They mention their thirty-nine-year marriage but neglect that only two of those years were happy. The father doesn’t mention his lack of relationship with the boy or that he found him to be ‘a bit of a weirdo’. The mother doesn’t speak up about her worry concerning the dead boy’s probable sexual deviance but she does help to explain the blue ink all over his body, telling them about the explosion on the bed sheet.

The last thing they want to do is attach strange sexual practices to their son and a cult.

So they lie. To protect his memory. To keep themselves safe.

Ungrateful’s father is far more benevolent with the personal information. He tells the authorities that she has found it tough to move on after her mother died. That she has run up a considerable amount of debt trying to find out who she is without a mother.

And that’s the part the police dig their teeth into. The money. It makes people so desperate. And desperate people do stupid things like rob a bank or jump off a bridge.

You can tell the parents that care the most, that find it toughest to deal with, because they continue to talk about their dead child like they are still here; in the present tense. Poet’s father is more of a past-tense guy.

For those looking on like they are watching their favourite soap opera, it’s the Lovers who garner the most empathy but also the most vitriol.

That poor grandmother, having to bury her own child and take care of those two little boys.

How could they do this to her?

How could they just leave their kids like that?

Something must have been seriously wrong for them to take that way out.

And that poor grandmother doesn’t want to say anything bad about her own son or her daughter-in-law. She doesn’t know for sure that they were struggling, but she had an idea, some intuition. But never did she think it was this bad.

And all their friends are shocked. The Lovers were looked at as paragons of love and commitment. The couples they hung out with all wanted to be like the Lovers; they looked up to them.

Someone says, ‘I guess you never really know what goes on behind closed doors.’ And while it’s with great sadness that they have to deal with the loss of their friends, and they feel terrible for those innocent boys left behind, somewhere within all of them, there is a happiness, a smugness, that the Lovers weren’t perfect and their own lives aren’t as shit as they once thought.