Nick Harkaway

I think that's true.

I mean, I think he had...

bizarrely good role models who were not his parents he had teachers he had aunts he had his Irish grandmother he had these kind of people who stepped into those roles half of them were kind of con artists and chauffeurs and dancing girls but they you know but they did the job because it was there and they were decent people um decent people but crooks some of the time you know but not you know it's possible to be a crook and not be Ronnie Cornwall um

But yeah, he had to make it up.

But then I think – I mean I'm a parent now and you always have to make it up.

I hoped in the kind of inevitable, kind of corny movie sequence way that when I wrote this book, I would sort of look up from my desk and see him sitting in the chair by the window, kind of, you know, maybe with a kind of Obi-Wan Kenobi vibe, like, remember the semicolon?

Exactly.

And of course I didn't.

And I'm not sure I even really hoped it.

I just, you know, it just would have felt kind of movie appropriate.

But what I got instead was the companionship of occupying the space that he occupied, the business of standing and holding the levers of the smiley machine and moving them around.

And there is a kind of unity that I get from that, which is incredibly emotionally powerful.

And some days it's actually kind of too emotionally powerful.

You have to kind of tamp it down.

But I'm not haunted by him.

Even in the most benign sense, I grieve occasionally.

I mean, you know, that doesn't go away.

It just gets manageable.

You know, but I when he died, I had this extraordinary moment because it was the deep days of COVID lockdowns in the UK and he was in a hospital we couldn't go into.

He was allowed in because he was ultimately an end of life care.