‘There are plenty.’

So I started, walking the yard, searching for weeds, hitting the few he’d missed the fortnight before. Then I saw the jumpers again. ‘Seventeen of them,’ I said.

‘It’s none of your business,’ Mum said, noticing them.

I kept working. Pop said, ‘It’s very strange.’ He took out a smoke and lit it.

‘People cope differently,’ Mum said.

‘With what?’ I asked.

‘It’s none of our business.’

‘It is if she’s gonna hang them out,’ Pop said. He stood, approached his roses and started plucking spent flowers.

‘If it helps her,’ Mum said, ‘then good. If I’d had to go through that.’

‘What?’ I asked, giving up on the weeds.

‘None of your business.’

Pop said, ‘Cosa the kiddy she gave up.’

‘Dad!’

‘It’s no bloody secret. He’s not stupid, are you, Clem?’

‘She wouldn’t want people knowing.’

‘Rubbish. She told you. She knew you’d blabber.’

I sat down, and worked on Mum. ‘Told you what?’

She fought to keep it in, but couldn’t. ‘She had a bubba and gave it up for adoption.’

‘Why?’

‘She told me once, but …’

We waited. Pop sat and said, ‘She’s not quite right in the head.’

‘No one is,’ Mum said.

‘Don’t see me hanging seventeen jumpers on a line.’

Mum glared at him. ‘If she knew I went around telling people …’

‘I’m not people,’ I said.

‘She was only young. Back then things were different, weren’t they, Dad? Her mum, who was Catholic, and terribly decent, said, You’re not having … an abortion.’

‘I know what an abortion is.’

‘Well, this mother made her have it and give it up for adoption.’

‘Did she want to keep it?’ I asked.

‘She told me she did, but this mother, she was worried about her Catholic mates.’

‘Fuckin’ Catholics,’ Pop growled.

‘She had to do what this woman said. No job, no money, no prospects.’

‘Any normal person would’ve let her keep it,’ Pop said. ‘That’s the human thing to do.’

‘Catholics aren’t human?’

‘No. What about when Wilf …?’ He stopped.

Wilf. I’d suspected. Mum waited, unsure, but decided the story was the best contraceptive. ‘The nuns took the boy and gave him to a family, and that was that.’

Pop said, ‘Family’s gotta stick together no matter what happens. But that evil woman … It’s always the religious ones.’

Mum slapped his knee. ‘Wendy’s never got over it. And then to have married him. You gotta feel sorry for the woman.’

As I did. Plenty of them in Lanark Avenue.

‘But the jumpers?’ I asked.

‘It’s her way,’ Mum said. ‘Every year she knits one for him. The size she reckons he might be. Once I asked her why she did it and she said if he ever comes back he’ll know she never forgot him, or stopped loving him.’

‘Not much chance he’d come back.’