I’ve been called many things in my life, but last night I heard what I believe cannot be topped in what remains of my days. It was around midnight, and Mia and I had gone to bed after an evening of immigration admin that had brought me within a micron of gouging my own eyes out. I had spent hours stitching together our travel history using emails and a magnifying glass to inspect the entry and exit stamps in our passports. Then I did the same thing to retrace where we had lived, and when, down to the day. Throughout, as is my nature, I ranted at no one in particular and provided a running commentary of what I was having to do. Mia, as is her nature, was calmer than I was. She could afford to be calmer because she wasn’t really doing any of the work. Instead, she viewed the whole business almost as an outsider, with passing interest and mild amusement.

“This is for you too, you know?” I said.

“But you’re so good at it,” she replied.

Now she was dropping off to sleep while I tried, finally, to do something I could call my own, and read for a few minutes.

“I’m glad that’s done,” I said with some resentment.

Mia smiled sleepily and mumbled, “You’re my almond shiner.”

“Your what?”

She pressed her head deeper into the pillow. “My almond shiner.”

It took me a few moments to compute this. “Shining armour?”

“Hmm,” she smiled faintly. “My knight.”

As she sank away, I pictured myself standing on a street corner at a little fold-out table, buffing almonds for a living and talking to passersby. That seemed about right, I thought, and turned out the light.

My mother has a sharp mind and blunt principles. She and my father were together, I think, for the same reason that electrons and protons are together, attracted by their mutual opposition. My father believed in the truth. This belief was the closest he came to religion. It was the closest he came to something he didn’t question and couldn’t really defend. My mother attacked this faith of his daily. Her assaults on the truth demanded that he step in to defend it, lest it be outgunned and outmanoeuvred, but his resistance was futile. Facts, it turned out, could not compete with drama.

My mother stretched and shrunk numbers to fit whatever story she was telling.

“I’ve told you four hundred and three times,” she’d say.

It was never thousands of times, or a hundred. It was specific, as though she’d counted these instances and there had been, in point of fact, four-hundred-three of them.

“You didn’t,” my father would counter. “It was more like—” he’d say, trailing off as he saw how he’d been suckered into doing the same thing, only with smaller numbers, “more like ten.”

She recounted things in such a way as to completely alter them. She did it so convincingly that my father’s insistence on the truth seemed, if anything, misguided.

“Then your father said,” she’d say, “you have a strong chin for such a weak face.”

“I didn’t say that,” my father would object, “I told you that afterwards.”

Yet, now and then, she bent the truth in a way that even my father was willing to overlook. Once, on some Sunday when I was perhaps thirteen or fourteen years old, my father’s oldest brother and all my cousins were over for lunch. My father and my uncle didn’t like one another much, and my aunt was always looking for things to find fault with. When she did, her insults were delivered in a near-Victorian manner.

“How lovely,” she once said of a new dress my mother was wearing. That’s always suited you.”

On this particular Sunday, my mother had made a leg of lamb. As she came from the kitchen toward the table, carrying the leg of lamb on a tray, she tripped and the whole thing bounced into a corner of the dining room. There was a sharp intake of breath from my aunt as my mother scooped it up in a fluid movement. No one said anything. As my mother was about to head back to the kitchen, she stopped, turned, and made an announcement. “Fortunately,” she said, “I have another one.”

I don’t think people who lived long ago truly understood anger. As far as I can tell, you only discover how angry you can get when you use a computer or drive a car. Of course, these things anger us for different reasons. A computer is infuriating as only something that is for all intents and purposes magical can be the day it doesn’t work. It’s like a limp wand. You can’t open it up and you can’t throw it across the room without breaking it or risking the sort of magic you don’t want to see. Yet you know that it’s not really the computer’s fault. There is someone, somewhere, whose fault it actually is, and you’d like to kill this person. When you drive a car, it is simpler. There is also someone you’d like to kill, but you know where this person is—in the next car.

I preempt all of this anger by getting angry before I start. That way, I figure, I don’t have to wait until something happens. I can get nicely worked up beforehand, and be ready when it does. I’m primed for hesitant drivers in their Prii—which, believe it or not, is the preferred plural of Prius—for stove-sized pedestrians, reverse parkers, and the like. The anger is less than useless, of course, but I’ve decided to embrace it against all self-help softness. If I cannot compose myself, I might as well compose long sentences using only swear words.

