At one end of the room my son sits in uncomfortable isolation. At the other a man stands facing him, interrogating him, in an increasingly aggressive manner.
I am standing to one side of his interrogator, my wife and her son nearby me.
How long have I known him now: this young man who is a part of me and I a part of him?
Only a year up to this point, perhaps, but already he has become dear to me.
The man who raised him and pretended to be his father has come to my home not just ostensibly to discipline my son but also to subtly establish his priority over me.
With every harsh word he stabs at my son I wince with inner pain but yet I feel I cannot protect him, I cannot intervene.
With his every word, however, this man diminishes himself. He shrinks in my estimation. He no longer deserves my respect. He is nothing to me.
Within a matter of weeks my son will set out on a journey alone.
For many months he will live an almost hermit-like existence in an isolated part of Tasmania caring for animals at a sanctuary there.
The few books remaining in my father's collection which he had carried halfway around the world to Australia were mostly novels about navies and the sea.
Some of the first adult books I read, therefore, were the works of Herman Wouk (The Caine Mutiny) and C.S. Forester (Brown on Resolution), and those of a man with the most intriguing of names, Nicholas Monsarrat (HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour and The Ship that Died of Shame).
I am not quite sure why but it was that latter title, itself, that resonated most with me at the time. Perhaps it was something to do with the incongruity to my adolescent mind that a thing composed of metal and wood and bristling with weaponry could actually be so anthropomorphised as to feel the very human emotion of shame and that it might actually die as a consequence.
I cannot now recall anything at all about the details of that tale but what I do remember is that the endpaper of the book was curiously somewhat thicker than any of the other pages.
I think I must have let that mystery lie for many months or so but one day I could resist my curiosity no longer and carefully prised the endpaper apart from the frontispiece to which it had in fact been glued around the edges and discovered my father's secret.
Written there in a beautifully curling and obviously feminine script was a dedication to my father on the occasion of his birthday and that this present was a gift of love from Betty.
How I used to linger over every line and every word of that lovingly inscribed message from the past.
For a long time it was my only concrete link to my mother. Her presence was palpable there.
For one short space in time, she had concentrated her energy transforming that empty page into what had now become her memorial.
