‘Oh, Tara,’ she said.

‘Fresh air,’ my dad ordered. ‘Where are the boys?’

The Daves stepped forward.

And one of his boys – he still called them his boys, these grown men with lives of their own, with triumphs and disasters that we knew nothing about – scooped me up as if I weighed nothing.

I looked into the worried face of Big Dave. Mad Dave went ahead of us, clearing a way through the party guests who had crowded onto the stairwell to gawp, getting the door as I was carried into the street.

Spike caught my eye and looked away with what might have been shame.

You big pussy, I thought. For all your bulging biceps! For all your cardiovascular workouts! Look at all these real hard men, Spike. Not gym-hard. Real-world hard. Look at the two Daves, Spike.

They would do anything for my father. I bet they would die for him, I thought, and I bet they would kill for him.

Then we were on the street and the night was cool and Big Dave gently parked me on a bench by a bus stop. My father knelt before me, the streetlights shining on his big bald Pablo Picasso skull.

‘Sorry, Dad,’ I said.

‘Ah, it’s OK, angel face.’

‘I’m spoiling your party.’

‘You’re not spoiling anything.’ Leo looked up and down the streets. ‘We can have the party out here! Hank Sinatra can sing “Angel Eyes” at the bus stop! You like that song, right?’

We smiled and then his face grew serious.

‘You work too hard, Tara. You try to do it all for your family. You push yourself and you push yourself and in the end your body tells you to stop. Believe me, I know what it’s like.’

There were tears in my father’s eyes and I felt terrible. He should not have tears in his eyes on his sixtieth birthday party. He touched my face and smiled with his infinite tenderness.

‘You really bought the ticket this time, didn’t you?’ he said.

12

Christian

This was how I knew my wife was having an affair.

The same way that everyone knows.

The same way that you will know.

It’s the phone, stupid.

Tara’s phone was a dead giveaway. And my wife’s phone had, I saw now, been giving her away for quite a while.

Tara’s phone was no longer left lying around our home – casually dropped on the coffee table or dumped on some random kitchen surface or on the table where we sat down as a family to eat, or stuffed half-forgotten in a bag or coat, or dropped on the dressing table by the side of our bed. At some point – how had I missed it? – Tara had started guarding her phone in a way that she had never done before. Her phone was suddenly under close personal protection. There was never a moment when I could mistake it for my own phone – an identical Apple iPhone X – and pick it up by accident, and not know that I had the wrong one until I saw the photo on the home page (Marlon and me and Buddy smiling on Tara’s phone).