You ate it too.
Which is not an accusation at all, when you look at it. It is a man’s arithmetic in a woman’s mouth.
I gave her the one thing I had, which was the fact that the plan had gone wrong, and I have had to accept that what I actually wanted, in that corridor, was for her to know that I had done it to her.
Renwick is not in that house. There is a process and it is slow and it is not finished, and I am not going to write about it beyond one thing.It did not begin with me.
I did not report anything. Eleven months on, I still have not made a statement about that Sunday to anybody in an official capacity, which surprises people.
It began in a hospital, that night, with a doctor and an eighty-year-old woman and a question about what she had eaten.
She answered it. Straight away, apparently, while her son was still in the corridor.
That is the only thing Nerine has done in this entire account that I have not been able to find a cold explanation for.
He rang eleven times in the first fortnight and then stopped, which I am told is normal and which felt, at the time, like the loudest thing that has ever happened to me.
He wrote to me in the March. Four pages, handwritten, in an envelope that came through a solicitor.
I read the first one.
It is entirely about how tired he was.
Eleven paragraphs, and I only read one page, and on that page the word exhausted appears twice and my name appears once.
He is describing the six months. Not mine. His.I have not read the other three pages and I am not going to, and I have not thrown them away either, which my sister thinks is a mistake.
How hard it was. How he had not slept. How nobody understood the position he had been put in.
A man wrote four pages to the woman whose soup he had been interfering with since the June, and the subject of those pages is how tiring it had been to do it.
I did not confront him at that table and I have not confronted him since, and the thing I actually did — the only genuinely useful thing in this whole account — took forty dollars and eleven days.