But nothing prepares you for the modern car. The modern car offers all the opportunities for rage that we’ve come to expect from older cars, but it has a computer inside of it and this adds an orthogonal dimension of outrage. My Ford Escape is a modest car as cars go, but a modern car nonetheless. It came equipped with a computer that is voiced by a synthesised woman who sounds positively post-coital. When I get into this Ford I might as well forget about the ire inspired by other drivers, and get ready for anger of the combined kind.

“Doong—doong—doong,” the Ford goes until I buckle up.

At this point, seconds in, I’m already seething. Who decided to let cars enforce a law? I wear a seat belt because it makes sense, but I feel ready to rebel when the car insists that I do. I’m surprised they haven’t yet mandated that cars refuse to start until you’re strapped in and have submitted to a quick eye exam and a breathalyser test.

“Call Mia,” I say after pressing the voice command button.

“Du-dong!”

“I didn’t get that,” the sleepy woman intones. “You can say, navigate to, or…”

“Call Mia!” I try again.

“Mamma Mia,” Siri cuts in from my phone, having somehow felt summoned, “here we go again, by Abba.”

At this point, I’m probably a few hundred meters from where I started, but I’m ready to kill the next guy in a Prius. All of this is sort of normal and happens more or less every time I get into my car. The apex of anger, however, can only be reached with the help of the navigation system.

“Obey traffic laws,” the sleepy woman slurs at an intersection where I desperately need the system to kick in and tell me which way to turn, “and use voice commands while driving.”

By the time she gets through all of her warnings and tells me what to do, I’ve had to turn the wrong way and am swept along in a concatenation of swearing.

“Rerouting,” she interrupts Frida and Agnetha who wail blue since the day we parted.

The truly infuriating aspect of the navigation system is its indifference in the face of our anger. Rerouting is not what Mia would say. If we ever get truly intelligent navigation systems, I hope that they also act the way humans would.

“What the fuck!?” I’d like the system of the future to shriek. “You meathead! I said left!”

But it’s no use. By the time we can have a system like that, we’d be strapped in the back seat, driven around by the car itself. Who knows, perhaps I’m wrong about anger and computers and cars. Perhaps real anger is the destiny of the people of the future who will helplessly watch as the self-driving Prius ahead of them hesitates and slows down for no reason whatsoever.

My maternal grandmother lost her parents to the Spanish flu, in early 1919. She was nine years old at the time. Her mother died in the morning. A servant rode to the undertaker in town and returned with men and a cart to collect the body. The undertaker’s men took one look at my grandmother’s father and went outside to sit under a tree and smoke until he was dead an hour or so later. That day, my grandmother and her sisters went to live with their grandparents.

My great-great-grandfather was a fussy and fastidious man. He interfered in everything, and no detail escaped his attention. Tasks had to be completed just so, and nothing else would do. His particular standards were such that the farm workers grew accustomed to standing around while he explained exactly how he wanted them to do something, and watching him complete the task in the process.

“Oh lordy, no,” he’d say to servants cutting meat to feed a sausage mincer. “Not like that!”

My grandmother told us that he’d then cut the meat into perfect cubes. “We do it neatly,” he’d say and feed the cubes into the mincer while the workers watched in puzzlement.

His wife, my great-great-grandmother, was not like that. She was a severe and tight-lipped woman. She didn’t care much for details, and she was not given to trifling emotions like sympathy and regret. She wanted to get things done.

“During the Boer War,” my grandmother told us, “when the English came to burn the farm, she set fire to things herself before they could.”

When she turned forty-three (see the story The half-life of simplicity), she had her coffin made, ready to be used. She had wanted a say in what it looked like, and she wanted to be familiar with it by the time they put her into it. As so often happens, difficult people live long lives, despite their belief that the Angel of Death is perched on the headboard. My great-great-grandmother did not die young and the coffin stood on the verandah for another forty years, filled from time to time with dried peaches.

While she hardly ever said anything, my great-great-grandmother is remembered to this day in a saying we have taken from her. In the nineteen-thirties, my grandmother told us, my great-great-grandfather started having headaches. He refused to travel to town to see a doctor, but he whimpered incessantly from the pain.

“Stop complaining!” my great-great-grandmother apparently snapped. “Go see the doctor.”

“The doctor can come to see me,” he replied.

