Then the dates.
The first solicitor’s letter in that file is dated the eleventh of the previous May.
My first symptom was in the first week of the June.
I can date it exactly because it was at my niece’s engagement party and I had to sit down in a car park.
Three weeks.
Read that again, because I had to.
The plan came first. The symptoms were manufactured to fit a document that already existed.
Every episode I had spent six months apologising for was an item being generated for a file.
And his mother was not surprised by anything that happened at that table.
She did not go pale because of the soup.She went pale because she knew exactly what she had just swallowed.
She handed him that packet in her own kitchen, forty minutes earlier, standing by a window, and she has since confirmed that in a room with two people whose job it was to write it down.
And she had done it before. That is in her account too.
Not every Sunday. She was specific about that and she was specific about it more than once, as though it mattered, and to her it clearly did.
Not every Sunday. Some of them.
As though there were a limit, and she had set it, and observing it made her something other than what she was.
I have gone through a diary and worked out which ones, roughly, from the Mondays.
There were eleven bad Mondays between the June and the February.
Eleven Sundays at that table. Eleven Mondays where I could not hold a thought and rang in late twice and cancelled a lunch.
And then Tuesdays were fine. Every single time. Tuesdays were fine, and in six months I never once put those two days next to each other on a calendar.
And she did not collapse from it.She had a panic attack, which a doctor established within about two hours in a hospital that night.
A seventy-nine-year-old woman sitting in the middle of her own family, working out that she had just eaten the thing she had spent six months helping to hand to somebody else.
PART 5
Now my part, and there is no honest version of this without it.
I had four minutes.
Four minutes between putting my hand on that doorframe and sitting down at that table.
I could have knocked the bowl over. It would have taken one movement and a sleeve and nobody would have questioned it for a second.
