When she’d finished, we sat in silence, watching Jack still talking to the WRVS ladies. They seemed to love his company.

‘It was a big disappointment to me that you married a flatfoot,’ she said finally. It felt like a conciliatory gesture. To emphasise her point, her nose wrinkled as if she smelt something bad. A habit from her time in prison or perhaps her protesting years, holding a banner, yelling: I smell bacon. I thought of my mother, dungaree-wearing even then – I’ve seen the pictures of before I was born – campaigning for CND and Greenpeace. She’s always fought against the machine. She never let any bastard grind her down.

‘Well, I suppose I have to trust your decision that it was the right thing to do,’ she said finally.

I felt a flush of annoyance: it was my marriage to make a decision on, not hers. ‘Trust me, it was the right decision. If we’d stayed together, someone – and not just the dog – was going to die.’

She started as if I’d electric-shocked her. I thought she was going to ask about Winston. She’d never met him as dogs weren’t allowed in prison, but she liked animals and always took an interest. Instead her eyes narrowed and her face flushed and she said: ‘You think this is my fault? All the troubles in your life are my fault?’

I sat back, challenged. I felt like saying: No, no, no, how did we come to this?

But I knew.

I shouldn’t have mentioned death. Or maybe I wanted to. Maybe I wanted to say it so she knew how I felt. Really I was thinking: Yes, your fault, your fault, your fault.

You should’ve left him.

I think it but instead I say carefully: ‘Not yours . . . maybe. Definitely Dad’s.’ The maybe felt like an act of defiance I’d never have felt capable of before. To even include my mother’s actions as being even possibly attributable to the mess and violence of my life, felt dangerous.

We never talked about my father. Never. This was the closest we’d come to talking about the spider’s web of our life. But all this time, he’d sat at the heart of it, dark, poisonous, waiting.

She opened her mouth to say something, but Jack was suddenly there, with a lady from the WRVS who carried the two mugs of tea. He held his packet of Hula Hoops, one hand snaking in and pulling them out. He’d pushed his finger into the pale hoops before biting them off, just as I had as a child, and I wondered if anything ever changed over time. Or if everything would just keep repeating itself through the years, ad nauseam.

If that was the case, where did that leave me and Jack?

Twenty-Four

twenty-four:

– now –

I look at my hands and I am shocked.