Indeed, a few months later, when a gaping hole had opened above his temple, the doctor came to see him. By then my great-great-grandfather was almost delirious with pain, and it was too late. He had a meningeal tumour, and that was that. The doctor and my great-great-grandmother stood at the bedroom door and discussed the course his illness would take. My grandmother, then in her twenties, stood quietly by. From his bed, my great-great-grandfather moaned that he’d like a mirror so he could inspect the hole himself. At this point, my great-great-grandmother turned on him and uttered the words we use today in jest and sarcasm.

“Be quiet!” she snapped. “Your suffering has but begun.”

Today, for no reason I can think of, I remembered the time Jack didn’t meet Amy. I’ve mentioned Jack’s tendency to un-meet women before (see the stories The one-lion cure for depression and A formula for distance), but I somehow forgot about the first and most telling example of this.

At the heart of Jack’s trouble with women lay the insurmountable problem of touching. The idea that a woman might want to touch him was at variance with his assumption that women were abstract versions of men who never became violent and smelled better. Once a would-be girlfriend became touchy, she became concrete. At that point, Jack left skid marks.

Then came Amy. Jack was sitting at his usual table in the far corner of our favourite coffee shop, brooding over a poem he was writing. The way he related it to me, he was furiously writing, minding his own business. But I’ve heard from others that he was staring into the distance while he slowly destroyed a plastic plant that stood nearby. Amy appeared out of nowhere and sat down at his table. She began to talk. She was a philosophy student, she said. She delivered a monologue about Derrida and Chomsky and modern physics and Zen and music and artificial intelligence. She asked no questions, and Jack never said a word. Then she left.

“She’s perfect,” Jack told me.

He returned to the coffee shop for the rest of the week but Amy didn’t show up. In her absence, she became even more perfect. Jack carefully constructed the details of their future relationship using the evidence of her talking and what it implied.

“We’ll be unsullied by vulgar physical details,” he theorised over the weekend. “There won’t be sex or anything like that.”

He resolved to seek her out in the coming week and get to know her. On Tuesday she came to the coffee shop but his nerves failed him and he did nothing. He sat in his corner and watched her having coffee at another table with friends. After an hour or so, they left.

“Nothing stopped her,” Jack fumed. “Is she testing me? Am I to take my turn now?”

“That’s how it works,” I said. “What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s crap,” he seethed. “It’s just a fucking game.”

“Exactly—”

He moved around in his small kitchen, picking things up and putting them down again.

“I hate games,” he said at length.

“Remember when you told me that there wouldn’t be sex or anything like that?” I said.

“Yes—”

“You’re right. There won’t be. There won’t be anything, for that matter, if you don’t do something.”

“But it’s crap.”

“What do you want? A cosmic connection?”

Jack kicked his dustbin.

“Well,” he said, “I don’t want this primitive shit. It’s what animals do.”

The next week he returned to the coffee shop, sat in his corner, and waited for Amy to show up. When she did, he ignored her, but he furtively noted her body language, the movements of her hands, the way she tossed her hair, and the way she and her friends glanced at one another’s shoes.

“It was all bullshit,” he told me. “She knows nothing about physics.”

“And you know nothing about chemistry,” I said.

“She’ll be needy,” Jack countered. “And she’ll want a lot of touching.”

When I flopped into the only comfortable chair he owned, Jack summarised everything. “I’m done with love,” he declared. “It’s crap.”

My father had a brown jumpsuit that he put on whenever he wanted to work on something in the house or garden. Over the years, the jumpsuit became tattered and shrank with repeated washing until it was so short in its legs as to look more like plus fours. But my father loved it and refused to replace it. The thing made him look ridiculous. Once, when a new school friend of mine visited, he spotted my father working in the garden in his jumpsuit, smoking a pipe.

“Who’s that?” my friend hesitated.

“Who?” I asked.

“That—that man?”

Perhaps because he looked so ridiculous, my father reliably did stupid things when he wore his jumpsuit. On my sister’s eighth birthday, when there were many little girls milling around our pool, he saw nothing wrong with walking around in his brown jumpsuit, looking like an off-duty clown. When I got bored and began to tease my sister and her friends, my father marched into the pool area to see what the commotion was about.

“Hey!” he howled and stabbed at the air with his cigar while he advanced on me. “If you—”

With that, he misjudged the edge of the pool and toppled into it like a felled tree.

