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stood slightly ajar and I eased it open. Little moon face, ghostly in the half-light. I dropped my hand into the cot, felt his breath on the backs of my fingers, laid my knuckles on his cheek: chilled. I slipped two fingers under the collar of his babygro; his back was warm. The baby thermometer on the wall had gone from ‘Just Right’ to ‘Cool’. I settled his blankets. The central heating would be clicking on soon.
    White flakes were sifting down through the wasteground trees. My shoes left black dance-steps on the thin snow. The car started first time. Down Great Western Road, past the lighted minimarts, the headlines under lattice frames: GANGLAND SHOOTING , SOCCER STARLET SLAIN . I thought of people waking up, going out for the paper, fixing brunch with the radio on, chewing toast, reading my piece on the Swan murder.
    Moir should have written it. Moir was the expert. He would know the whys of this killing. He knew the language, the precise level of insult offered by the corpse of Billy Swan. When he came back to work he would follow it up, chart the feud when it all kicked off. I bigfooted Moir in the old days; now he would bigfoot me. For the moment, though, it was my story and it wasn’t the worst feeling in the world to have ended Moir’s monopoly on the front page, if only for a week. As the car joined the motorway I put the foot down. Even in my prim, begrudging prose it would boost us by four or five thousand.
    The snow had lain on the Fenwick Moors and the whiteness rolled away on either side. I thought of my dad in his coffin, the white billowing satin lining, the tight yellow skin of his nose, the folds of his neck above the white tieless shirt. It was last winter, nearly a year since we travelled this road, the same road in the same weather. He died before I came back to the Trib so he never got the chance to ask me: Why did you come back? His own question was different. Though he never put it in words, the gaps in his conversation, his non-committal grunts and downcast eyes when I spoke of my new job, asked it for him: Why did you leave?
    He was a high-school English teacher who dreamed of being a journalist. I was fulfilling his ambition when I signed on at the Trib . His hero was George Orwell. Not the novelist, not the visionary allegorist of Animal Farm and 1984 , but the hack reporter, the jobbing columnist for the New Statesman , the Observer , the Manchester Evening News . He kept the four volumes of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters in an alcove shelf beside the fireplace and you counted it a lucky day when he didn’t say ‘Listen to this’ after tea and read a passage from ‘Revenge is Sour’ or ‘Books v. Cigarettes’ in his correct and earnest reading voice. When I was handed a photocopy of ‘Politics and the English Language’ on my first day at the Trib I was able to hand it straight back. I could probably have recited it from memory, and though I doubtless flouted them in everything I wrote, its rules – ‘Never use a long word where a short one will do’; ‘If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out’ – were as familiar to me as the lines on my brow.
    My father’s paper was the Tribune . Every night after tea, before he started his marking, my father sat down with the Trib . He would vanish behind the big pages, the vast crackling sheets that only a grown man could manage. You didn’t interrupt him. I would watch him in the telly’s reflection, his arms spreading as he turned the pages, as though the paper were a set of chest expanders.
    When he’d worked his way through to the sports pages he’d close the paper, fold it against the crease and fold it again, fish a biro from the jacket he’d slung on a kitchen chair-back and tackle the crossword.
    One night he opened the paper and gave a short laugh. ‘Come here,’ he told us, ‘come and see this.’ It was a letter he’d written. They’d printed it there on the letters page, a thin jaggy