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had bought me a present, a model plane, and I had made a start on it. We sat in silence: I with my glue and pieces of plastic, he with his newspaper, cigarettes and glass, she looking into the middle distance as she always did, trying not to move, trying to escape his inevitable attention. Then it began. The insults, the curses, the accusations of being stupid and parasitic; of being sexless and ugly, a
shivering, useless fucking mouse of a woman.
    I leapt up at him and went for his eyes and as his right hand clipped my face I bit into the knuckle, blood filling my mouth as I felt his left rip my hair and pull my head right back. He twisted his hand free from my teeth and punched me in the throat with just the right amount of strength to floor me, gasping for breath like someone drowning. He stood up and rocked on the balls of his feet and laughed at us both, then left the house, crushing my half-built plane underfoot and kicking its pieces across the carpet. My mother held me to her and all I could do was apologise for blanking her that day at school. I kept telling her I was sorry, and she kept pretending she hadn’t noticed, or had forgotten, though I knew she hadn’t. I knew too that it had hurt her perhaps more than anything he had ever done. I buried my face in her neck, smelled the face cream she wore at night, the washing powder of her clothes, the sweat of her banked-up fear. I kept the tears back, refusing to cry. Who would I have cried for? Not for myself. For her? If I started to cry for her, I thought, I would never stop. She would have thought of my being at university as a kind of restitution of something she had deserved. He thought of it as usurpation of what was his by right. Perhaps it was the same thing, just seen through two different temperaments.
    I had a scholarship and enough money to live on so that for the first time in my life I was financially comfortable. And ashamed of it: I had almost as much as my father had earned in work, and received more than his dole brought him now.
    I studied politics, though study isn’t the word: I went to lectures on political theory from which I memorised the slogans and disregarded the thought behind them. I threw myself into what at first looked like
the life
. I even sold the
Socialist Worker
outside shopping centres until I became sick of its mix of spite and outrage, the pissing-in-the-wind confrontationalism that masked its complete marginality. I even preferred the abuse I got from passers-by to the cloying liberal guilt of the few who stopped and bought the paper, never read it, and who discreetly binned it a few streets away when they thought no one was looking.
    When I decided that we were learning about politics not in order to reimagine the world but the opposite – to continue justifying why it was this way and could be no other – I changed to art history and spent my days touring galleries and reading catalogues. I would like to say it fed something indistinct and unformed in me – a desire for beauty, to appreciate it without needing either to own it or break it, and a way of talking about feelings of extremity without letting on that they were my own. Maybe that was a part of it, but what I really savoured at the time was my father’s indignation that I was spending my time and his money – he was always, in his own mind, the living embodiment of that modern Christ-figure, The Taxpayer – in useless, escapist and possibly homosexual occupations. Back from college one weekend, over dinner, I mustered the courage to talk about a painting. I used the word
lovely
. He coughed up his food, wiped his mouth and left the table.
    The high point of my first and, as it turned out, only year at university was when I spent a night in a prison cell for decking a commuter who spat into my book as he stepped across me on the Underground at Trafalgar Square. I looked up to find him grinning, a sharp-suited spiv with a briefcase and a humorous tie, part of