tiled floor. I found that the sound travelled through the ceiling far crisper in this part of the room. Eyes shut, I was just drinking up the laughter and general buzz from below when the bedroom door opened and in marched my father, hand in hand with one of the female guests.

‘What about your wife?’ the woman half whispered.

‘Oh fuck her, the miserable cow,’ my father replied, hardly bothering to lower his voice.

Frozen to the spot and praying that they wouldn’t look my way, I watched as Dad pushed her onto the bed and started to kiss her face and her chest.

She complained: ‘Stop it! I don’t like it, get off me!’

My father rolled off the bed and marched out of the room. ‘Fuck you, then, you’re all the same,’ was his parting comment as she followed him out.

The room was quiet again and my heartbeat gradually slowed. I crept out of the room and never visited it again.