I’m not sure a lot of people like my father, but I do, three times over.

My friends sometimes tell me he scares them. They think he’s handsome, that much is certain, with his black eyes, his raven hair, his short beard on his square chin. But maybe it’s exactly that, his confidence, that creates some distance.

You know what I mean?

My father is one of those people who are sure of themselves, who give their opinion with a single definitive word, give their friendship with two and take it back with three, the kind who can mow you down with a look and show no mercy. The scary teacher, the boss that you fear, respecting him and hating him at the same time. My father’s a bit like that with everyone. Except me!

I’m his darling little daughter. All his tricks might work with other people – his conductor’s baton making them play to his rhythm – but it doesn’t work with me.

Take his job, for example. He says he works in the environment, in agronomy, ecology, that he’s helping preserve the green lungs of the planet. In fact what he really does is sell turf! fifteen per cent of the market goes through him, apparently that represents thousands of jobs in France, and in a dozen other countries, so people keep their mouths shut when he talks about it, when he says it was only twelve per cent of the market when he first started at Fast Green, and that he expects to get to seventeen per cent before the year 2000. Others look impressed when my father says that every minute, an area the size of a football pitch is re-turfed in France, and that whatever you say, at the end of a day, that’s the equivalent of the Forest of Fontainebleau. They even look startled when he says he doesn’t care about Kentucky Bluegrass or fescues, those stalwarts of the lawns of big suburban houses, given that he’s in charge of the whole of the golf-course market in the Ile-de-France, and that he only ever sells agrostis stonifera, the blade of grass that tops them all.

It just makes me laugh.

A father who sells turf!

The shame of it. I’ve told him plenty of times – he could have found something better to fill the dreams of his darling daughter! So I jump onto his lap and tell him I know all his tall tales about turf are only so much nonsense, and that he’s really a spy, or a gentleman burglar, or a secret agent.

My name is Grass.

Ray Grass.

Right now, as usual, Papa isn’t here. No one is here apart from me.