Not into that house. My mother has not been living well and I want that understood, because it is the thing that made the whole arrangement so hard to see from the outside.
She has the same three-piece suite she had when I was at school. Her car is a 2013 and it does not always start. She has not been on a holiday since my father passed.
She was moving it on within about a week of every transfer. Five years.
Some of it went into that workshop as cash and some of it went against a debt Pike took on in 2019 that I knew nothing about and that I am still finding the edges of.
I do not think my mother ever saw one pound of it as hers.
I think that is supposed to make it better and I have not found that it does.
I asked her about it once, in the September, in her kitchen, which is the only real conversation we have had since that reception area.
I asked why she had not just told me Pike was in trouble.
Because I would have helped him. I want that on the record and I have said it to his face too. In the March of that year, if my brother had rung me and said the workshop is going, I would have found something, and it would not have been enough and I would have found it anyway.
And my mother said: he wouldn’t let me.
I said: he wouldn’t let you ask me for help.
And she said yes.
Then she said the thing that told me what that family has actually been for fifty years.
She said: you were always the one who managed. He’s never been able to stand that.
So a man let his brother’s daughter eat half a bread roll for five years rather than make one telephone call in which he would have had to be the one asking.
And a woman of seventy-one decided that her job was to protect the son who could not ask, from the son who could.
That is the whole machine and it has been running in that family since long before any of this.
PART 5
Now the detail, and this is the one that took me another eleven days and a woman in a records office to find.
The first hardship application at that school is dated the ninth of the March.
I flew out on the twenty-fourth of the May.
Eleven weeks.
Eleven weeks before I left the city, while I was still sleeping in my own house and still saying goodnight to my daughter in person, somebody had already filled in a form at her school saying that her father made no regular financial contribution.
I had not gone anywhere. I was at home. I had been at home every night that week.
I sat in a records office and read that date about eleven times and then I went outside and sat on a wall.
Because it is not opportunism. That is what I had been telling myself for eleven days — that a difficult situation had arisen and two people had taken advantage of it badly.
A form dated eleven weeks before the flight is not taking advantage of something.
It is a plan that was already running while I was still in the room.
And then there is the job.
I did not find that job. I was not in any state to find a job in the March of that year — I could not open post, and there is a period of about six weeks after my wife’s service that I genuinely cannot account for.
Somebody sent me the listing.
He sent it in an email with about four lines under it about how it would sort the debt out and how Mum would have Talise and how it was only a couple of years.
It was Pike.
