He had been young, too young to lose a tooth. He fell up the staircase and it came loose on the hardwood. There was so much blood my knees felt weak. I remember how he held it in his hand. He thought it was bone, some integral part of him, and he pleaded with me to take him to a doctor.

I tried to comfort him.

‘It had to come out eventually, to make room for your adult teeth,’ I told him, and he nodded his head, but I could tell that he was lost in his anxiety. I could see it in his eyes, because they were Simone’s eyes.

Eventually she came home and scooped him into her arms. She kissed his cheeks, still fat from early childhood, and told him all about the tooth fairy. Then the two of them went upstairs to place the white sliver beneath his pillow. I stood in the kitchen and heard the birdsong of their conversation, voices distant and muffled.

I remember how much it frustrated me that I could never soothe him the way that she could. I approached his problems with a cold logic, an efficiency that always seemed lost on him. It led often to frustration on my part and created a distance between us that I could feel growing. A hardening of our relationship.

I watched later from the doorway as Simone lifted the pillow beneath him and swapped the tooth for a coin. A token of youth.

I can still see the shape of her body in the dim light of that night. She seemed almost to float, like she was made of air. She asked me in the hallway what I thought we should do with it. It felt wrong to throw it away. But did we really want to keep it?

I can’t remember what we did with it, in the end.

Maybe she bought a little ceremonial box and kept it as a trinket.

Maybe we flushed it like a dead goldfish.

Or maybe I walked it into the woodland behind the house and covered it with a shallow mound of dirt.

The horrible truth of the past is that our memories are organic. They ripen and sour. They transform with each recollection. I remember the beginning of his life and the end of it. The two moments coalesce to inhabit the same space in my mind, and in that way my memory of him is stained, and by extension so too is his life.

I begin to think that perhaps that is all a person really is: a practiced story, a performance refined with each retelling.

When I open my eyes Simone turns to the therapist and says, ‘I believe there are parts of yourself that you give away temporarily, that can return to you, and there are parts that you must forfeit in perpetuity. There are places a person can go that they simply cannot return from.’

XXII

In the silence of our bedroom my history reduces to the rooms I remember most clearly throughout my life. They come together to form a house I don’t recognise. An uncertain geography.