I didn’t answer; my unease must have shown on my face.

‘You won’t be doing anything wrong. It’s my watch. Grandad left it to me.’

‘Are you going to sell it?’

He wrinkled his forehead. ‘Sell it? Are you messing around? I love that watch. Since I don’t live at home any more I want to have it with me. That’s all.’

I believed him. I wanted to believe him. Besides, it seemed a reasonable enough explanation.

‘OK. I’ll get it. Do you still live in the same flat?’

‘Yeah.’ He smiled. ‘Bring it whenever.’

So I agreed. And in doing so – although I didn’t know it at the time – I set in course a chain of events that would bring family life crashing down around me – and all of us.

Wednesday, 21 July 2021

Tom

They heard a cry from upstairs and Tom paused.

‘I’ll get her,’ he said. ‘You stay here.’

Alice put her hand on his knee. ‘There’s more?’ she said.

‘A lot more.’

‘And it gets worse?’

He nodded. ‘A lot worse.’

She squeezed his knee, then leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. ‘I’m so sorry you went through all that.’

He shrugged. ‘It is what it is,’ he said, and stood up. ‘I don’t think about it too often. But it does make me – not nervous, exactly, but vigilant – when it comes to Jo. I don’t know what pushed Roland down the path he took – or if anything even did. Maybe it is just who he is, or some chemical imbalance in his brain that drugs helped him with. I don’t know. But I do know I need to do whatever I can to protect Jo from it. I can’t go through that again.’

‘You won’t. We won’t.’

Jo cried again, louder this time, and Tom moved towards the door.

‘I want to know the rest,’ Alice said. ‘What happened next.’

‘I’ll tell you,’ Tom replied. ‘But I have to get Jo.’

‘OK,’ Alice said. ‘I can’t believe you never mentioned any of this.’

‘Well,’ Tom said. ‘I guess we all have our secrets.’

The Baby

Who would choose to have one of these? Who would want a baby?

They do nothing. They give nothing. They just take: money, time, attention. People with babies are no longer themselves. They live for the child. It cries: they come running. It wants something: they provide it.

Wiping up puke and shit and piss.

It’s degrading.

An adult human, reduced to wiping up puke and shit and piss.

Animals don’t do that. Unless their mother protects them, a lion will eat his cubs. They are mere prey to him. He feels nothing for them.

They are food.