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receiver to her ear, not
     speaking. It was dark; the flagstones were cool under my bare feet. Mum seemed to be
     glowing red: the henna in her hair,the tan shiny with coconut oil, the
     sarong over her hips. We moved closer to her. I could smell the coconut oil on her skin.
     I heard her say, her voice hissing like water falling onto hot coals, ‘Yes.
     I’m sure! You’d better get over here.’ I knew that I needed to sit
     down for this. Mum was glowing redder and hotter, and the smell of coconut was making me
     feel ill. I sat on the stairs. Corwin had his hand on Mum’s shoulder. She replaced
     the receiver and turned towards me. A flame-ball of fury rolled from her and engulfed me
     whole.
    There is a gap in time. Corwin tells me
     that he wanted to run to Brock Point, but that Mum, already dialling the police, said,
     ‘No. I need you here.’ And that I sat on the stairs and didn’t move.
     But all that is gone from my memory. The next thing I remember is Fuck Off Bob sitting
     in our armchair, crying and emitting hangover fumes. Even I am prepared to admit that on
     a normal day he was a good-looking man, big and dark, with those shoulder-length brown
     locks, which he claimed to be an inheritance from a washed-up survivor of the Spanish
     Armada. But hung over and crying, his carefully cultivated piratical appearance took on
     the quality of a dishevelled morning-after fancy-dress costume. Corwin and I sat at
     either side of Mum on the chesterfield, facing him, and watched him snivel.
     ‘I’m so sorry!’ Snivel, snivel. ‘I’m so sorry.’ The
     tears ran into the handsome crags of his cheeks and dripped off his chin. All I could
     think of was how much I hated him; that, if my father was dead, I wanted Bob to be dead
     as well, or maybe even instead, but just very painfully, brokenly, dead.
    Bob had woken up on the shag-pile rug
     (bought so that he could say
shag
-pile) with the feeling that something had
     happened – something awful and irrevocable. He said – more than once, ‘It was such
     a good night!’ He was trying to give it some context: all that jolly good fun, we
     were to understand, was an essential element in the story. My father had been
happy
as hefell off the cliff, or he had fallen off the
     cliff
because
he was happy. It was hard to distinguish the subtleties. Bob
     sounded like a Devon rustic – all those years of taking the piss out of Devon rustics
     saying what a ‘good noiyt’ it had been, and the accent had stuck.
    The part of the story with which we were
     grappling was that Bob had watched my father fall off a cliff, then gone home. We
     expressed this conceptual difficulty. Why had it not occurred to him to call the police?
     ‘You don’t understand,’ he sobbed. ‘I was out of it! I
     didn’t know what was going on …’ His manly frame convulsed in the armchair,
     a bagpipe wheeze of despair filled the room, and he started apologizing again.
    The shock had brought out our default
     characters. Mum was too angry to speak. Corwin was trying to be civilized. In the end it
     fell to me to say, ‘Look, Bob, we don’t give a flying fuck about how sorry
     you are. Just begin at the beginning and take it from there.’
    So, this is the story of my father’s
     death:
    It had been a good night. There had been
     much merry, merry monthing of May and still more pinting of Old Peculier and even my
     father had cheered up by the time they rang the bell. He and Bob were laughing all the
     way home. (‘Not quite,’ I interrupted. ‘What?’ said Bob.
     ‘Not quite all the way home,’ I said.)
    It was such a beautiful night, so beautiful,
     that when they got to Brock Tor they were overcome with nostalgia and a need to urinate
     into the chine, for old times’ sake. So they wandered off the main path and down
     to the cliff edge below the tor and they both took a piss. And my father was laughing,
     and Bob himself was laughing so hard he almost passed out – in fact