Ellis met her in the Warrington Arms, a large pub on a roundabout in West London. The pool table was winner-stays-on and Ellis was on a roll when Tammy came up against him. She was short and athletic and had freckly skin and long blond hair. After he had let her beat him and her friend Sinead had accused him of being a “patronising misogynist” for not trying properly, Tammy declined to play on and Ellis followed her to the bar. He asked her why she had such healthy-looking skin and she laughed and told him that she was brought up in Kenya and that lots of people raised in Africa had that look.

“I’ll look like shit when I’m older, though,” she said.

“I doubt it,” Ellis said.

“I will. I’ll wrinkle.”

“You’ll make wrinkles look good.”

“Smooth.”

”No, I wasn’t trying to be. I’m not.”

“I like your nose. Did you break it?”

“Twice so far.”

She said she’d buy him a pint. She leant against the bar as she waited to be served, and Ellis took the opportunity to look at her breasts. They looked soft and large and they commanded his attention for a moment too long.

“They’re bigger than they used to be,” she said.

Ellis looked blank.

“My tits,” she explained. “I’ve had a growth spurt.”

“I’m sensing a domino effect,” he said.

She looked him in the eye.

“I’m sorry I offended your friend. Is she a lesbian?”

“Not all women who use the word ‘misogynist’ are dykes. Ignore Sinead, she’s in a shit mood. I think it’s nice you let me beat you.”

“I only did it because I’m old-fashioned and I’m crap with women.”

She smiled curiously at him and he felt all at sea.

“Had I been trying, of course,” he added, “I’d have whipped your arse. Best you understand that rather than get an unreasonably high opinion of your abilities.”

She laughed under her breath again. “Anything else you want to get off your chest?”

“Plenty. I’d ask you for your number if it weren’t for the fact that you’re absolutely definitely bound to have a boyfriend already and your non-lesbian friend will probably have a go at me for hitting on you.”

“You’ll have to stand up to her then. I do have a boyfriend. 01 374 9804. He’s in Dubai.”

“Is he bigger than me?” Ellis asked, gesturing to the barman for a pen.

She smiled and gave nothing else away. Ellis wrote the number down on his hand. She held his hand to check the number was right. Then she took the pen from him, unbuttoned his shirt and wrote her name across his heart.

They tended to meet twice a week, but in a haphazard way which didn’t involve planning ahead. They didn’t talk much and they rarely went out other than to the pub they had met in. They would play pool competitively and feign disgust at the other’s tactics, accuse the other of gamesmanship and settle disputes with arm wrestles. They sat in Tammy’s favourite corner and watched the behaviour of others. They lay on the sofa at Ellis’s flat watching videos and MTV. They made love. They laughed a great deal. He took out-of-focus photographs of her at the window of the flat with views of the Westway beneath and dreams of becoming the next Anton Corbyn. They bathed together, staring at Ellis’s map of the world on the bathroom wall. They didn’t talk about the past or the future. He missed her when she was not there. He wished she was watching over him in certain moments. He scribbled down sums on bits of paper to work out how many hours or minutes it was before he would lie with her again.

London was a different city now Ellis had cash in his pocket. Jed and his new girlfriend, Emma, rented a flat in Dalston and Ellis saw them often, as well as Milek and Carla. He preferred to go out every evening. If no one was around he’d go to the cinema alone. Going to the cinema, he came to believe, was something that should absolutely, definitely, without doubt, be done alone. The exceptions were horror films and comedies, both of which could be group activities. He watched blockbusters on the big screen at the Odeon Marble Arch but his favourite cinema was the Curzon Mayfair, where he could take a cup of tea to his seat. The deep, soft, slanted seats of the Curzon cradled him through Wings of Desire, The Big Blue, Midnight Run – twice in one weekend – Angel Heart and The Sacrifice. And at Christmas, he wandered into a repertory cinema in West London and saw a film called Days of Heaven and left the cinema dazed by sadness and longing. He remained haunted by the film well into the New Year and bought a vintage poster of it from a shop in Soho and had it framed and gave it to Tammy.

