My father rang at lunch: sighed, said it was getting to be a bit much. His girlfriend had broken up with him, he’d been going out too often since. He thought I’d better bring him in. I took a cab to his house and asked the driver to wait, but my father was already trundling his way outside holding a leather overnight bag and waving the cane whose use had only recently been a sort of joke. When we arrived at the hospital — an old Georgian townhouse that felt more like a hotel — the staff thought I was some stunted wayward daughter whose father had pulled her away from glass-cut coke and bitter men. My father laughed. 

“Oh, no. She’s got this thing under the eyes. Hyperpigmentation, was it? Though you are looking rather thin, darling.” 

The room was bright, with expensive sheets on a single bed. I helped him into it and slapped his old copy of David Copperfield down on the nightstand. An easily retrieved vestige of his own childhood, the book was bestowed on me as a sort of talisman when I left home, and now he snatched it from the glare of a small lamp festooned in an impertinent red silk. 

“Ghastly Classics editions,” he said, scratching the rubberized cover with his thumbnail. 

I told him I should probably get back, though we both knew my work — tutoring children in subjects where I’d once shown promise — wasn’t so demanding as to keep me from his bedside. I needed the evening to summon the energy required to be patient with him. I looked at my father on his starched sheets very sternly then. 

“I love you,” I said. 

He nodded slowly, as though he’d been given some kind of instruction that might take hours to parse. 

When I came back the next day he was squinting at a page some way in. I’d barely shut the door before the book was spread scabrously before me. “24: My First Dissipation,” I read aloud. He smiled plaintively, and I suggested tearing through at this speed would likely not be good for him. 

“Might make you a bit seasick,” I said, retrieving the book. My father unclasped his hands and slid them below the thin sheet, his fingers tapping expectantly underneath the cover.

“But you’re feeling a bit better? Being here?” I asked.

“Better.” He said it like it was a ridiculous idea.

A nurse entered the room with his food, the steel cloche rattling on its tray as she moved toward us. My father looked embarrassed. She backed away with almost cartoonish deference and I lifted the lid to find a baguette sandwich; neither of us knew what to make of that. My father ripped the sandwich in two. He paused for a moment, then gave me the bigger half. 

I sat on the end of the bed, pulled the tomato slice from the bread, and placed it in the bin. Empty pill cups and tomato. My father watched me as he chewed. After a minute of silence, he pulled a hair from the back of his throat and held it up to me. I shrugged.

“I find it sort of moving to find a hair,” I said. 

“Yes, I can see that,” he said. “Rachel hasn’t called.” 

“I thought you weren’t allowed phones.”

“But I gave her the number here. And my room.”

“You told her you were here?”

“Well, I thought she should know.” 

Rachel, my father’s ex-girlfriend, was 32, the age my father had been when she was born. I knew the sort of text he would have sent her, the kind I’d received in the past. Something to the effect of all of his problems lying at her feet, problems for which she’d one day have to atone. His own possible failings — carelessness, egotism, occasional cruelty — were comfortably positioned as the inevitable result of some fundamental flaw in the person to whom he was closest, and who therefore had a certain responsibility to create an environment in which his more favorable traits might flourish. I had, rather graciously, made some effort to withdraw from this duty so that Rachel could now stand accused of keeping him from his charm, locking it away so that he might stew, lonely and futile, at the cost of however many hundreds a night in Lisson Grove. And what, he thought, did that say about her? It was true that he drank more than he should, was a little too unsteady on his feet to still be snorting powders, but I wasn’t convinced that he needed to be locked up. He wasn’t a reflective drunk; drinking seemed to ease him into himself. I couldn’t bear the thought of him permanently sober. 

I asked him if it might just be the case that he was depressed. 

“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.” 

“Well, a lot of people are. It wouldn’t be a strange thing.”

“Look,” he said, some memory of his former authority making an appearance in his fist, which emerged from under the sheet. “A lot of people are depressed because they’re secretly pedophiles.” He was really pleased with that.

“Are you a pedophile?” I asked.

“No, no.” He cocked his head. “Maybe in a sixties way.”

“You mean in a now way. You in the sixties would be a pedophile now.”

“Yes, that’s it. That’s the way round. Anyway, now I’m not an anything-phile.” He exhaled, looked me over. “A lovely daughterophile, maybe.”

“You know, I don’t think it’s fair that you make Rachel feel guilty,” I said. “It’s reasonable to not want to pick up your pants and flush the toilet for you.” 

