He shrugged it off, all the sage advice of the medical profession.

‘Dr Khan says that I should be on the chopping block. Dr Khan says that I should sign up for the booming prostate cancer industry. Dr Khan wants me to have surgery. Dr Khan wants to give me a cure that is worse than the disease. No thanks, Dr Khan. And I didn’t want his tests in the first place.’

‘But if you do nothing it could spread. And then it will be too late for surgery. It will be too late for everything.’

Leo shrugged. ‘That’s the problem with watchful waiting and active surveillance and all that. You run the risk that sooner or later the little bugger will get bigger.’ All this without a trace of self-pity. ‘But I’ll take my chances.’

When I was a little girl, I could not imagine this world without my father in it and now it seemed so close that I could feel it breathing in my face.

‘Are you in pain, Dad?’

‘Only when I laugh.’

‘Please talk to me! Don’t joke, don’t pretend it’s nothing, don’t just turn me away.’

‘What do you want me to say? I’m not having surgery, Tara. It’s not Dr Khan and the surgeon who have to live with the side effects.’

‘The side effects? The side effect of surgery is that it will save your life!’

He snorted. ‘What kind of life? A different life. A life that’s not worth having.’ He shook his head, and I knew he had spent hours thinking about this subject, lying awake in the middle of the night with my mother sleeping by his side in her hideous eternal-youth, skin-regime face mask. ‘You’ve got to go sometime. All this clinging on to life however rotten it gets – it’s just modern rubbish.’

He pretended to study My Family and Other Animals.

‘Wanting to stay alive is modern rubbish, is it?’ I said. ‘A bit woke, is it, Dad? A bit enlightened? Is all this staying-alive stuff for the snowflakes, Dad?’

‘Not accepting we all have our time is modern rubbish. Look – they’re too quick to chop men up, Tara. The booming prostate cancer industry! Well, they’re not recruiting me. Leo Doherty may have left school with nothing more than a certificate for swimming his width, but I know enough to keep off their butcher’s block. There’s no such thing as minor surgery. Only minor surgeons.’

‘Dr Khan is trying to help.’

‘If Dr Khan wants to help, then he should leave me alone and stop getting me to have all his tests and stop upsetting your mother and you.’

‘What was it you always used to say? I’m going to die a fit man. Well, if you don’t have surgery, you’re not going to die a fit man, are you?’

‘Well, at least I won’t be a man in a nappy!’

The boy in the other bed – he looked like some kind of junkie – covered his head with his prison duvet. I realised that Leo and I were close to shouting at each other.