‘What for?’ I asked Ginger. It felt like there was so much to forgive. The affair with my dad. Telling him about James Caine. Our takeaway disaster tonight. The fight in our living room. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’

‘All of it,’ Ginger said. ‘Forgive me for all of it.’

‘There’s nothing to forgive.’

It was true. As Ginger kissed me goodnight and hugged me hard, I understood why she had told my dad about James Caine, and I could even understand why she had an affair with him in the difficult early days of her marriage.

Women liked my father, you see – apart from my mother, of course. My dad liked them, too, and he craved a little sugar in his bowl, and he felt that he had earned it.

And I understood all of that, because I felt it too.

36

Christian

Prisons don’t have hospitals.

If an inmate needs serious treatment, such as surgery on the malignant tumour that is killing him, then he is moved to a regular hospital. But prisons do have in-patient beds like the one that Leo was sitting on now in his stripy M&S pyjamas, a tartan dressing gown tied modestly over the top, and a copy of My Family and Other Animals on his lap.

Marlon sat by his side.

The old man and the boy smiled at each other.

‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ Leo said.

‘Very,’ Marlon said.

‘Then I’ll begin.’

A few short weeks ago, Tara and I had been afraid that our son would be overwhelmed by today – by the forbidding Victorian hulk of the prison, by the tough kids running wild in the waiting area, bug-eyed with sugar and neglect, by the sight of his sick grandfather in his pyjamas, and by the sadness that settles on you in prison, there in every breath you take, the claustrophobic melancholy of life inside, that sense you never escape of human beings locked away from everything they ever loved.

But our boy was happy to see his granddad. It was as simple as that. And some special light inside Leo seemed to come on when he was around Marlon.

‘What did you do to your hand?’ Leo asked me.

I looked down at the bandage on my right hand where a couple of days ago I had clumsily hit Spike on his concrete-hard skull. I shook my head, finding that I didn’t have the heart to discuss a badly sprained wrist with a man who had prostate cancer.

‘He fell over,’ Marlon said. ‘Silly daddy.’

‘Silly old daddy,’ Leo happily agreed.

On the other side of the room, a young man was shivering and sweating in the small ward’s only other bed. He could have been in the early stages of a fever or the late stages of withdrawal from heroin addiction. The prison visitor learns not to ask. When we had arrived, the young man had thoughtfully pulled the sheet up to his chin so that only his already skull-like face was showing. He had gaunt, sunken features, a face with a million miles on the clock, although he could not have been out of his twenties. He was thoughtfully making a real effort to stop his teeth chattering as Leo read to Marlon.