Andy sighed and looked pained as we shuffled a half inch forward in the cue. Cueing for gelato felt a bit pointless without dad. He had been the one whining about his gelato deficiency all through the Vatican City, and now every time I look at a gelato I see his big, ungrateful face stamped over it like a watermark. Of course he’d wandered off at the first mention of a cricket game on the other side of town. Too fucking typical. His phone was kaput so we were all at the mercy of his, probably drunken, brain. We assumed he’d find his way back to the palazzo at some point, though we couldn’t be sure.

Five hours passed uneventfully, with the small exception of Andy getting shat on by a big beefy Italian seagull thing.

‘Ew, that thing just shat on me.’

‘That awful tie-dye bucket hat was asking for it’ I reply dryly, ‘it’s like a big colourful bullseye for birds.’

‘Georgina lent it to me,’ he said sulkily.

I bit my tongue then. Georgina was my brother’s ‘ex’ girlfriend, though he had yet to accept this minor detail. He broke up with her in the most brutal way imaginable: on one of those infernal spinning cup machines in Lunar Park. Truly speaks to her demonic disposition, though I’m not allowed to say anything as he’s still madly in love with her apparently.

‘There are lots of cats in Rome’ Andy says, clumsily changing the subject.

‘Yep, hordes of them.’

We decide to go looking for dad. Waiting wasn’t doing the trick. Sweating our way through the Roman Forum, we come across the scene of Julius Caesar’s brutal murder. Andy registers no interest whatsoever, and I must say I’m underwhelmed too. For god’s sake, at least dress it up a little. It’s just a rock beneath another rock. Good place for a bat to die maybe, but the ruler of half the ancient world? Yeah, I’m not buying it.

Around lunchtime, we decide it’s time for some pasta and a soda. The food had barely touched our lips before we wolfed it down like starving animals. As for the soda, we just threw it back into our skulls like skeleton men. The July air simmered around us, making a meal of us too.

‘This is getting pretty damn old,’ says Andy.

‘What?’ I say, uninterested.

‘Dad’s antics. He made such a big fuss about this trip and father-son bonding, with the culture and the wine and the traipsing around monuments. I didn’t envision us traipsing around town all day everyday searching for our absolute relic of a father figure.’

‘Oh, c’mon. It’s dad. What, you really expect someone to change just because they’re in a new environment? Sounds like you’re deep in delusion mate.’

‘Yeah, maybe,’ he sighed. I felt bad then.

I wish he could change. He was a fun guy, and occasionally a fun dad, just never a complete dad, really. He really needed our mum, and now that she had left him, he was truly untethered, like a helium balloon drifting hither and thither towards sports games and pubs and women with faces that were equally balloonish.

‘Let’s just go back to the hotel and watch some TV. We can wait for him there,’ says Andy.

But I hadn’t heard him. I had caught sight of something so chaotic, I couldn’t help but burst out laughing in a rush of relief, admiration, and euphoria. It was dad, bounding towards us like a golden retriever, packs of beer under his arm, clutching a worn-out old cricket bat with his other arm, hordes of angry Italians running after him to apprehend the thief. Andy caught sight of it then, rolled his eyes, and couldn’t help but let the smile win and spread across his face.

‘I knew all along that this was how it would end.’