I think I know why. If she had told me, I would have had to carry it while she was dying, and she would have spent her last weeks managing my anger instead of being ill.
So she carried it on her own, and put it in a drawer at a solicitor’s office, and left me eight months of an ordinary, calm mother instead.
I did not find out what that cost her until I was twenty-one, reading two pages in my grandmother’s spare room.
What I have had to take.
I believed her.
Not about Nell. About me.
Thirteen months of useless and by the end of it I was checking work I had done properly. I stopped putting my hand up in seminars in the December. I turned down a supervisor shift at the café in the February — more money, which I badly needed — because I genuinely, sincerely believed I would not be able to do it.
Nobody made me turn that down. There was no scene, no threat. I did that on my own, in a staff room, out of a belief that had been installed in me at the rate of about one sentence a day by a woman in a wheelchair.
That is what I have had to take back. Not the house. The house was a legal fact my mother arranged while she was dying.
The other thing was thirteen months of somebody renaming me, and I let her, and I helped.
And there is one more, and it is worse, and it is mine.
I held her head off the concrete for eleven minutes in the rain.
And when she told my father in the hospital that the steps were wet because I had cleaned them wrong, I did not say a single word.
I stood at the end of that bed and let it be said. I had just kept her still and warm on the ground and I could not manage one sentence in my own defence.
That is what thirteen months of it does. It is not that you stop believing you are worth defending. It is that defending yourself stops occurring to you as an option.
What happened after.
I did not throw them out. Everybody expects that part and it is not what happened.
I went to Ada Thorpe on the Monday, with Nell, and I asked what my options were, and then I made a decision I was not sure about for about six weeks.
I gave them six months. In writing. Rent free.
Not out of generosity. Ada Thorpe’s advice was six weeks and she was right legally and I did not take it.
I did it because my mother’s letter says not to punish him, and because I did not want to be able to be told, ever, by anybody, that I had thrown my father out of a house on the day of his wedding.
They left on the ninth of November. They have a rented flat on the other side of Ashmount.
Cassia has not spoken to me since the Lark Rooms and I understand that. I would not speak to me either.
Dad rings about once a fortnight. We talk about the boiler and his car. He has apologised once, in the July, and the apology was, in its entirety: “I should have handled it differently.”
Handled it.
Where things are.
I am twenty-one. I live at Fourteen Wexford Row and Nell has the back bedroom three nights a week and her own flat the rest of the time, which is an arrangement she insisted on and which I have learned not to argue with.
I finished my degree in the June. And I took the supervisor shift, in the September, when it came up again — I have been running the morning side of that café for four months and I have not yet made a mistake that mattered.
And the last thing.
The mug is on the shelf by the kettle. In use. It has tea in it most mornings.
Nell asked me once whether I wanted to put it somewhere safe, and I said no, because a mug in a cupboard is not a mug, it is an exhibit, and we had a house full of exhibits for a year.
But that is not the last thing.
The last thing is that in the December, clearing the back bedroom, I found my father’s copy of the will in that drawer under the boiler guarantee.
And there is a pencil mark on it. On page two, in the margin, next to the clause about remarriage.
A small tick.
He had read it. He had found the sentence. He had put a tick next to it, the way you do when you have understood something.
And then he had put it back in a drawer, and gone downstairs, and got on with the next twenty-two months.
I have kept the will. I have not kept the tick to myself; I have told exactly one person, which is Nell.
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She looked at it for a long time and then she said: “Your mother knew him better than we did.”
And she put the kettle on. And I got the mug down.
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