I carried on paying all those small things for years.
The subscriptions. The card. The membership. Four or five others I did not even remember until I went looking.
I called it easier than cancelling.
I have said that sentence out loud to two separate friends, in exactly those words, and both of them nodded, because it is an extremely good sentence.
It is cheap, it is modest, it makes you sound mildly put-upon and essentially decent, and it ends the conversation. I recommend it to nobody.
What it actually was is this.
As long as they needed me, they rang.
And I would rather be rung about a credit card than not be rung at all.
That is it. That is the whole of it and it took me forty years and a hospital corridor to be able to write it down.
That is the whole architecture of forty years in that family, and I built half of it myself.
I was not simply being used. That is the comfortable version and I held it for about four weeks.
I was running a subscription of my own. Monthly. For contact. And I was getting exactly what I paid for.
And the thing about that arrangement is that it works. It delivered exactly what I was buying. They rang me perhaps forty times a year, about money, and I was in the family.
And then Wrenna was in theatre for thirteen hours and nobody rang at all.
Not because they are monsters. I have stopped needing them to be monsters; it took about six weeks.
Because on that particular day there was nothing to buy. There was only something to give, and that is a different shop, and none of them has ever been in it.
It has been eleven weeks.
I did not take anybody to court.
There is nothing to take and there never was going to be. That was explained to me by a solicitor in about eleven minutes, kindly, with a cup of tea I did not drink.
I paid him for the eleven minutes and I do not regret the money, because what I was actually buying was somebody qualified telling me that I was not mad.
What I did was put an envelope through my parents’ door on a Tuesday morning at about eleven o’clock.
I did not knock. I drove there, I parked four houses down, I walked up, and I posted it.
