Uncertainty cut Gordon through his centre, like a spike hammered through the crown of his head into the base of his spine. Had he invented his entire memory of his big brother hauling him up the cliff? Had he invented himself kicking Owen? Amid the horror and shame and panic, had he buried another story, the story that others might have believed, the story that Kelly herself and, for all he knew, his parents, had poured into the lie-shaped mould that he and Sam had left vacant? Had Owen fallen backwards on purpose? Had his last face been a smile of relief?

‘Mum, do you know if Tony Eastaugh ever interfered with Owen?’

‘Why on earth would you ask me that?’

‘Did he?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘No he didn’t, or no you don’t know?’

‘That man—whatever we think of him, whatever we wondered, we just couldn’t afford to think about things like that.’

‘He perved on kids at the surf club.’

‘That isn’t the same as … other things,’ Norma said. ‘There were whispers, of course, but in those days you just steered clear of it and got on with your life. What was to be gained?’ Norma chewed on her lip. ‘Owen was a terrible accident, nothing to do with all that.’

Gordon knew, at this point, that he would not tell his mother what he had come to tell her. He would not reanimate the dead. Owen was gone. It was an accident. There were no witnesses to Gordon’s state of mind, only one to his action, and it was all so deeply buried that it might as well be a fable. Telling her now what he still remembered, or thought he remembered, would be the worst kind of cruelty. As Ben had said, it would be a secret doubled.

Instead: a kindness for a kindness, a lie for a lie.

The consequence of that fiction—the promise Gordon and Sam made to each other—might have tied a knot that only tightened with each pulling year, but when Gordon observed the faraway smile on his mother’s face, he could see that through keeping his secret, he had kept Owen alive for her. She had never managed to close off the past; the lie, the doubt, the story about the accident, had left open a space in which Norma and Owen still spoke to each other. Forty-two years had not been wasted.

‘There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it was an accident,’ Norma repeated with finality.

By lying to himself, too, Gordon had kept Owen, or the chance of Owen, alive. Fucking let him go.

‘All the same, I can only speak for myself,’ Norma said. ‘Your father might have his own ideas.’

Gordon’s courage to speak failed him, again. Maybe all that failure of courage had been the victory of something else. Hard for him to call it love, but what else could it be?