enough of listening to us.
And the first year, which he described to me at that kitchen table and which I had never once imagined.
Education
She died on the ninth of March. Pia’s hair was past her shoulder blades by then, because Carys had stopped trimming it in the November.
And a man who had done a plait four times in his life, under instruction, in a hospice, was left with a three-year-old and a notebook.
He said the first six weeks were the worst thing he has ever done. Not the funeral. The mornings.
A three-year-old who would not sit still, who screamed when it pulled, who wanted her mother, and a man crying so hard behind her that he could not see the sections.
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And he could not stop, and he could not get it wrong, because it was the last instruction he had.
He got the two
French plaits right — properly right, both sides even — in the June.
Three months.
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And he told me that when he finished them he took a photograph of the back of her head and then sat on the bathroom floor, and that he has never deleted that photograph and he has never shown it to anybody.
“That was the only thing I got right that year,” he said. “The whole year. One plait.”
What happened after the concert.
Nothing, for about three weeks. That is the part I am least proud of.
Everybody went into the hall and watched forty children sing, and afterwards everybody was very careful and very bright with him in the car park, and then we all went home and talked about it to our husbands.
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And in the corridor at drop-off it got worse, not better, because now there was a phrase. He cries when he
brushes it. You could hear it going round.
Two of the three mothers were embarrassed. The third one, Roz, was not, and said in front of four people that she had been proved right, which is a particular kind of person and there is one in every school.
And me? I said nothing at all. Again. For the fourth time in two years.
Education
What I did in the January.
Our girls are friendly. That is the only reason I had a door at all.
