RAG DOLL

Dad had been found by a neighbour on the first-floor landing, a crimson halo radiating from his head. The paramedics suspected a heart attack or aneurysm, but the post-mortem revealed nothing that might have caused an otherwise healthy seventy-two-year-old to topple over and die like that. So to anyone who asked we said that he’d had a dizzy spell or stumbled down the stairs and split his head open on the tiled landing. Mum seemed to relish conveying such details to people, and during the week I was over for the funeral I witnessed the way she deftly refined the story.

‘Your dad wasn’t very popular,’ she said as we left the crematorium. Including us, six people had attended. No eulogy.

‘What about that colleague of his,’ I asked, ‘the one he used to go to Bach recitals with?’

‘Dr Richter? He’s been dead for years.’

‘What about Douglas and Suzanne?’

‘He fell out with Douglas over a mattress,’ she said.

My dad, it turns out, had spent much of his retirement falling out with people, as if he’d discovered his true purpose late in life. Along with Douglas (mattress), the list included Ian Strange (lapsed socialism), Marco Ferri (lost DVD), the Gillmans (golf handicap) and my brother (tattooed wife, veganism), who hadn’t spoken to his father in over three years and missed the funeral, claiming he’d been called up for jury duty.

And then there were the neighbours, lots of them, seven other flats in the block. Dad had pestered them relentlessly for years over the slightest offence to his senses – the smell of bleach, the sight of bikes and prams on the ground floor, the whine of a washing machine late at night.

‘I can’t believe Elaine turned up,’