In the end, most stories are quite simple, when you look at them from a distance. They tried to get her to have an abortion; she refused. In the end it didn’t matter; she had a miscarriage anyway. Heroin use and pregnancy don’t mix that well. I talked to Mum about it: It’s a mercy, she said. Poor girl, but it’s a mercy. They tried to get her off drugs – I think they’d given up on Roland – but they failed. She was on a slippery slope, and she stayed on it. I doubt the miscarriage helped; junkies tend to find it harder to kick the habit when they need what it offers more than ever.

And that was it, really. Chrissy died a year or so later. Overdosed. Another statistic; another life thrown away.

Dad saw Roland one more time, Mum told me later. The evening he heard Chrissy had died he went out. When he came back his right hand was wrapped in a piece of cloth. I went home the next day and his knuckles were red and swollen.

Mo never spoke to Dad again. Like I said, we need someone to blame, and she blamed him. We went to Mo’s funeral, a few years later. It was the only time I’d ever seen Dad cry.

Wednesday, 18 August 2021

Tom

Telling the story had brought it all back, but in telling Alice what had happened, he had remembered something else.

He had remembered the feeling that everything he had thought his life was made of, everything he had thought his family was, was falling apart around him. On the Sunday evening after Chrissy’s funeral he had sat in his flat getting ready to go to work the following Monday, and he had realized that his colleagues would see this bright, professional, committed person and have no idea what was happening in his life.

His wayward but charming brother was a wreck, his dad and his aunt were no longer speaking, his mum was withdrawn and nervy, and his cousin – brilliant, beautiful Chrissy, who had had the whole word at her feet – was dead.

It was not a feeling he ever intended to experience again.

‘So,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m a bit tentative about allowing Roland back into my life.’

‘I can see that,’ Alice said. ‘And why you might think he could have hurt Joanna, accidentally or otherwise.’

‘But if Dad wants it’ – he shrugged – ‘I suppose I can go along with it.’

‘You don’t have to.’