She was hiding it because she had been taught that telling me would be the thing that broke me, and she had decided, at ten and then eleven and then twelve, that she was not going to be the one who broke me.
And here is my part, and there is no version of this account that is honest without it.
I rang home every Sunday. Sixty months. I did not miss one of those either and I used to be proud of that.
Every single time, I asked my mother how she was doing.
Then I got about four minutes with my daughter and I asked her about school, and she told me about school, and I said I love you and I rang off.
In five years I never asked that child one question where the answer could have been bad news.
Not one. I have gone back through it and I cannot find a single one.
And once — once — I saw it.
Video call, the January of 2023. She was in the kitchen and there was one bulb working behind her and there was a gap on the counter where the microwave used to be.
I noticed both. I remember noticing both.
I said something about the light and she said the bulb had gone, and I said get Grandma to sort it, and we talked about something else.
I had a child on a screen standing in a kitchen with the microwave gone, and I moved the conversation along, because the alternative was a conversation I did not want to have at the end of a fourteen-hour day.
PART 8
Most of it is gone.
I want to say that early because people want the part where it comes back and it does not. There is no van full of it and no cheque.
The workshop went in the February. There is a repayment arrangement against Pike that will run until roughly 2041 and that pays me a sum per month that would not cover a weekly shop.
There is a police matter. It is ongoing and it is slow and I am not going to write about it.
My mother is seventy-one. She has not been charged with anything and I do not know yet whether she will be, and I have been asked twice what I want and both times I have not been able to answer.
She has written to me once. It is two pages and it is mostly about Pike, and there is one line about Talise, and the line is she was always fed.
I have read that line perhaps a hundred times.
It is true, in a way. Nobody in that house was starved. There was food in it.
She was fed at the level of a household with no income, in a house receiving between two and three thousand pounds a month, and a seventy-one-year-old woman has decided that this is the same thing as being fed, and she is going to go to her grave holding onto that sentence.
Talise is fifteen.
She lives with me now. She moved in the August and I took a role back in Hallowbridge at about two-thirds of what I was making, and we are fine, and I use that word carefully.
She did four sessions with somebody and then said she did not want to any more, and I did not push, and then in the December she asked to start again and now she goes every other Tuesday.
Her school kept her on that programme for the rest of that year and I let them, on Mrs Boateng’s advice, because she said something to me that I have not been able to improve on.
She said: let her keep the lunch. Take away everything else, but don’t make the first thing you do be taking away her lunch.
Here is the last thing, and it is the reason I have written any of this down.
The fridge has been full since the August. Deliberately full — I over-buy and I know I do it and I have stopped pretending it is about convenience.
And in the March, cleaning her room, I found half a bread roll wrapped in a napkin in the drawer of her desk.
Seven months after she moved in. In a house with a full fridge.