“Promise me you’ll watch this film the next time it’s shown anywhere, whenever it is, whether or not your boyfriend is in town.”

“I promise.”

“If you see this film you’ll know everything I think and feel about everything.”

“If you told me then I’d know.”

Once, when Ellis was at the off-licence, Tammy answered the phone in the flat and spoke to Denny. Ellis heard her laughter from the stairwell and the sound of her hanging up as he opened the door.

“You just missed your dad,” she told him. “I told him I had you out doing my shopping.”

“What did he say?”

“What’s my secret. Then he told me I’d better not say.”

“Did he ask who you were?”

“No. No questions. Like father, like son.”

She sat on the bathroom floor and read her book as Ellis bathed and after a few pages she put her book down and said, “Why is your dad’s breathing so heavy? Has he got emphysema or something?”

“No, no! Nothing like that. He just has to take these tablets at the moment and they make him a little weak so colds and things like that just hang around him a bit.”

Ellis took a breath and submerged himself. She waited for him to resurface, then said, “A little weak? Sounded like he can’t breathe.”

“No. The big picture is good. A-OK. This is just a normal thing in the stage, like anyone else.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

“That’s why we don’t talk much,” Ellis said.

“Do you mind me asking?” she said.

“Not at all. But there’s no problem. There’s nothing to tell, that’s why I’m not telling you much.”

Their conversations were usually in whispers, with their heads almost touching. Lying together. Pillow, sofa, carpet, grass. They didn’t use sentences, nor express their wishes or fears. They would, instead, gently push towards each other images of a love affair they dare not attach their own names to. Places two lovers might go. Things two lovers might do. Moments two lovers might share. But Ellis didn’t risk asking for these things to really happen, he did not venture to lay claim to her love, for fear that her answer would be no or that she would simply disappear. He was naive enough, inexperienced enough, to believe that the affection and intensity that she showed for him could possibly be manifestations of a casual fling and that she could be repeating it all, or even usurping it, with her boyfriend. There was something perfect, almost sacred, to Ellis about the expectation of love, the hope for it during the long times they were apart, that outshone love itself. He thought sometimes of the Tudor ship that was lifted from the bottom of the sea. It was live on the television, one rainy morning when Ellis was young. As soon as the ship was out of the water, they had to keep hosing it down so that the air didn’t kill it. He and Tammy belonged at the bottom of the sea together, where no one could see them and no one could stop them and the air couldn’t harm them.

She’s not a butterfly-lady, she’s a mermaid.

The place still smelled of Fry’s Peppermint Cream. He was sure of it. In the waiting area, patients stole glances at each other and guessed what stage of the mock battle they had reached. Denny sat forward on his chair with his hands wedged beneath his legs. He breathed diligently. Beside him, Ellis slipped deep, deep into daydreaming of a small rented flat with Tammy. It had slanting ceilings and a narrow balcony high above the streets. Their bed was tucked into a corner and there were candles in a small recess in the wall above the pillows. Opposite the bed was a window that framed the sky and Tammy’s sleeping body was drenched in sunlight. In one corner was a pile of books Tammy had read or was soon to read and in another were Ellis’s photographs. Photographs of places they had been to together. Beautiful photographs, the work of master craftsman, Ellis O’Rourke.

Denny brushed against Ellis as he got up and walked towards the open door, in which stood the consultant, with a closely guarded smile for his two o’clock. Ellis watched the door close and turned his attention to a rack of pamphlets. He read eight of them in detail and by the time his dad reappeared he had a worrisome ache in his testicles and a large tumour pressing against the wall of his brain.

“I have to get a prescription,” Denny said, heading off slowly down the corridor, grateful to be accompanied by a son who would not plague him immediately for information. He felt guilty thinking it but he knew things would not be the same if Chrissie were here. It would be more traumatic.

They sat on a bench at the entrance to the children’s cancer ward and waited for the prescription. Hairless children appeared at the far end of the corridor, chasing in all directions like a swirl of leaves. Amid the shrieks of laughter, Denny and Ellis O’Rourke caught each other’s eye.

“We should have no complaints,” Denny said.

“No,” Ellis agreed.