“She wants this, Mutts. This is what she wants. To know that I’m suffering so that when she comes back — which she will — she’ll feel good about herself. But she won’t be coming back to find me grovelling. I’ve got my doctors, and I’ve got my Mutty, the only dictator I need.” 

He stroked my hand and curled his rough fingers around my thumb, gave it a squeeze. I’d been named Rose for the more beautiful of my mother’s aunts, a decision made in the hope it would have some determinant power; I’d been born with my father’s nose. As he told it, my mother had elected at the last minute to expand the name to Rosamund, a perplexing decision, but one I’d come to understand as having been made in the possible event of my becoming properly beautiful, in which case a dowdy name might have provided some ironic contrast. I hadn’t, not really, and Rosamund was only used during the frightening first register of the school year, when it felt like a cruel reminder to me and the rest of the class: there was something musty about me, worn in. My father had always called me Mutty, as though he were a child himself, unable to pronounce my full name; I’d only learned that it meant mother from a brief fling in my teens with a half-German boy. 

“I’m not sure it’s so complicated a scheme as you’re making it out to be,” I told him now. “There’s nothing you said to Rachel? Nothing that would’ve hurt her?”

“Nothing, really,” he said. “This is just, I don’t know. A control thing.” 

The complaints he’d been lodging about his lineup of young girlfriends had, since my adolescence, been met with my defense of them, but when I was on my own I always loathed their wish to be anything other than a caretaker for him. It felt increasingly difficult to pity their misunderstanding of the terms.

“So what’s going on with you,” he asked. “Romantically. Sexually.” He’d always said sexual like there was an extra y in there somewhere. Sexyually.

It pained me to tell him that things were in fact a little slow. When this was the case — as it often was — I felt that I’d failed in some essential way. He wanted very much for me to be desired. When we went for dinner I could see people looking us over: my father had a habit of walking behind me with his hand on the small of my back, making a little performance of guiding me somewhere, though we both knew he was hanging on. He’d announce to a waiter that I was his daughter, not his girlfriend. They know, I’d say. 

I graduated from university without having convinced someone to fall in love with me, the task I most feared others seeing me at work on. Towards the end of my degree I attempted to claw a foolish path out of my hopelessness: I met George at a loose friend’s birthday and was taken with him immediately. He was a clever, sultry boy who managed exactly the kind of detachment I so failed at, one that seemed to suggest a robust sense of self. He’d been raised in Ealing by a pair of reasonably happy parents who seemed amazed by every sentence that came out of his mouth; he claimed to crave the kind of scrappiness I’d apparently presented in my dispatches from life in a family of two. (While I was in primary school my mother, who my father reminded me constantly had once been considered the most desirable woman in London, had embarrassed them both by getting cancer and becoming, as he saw it, prematurely elderly, something she’d had the sense to do mostly in private.) In my final year my father had decided a mole on his back was dangerous — malicious, he’d said at the time — and I’d rushed back to escort him to his biopsy. He was so convinced he was dying that I began to believe him, and while I was there I had the distinct impression that I was collating information for later use. When my father spoke, I could imagine the way that I’d copy his voice, the lines I’d land on. Sadness then seemed glamorous and exciting, though occasionally it gave way to the more vertiginous sense of not quite knowing where in the story I was. I sped through those days — convinced they could be some of my father’s last — as though hurrying to get to the end, even as I feared it, the way, when finishing a novel, one has to cover the final paragraph with a flat hand to prevent the eye from flickering toward it. The mole was nothing. I went back to university and recounted the whole thing to George, who slept with me that night. When we finished I lay in bed with my hands behind my head so that I wouldn’t wrap them around him. 

After university I suggested George come and work for my father for a while. My father wanted a personal assistant and I wanted George to witness the complicated, scrappy conditions he’d appeared so charmed by at parties. Our relationship hadn’t amounted to as much as I’d hoped, and the infrequency of our sleeping together was made more painful by its tenderness. At first I felt some thrill in the negotiation between us, alternately jostling with George for my father’s attention, or with my father for George’s, or on some few occasions sensing each of them vying for my own. But in the end it became clear that it would only ever be my father and I pushing each other out of the way: George managed to extricate himself from our tangle after about three months, furnished, I imagined, with a compendium of stories all his own. Both my father and I experienced a sort of shamefaced grief at his departure; to see the other discarded was to experience it oneself. But my father, at least, had his honour restored: Rachel started part-time a few weeks later, and pretty soon they came to the decision that his meager projects did not require full-time assistance, and that they’d be better off as lovers. Though as I understood it my father still paid George an occasional one-off fee to reply to a tranche of emails. 

