But then Tara was in the doorway of our bedroom, a slim silhouette in the light that seeped in from the street, and I felt the old feeling that I always got when I was around Tara, it surged up in me, and filled my heart.

I felt like the luckiest man in the world.

She slipped into bed, our son between us, and I did not need to count my blessings because they were both in my arms.

When we were in bed on such a night, when Marlon was still so small, our family felt like one body tangled up under the duvet. We were a jumble of warm limbs and breath and love. Nothing ever felt more right.

They were the measure of my life, Tara and Marlon, in my dreams and all my days, together and apart, forever and ever.

Then Tara spoke softly in the darkness.

‘I don’t think I can sleep tonight,’ she said.

‘Then just rest your eyes,’ I said.

I reached across Marlon to take Tara’s hand, and I smiled to myself as I felt her fidget but then settle, relax and finally slide into sleep, and I knew that even if she should turn her back on me in our deepest rest, or if I should move away from her in the dead of the night, then we would somehow always know to reach out, and we would always find each other again, and I would still be holding my wife’s hand when morning came.

10 YEARS ON

THE ONE BAR, TOKYO

Tara

He is simply Marlo now, not Marlon any more, almost sixteen years old, taller than me for two summers, and I watch him standing outside Shibuya station, frowning at his Rough Guide to Tokyo as the crowds go about the business of the night and the rain comes down in sheets, drum beating on all those convenience store umbrellas, transparent as cellophane.

‘Can you find it?’ I ask, and Marlo sighs with that special kind of exasperation that is unique to a teenage boy addressing their slow-witted parent. I lightly punch his arm. ‘Be kind,’ I tell him, and he smiles that slow, shy Marlo smile that always makes me forgive him.

The name we gave him at birth was packed away somewhere between the end of Lego and start of troubled skin. His choice, of course. And Marlon, we saw immediately, my ex-husband Christian and I, was never really him. That was just our idea of who he might grow up to be, our juvenile Brando fantasy for our baby boy. What are you rebelling against? What you got?

No, a young Brando was not him, not this gentle soul frowning at his guidebook, squinting behind his glasses, although it might have been me once, long ago, coming home from some club as my father was setting off to work in his van with the two Daves. There was a time when I was up for rebelling against anything they had. But my son is a far sweeter teenager than I was, and I am proud of the man he is going to be, the man that I am raising. He will be kind.