“Who’s that?” one of the girls asked when he surfaced.

While this was a mere misstep, the same cannot be said of the day he quite literally painted himself into a corner. We heard him calling from his new study.

“What’s wrong with you?” my mother asked as she surveyed the scene.

“I didn’t see,” my father replied sheepishly.

He stood in the only unpainted spot of the new hardwood floor at the far end of the room. He looked particularly forlorn in his silly jumpsuit.

“This is the dumbest thing you’ve ever done,” my mother declared. After a moment she added, “Including the time you fell out of that tree because you’d sawn off the branch you were sitting on.”

“I know,” my father sighed. “I get distracted.”

“Well,” my mother said as she lit a cigarette, “you’ll have plenty of time to focus now. I’ll toss you a book.”

For us, the jumpsuit spelled trouble. Whenever something had to get done, my father disappeared to go put it on. Once he had it on, there was no limit to how bad things could get. It was a little like Clark Kent stepping into a telephone booth to become Superman, but with the opposite outcome. One day, a few years after the painting incident, my father managed to outdo himself. My mother complained that the rinsing sink in the scullery had become blocked.

“Dammit,” my father muttered. “Did you have to fill it halfway before you decided to tell me?”

“It’s a scullery,” my mother called after him as he went off to get into his jumpsuit.

“What idiot designed this?” he complained a few minutes later as he lay on his back under the sink, fumbling with a spanner to loosen the jamb nut that secured the gasket. He’d explained that he planned to drain the water from the sink by uncoupling the pipes below it, but it wasn’t clear to the rest of us what this would achieve.

“It’s going to come down in your face,” my mother remarked and lit a cigarette.

For her, it was home theatre. In fact, we had all gathered around, partly to cheer my father on and partly so that we wouldn’t miss out on whatever happened next.

“I’m not that stupid,” he said through clenched teeth.

Sure enough, he loosened the nut, got out of the way, and pulled the pipe free. The dirty water from the sink above drained into a bucket and relatively little spilled onto the floor.

“There,” he said in triumph as he got up, holding the reeking bucket. “See?”

“What next?” my mother asked.

“One step at a time,” my father said and glared at her over his glasses. “First we dump this.”

In a fluid movement, he emptied the bucket into the sink.

The year I turned twenty-three, I was alone in my parent’s house on Christmas Eve (see the story The red wheelbarrow). It had been a sweltering day, and it hadn’t cooled down much during the evening. I had left the windows open to let in what little breeze there was. At two in the morning, I was still awake, reading the Douglas Adams book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. At the end of chapter twenty-seven, the supercomputer Deep Thought had just revealed that the answer to the Great Question, the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, was in fact forty-two.

As I sat back to marvel at this, there was a juddering screech of brakes followed by a loud crash. The sound had come from the Old Military Road, today called the M33, that passed behind our house. I ran out to the pool and peered over the wall, but there was nothing. About a block up from us this road intersected another large artery called Glenwood Road. I couldn’t see this intersection from the wall as there was a bend in the road, but I could make out flashing amber lights.

That was quick I thought as I jogged barefoot up Old Military Road. It hadn’t even been a minute. How could tow trucks be on the scene already?

But I was wrong. What I had seen was the flashing indicator of a BMW into which a pickup truck had smashed from the side. It was eerily quiet but for the sound of water and oil and gasoline that dripped from both vehicles onto the warm road. There was glass everywhere and I had to approach carefully so as not to step in it. The truck was closest to me. The driver-side window was open and the driver, a man who was perhaps in his thirties, was dead. I had never seen a dead person up close before and had always expected that it would be obvious why they had died, that they’d be broken in ways I would be able to understand. But all that seemed to be wrong with this man was a thin runnel of blood that trickled from his right ear and a strange bulge in his neck.

The driver and passenger of the BMW were also dead. Unlike the man, they had been mangled by the impact of the collision. The driver had been thrown onto the passenger and they seemed to be holding one another a last time.

I stood there with them for what felt like hours before other cars and emergency services arrived. Everything these people were planning to do a few minutes earlier had been reduced to the amber flashing of an indicator. The plastic and metal and glass would be cleaned up. By the next day, others would pass there without knowing. The death of these people would tear a hole in the lives of others, but the rest of the world would know nothing about it.

All of it mattered, it seemed to me, and none of it did.