PART 5
But here is the part that is not about money, and it is the part I have had eleven weeks to look at.
That loan was paid off in 2019.
By me. Out of my own account. Every month for ten years, by direct debit, starting at twenty-two years old when I did not have it to spare.
And I never once asked why the balance was that high.
I noticed, obviously. I am not stupid and I am good with numbers.
There were about four separate occasions where I looked at the balance and thought that seems like a lot.
And then closed the app. Four seconds, each time. Four seconds, four times, across ten years.
That is not actionable any more.
It stopped being anything anybody could do something about years ago. I have had that confirmed by a solicitor, in about eleven minutes, for a fee.
There is nothing at the end of this that involves a courtroom and I want anybody reading it to stop hoping for one now.
It is simply ten years of my life.
Paid monthly, by direct debit, between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-two — which are the years I was working two jobs and then raising a daughter on my own and then doing both.
For a blazer in a photograph on a hall wall.
And my brother knew.
Not as a boy.
I want to be fair about that and I have been careful to stay fair about it in eleven weeks of thinking.
He was eleven years old in 2009. Nobody holds anything against an eleven-year-old and I never have.
In 2021. Clearing out our parents’ loft, at thirty-one years old, he found the paperwork in a cupboard in a box.
He has known for four years.
He read it. He put it back in the box. He put the box back in the cupboard.
And he said nothing to me for four years.
Through two Christmases. Through my fortieth. Through the nine days his niece was in a hospital bed, and through the Thursday evening he stood in my living room about a gym membership.
And he did ask about it.
That is the only thing in the whole of this that genuinely surprised me, and it is the reason he is still on my step at all.
He went downstairs with the papers still in his hand and he asked our father directly.
