Now, at Grootkloof, with the birds (Derek didn’t try to distinguish them) increasingly clamorous outside, the cool quiet of the cabin and the fuzzy-headed after-effects of the whiskey and pills, he was reminded of another incident with his father. It happened during Derek’s first year at university when he was suffering the painful jolt of waking each morning and remembering that he and Michelle were no longer together. For a while, he imagined if he went to as many parties and wooed as many girls as possible, Michelle might become jealous and regret having broken up with him. It was at one such party when, already far gone on alcohol, he took a freshly-lit joint from someone and made a show of sucking on it until it burnt his fingers. When he was still out cold on the couch in the party house at eleven the next morning, someone called his parents’ home.

The first thing Derek remembered hearing that morning was Jock’s voice in the room.

“What happened here?”

“Erm, well sir, I think he overdid it last night,” said a young man, presumably one of the residents of the house.

“Give me specifics, lad.”

The room was quiet for a moment until a girl spoke up.

“He’d been drinking, a lot, for several hours and then smoked an entire joint. That’s, erm, dagga. You know, cannabis.”

“I know what it is,” said Jock, his voice low.

The man resumed. “He went a bit odd, sir. Angry and very loud. Shouting at everyone and saying things that made no sense to any of us. Then he stood on the table and started demanding that someone go and fetch his girlfriend—”

“Michelle Lowe,” interjected the girl quietly. “Hard to forget the name.”

“Ja, that was the name he shouted again and again. Anyway, no one here knew her but that didn’t stop him going on and on about her. I guess after a while we ignored him and he, well, fell asleep. We didn’t expect to find him still here today, though.”

The pair helped Derek to his feet and to the bathroom where he threw up several times, before they loaded him into Jock’s car. Not a word was said on the drive home. Mrs Mackenzie came out to meet them when they drew up in front of the house, her eyes darting nervously between father and son. Jock got out of the car and walked inside.

“This is it,” he said, not bothering to look at his wife. “This is what your son has amounted to: nothing.”

When Jock died less than a year later, father and son were barely talking to one another and there was certainly no evidence that the older man had changed his opinion of Derek.