‘You never seem keen to please, no, it’s what I like about you.’

‘Don’t say that. Don’t give me a subtle warning that I’ve got to behave exactly as you’d like me to otherwise you’ll go off me.’

‘Nina, come on, I’m not saying that.’

‘It was an awkward situation for everyone.’

‘No, I know, I know,’ he whispered, lifting my hair to kiss the back of my neck. ‘As long as you’re fine.’

‘I am fine,’ I said, touching his feet with mine.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I stared at the magnolia paint of my bedroom wall and felt the heavy weight of Max’s body holding on to me. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the gaps I’d seen over the course of the evening. Between Joe and Max. Between who Max was with me and who he was with other people. Between the cottage in Somerset where I thought Max’s dad lived and the flat in Australia where he actually lived. Between who I was with Joe and who I was with Max. As I tried and failed to get to sleep, I imagined all the gaps filling up with dark, sticky, tar-like liquid and it made me feel inexplicably ashamed. I wondered if Joe and Max had thought of all the gaps in their lives and relationships and selves as they had fallen asleep that night. I wondered it as Max snored, peacefully and loudly, in my ear.

7

Dad answered the door. He was wearing a pale-blue shirt underneath the navy cable-knit cardigan with brown buttons that I bought him for his seventieth. He only wore two jumpers on rotation per decade. His face was pale and the skin under his eyes looked thinner and lightly marbled with berry-coloured capillaries. Or maybe they’d always been there, I was just studying his face harder these days, looking for the tiniest marks of deterioration.

‘Dad!’ I said, giving him a big hug.

‘Oh, Bean,’ he said, sighing into my hair as he hugged me. ‘It’s been quite a week here.’

‘Where’s Mum?’

‘She’s out,’ he said, walking towards the kitchen. ‘She’s not speaking to me.’

‘Have you two had an argument?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ he said. ‘This morning. A right barney.’

‘What happened?’

Dad stood over the dining table, which was covered in the silverware that was only taken out for Christmas. There was an open bottle of polish.

‘Why are you doing all this? Have you got people coming over?’

‘No, we’re meant to be going away,’ he said, rubbing the prongs of a fork with the cloth. ‘That’s what the argument was about this morning.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘An opportunity has come up to go to Guinea.’

‘Guinea?’ I said, dismayed that Mum hadn’t brought this up on one of our many weekly phone calls in which she would list everything she had bought from Sainsbury’s and how she intended to use it all.

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘We are meant to be setting sail through the seas next week, but Mum has other ideas.’

‘Is it, like, a cruise?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it the same company you guys and Gloria and Brian used when you went to the Canary Islands?’

‘No, no, Gloria and Brian aren’t coming,’ he said. ‘God, that’d be a sight. No, just your mother and I. It’s me they want really, I’d be happy to go on my own.’

‘But Mum doesn’t want to go?’

‘No, she thinks it’s too dangerous and she’s worried about the weather.’

‘Well, that’s a fair enough concern,’ I said. ‘Maybe you can go at a later date.’

‘No, it has to be next week, even if there’s a storm.’

‘What are you doing with the silver?’

‘We’ll need it,’ he said. ‘For the trip.’

‘I’m sure they have their own cutlery on board.’

‘No, no, not for eating,’ he said, laughing at my suggestion. ‘For selling! Why pass up the chance for your mother and I to be merchants at last?’

Why pass up the chance for your mother and I to be merchants at last? Only Dad could come out with a sentence like that and it be unclear whether it was factual or fantastical. Nearly everything about my dad was still utterly recognizable to me – the East End edges of his vowels, the softness of his voice, his laugh, his vocabulary voluminous with the low-key language of chit-chat-with-the-neighbour (‘a right barney’) and poetic meanderings (‘setting sail through the seas’). I had read over and over again when researching Dad’s condition that what loved ones of sufferers experience is a sense of living grief – that the person you knew fades into an unrecognizable state. But I, so far, had found the opposite to be true in his case. It’s what made the reality of his eventual fate even more difficult to process. His illness was making his personality more technicolour – more eccentric and exaggerated – than it had been before, rather than giving him an entirely different one. He was Dad concentrated – like a human stock cube – stronger, undiluted, boiled down, less filtered. He was harder to have a relationship or even a conversation with, but he was definitely still there. At times it felt like the trueness of his self was emerging more than it ever had.