Denny took the chain from round his neck and handed it to his son.

“I want you to have this,” he said. “It was your mother’s.”

Ellis ran his thumb across a worn-down St Christopher and put the chain round his neck. A nurse swept through the corridor, sending the children scattering, and suddenly they were all gone.

They went to the hospital café so that Denny could take his new pills with a cup of tea and something to eat. On a table nearby, two elderly ladies were selling Christmas cards in June.

“It’s not very good news,” Denny said calmly.

Ellis nodded and smiled weakly.

“I’ll talk to you both together though.”

Ellis nodded again. This is what it’s like to feel empty, he told himself.

Chrissie had evolved into a person who was always late and always angry and surprised about being late, as if it was always the first time. As Ellis and Denny drove out of the car park, she drove in at speed, agitated.

Denny muttered, “I just want to get home.”

Ellis went across to Chrissie’s car. “Follow us home, OK?”

“What’s happened?”

“He hasn’t said a single thing, I promise.”

She nodded and smiled.

“Drive slowly,” Ellis told her, as she tended not to.

“Six months to a year,” Denny O’Rourke said. “A year at the very most.”

From his daughter and son came gentle nods of comprehension and faint, brave smiles.

“The consultant did say that if my breathing improved and I grew stronger, then there is a final option of intensive treatment. A last throw of the dice. It would change me radically and it would probably not work.”

Ellis heard this with a degree of vindication. As he had suspected from the outset, all they had to do was to keep him breathing until an idea came along. They had a year to come up with something and that was time enough.

“I’ve already told him that I’m not going to have any more treatment,” Denny said.

“But you could change your mind, if you do get stronger?” Ellis said.

“Ellis …” his dad sighed. The sigh fell into a smile and he hadn’t the willpower to say any more.

Chrissie experienced the same peaceful calm as her brother that morning. Life was simple for them. There were no dilemmas. There were no headlines or traffic jams, no financial worries or private life complications. There was no competitiveness. The world was quiet. There was just one inescapable truth. Life, at its worst moment, was less complicated than it had ever been.

“We’ll have the summer together,” Denny said. “Let’s enjoy the summer and then we’ll let it be.”

Ellis stepped out of Charing Cross station and waited on the Strand for his bus. Some minutes later, a stranger brushed against him and he found himself walking past the National Gallery and following his dad’s daily route to Jermyn Street, with no recollection of having decided to take a walk. He imagined the thoughts his dad would have carried with him along these streets over thirty years, then watched people come and go through the swing doors of Denny’s office building. He felt all the while like an invisible man, at liberty to stand and watch without being noticed. He ordered some food in the café opposite the office and took a seat by the window. There was a blast of sunlight reflecting against a glass-fronted building. A middle-aged man with a brown leather briefcase walked by. Although he was walking briskly, the man seemed momentarily suspended in the sunlight as Ellis looked up, the same way the second hand on a clock seems not to move when you first glimpse it. The man was of a certain slim, old-fashioned build that reminded Ellis of his dad and Hedley and their colleagues. Men of a certain timeless appearance, reminiscent of an era when men in their twenties looked middle-aged. Men who have the sort of hair that needs to be brushed or combed, who wear suits that don’t shine in the light, suits that accentuate height rather than breadth. Men who don’t seem to rush or get flustered, who were born to Victorian parents but are growing old in an almost unshockable world. The man in his suit, hovering a few inches above the pavement in a heat haze and caught in the glare of sunlight, was one of these men. It struck Ellis as strange that of all the worlds Denny had inhabited, it would be this one, the one he valued the least, that would remain preserved for Ellis to visit at any time if he wished to. Jermyn Street had changed little in the decades Denny worked here and promised to carry on in the same vein, offering Ellis a living museum of a thousand faithfully recreated details, a perfect re-enactment of Denny O’Rourke’s London save for the sight of Denny’s own commanding frame and handsome face emerging on to the street at four o’clock in the afternoon with thoughts, hidden beneath his placid expression, of only his family and his home, and the irritating sense of never being able to get back to them quickly enough.

