He dragged on his cigarette and looked down at his drink, slumping forward slightly in his chair. ‘He couldn’t stand to watch another man cry. Far as I can remember, I only ever cried in front of him once. I was ten. I’d had a run-in with some older kids. I’d been riding home from school and had taken a shortcut through the Dustbowl – that’s what we called this big, pie-wedge-shaped patch of dead land near where I grew up. I was waved down by three boys. They were tooling around at the big storm drain. One of them was Jim Haskin. A few sandwiches short of a picnic and mad as a cut snake, we used to call him. Not to his face, of course. I can’t remember the names of the other two, but I can still picture their dirty faces.’

Kate said nothing.

‘It was those other two kids who dragged me off the bike,’ Fisher said. ‘But it was Haskin who wheeled it into the mouth of the storm drain, gave it a steady push right down into the dark and told me to fetch. They gathered around and watched me go in after it. Two steps in, my heart was pounding. Three steps, I was just about ready to scream.’

He smiled, but it was a tragic, distant smile, and made her feel cold.

‘The darkness in that storm drain was total and complete, like death,’ he said. He hiccuped and nearly lost his cigarette. Kate was all the way across the room, but she could see the tears in his eyes. ‘My bike had been gobbled up by that darkness and it wanted to gobble me up too. So, I ran. Christ, I loved that fucking bike. For all I know it’s still there, rusted out and waiting for me in the dark.’

‘Fisher, you were ten. Anyone would have cried in that situation. I’d cry if it happened to me now.’

‘Dad saw things differently,’ he said, long-buried scorn in his voice. ‘I came in the front door, crying like a puppy; he looked down at me like I was nothing. Like I was less than nothing. It wasn’t just that he saw crying as a weakness. It disgusted him. I disgusted him. Made him sick to his stomach. You know what he told me, Kate?’

‘What?’

‘Be a man.’ He finished his cigarette, stubbed it out on the windowsill and flicked it into the night. ‘Be a man. It seemed like such a strange thing to say to a child. I swore then that if I ever had a son, things would be different. But what does the Bible say about the sins of the father? That they shall be visited upon the sons to the third and fourth generation? Pam would know.’