I heard a car pull up outside the house and I went to the front door. Mum was getting out of Gloria’s silver Toyota (every car in the North London suburbs was this shade – the roads looking down from outer space would be gilded with silver). Gloria saw me standing at the door and waved. I waved back. Mum was carrying a rolled-up yoga mat and wearing a lilac tracksuit.

‘Bye, Glor!’ she shouted as she walked away from the car. ‘I’ll see you at Mingle and Mindfulness.’

‘Bye, Mandy!’

Mum approached me and gave me an exacting and prissy kiss on the cheek.

‘Is that really catching on?’

‘Yes.’

‘Everyone is fine with suddenly calling you Mandy?’

‘No one has a problem with it other than you.’

‘What’s Mingle and Mindfulness?’

‘Exactly what it sounds like,’ she said, walking past me and going upstairs. I followed her to her bedroom. ‘Take the mickey all you like, Nina,’ she said, sitting on the edge of her bed and taking off her trainers as I stood by the wall watching her. ‘It’s not going to embarrass me.’

‘Sorry, I’m not taking the mickey.’

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘Downstairs. He said you had an argument.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t an argument, it was just a tiff,’ she said, moving to her vanity table, where she reapplied her gold jewellery.

‘About a cruise or something?’

‘A cruise?’ she said, her face contorting in confusion.

‘What was it about?’ I asked.

‘All I asked was for him to be a little less abrasive when we’re out and about at social occasions.’

‘He’s the least abrasive man alive, what do you mean?’

‘We went for lunch at Gloria and Brian’s last weekend and halfway through the meal he stood up to go to the loo, then just didn’t come back.’

‘Where did he go?’

‘We found him walking around their cul-de-sac half an hour later.’

‘Right, and what else?’

‘We were at a drinks party last night and he was rude to an acquaintance of ours in conversation, then sat in the hallway on a chair with his coat on for the rest of the night, making it obvious he wanted to go home. I was mortified.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Do you remember what triggered it?’

‘It was just normal conversation.’

‘Yes, but do you remember exactly what was being spoken about in both instances?’ Mum thought for a moment with a frown – once again annoyed that I was using interrogation rather than tirade to try to solve the problem.

‘At lunch, we were talking about Picasso, I think,’ she said. ‘Yes, that’s right, Brian had been watching a programme the night before about Picasso.’

‘And what about at the party last night?’

‘The man asked Bill what his favourite texts on the syllabus were when he was an English teacher.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘He said, “Mind your own bloody business,” and walked off.’

‘Right,’ I said, trying hard not to laugh at the thought of Dad the social anarchist in a cream-carpeted living room – the Punk of Pinner. ‘It’s completely obvious to me what’s happening here. Dad loves talking about art and he loves talking about books – he’s so well informed on both of those subjects, but –’

‘Nina –’

‘Mum, please. Just listen to me, I’m not having a go at you, I’m trying to understand him.’ Her mouth tightened and she turned from the mirror to speak to me rather than my reflection. ‘I think Dad is at a stage where he’s aware that something isn’t right in himself, but he doesn’t know what it is. He’s pushing people away and isolating himself as self-protection. Think about who he is – he would prefer people to think he’s rude rather than stupid.’ Mum stayed quiet, fiddling with the rings stacked on her wedding finger. ‘He’s currently downstairs polishing all the silver, by the way.’

She laughed weakly and closed her eyes in an expression that looked something like tiredness. It was the first small, visible sign of defeat I had seen in her for months. ‘A perk at last.’