I am taught basic differential calculus on our drive down, and when I fall asleep here on the sofa after a three-hour lunch of cheese, with one bent leg somehow balanced on top of a stiff cushion, I dream that I must calculate how to find a new father, that there is a new father waiting for me in one of the tiny dark doorways I must get my unanswering long limbs to visit. I think of the maths teacher telling me at eleven that Maths Is Everything, that anything may be calculated if we only know the variables with which to begin, and the two novels I’ve been reading today metastasise in my brain to shape my dreams into airless, endless puzzles to which the answer is “the Father”.
I might eat fractionally less cheese tomorrow.