“Bunch of dingy-as-hell venues up and down the country. Pubs, warehouses, that kind of thing. Places you’d play for the beer, and the exposure, and the love of it. It’s where we all got our start in the day. Anyway, I took Mark to see Max Merritt and the Meteors, and what those guys could do with just two acoustic guitars and an electric keyboard… I think that was a real inspiration to him.”

“Let me guess: you also said to him, ‘Wow, it sounds like you’re in dire straits.’”

He smiled. “So you did know who he was.”

“Yeah, all right. I had an idea.”

“Of course, it’s all different now.” He paused meditatively and took a swig of Ajax Napalm. “This actually isn’t bad. Though in my day what you call craft ales we used to call beer.” Another equally meditative pause. “Then the chains took over and the small breweries shut down, and everything was pressurised and standardised. And now we’ve forgotten where we came from, so a bunch of guys in their twenties are trying to sell back to us something we should have never given away in the first place.” A third pause. He was really good at this. “It’s a funny thing, the pendulum of the world.”

“Is that,” I asked, half-sincerely, half not, “what you’re going to call your next album?”

He shrugged. “That depends on your mother. Your mother and the cancer.”

“So, um, what’s up with that? Are you okay?”

“Waiting for tests.”

Oh fuck. For a split second, Jon Fleming just looked like a bald, old man drinking IPA from a fancy bottle. “Look, I’m…sorry about… It must be awful.”

“It’s what it is. And it’s made me think about things I haven’t in a long time.”

A month or so ago I would have said “you mean, like the son you abandoned”? “Like what?” I said instead.

“The past. The future. The music.”

I could almost pretend that I fit into “the past” but it wasn’t much comfort.

“You see, it’s like the beer. When I started out, we were just kids with big ideas playing on borrowed guitars for anyone who’d listen. Rights of Man recorded our first album on a busted-up eight-track in a garage. Then the studios swept in with their bubblegum pop and their bands of plastic children, and all the dirt and the heart went out of the business.”

I’d read interviews with Jon Fleming, I’d listened to his songs, I’d seen on him TV, so I knew that this was just how he talked. But it was different when it was him and you, and those intense blue-green eyes were looking right at you, and making it feel like he was telling you things he’d never tell anybody else.

“And now,” he went on, with legendary melancholy, “we’re back in the sheds and the bedrooms, and people are making albums on borrowed guitars on busted-up laptops, and putting them on Soundcloud and Spotify and YouTube for anyone who’ll listen. And, suddenly, it’s real again, and it’s where I began, and where I can never go back to.”

For once, I wasn’t trying to be a dick. But at this stage, against my better judgment, I was genuinely interested. “And how does The Whole Package fit into this?”

And for the first time—the first time ever—I got a reaction from Jon Fleming. He looked at his beer and closed his eyes for a long moment. “I can’t be what I was,” he said, “so I have to be something else. Because the other option is being nothing. And I could never be nothing. My agent said Package would be a good fit for me—remind my old audience I was there and tell a new audience who I am. It’s not a comeback, it’s a curtain call. It’s standing on the stage with the lights going down and begging the crowd to wait and listen to one last song.”

I didn’t know what to say. I should have realised I didn’t have to say anything. He’d do the talking for both of us.

“Everybody tells you that when you’re young, you think you’ll live forever. What they don’t tell you is that when you’re old, you think the same. It’s just everything starts reminding you that it’s not true.”

How the fuck had I got here? What was I supposed to do now? “You’ll…you’ll never be nothing, Dad.”

“Perhaps. Except you look back, and what have you done?”

“Like, nearly thirty studio albums, countless tours, a career spanning five decades, that one time you stole a Grammy from Alice Cooper.”

“I didn’t steal it. I won it fair and square.” He seemed to cheer up slightly. “And we beat the shit out of each other in the carpark afterwards.”

“See. You’ve done loads of important things.”

“But when it all comes round again, who will remember?”

“I don’t know, people, the internet, me, Wikipedia.”

“You could be right.” Having downed the last of his IPA, he set the bottle down with a decisive clank. “Anyway, this has been good. I should let you go.”

“Oh, you’re going?”

“Yeah, I’m expected at Elton’s for a party. I’m sure you and…and the boyfriend have a lot to do as well.”

Somehow, he was making me resent the ending of a meeting I’d resented the start of. “Okay, well. This was a thing we did.”

As he stood, I realised he hadn’t even taken his coat off. But, then, he paused and gave me one of those deep, soulful looks that, just for that moment, made it all okay. “I’d like to do this again. While there’s still time.”

“I’m pretty busy the next couple of weeks. I’ve got a work do and it’s Oliver’s parents’ anniversary.”

“After that then. We’ll go to dinner. I’ll text you.”

Then he was gone. Again. And I did not know how to feel. I mean, I was pretty sure I’d done the right thing. But, apart from that, I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to be getting out of it. There was no way we’d ever be close. Any chance of that had gone out the window when he’d walked out on me and not come back for twenty-five years. And, now I stopped to think about it, he’d still expressed no remorse about that, and was clearly never going to. Probably we’d never even have a conversation that didn’t centre entirely on him.

Not that long ago, it had been a point of pride for me to take the fuck all he was offering me and shove it up his arse. But I didn’t really need to do that anymore, and I think I liked not needing to do that. Besides, the man was dying. I could listen to a few stories if it helped him deal. The truth was, Jon Fleming wasn’t going to change, and I wasn’t going to be important to him in the way I used to think I had to. But I was sort of getting to know him. And I was sort of getting to be there. And that was something.