Until I heard it, and leapt over the couch and hauled open the curtains and the car drew up and Lewis waved at me as he got out and I whooped, "It's them!" to my mum, who smiled and relaxed and looked suddenly beautiful again.

There was a big three-cornered hug in the hall; then mum saw Verity standing by the door, taking a very long deliberate time to take her jacket off and hang it up; and so she was brought into the scrum too, and that was the first time, I realised, that I'd ever actually embraced her, even if it was just one arm round her slim shoulders. It was all right.

Then the phone rang. Mum and I jumped.

I got it. Mum took Lewis and Verity into the lounge.

"Hello?"

"Hello!" shouted a voice of immodestly robust proportions. "To whom am I talking?" the booming voice demanded. It was Aunt Ilsa. We'd left a message at the only contact address we had for her, two days earlier. She was in Ladakh, a place so out of the way it would take several international airports, a major rail terminus and substantial investment in a network ot eight-lane highways to promote it to the status of being in the middle of nowhere.

"It's Prentice, Aunt Ilsa." There was a satellite delay. I was talking to what I suspected was the only satellite ground station between Islamabad and Ulaan Baatar. There was a lot of noise in the background; it sounded like people shouting, and a mule or something.

"Hello there, Prentice," Aunt Ilsa bellowed. "How are you? Why did you want me to call?" Perhaps, I thought, she'd been taking steroids and they'd all gone to her vocal chords.

"I'm… there's —»

" — ello?"

" — some bad news, I'm afraid."

"What? You'll have to speak up, my dear; the hotelier is proving refractory."

"It's dad," I said, thinking I might as well get this over with as quickly as possible. "Kenneth; your brother. I'm afraid he's dead. He died three days ago."

"Good God! What on earth happened?" Aunt Ilsa rumbled. I could hear shouting. The thing that sounded like a mule went into what appeared to be a fit of coughing. "Mr Gibbon!" roared Aunt Ilsa. "Will you control that fellow!"

"He was struck by lightning," I said.

"Lightning?" Aunt Ilsa thundered.

"Yes."

"Good God. Where was he? Was he on a boat? Or —»

"He was —»

" — golf course? Mr… hello? Mr Gibbon had a friend once who was struck by lightning on a golf course, in Marbella. Right at the top of his back-swing. Bu —»

"No; he was —»

" — course it was an iron."

" — climbing," I said.

" — number seven, I think. What?"

"He was climbing," I shouted. I could hear what sounded like a fight going on at the other end of the phone. "Climbing a church."

"A church?" Aunt Ilsa demanded.

"I'm afraid so. Listen, Aunt Ilsa —»

"But he wouldn't be seen dead near a church!"

I bared my teeth at the phone and growled. My aunt, the unconscious humorist.

"I'm afraid that's what happened," I said as evenly as I could. "The funeral is tomorrow. I don't suppose you can make it, can you?"

There was a noise of some Ladakhian confusion for a while, then, fortissimo; "I'll have to leave you now, Lewis —»

"Prentice," I breathed through gritted teeth.

"— Our yak has escaped. Tell your mother our thoughts are with her at —»

And it was goodbye downlink.

I looked at the phone. "I'm not sure you have any to spare, aunt," I said, and put the phone down with a feeling of relief.

"I need a drink," I said to myself. I strode purposefully towards the lounge.

Lewis had been marginally more sensible than me, later on, that night before the funeral; he'd gone to bed one whisky before I had, leaving me in the lounge alone, at about three in the morning.

I should have gone then too, but I didn't, so I was left to get morose and self-pitying, re-living another evening in this room, another whisky-connected two-some over a year earlier.

"But it's not fair!"

"Prentice, —»

"And don't tell me life isn't fair!"

"Aw, think, son," dad said, sitting forward in his seat, clutching his glass with both hands. His eyes fixed on mine; I looked down, glaring at his reflection on the glass-topped coffee table between us. "Fairness is something we made up," he said. "It's an idea. The universe isn't fair or unfair; it works by mathematics, physics, chemistry, biochemistry… Things happen; it takes a mind to come along and call them fair or not."

"And that's it, is it?" I said bitterly. "He just dies and there's nothing else?" I could feel myself quivering with emotion. I was trying hard not to cry.

"There's whatever he left behind; art, in Darren's case. That's more than most get. And there's how people remember him. And there might have been children —»

"Not very likely in Darren's case, was it?" I sneered, grabbing at any opportunity to score even the smallest rhetorical point over my father.

Dad shrugged, staring into his whisky. "Even so." He drank, looked at me over the top of the tumbler. "But the rest," he said, "is just cells, molecules, atoms. Once the electricity, the chemistry, stops working in your brain, that's it; no more. You're history."

"That's defeatist! That's small-minded!"

He shook his head. "No. What you're proposing is," he said, slurring his words a little. He pointed one finger at me. "You're too frightened to admit how big everything else is, what the scales of the universe are, compared to ours; distance and time. You can't accept that individually, we're microscopic; here for an eye-blink. Might be heading for better things, but no guarantees. Trouble is, people can't believe they're not the centre of things, so they come up with all these pathetic stories about God and life after death and life before birth, but that's cowardice. Sheer cowardice. And because it's the product of cowardice, it promotes it; 'The Lord is my shepherd'. Thanks a fucking lot. So we've to live like sheep. Cowardice and cruelty. But everything's okay, because we're doing the Lord's work. Fuck the silicosis, get down that mine and work, nigger! Aw shucks; sure we skinned her alive and threw her in the salt pans, but we were only doing it to save her soul. Lordy lordy, gimme that old time religion and original sin. Another baby for perdition… Shit; original sin? What sick fuckwit thought that one up?"

Dad drained his glass and put it down on the glass-topped table between us. "Feel sorry for yourself because your friend's dead if you want, Prentice," he said, suddenly calm and sober. "But don't try to dignify it with what's supposed to be metaphysical angst; it's also known as superstitious shit, and you weren't brought up to speak that language."

"Well, thanks for the fucking censorship, dad!" I yelled. I jumped up and slammed my own glass down. The table top cracked; a single big flaw crossed, deep and green and not quite straight, like a dull ribbon of silk somehow suddenly embedded in the thick glass, from one edge of the table to the other, almost underneath our tumblers.

Dad stared at it then snorted, chuckling. "Hey, yeah! A symbol." He shook his head, glum, muttering as he sat back: "Hate the fuckers."

I hesitated, looking at the cracked glass, instinct — or training — telling me to apologise, but then did what I'd intended to do, and set about storming out of the room.

"Just fuck off, dad," I said before I slammed the door.

He looked up, pursed his lips and nodded, as though I'd asked him to remember and put the lights out before he went to bed. "Yup; okay." He waved one hand. "Night."

I lay in bed seething, thinking of all the smart things I should have said, until I fell into a troubled sleep. I woke early and left before anybody else was up, driving my hangover back to Glasgow and shouting at caravans that got in my way, and that was the last meaningful, full and frank exchange of views with my dad that I ever had.