“You must have something going on,” my father said now. 

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t.” I passed him back the rest of my sandwich. He looked genuinely upset. My role as his bovine housemistress worked best when he understood it as a kind of winking performance, one that he enjoyed bristling at. He liked always to behave as though I were some cruel shrew masquerading as a daughter, partly because he didn’t know quite how else to treat women, and partly, I expect, because he was repulsed by the idea of being a father: it might frighten away whatever prospects he imagined were circling. Having the upper hand in our relationship suited him like a baggy sateen-blend number in that it was comfortable but produced an awful lot of noise and made him look like a sweaty moron. Before he was interned in his most recent relationship, I’d go drinking with him and his friends outfitted in something bias cut and slinky that caught at the nipple. My father would quail in the corner like a little boy until he saw that I’d sufficiently frightened his friends, and then it was utter love, and he could start jostling me about. I was his! 

He looked at his wrist and told me he had a session with a doctor in a couple of minutes. 

“Not that I’d want to know his name anyway, but it really doesn’t help that it’s Kevin,” he said. 

I walked to the window and parted two slats in the blinds. Taxis wove around Lisson Grove, the arms of the drivers protruding from the windows as though grazing the haunches of loyal, beaten-down horses. 

“You’re just annoyed he’s a man.”

“I’m annoyed he’s anyone,” he said. “There’s a reason doctors have titles. Fragile people” — he raised his eyebrows here — “ought not to imagine the lives and opinions of strangers in their orbit.”

I kissed him on the forehead and told him I’d leave him to calm down before Kevin arrived.

“Will you be back?” he asked. 

“Yes. I’ll ask downstairs when’s good. Do you want anything from the house?”

“iPad,” he said. “And some twiglets.” 

 

When I left I practically skipped down the street with the drama of it all — the hospital, the pills, the indignity of having a father. He and I had played our little roles so well I’d half expected us to shake hands like a couple of green-shinned footballers and leave at the same time. It couldn’t be denied: I wanted to have my wrists strapped down too, only then I wanted to go to a party where exactly one woman was more beautiful than me, but in an obvious, unintellectual way that might reflect poorly on those who desired her. 

I walked toward his house, admiring my own elegance in the windows of shops as I veered around people walking upstream, their heads down and arms crossed around their waists. The roads were oddly clear but I stopped at the red man’s orders anyway. I was embarrassed to be waiting, a shame I liked to quash by imagining ridiculous scenarios where drivers would call out to ask why I wasn’t crossing. My father died that way, I’d tell them. 

I shouldered my way through the stiff front door and went straight to the kitchen. Though Rachel had dealt the final modernizing blow to the house, replacing heavy curtains with walnut blinds and putting the old rugs up on eBay, the smell of smoke lingered. I opened the back door to the garden and leant on the frame to light a cigarette. The back of the house was so successfully girdled by bamboo that the view from the kitchen was like a Magritte: the garden itself perpetually a dim, English grey, while the sky above still managed a proud handle on its watery blue.

I thought about Kevin and my father, worried that he’d seemed nervous; he was not, generally speaking, a self-conscious person, one of the few things I envied him. By the time I was at university I suspected it was obvious I craved attention, even devotion. At parties I’d try to remember that I should keep something of myself back, that perhaps I could draw an audience without brandishing the ugly figure of my father. But it took only about half a glass of wine for me to feel his sentences clicking along the backs of my teeth like a lozenge, or a pip I was desperate to shoot out. The next day, before I’d even regained the sense of my body, the memory of my own voice would come back to me, the way I’d hurled it around: my father, my father, my father.

Home one weekend, I asked my father whether he’d really never felt embarrassed at the memory of saying the wrong thing, or of talking too much. 

“Oh no, absolutely not that,” he said. “Occasionally I witness someone else’s social incompetence and get a flicker of sort of… empathy, of imagining that were me. But no.” He ashed his cigarette. “Mostly when other people are talking I’m just thinking: I wish it were me.”

“I can’t tell if it’s more disturbing for that to be true, or for you to want me to think it is,” I told him.

