I thought again.
‘No.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘The roses are bright; they’re beautiful, but they don’t last very long. And that’s all right; it’s an important part of what they are.’
We took the roses inside.
o
My next memory is of the following winter, of being led into my parents’ bedroom to see my mother’s body, to say my last goodbyes.
I remember snow piled up against the windowpane and the blizzard blowing outside, but the room itself was still and quiet. Dust particles hung like stars, fixed points in unchanging space. My mother’s head looked so light on her pillow; she seemed to be barely there at all.
I walked across to her bedside, unafraid.
I felt no sudden pain of separation. Like my father, though in a different sense, my mother had always been leaving home by degrees.
I remember feeling that it was not as if her life had ended, but more that she’d arrived at the natural conclusion of some motherly process. Since the beginning of time, her voice had been growing steadily quieter and her movements more slow. In the last few weeks she’d read to me in a barely audible whisper, and in the last few days she had read in silence, her mouth forming words I’d been unable to hear. She moved less and less until her movements became imperceptible, until, finally, there were no movements at all. One thing becoming another – this was how it had always been, and in the end, it was no more complicated than that.
I stood quietly beside the bed, my hand on my mother’s, watching the snowflakes swirl and pile against the windowpane. I could feel snow falling inside me too, I realised, a settling white blanket that made my thoughts quiet and edgeless, a cosy sort of numb.
After a little while, my eyes drifted down and found a large book, Broten’s Encyclopaedia of British Plants and Trees, sitting on the edge of my mother’s bedside table. We’d read this book together and the hundreds of descriptions, etchings and colour plates were all very familiar to me. I hauled myself up onto the mattress beside her, reached out and heaved the encyclopaedia onto my lap, and then opened it.
It fell open, and there, between two pages of text, was something I couldn’t remember having ever seen before.
A real, red rose, pressed completely flat – flat almost to transparency.
I put out a hesitant finger and found that I could move it.
Carefully, very carefully, I slid the rose loose from the lines of type.
I stayed like that for a long time, sitting quietly, just holding it in my hand.
2
Thirty Years Later
Broten’s Encyclopaedia of British Plants and Trees is the first book on my bookshelf, but you wouldn’t know what it was if you saw it. It’s cocooned in bubble wrap and the sort of UV-resistant plastic that keeps old Superman comics from falling apart in the sun.
The thirty-year-old rose inside is only slightly the worse for wear. One petal is gone, plucked from it by my scruffy-haired sixteen-year-old self. The idiot. He felt the need to carry that petal around and show it to girls at the sort of parties where they’re always playing The Cure. Eventually, of course, he gave it away to one of them as they sat in a locked park, late one summer night.
There are other, lesser, damages. A leaf folded and split accidentally here, a thorn come loose and picking at the book’s bindings there. With each exposure, these things build up. That’s why, nowadays, my mother’s rose stays firmly pressed between its pages, safe in the pitch-black care of etched hawthorns and hyacinths, swaddled in its bubble wrap and Superman’s special plastic.
The next book on my bookshelf – and this is assuming we’re travelling east, as all young readers here learn to do 
The inscription on the title page reads, ‘I’ll always be here for you, Tom’, and if you asked me to, I could reproduce every curl and line of that note from memory, even now. It’s a solid book with a lot of wear, pages thumbed, corners folded, passages underlined. A collector’s bookshop might describe it as ‘heavily used’, but if it were a teddy bear, you wouldn’t hesitate to call it ‘well loved’.
After the Collected Works, we come next to three books from my early teens. A handsome hardback of Don Quixote, a paperback of It, and a dog-eared copy of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.
These books are survivors, remarkable because they still exist. At the age of thirteen, on one long-forgotten day in July, I took each one down from its shelf in our country home and put it into a suitcase (along with Collected Works and the encyclopaedia of plants and trees, which went everywhere with me) to take to my aunt’s place by the sea for summer holiday reading. Because of this, these books were not in our house when my father’s second wife, the poet Margery Martin, burned it down and destroyed everything else that we had.
Let’s move on.
After the survivors, there’s another book by my father, The New Collected Writing. This is a thin, black book, a line of soot and desolation dividing the shelf like the K–T boundary. Its inscription reads ‘To Thomas, my son’. Dr Stanley Quinn left room for more words to follow, but must’ve reconsidered, or never got around to adding them. The rest of the page is untouched. And marks an ending, this book, a scarred and blasted Maginot Line between me and my father. A line that neither of us would reach across for the many long years that followed.
The books continue along the shelf, more than a decade passing with them, until finally we arrive at The Qwerty Machinegun by Thomas Quinn, my own first novel. I posted this particular copy to my father on publication day, only to have it come back a week later with a curt note from someone I’d never met – ‘Too little, too late’, it said.
Too little, too late. The obituaries began to appear a few days later. My timing has always been lousy. My father – my talking, speaking, moving, breathing, hand-holding father – had come apart for good.
o
Just beyond The Qwerty Machinegun, standing behind my own first novel like the Empire State Building stands behind that little church in New York, is another first novel – Cupid’s Engine.
This huge book sits at the absolute centre of my shelf like a great, dark keystone, every inch of its creased and battered cover plastered with praise: ‘The crime novel of the decade’, ‘An intricate puzzle-box of delights’, ‘addictive and astonishing’, ‘a feast for whodunit fans’, ‘flawless’, ‘remarkable’, and somewhere in amongst it all, ‘“A uniquely talented writer” –Stanley Quinn’. My father rarely supported other writer’s books in this way, but then, Cupid’s Engine is remarkable in at least half a dozen different ways. The book’s author, Andrew Black, barely gets a mention on this particular cover, but that hasn’t stopped the name looming large in the imaginations of the literary press and reading public in the nine long
