We sit beneath a painting of the sea and talk about the weight of absence. How after the accident we had both begun to see the body of our own grief. We had watched as it was born, fusing bone and knitting skin. How over the course of several weeks it had come together in the shape not of a man, but of a boy. And how gradually it had taken residence in the house, bringing with it a furious anger.

Simone held a mirror to it, directing it squarely upon herself, whereas I projected it in great fits of rage that saw plates smashed and tables overturned. Now I seemed to carry it wherever I went. I felt it coursing through my body like an oil slick in my bloodstream.

My mother insisted that I had inherited my temper as a sort of birthright. That I came from a long line of men completely incapable of getting out of their own way. Like my father, and his father before him, I had been saddled with it. A debt that I would never be able to repay, that I was ultimately destined to bestow upon my own children.

My father certainly hadn’t been an easy man to live with. I remember incessant arguments between him and my mother. Small squabbles that would gradually escalate until you heard the front door slam and his car pulling out of the driveway. He would disappear for hours at a time, leaving behind the kind of silence that rang in the ears. Often I found my mother smoking silently at the kitchen table, staring out towards some imagined landmark.

He became an almost mythic creature in my young life, like a character from the comic books I read; I regarded him as a sort of subhuman. He was a creature relatable at a distance but alien under any sort of direct scrutiny. His motivations were indecipherable to me. When he slept did he dream of other lives? Did he harbour desire, I wondered, or was the idea of his own happiness as vague and abstract to him as it felt to me?

He lived and died a labourer. I was still a boy when he was formally diagnosed with mesothelioma. I’d been playing one morning when my mother sat with me and explained the cause of his illness. A tiny particle, she said, ingested on a worksite. A microscopic fibre that had lingered in his body, slowly going about its work.

As I sit and try to remember his face, the shape of his body, I realise my memory of him has been tainted by the symptomatology of his disease, the circumstances of his death. I see his clubbed fingertips. How his cough would rattle through him and wake me in the night. How I would lie still in bed and hear him wandering the halls, his wheezing breath like some terrible phantom.

I remember my parents arguing with increasing frequency towards the end. My mother sided with the doctors, who urged him to pursue palliative care, but the more she insisted the more he seemed to lean into his own fate. He would storm out of the house, gripping the roof of his car to steady himself, before vanishing.