By the way he held on to her, Tammy knew that something was on Ellis’s mind. When he buried his head against her chest, she stroked his hair. When she asked him if he were all right, she felt him nod. When she peppered his head with little kisses, he kissed her back and they made love unnecessarily, because she thought it was what he wanted to do and he didn’t know how to say that it wasn’t, without having to explain why.

The following Saturday, Ellis found his dad at the bottom of the garden, feeding papers on to a bonfire.

“You seem better today,” Ellis ventured.

“Abusing the nebuliser with abandon,” Denny said. “And clearing the decks. Making everything shipshape.”

They watched the fire with the reverence that flames inspire and Ellis recalled the muted buzz of the football reports on a portable radio as his dad worked in the garden at the cottage on Saturday afternoons.

“What was that guy on LBC called?” he asked.

“Steve Tongue … sounded like he was broadcasting from the moon.”

“Adverts for the Houndsditch Warehouse and Dickie Dirts jeans …”

“Chrissie forced me to drive her up to Camberwell to go to Dickie Dirts!”

A church clock chimed somewhere above the sprawl of rabbit hutch houses and Ellis sensed that his father would have liked an extra hour or two to himself this evening.

“I suppose we’ll start going to church now,” he said in a tone of voice which might have meant it and might not.

“I did, months ago. With Reardon,” Denny said.

“Fat lot of good it’s done you,” Ellis said.

Denny flashed his son a smile. He welcomed that sort of chat. He wanted that rather than the other sort.

“I’m on a mission. Want to sort all this stuff out whilst I’m in the mood.”

Denny marched back to the house. Ellis stayed and felt the warmth of the fire on his face and the cool evening air on the back of his neck. He watched the flames and his eyes were drawn to a familiar bundle of letters sitting on a book-shaped mattress of white ash. An image came to him, of the blue canvas-bound diary Denny had kept as a young merchant seaman. It seemed that the diary, which had for many years cradled the letters written by Ellis’s mother, was now an ashen altar on which the letters were about to burn. The chevroned envelopes lay unchanged for a few moments more. Then an Indian stamp curled in the heat, the handwriting began to melt and a white flame licked around the bundle from underneath. The letters ignited. Ellis grabbed a pitchfork and dug them out of the fire, tossing them on to the grass. He picked them up and scurried across the garden, tossing the hot bundle from hand to hand –

“Fuckfuckfuck …”

– and dropped them out of sight, behind the shed. He looked at his hands. They were red from the heat. A slow, incurable sting released itself across his palms, which he wedged under his armpits. At his feet, the bundle of letters reignited. Cursing himself, he took the pitchfork, speared the burning letters and returned them to the fire, pushing them into the centre of the glow. He shook the pitchfork free and a small shower of embers broke from the envelopes and floated into the air. One danced above his head and descended slowly, charmingly, towards him. Ellis cocked his head obligingly to one side so that the ember fell against his neck and burnt him there.

Ellis found his dad writing at the kitchen table.

“What’s that on your neck?” Denny asked.

“A little burn.”

“Looks nasty.”

“I like it.”

“Strange boy,” Denny muttered, and smiled at his son.

“What you writing?”

“A letter.”

“Who to?”

“No one.”

“No one?”

“Pour me a drink, make yourself useful,” Denny purred.

“No one writes to no one. Who’s it to?”

“It’s to you.”

“Me?”

Denny put his pen down and feigned annoyance. “Yes, you. Now stop disturbing me.”

“What’s it about?”

Denny ignored him. Ellis laughed nervously.

“Why don’t you just tell me? I’m right here.”

“Don’t want to.”

“Just tell me!”

Denny snapped. “I don’t want to tell you, Ellis!” He lowered his voice, without sweetening its tone. “I don’t want to tell you. I want to write it and I don’t want to give it to you now. It’s not all about you, Ellis, you losing your father. I’m losing my life. I know you’re scared of being without me but I’m terrified of going, so sometimes you’ve got to just bloody well leave me alone. I need to prepare and don’t tell me I’m not going to die, Ellis, it’s not appropriate any more!”

The room fell silent. Neither of them moved.

