To tell it properly, I’m going to need to relate this next part using events I haven’t seen and people’s perspectives I can only guess at. I’m going to tell you these things as truths. Even if I have to rebuild the colour of people’s coats or their small talk about the weather (I remember the weather, actually, so I don’t need to fictionalise that: it was a baking summer day), it’s a worthwhile compromise. My version of events won’t be nearly as useful, not least because of patchy childhood memories, but also because I was geographically limited on the day. And I fear that if I just tell my side, you’ll be too quick to judge my mother.

So: the Day. It’s an important day. There is a death. It is the day my mother shot somebody. It’s the day she got the scar above her right eye. The day she earned her Cunningham stripes, so to speak.

It’s months after Dad died. But you wouldn’t know it.

My mother does not take shit. Not from her children, not from the universe. I mentioned before that I measured my father by the spaces he left. Now he’d left the largest one yet, but we didn’t have time to notice. Our mother sought to keep us busy: our extracurriculars tripled as if we were applying to Harvard. Any gap in the schedule was closed. I once got a haircut two days in a row.

We had to join sport teams (in which there was more frolicking with various implements than actual sport, given our ages) as if we were potential prodigies. I swam. Jeremy played tennis. Michael settled on piano instead of sport (and now he’s the one with shoulders). All three of us would go to the others’ practices: sit on the umpire’s chair, doodle on the blackboard, dangle our feet in the pool. We moved around town together, eight-armed. This served the dual purpose of saving on babysitting and keeping us busy. Mum was trying to force us to feel normal. We didn’t talk about Dad, we never stopped to acknowledge that life might be different, we just powered on. Few friends dared drop by with a casserole or a lasagne after the first attempts were fed to the cat. A boy in my class, Nathan, had had a few weeks off school when his dad died of cancer. I brought it up once and had to join Joey Scouts.