If you cried, no one was allowed to pick you up.”By they he means the baby nurse, my mother and grandmother “They didn’t even let me say goodbye,” he says. He puts his hand under my chin and turns my face towards his.My mother is watching him. At one point she opens her mouth as if to say something, but then closes it. As my father talks, tears seep into the crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes. They don’t fall so much as spread into a glittering web over his face, following the fine lines made by the sun, by laughter, by sorrow. I’ve never seen a man cry before.My father’s eyes: what is it about them? Their colour is utterly familiar – the same as mine, the same as my mother’s – but they burn like no other eyes I’ve ever seen before or since Burn like a prophet’s, a mad-man’s, a lover’s.

Always shining, always bloodshot, always turned on me with absolute attention. Intelligent eyes, enraptured eyes, luminous, stricken, brilliant, spellbound, spellbinding eyes.I don’t know it yet, not consciously, but I feel it. My father, holding himself so still and staring at me, has somehow begun to see me into being. His look gives me to myself, his gaze reflects the life my mother’s wilfully shut eyes denied. Looking at him looking at me, I cannot help but fall painfully, precipitously in love. And my loving him is inseparable from a piercing sense of loss.

Whenever I am alone – in my bedroom, the bathroom – I find myself crying, sometimes even sinking to my knees. How am I to endure this new despair? How can it be that I am 20 years old, that I’ve had to grow up without a father, only to meet him now when it’s too late, when a childhood is over, lost?On the last night my father spends with us, I wake after only two hours of sleep I sit up in bed and find my wristwatch on the nightstand It’s 10 minutes before three. My throat is sore as if I’m catching a cold, and I go downstairs for a glass of orange juice. I move quietly so as not to disturb my father sleeping in the den The thick carpet on the stair treads absorbs my footfalls. As I pass the den’s open door, I see that the convertible sofa is empty, my father is not in it. I turn on the lights in the living room just to make sure he’s not sleeping on that couch, but already I know where he is: in my mother’s bed.I sit on the carpeted stairs to consider this, their cheating on his current wife and my mother’s banished, trusting partner. Do my parents perhaps consider their bond so primary that it is absolute, ungovernable by the dictates that guide more pedestrian relationships? Maybe they believe that they are being faithful only when they’re sleeping together, and that other loves are the betrayal.