Then Ellis said, “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry I shouted.”

“You were right to shout … you could have shouted more often.”

Denny lifted a black metal box, the size of a shoebox, off the floor and placed it on his lap. He had kept bills and chequebooks and papers in there all his adult life but this evening, with the bonfire done, it was empty. He clicked his fingers, reminded of something, and started to rifle through the mess around him.

“Where the hell did I put that note?” he muttered.

“What note?”

“Note for you. She made me promise I’d write it down and put it by your bed.”

“Who did?”

“Tammy.”

“What’s the message?”

“To call her.”

“I think I can remember that without the note.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean you’ll do it. She always sounds so lovely, that girl. Why don’t you like her?”

“I like her too much.”

“Well, you’re an idiot then. Just call her.”

“That’s your expert advice, is it?”

“You can’t like someone too much. More to the point, a young man as hideously unattractive and talentless as you is in no position to turn down a Tammy.”

Ellis smiled. “Tell me then, smartarse, did she mention her long-term boyfriend?”

“Oh.”

“Oh, indeed.”

Denny gave up searching for the note and despaired. “That’s ridiculous! I only wrote it ten minutes ago. I promised her I’d put it by your bed.”

“Well, what exactly does the note say?”

“Call Tammy.”

“Those two words?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ve got that. Really.”

Denny sat back on his chair and took a few deep breaths, none of which seemed to adequately fill his lungs.

“Do you want your nebuliser?”

“Yes please … No, bugger it! Pour us both a little Scotch instead, dear boy, and pull up a chair whilst I fill this with junk.”

When Ellis returned and placed a glass beside his father, Denny was filling the metal box with objects from the mess around him: his certificate of discharge from the merchant navy, a small bundle of old family photographs, a prayer card from his wife’s funeral, an envelope with leaves from the garden of Gethsemane which his grandfather picked in the 1870s, a ticket stub from the 1950 FA Cup Final, a leather bookmark from Runnymede, his cufflinks, a pocket guide to butterflies.

Ellis watched the objects enter the box and felt he understood some sense of a criteria for their selection. They were all things he and Chrissie had played with and looked at as children or things they had been curious about.

Denny stopped. He looked hard at Ellis.

“I always knew I was going to have you,” he said. “I knew it when I was as young as you are now. And the weight of that has made it impossible for someone as plain as me to ever say what I feel and I’ve probably never allowed you enough room to breathe for the same reason. And I apologise. But it’s been impossible, always impossible, to put into words how deeply I love you, Ellis.”

Ellis felt his mouth caving in. He stood as if he’d been shot. And when he did manage to move, it was not towards his father, as he intended, but out of the room. He sat upstairs in a daze and only stirred much later when the burn on his neck began to sting. He went to the bathroom and rubbed cream on to the burn and imagined it was Tammy rubbing the cream in. She talked in hushed tones to him, her lips close to his ear. She told him that everything was going to be all right.

He was still thinking about Tammy when the phone rang late into the evening. He was thinking about telling her that he wanted to be with her all the time and not to share her. He was thinking that he would ask her if she wanted that too, even though her answer might be that she didn’t. He was thinking that he would like to tell her about his dad. He wrote down what he was going to tell her so that he could say it all as he meant to. He was putting the lid back on his pen and was about to lift himself off the bed and go to the phone and dial her number when the phone rang and his dad picked it up and, not long after that, Ellis was standing at the foot of a huge silver grain store in the plains of Iowa, watching the reflection of sunset in shimmering curves of steel and promising himself that as long as he remained in this alien, beautiful, wind-blown place, his dad would not be dying back home.

“That was Milek, in a hurry. If you’re interested in a job in America you’re to ring this number tonight.”

Denny held a scrap of paper out to him and when Ellis hesitated he pressed the paper into Ellis’s stomach.

“If you were to set back your career because of me, I’d be furious.”

When Ellis came off the phone, Denny was waiting in the dining room, with the door to the garden open.

“Tell me,” he said.

“It’s a guy called Gerd. He’s represented by the same agency as Milek. He takes photographs of small-town America. He’s doing a book. He needs an assistant for a six-week trip. I’d have to fly to Boston day after tomorrow and meet him there.”

