My biological father gave me a car for my 17th birthday, then told my stepdad, “now he knows who his real father is.” — I wanted to humiliate him back, but then I came up with a lesson the whole family would remember.

And I have thought a great deal about whether to tell him.

And I am not going to, and the reason is not that I am above it.

It is that telling him would be about me. There is no version of that phone call that helps Hollis Brandt. It is just me wanting a man to know he was beaten, thirteen years later, by somebody who did not tell him at the time.

Ollie is twenty-four and he is a plumber and he is better company than any of us.

My mother and Hollis are still married and she is fifty-four and he is fifty-seven, and she told me in the August that the Saturday job was the only thing they ever properly argued about, because she worked out what it was for in about three weeks and he would not discuss it.

And the car.

It went in 2016, when I left. Sold for about nine thousand, which went straight back into the account it had come out of, and which is what I used for my first year’s books and a deposit on a flat in 2019.

So I did get it in the end. It just went the long way round and through a man who is not my father.