‘I love you, Dad!’ Tara said, too loud, too breezy.

He smiled at her. ‘I know, angel face.’

‘And, Dad – please, Dad – are you all right?’

I saw all the roles that Leo had been removed from. The roles he had removed himself from. Breadwinner, builder, businessman. That had all been stripped from him. Husband, father, grandfather. But his daughter still looked at him as if he was the king of the world.

Leo glanced across at the play area again.

‘We can’t move from the table,’ he said. ‘The inmates, I mean. So the children – the little ones – don’t understand why their daddy doesn’t want to play with them. It’s confusing for them! It’s upsetting! Of course it is. So you can never bring Marlon here. Never. You know that, right?’

And at last, when he spoke of Marlon, Tara unravelled.

Leo took her hands. A guard looked, then looked away. Because holding hands was the only physical contact that was permitted during the visit, although hands must be visible at all times. Leo and Tara kept their hands on the plastic tabletop. So that was allowed. Their visible hands.

‘I wanted you to watch Marlon growing up,’ she sobbed. ‘I wanted you to be there for him. The way you were for me. The way you were always there for me. Even if you were busy – even if you were not around – I knew that you were still there for me.’

Leo smiled sadly. ‘I was never going to watch Marlon grow up, angel face,’ he said.

She did not understand.

And neither did I.

‘There’s not enough time,’ he said. ‘You have your time and then your time is done.’ He shrugged. ‘We ran out of time – that’s all.’

And that’s when I started to understand what he was trying to tell us.

Leo was dying.

‘He was always so proud of his yearly medical,’ Jen told us back at home, snorting with a kind of derisive affection, a gesture learned during many years of married life. ‘His blood tests! His cholesterol! His bloody biochemical tests of his liver, kidneys, calcium and all the rest of it. He waved his results around like they were an Academy Award.’

‘Flying colours,’ Tara said proudly. ‘Always the flying colours. The doctor always said he was healthier than men half his age.’

Jen exhaled. ‘But nine months ago he had his annual medical and his PSA score was off the scale,’ she said.

Tara and I looked at each other. Nine months ago?

‘Do you know what PSA is?’ Jen said.

It rang some dark, distant bell. But Tara and I were still too young to be experts on all the things that can kill you. That stuff – the language of mortality – takes years to creep up on you.

‘PSA is the protein produced in the prostate gland,’ Jen said. ‘Prostate-Specific Antigen. The PSA is the blood test for prostate cancer.’