He looked up at me and shrugged. “Either way it’s a mark of good character, I think.”

 

Upstairs, I retrieved my father’s iPad from his desk, where it sat among the carefully placed detritus of the idle: the bouquet of capped blue biros in their mug, a notepad with a couple of phone numbers written down in an unsteady script. 

My phone vibrated in my back pocket and I thumbed the answer symbol before I’d had much time to consider: it was my aunt. 

“I saw the Facebook post,” she said.

“What Facebook post?”

“So he’s back in?”

Susan was my father’s matronly older sister. He saw her as his childhood protector, the girl who’d pick him up from school when his own mother forgot or was otherwise engaged. Susan was too practical to have had something as mawkish as a bad childhood, but had come away distrusting beauty and charisma. She’d hated my mother for it, I’d been told, and Susan spent a good deal of my childhood reminding me that there was a noble morality in being not quite beautiful. A noble morality! This had sated me until I’d found a school report of my mother’s from her final year: “She bears the weight of her great beauty with equanimity,” it read. 

I let my aunt prattle on about all the ways my father was raising the odds of what she somehow still called his early demise. I opened Facebook and found that he had indeed uploaded a photograph of himself: moody, with his thick gray hair slicked artfully back. 

“The Ballad of Capio Nightingaol,” he’d written. My father had a habit of posting statements to Facebook not unlike those shared by the girls I’d been at school with, who’d felt their romantic entanglements bore the same intrigue as unfolding political scandals. When he was particularly low, I often worried that I’d learn of his death by something as idiotic as a post saying “goodbye.” Below this new post was a comment from an ancient, dour friend of his from school who’d written “You are SO creative!!!! Happy New Year! 2022 will fix us all!!! I retired! I’ll see BOTH of you sometime next year.”

“Anyway,” my aunt was saying. “I’ve rung the nurses. To sort of warn them.”

“Right,” I said.

“I only don’t want them to make it all difficult by getting up in arms because he complimented their lipstick or something.”

I pictured his watery little eyes trailing various nurses as they moved about his room. My father was prone to falling for women who looked after him, feeling as he did that they were there because of his charm alone. It was a trait my aunt had often accused me of having inherited. “You and your father put far too much stock in who is cleaning up whose sick,” she said once.

I told Susan I was sure the nurses appreciated the gesture, that I’d likely be back to run interference with them myself before long, and that I had to go. She told me I was welcome.

 

Back at my flat I took a sleeping pill, spent twenty minutes intermittently holding my breath to see if the wheezing sound was me or an intruder under the bed, then took another. When I woke, it was two in the afternoon. I dressed and got a cab to the clinic. The driver deposited me at the far end of the building, where the red brick gave way to the Portland stone of the residential part of the street. I looked up to the window and wondered what my father was doing in his plush little pen: wanking, probably. 

I said my father’s name at the door and was buzzed in, but when I tried to climb the stairs to his room the woman at the front desk told me he wasn’t there. She looked embarrassed. 

“Where is he?” I asked.

“I believe he’s at the pub.”

I looked at her incredulously. 

“We have an open door policy,” she said.

“Right,” I said. “Right. Has anyone else called?” I asked. “Or been in?” 

“No, but he said he was meeting a friend —”

“Woman? Did she wait outside?”

“I stand here,” she said. “Not by the door.”

“Do you know what pub?”

She looked at a notepad on the desk and said, “The Globe.” 

I found my father at a table in the back, eating a plate of tuna carpaccio, his hand resting on a small, bulbous glass of red wine. Sitting next to him was Barry, a man with the resting frown of a sexual deviant, whom my father had kept around since they were at school. I couldn’t decide whether a phone call to Rachel or to Barry would have been more pathetic. 

“Hello?” I said, too loudly. “The pub?” 

“Hello, darling,” my father said. Barry looked at him nervously. My father often behaved as though their friendship were an act of charity. Occasionally he seemed to recognize the fact that the relationship was mutually beneficial, that he was just as lonely and socially incompetent as Barry had always been. But he’d always shudder the thought away. 

“I wanted some proper lunch,” my father said. “I’m fine. I mean, I’m going to go back, probably. But I’m fine.” 

Barry asked me what I’d like to drink.

“Wine,” I said. Barry practically bowed before backing away. I watched my father eat.

“Still no word from Rachel,” he said, removing bits of cress from the top of the fish. “Really cruel, I think.”

