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By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, overcrowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to barely be remarked upon. Meanwhile, in literally gilded towers miles above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepreneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept cocktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.

‘So what you’re saying,’ said Connie, looking up from her novel, ‘is that the future, basically, is going to be a bit like Mad Max?’

‘Not exactly. But it might have elements of that.’

‘So Mad Max, it’s like a documentary, really—’

‘All I mean is the future world might not be as hospitable as the one that you and I grew up in. That dream of progress is dead. Our parents imagined holiday camps on the moon. We … we have to get used to a different notion of the future.’

‘And you want Albie to choose his GCSEs based on this Mad Max-like vision of the future.’

‘Don’t tease me. I want him to do subjects that are useful and practical; I want him to do something that will get him a job.’

‘You want him to be up in the gilded tower. You want him to have a robot butler.’

‘I want him to be successful,’ I said. ‘Is that a strange ambition for my son?’

‘Our son.’

‘Our son.’

At that time, Albie was not doing well. Instead of providing a sense of calm, the countryside enraged him. He showed no interest in learning the binomial names for the common British birds, and the frogspawn I procured for him held no appeal. He missed his friends, the cinema, the top deck of buses; he missed eating chips on the swings in the playground. But wasn’t the countryside one wonderful giant playground? Apparently not. Albie went for walks with great reluctance, glaring at warblers, kicking the heads off flowers as he passed. If he could have burnt the countryside down, he would have. At school his grades were consistently poor, as were reports of his behaviour. He did not work, he did not concentrate, sometimes he didn’t even turn up. Connie, though concerned, took all this in her stride, but I was angered and shocked by it. I had not expected obedience to be genetic but neither had I anticipated these calls from the headmaster’s office, these letters home. My own son took me by surprise. He was not what I had expected, was not like me at all. Most hurtfully of all, he seemed to take a perverse pride in this.

I didn’t lose my temper, or only every now and then, and I was not disappointed by him, only by his behaviour, a semantic distinction that was probably lost on a thirteen-year-old boy. He was smart, sharp, he had a good brain, he just required some structure and application. I assessed the key areas requiring attention, took the matter in hand, and despite my fatigue I’d spend evenings and weekends with him at the kitchen table, working through chemistry, physics and mathematics in what I hoped was a supportive fatherly manner, Connie hovering nearby like a boxing referee.

‘How can you not do long division, Albie? It’s pretty basic stuff.’

‘I can do it, just not in the same way.’

‘So you write down four and you carry the three over.’

‘That’s the bit we don’t do any more, the carrying-the-three bit.’

‘But that is long division. That’s what long division is!’

‘Not now it isn’t. They do it differently.’

‘There’s only one way to divide, Albie, and this is it.’

‘It isn’t!’

‘So show me! Show me some other magical way to divide …’

The pen would hover on the paper then be tossed across the table. ‘Why can’t we just use a calculator?’

I’m not proud to say that a number of those evenings of supportive coaching ended in raised voices and red eyes; the majority of them, perhaps. On one occasion he even punched a hole in his bedroom wall. Not a supporting wall, of course, just a plasterboard partition, but I was shocked nonetheless, especially when I paused to consider that he must have been imagining my face.