Now my part, and there is no honest version of this without it.
In the May, my brother changed his mind.
He rang me and he was very clear and very calm, which he had not been in months, and he said he wanted them to know.
He wrote them a letter. Four pages, both sides, in a hand that had got worse since February.
And he gave it to me to post, because he could not get to a postbox by then.
I put it in a drawer.
Two weeks.
I was nineteen, five months pregnant, in one room with a shared bathroom, six weeks after being put out of that house by the man that letter was addressed to.
And every single day I looked at that drawer and thought: not today.
Because posting it meant handing them a way out. It meant them getting to be the family who found out in time and drove down and held his hand, and me still being the girl on the porch with the holdall.
I wanted them to have to ask me.
He died inside those two weeks.
That letter said where he was. Ward and everything.
I posted it in the September, three months after, with nothing added, because I could not think what a person adds to that.
My father has never mentioned it and I have never asked whether he opened it.
My mother has. She told me in that kitchen that he reads it about twice a year, in the garage, and that he thinks she does not know.
She said: he keeps it in the toolbox.
And then she said the sentence I have not been able to put down since.
She said: he didn’t know your brother was ill either, love.
She meant it as a comfort. She meant that the two of us are in the same position.
We are not in the same position. But I understood for the first time that in my father’s head there are two people who were not told, and one of them is him.
And I was not the only one in this story with something in a drawer.
In 2017 my mother found my address, through a woman at her church whose daughter worked for the utilities.
She drove eight hours. She parked across the road from my building at about four in the afternoon and she sat in that car for two hours.
She saw us come back from the shop. She has told me what I was wearing.
Then she drove eight hours home and she never knocked, and she never told my father she went.
Seven years she has had that, and she gave it to me on a Sunday morning in her own kitchen, about nineteen hours after I turned up.
I asked her why she did not get out of the car.
And she said: because you looked all right, love.
She said it as though it were an answer. And after about four months I worked out that it was one.
She had driven eight hours to find out whether she had ruined my life, and when it turned out she had not, she went home, because the only thing that would have made her knock was me not coping.
She did not come for me. She came for the information.
I have not said that to her and I am not going to.
PART 5