“You seem okay. I don’t think she needs to worry.”

He stopped eating and looked up at me. “I’m not okay,” he said. “She should absolutely worry. As should you.” He returned to his food and shook his head. “You’d think,” he said, chewing, “I’d have to try and top myself to get your attention.”

I picked some crust from my eye and flicked it away, my father following the action, 

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. This seemed to please him in some way. His plight! If you can’t get what you want, get what you fear. Fair enough.

“It’s not right your mother gets to be the martyr all the time, and I’m the awful one. Rather clever of her, really.”

When he looked up again he seemed properly frightened, and I imagined him hobbling back to his fortress flush with empathetic, handsomely paid doctors.

Barry returned with my drink and my father told me they’d been talking about the novel Barry had been writing for the past twenty years: Vulgarity. I looked at my father but his eyes remained fixed on his food. I had nothing to do but ask Barry what the book was about. He reeled off an embittered diatribe about men, women, sex. Society. 

“Don’t you think society has changed at all,” I asked, “since you started writing it?” Both men looked at me. 

“Society stays the same,” Barry said. “Essentially.” 

My father bowed his head in solemn agreement. “Bloody good title, Barry.” Barry shrugged, and told us he might change it. He’d have to see. 

“Though it does summarize my issues. As I see them, sort of thing,” he said, exhaling a little burp before he brought his pint to his lips again. 

“Do you know they don’t take Amex?” my father said. “At the hospital?”

“It’s not a hospital,” I said. “It’s a resort for rich men with truncal obesity.”

Barry returned his glass to the table between us as gently as he was able.

“Barry,” I said. “Tell me about what’s happening with you. Other than the book.” Barry knew that there was some sort of thing going on between me and my father, but he was too cowardly, and too self-interested, to resist my question. He shot an obedient look at my father anyway, whose silence he took as permission to tell me about his allotment. This was actually the main thing I liked about him, his duty to his little patch of soil and the misshapen vegetables he grew there. At least he could draw sustenance from two hundred and fifty square feet in Walthamstow, if not from my father’s inimical gaze. Barry didn’t get far before my father cut him off.

“Barry was telling me, before you arrived, that they’ve started playing music in the tubes. What was it, Barry?”

“Classical music,” he said. “They’re playing it through speakers in all the stations. Meant to stop knife crime, apparently.”

“They’ve been doing that for years,” I said. “They were doing that when I was at school.”

“Waltzes!” my father said. He shook his head and used the outermost prong of his fork to dangle the last of the carpaccio into his mouth. “Another sick, sentimental bit of rubbish thought up by the Austrians.”

Barry chuckled. I stared at my father while he fussed with his cutlery, then glanced at his watchless wrist. He said he’d like to go back now, please, offering me his arm so I might pull him out of his seat and back to his nice, clean bed. 

“Barry,” I said. “What do you think about all of this?” 

He wobbled slightly, asked me what I meant. I gestured toward my father.

“Sorry,” Barry said. 

He couldn’t come up with anything else. His plight! Mine!

“For god’s sake,” my father said. “I’m an old man. And everyone wants me to suffer.” 

“Not everyone,” Barry said quietly. 

“The women do,” my father said. 

Barry nodded slowly. “He only wants to get better,” he said with a sympathetic look at the back of my father’s chair. “So that things can be nice. He wants — with you, and with everyone — you know…” He paused here. “Niceness,” he offered eventually. 

“Things all seem fairly nice to me,” I said. “This is all quite nice.”

My father used his entire head to roll his eyes, swinging it from left to right. “I don’t want to be sad, Mutts. And I know that you don’t want me to be either. I’m not asking for help, exactly, am I. It’s why I’m paying this lot over at the hosp. Barry here took it upon himself to try and cheer me up.” 

“Well I’ll leave you to Barry,” I said, standing up. My father wiped the corner of his mouth and looked at me dumbly. Barry smiled; he couldn’t help it.

 

It was a Friday: I texted as many people as I could. Melissa, a friend from university, eventually replied to say that there was a party at a house not far from my own. The idea of being at a party while my father was locked up — willingly or otherwise — in his linened hovel made me feel dangerous and important, as I had felt during the playground games in the weeks following my mother’s death, when pain floated around me like an aura, ripped and gleaming from the adult world. 

