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I’d been thinking about what Mum said in her diary, about me being a half-baked version of my dad. I’d been thinking about it even though I wasn’t supposed to have any idea what she thinks.

I sat in my room and asked myself the same question over and over.

Have I been remembering my dad correctly?

It’s probably no accident that I hardly ever asked Mum about him and always asked Pansy. Maybe Pansy saw him the way I wanted to, half blind, without the cruel light of actual knowledge. After all, how well do mothers know their sons? I was hanging with a dead lady, not sleeping much and helping myself to her innermost thoughts, and Mum didn’t have a clue about any of it. So it follows that Pansy’s grown-up boy who’s been missing for five years would be a near stranger to her.

And come to think of it, how well does anyone know their own mum and dad? I’m only just beginning to learn. You start off thinking they own the world, and everything is downhill from there. Parents do too many things to wake you up to the idea that they are less than perfect.

 Speak like they think teenagers speak (always wrong, excruciatingly wrong).

 Get drunk too quickly or too much.

 Be rude to people they don’t know.

 Flirt with your teacher and your friends.

 Forget their age.

 Use their age against you.

 Get piercings.

 Wear leather trousers (both sexes).

 Drive badly (without admitting it).

 Cook badly (ditto).

 Go to seed.

 Sing in the shower/car/public.

 Don’t say sorry when they’re wrong.

 Shout at you or each other.

 Hit you or each other.

 Steal from you or each other.

 Lie to you or each other.

 Tell dirty jokes in front of your friends.

 Give you grief in front of your friends.

 Try to be your mate when it suits them.

Even with great parents, the list is endless. They can’t ever win.

I was eleven when Dad left.

And now it had occurred to me that instead of missing him and dreaming about him and seeing him in crowds and turning him into some kind of mythical über-dad, I might have been arguing with him, buying records with him, getting underage drunk with him, stealing from him, calling him a hypocrite, realising he had bad breath. Real things, mixed up things, not perfect scenes of craving that go on entirely in my head.

Dad didn’t have to go through all the stuff that Mum did with us. For instance, my hyper-critical phase, when every single thing mum did was so humiliating and even hearing her breathe or chew or open her mouth to speak put me in a bad mood.

My dad got away with that because I thought he was perfect and he wasn’t here.

And in the time he’s been gone I’ve learned stuff about my mum, layer by layer, bad and good. It makes sense that the way I see Dad would have changed in that time too.

So I started to believe that Mum was right about me and that we might need to talk about it. And I had no idea how to go about something like that.