I wrote to his mother’s house at Thornedge, where he was living.
Two pages. The scan photograph at twelve weeks, with four of them on it and the sonographer’s annotation down the side, because by then we knew.
And one line at the bottom asking him to ring me. Any time. Reverse the charges.
That letter arrived. She has never pretended otherwise. She took it out of the hall, read it, and put it in a drawer.
Not for a week. For eight and a half years.
And when I asked her why — on Christmas Day, in that front room, with four children in the kitchen with a tin
of chocolates and a woman in a red dress who had gone very quiet — she said it in about eleven words and she did not cry.
She said: “He was twenty-nine and he was coming apart. I bought him a year.”
A year.
She bought her son a year, in the April of 2017, and then she did not give him the letter in the April of 2018 either, or in 2019, and at some point a thing you are going to do next year becomes a thing you have done.
