An interview with my father concerning the facts of my conception

I face my father across the dining table.

The house is smaller than I remember. Newcastle too. I do not belong here. It has nothing of my mother in it.

He has shaved his face raw and rough. It is like looking at my face gone wrong,

I place the mic between us. “Ready?”

“This is for a magazine, aye?”

“Aye.”

I half listen to him tell me about the area he and I grew up in, praising the sense of community. He does not know I am not straight, does not know how I ran from those streets.

It is after an hour I ask the question. “Do you remember when I was conceived?”

I picture my Mam in the seventies, her dress like silk but actually polyester; the dusty smell of cigarettes and sweat.

“Me and two other lads had a pigeon cree,” he says. “We used to race them pigeons, take turns to feed them. One day the three of us went down to check on them They were dead, heads chopped off. The other lads cried but I didn't.”

I say nothing as I wait for an answer to my question.

I have not pressed record.