When I got to the front step I was greeted by an old cat, thin and suffering. I bent down and stroked its haunches, my hand skimming the bones in its papery fur. I wiped off my hand and rang the bell, and was let inside by a man midway through a conversation he returned to with some fervor. In the small kitchen I poured a large glug of wine into a plastic cup which I escorted to the back garden. I found Melissa sitting alone on a low brick wall circumscribing the patio. 

“Good,” she said when she saw me. “Very bad scene here. Sorry.” She tapped her cigarette against her hand in a way that was so affected it won me over.

I sat down next to her and asked her how she was. She told me she’d been sexting.

“With who?” I asked. 

“A girl from the web. She’s twenty-two.”

“I can’t sext,” I said. “Too many adjectives.”

We looked at the people milling about the garden, whom I took to be the kind of baby-voice girls who run baths at parties, splashing about upstairs and waiting for people to join them or take pictures. I used to feel a kind of avuncular warmth towards these types, but the problem is only one or two of them is the real thing. You hardly need to see a flicker of unease on their faces to want to crush them under your heel.

I told Melissa about a man I used to sleep with who would say good luck whenever I left his house. 

“Like he’d be in bed and look at me properly and wish me luck,” I said. “It felt really menacing. When I asked him about it he just told me he got the sense that I found life very difficult.”

“You do find life very difficult,” Melissa said. 

It stung, though not enough to detract from the relief of being told something about oneself. This seemed to me a large part of the point of having friends. I used to ask them directly, but that felt like scanning the racks for a novelty keychain with your name already engraved. And it really was that stupid. You had to pretend you were doing it absentmindedly, or as a joke. 

“But I don’t want to appear that way to people I have sex with,” I said. “That’s something you maybe reveal slowly.” 

“Oh god,” she said. “I meant to tell you. George’s here.” She leaned in when she said it, and I wasn’t sure quite what we were conspiring in. It seemed as though she’d forgotten momentarily that she was talking to me, rather than about me to someone else.

“How strange,” I said to Melissa. It was a statement I felt could imply any number of reactions, all of which I tried to draw around me. 

“Everyone knows everyone,” Melissa said, standing up, though of course I knew only two people: her and George. I followed her inside to make drinks and let a couple of men talk to us about contemporary art, though after a short time we returned to our brick seat to complain about the time we’d spent away from it. Melissa was telling me that everything the men had said about art, life, had been totally wrong. I followed Melissa’s eyes as she scanned the garden, grateful for the freedom to await George’s possible appearance. It was getting to that stage of the evening in which everyone’s desperation seems to bubble abruptly to the surface, their faces reddened by the exertion of it all: the chitchat, the diligent dancing, the strain of keeping one’s eyes fixed on an immediate group rather than flickering helplessly around. I watched a slim, idiotic man sidle up to a circle awaiting the end of a joke; they turned the other way. A woman near the kitchen door kept asking, too quietly, if anyone had a cigarette. She seemed almost to be gripping the doorframe, as though trying to convince herself she wasn’t particularly bothered if someone gave her one or not. 

I felt Melissa dig her finger into my thigh and looked up to find George staring down at us like we were his two pet geckos. He seemed so pleased to see me I couldn’t help but laugh. I released Melissa with a little pat on her knee and stood to face him.

He was the same, the only real sign that time had passed sitting in the hollows of his eyes, which used to make him appear almost cross. Now they seemed searching, a little tired. He rubbed the side of my arm, told me it was good to see me, and when I looked at his hand he retracted it to the small, silver hoop he wore in his ear, the same he’d worn at university.

“How are you doing?” he asked. A smile spread across his face as though he were relieved to find me in the garden of this horrible party — as though he’d be relieved to find me in the garden of any party in London.

“I’m well. Mostly, you know,” I said. “And you?”

George was working in television, he told me, developing documentaries about underreported crimes. “But not,” he said, “sensationalized. More educational. But you know, films. Filmic. Narrative journalism.” He seemed nervous, though I wasn’t sure why. “One of the guys at work brought me,” he said, looking around, and I realized for the first time that we were both about half a decade older than most of the people occupying the garden. “Do you know this lot?” 

“No, no,” I said. “They’re Melissa’s. She texted me. Or I texted her.”

He told me it was nice Melissa and I were still close. Who else did I still see, he wondered? I prevaricated, told him stories about the children I tutored, the wives who bullied their husbands, the husbands who bullied their sons. The sons who bullied me. 