“What a wonderful opportunity,” Denny said.

They sat in uneasy silence. Ellis imagined the places he was on the brink of seeing. He savoured them and then he made balloons out of them and let them go.

“I’m not going to go,” he said resolutely.

“It’s only six weeks. We’ll still have plenty of time before I pop my clogs.”

“No,” Ellis said. “No.”

“Do all photographers have to have East European names?” Denny asked.

“It’s standard,” Ellis said.

They watched the line of walnut trees. Ellis confessed to himself how much he wanted to go. It would take little to persuade him.

“You’re bloody well going, Ellis,” his dad duly said.

After his son’s departure, Denny O’Rourke packed the atlas and travel books away in a cupboard under the stairs. He went to bed and pictured his wife waiting for him. He anticipated their reunion with the same enthusiasm he had once had for moving his children into the run-down cottage in the Kentish Weald.

“He has a whole year in which to improve,” Ellis reasoned. “He’s already looking stronger and better this week. That’s week one out of fifty-two. By the time I’m back he’ll be strong enough for the nuking and we can actually sort this out once and for all.”

“I can’t believe you’re going to Iowa,” Jed repeated.

“Not just Iowa, that’s just one of the places.”

Jed shot him a glazed expression. “Not the point I was making, Ellis. What does Tammy think?”

“About what?”

Jed’s face fell further. “About the chances of free elections in South Africa, what the fuck do you think I mean about?”

“I think you mean about either me going on this job or my dad’s health,” Ellis said.

“Or both?” Jed suggested.

Ellis took a long, exaggerated sip of his beer.

“Nice pint,” he muttered.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t told her you’re going away.”

“No,” Ellis said. “I won’t tell you.”

“Why haven’t you?”

“Because she might not be that interested. She might turn round and say, ‘You know, you don’t have to let me know what you’re doing, you’re not my boyfriend.’”

“Does she ever speak to you like that? Ever?”

“No. Never.”

“Well then.” Jed slumped back, unimpressed.

“OK, before you start lecturing me,” Ellis said, “a few things. Firstly, you’ve never met Tammy and that’s because we’re not going out together because, secondly, she is going out with someone else. Thirdly, no, yes, she doesn’t know I’m going away but I’ve written her a postcard.”

“A postcard! You dick! What on earth of?”

“What do you mean, what on earth of?”

“What’s it a postcard of?”

“It’s not of anything.”

“It must be of something. Torbay, Beefeaters, painted tits.”

“It’s a blank postcard. Like you get from an office supplies shop.”

Jed raised his hands in despair.

Ellis protested, “It leaves more room to write to the person. The address can be written where people like you would have some colour-enhanced photograph of sombrero-clad donkeys on Bournemouth beach! The blank postcard is the more communication-friendly choice compared with the picture postcard. And fourthly, she doesn’t really know my dad is ill. Not really ill. She’s not my girlfriend, she’s with someone else.”

“Nevertheless,” Jed reminded him, “you and she are lovers. And you are incapable of holding a conversation which doesn’t refer to her. So, are you not at worst curious and at best eager for her opinion and thoughts and guidance?”

“I’m eager for her to ditch her boyfriend and go out with me.”

“So why don’t you ask her to do just that?”

“Because I don’t want her to say no.”

“You’d rather not ask than hear her say no?”

“That’s right.”

Jed despaired. “I am going to say one more thing whether you like it or not. I think that you should say no to this job. I think your dad is dying. I think that one good bonfire with him has persuaded you he’ll get better. I hope I’m wrong but I don’t think I am.”

Ellis nodded obediently and smiled and looked away. When Jed returned from the bar, he had gone. He went to America the next day and took the postcard he had written to Tammy with him. He read it on the plane. It was the best set of words he had ever put together. He had told her he loved her. He had forsaken the coded imagery of their pillow-talk and written from his heart and laid himself bare. He had got every word right. But he had not posted it. He had got the words right because he knew he was never going to post it. Because the answer might be no. Because he might lose his grip and fall. Because he might drown.