Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

It was the first of many ways in which I have given him cause to find me an irritating old man. The first, but not the last, and we have turned our backs on one another and inevitably reunited a dozen times over the years. We argue because Michael cannot understand that in some small reserved areas of the world I still know better than he does; and I cannot get my fuddled head around the possibility that I should accord him the same respect I would to a man of his accomplishments and standing who was not my son. I do try, but somewhere in me is the shape of him, standing naked astride a pile of Lego bricks with his face covered in baked beans, declaiming, “Frain frain frain!”—his childhood word for “train.” It’s hard, when that is one of your most treasured memories, to mind your Ps and Qs.