I asked him what underreported crime was his current subject, and he said that actually, he was between projects. 

“Which, you know, in that sense thank God” — he patted me on the arm again — “for your dad. It’s really useful to have that sort of… back up. Padding, I mean.”

“I’m pleased,” I said.

“And how is he?”

I felt hesitant then, the idea of my becoming an anecdote for George appearing in my mind. I pictured my father sandwiched between his two white sheets: I felt I ought to scoop him up with the entire mass of fabric and throw the whole thing out, a spider in a tissue, or else risk gathering him into a bindle to be hefted onto my back until it gave out for good. I shrugged.

“He’s fine,” I said. “He’s well, I think. As well as he can be,” I said.

“Right.”

George took a drag of his cigarette and tilted his head just a fraction, waiting for me to say more — a trick he’d learned, I imagined, from interacting with his subjects at work, hesitant to corrupt the audio. I worried suddenly that I would comply, but I stopped myself. We were sitting now, and I refilled both of our glasses, which gave George a moment’s rest from maintaining eye contact. He seemed to be puzzling over some complicated arithmetic, and I fussed around with my pocket while he did so, aware, of course, of the way he was leaning toward me. He turned and asked if I wanted to leave, have a drink at mine instead. He said it like he was trying not to be rude: would I mind terribly? The groups circling the garden seemed very beautiful then, all of life in their careful arrangement. 

On the bus I began to feel acutely aware of how drunk I’d become. I shifted around in my seat while the driver made his convulsive attempts to merge onto the Euston Road. George took out his phone and brought up the crossword. He had to finish before it switched over, he said, to the next day’s puzzle. It wasn’t even midnight and I had him alone on a bus headed toward my flat. We hunched over his phone and I spat answers while George’s fingers hurried across the screen. 

When we got off he took my hand. He swung it as we walked toward the flat, and I felt unutterably happy. By the time we got inside I almost had to grip a hand over my mouth to stop myself from bursting into hysterical laughter. I retreated to the kitchen for wine, and when I returned to the living room proffering two glasses George was examining the back of a novel. He held up David Copperfield, the pea green paperback edition I’d bought from an airport Smith’s in the hope it might hold some of the medicinal properties of my father’s copy. “Your dad once told me to read this,” he said.

I laughed, told him he should. I sat on the sofa expectantly while George pretended to finish reading the blurb. He slotted it back into its place on the shelf and retrieved his glass of wine.

“Poor him,” he said. He rolled his shoulder. “And poor Rachel, really.”

“How do you mean?” I asked, more quickly than I thought myself capable of. I wondered what George had been told about my father, and by whom. I tried to recall how my father had met Rachel in the first place. George was exactly the sort to offer up a pretty replacement to step into his role just as he left it. Had he warned her about our dysfunction when he put her up for the job? Had she been feeding him information in agreement ever since?

“With things being difficult,” he said. “With them. Just seems very… tortuous, I suppose.” 

The memory struck like an analeptic: Rachel had been recommended by an old friend of my father’s. Though now I felt incapable of moving my body at all, of working out what it was I was supposed to be collating and distributing, what should be withheld. 

“Well,” I said. “I don’t know if it’s poor her. Completely.” 

He looked at me and dropped it. I wanted that smile from the garden again.

“Poor everyone, really,” I offered. Hard to argue with that. 

“Poor everyone,” he agreed.

When he kissed me I silently thanked his polite Ealing parents. 

We fucked in the dark, and I clung onto George’s body as though I were hauling a heavy rock I needed to drag across the top of some dark cave I was hiding in. My phone buzzed from the edge of the bed, its horrible calcic light illuminating the creases of George’s eyes, and the fact that they kept darting toward it. I pushed it off the bed after the second ring and gripped George’s neck, pulling his face towards my own. The buzzing returned, and George asked me if I wanted to pick up, whispering it into my ear. I clamped his mouth shut with my thumb. Afterward, when he’d caught his breath but not yet wrested his flaccid penis from inside me, he dangled a long arm down the side of his bed and retrieved his own phone. It rang silently, its message expressed only in the blinding glow of the screen, which he turned on me like a policeman’s torch: My father’s name, ‘hospital’ in parentheses, appeared in large block letters. I froze. George answered the phone; I let him. His palm, which had been pressed against my shoulder — less out of affection and more in service of propping himself up — flinched against me, a terrifying microscopic movement. I used both legs to kick him off.