Translation Tools & Resources
That is not being kind. That is being comfortable and
calling it kind.
What I have decided about the three of them.
They were right and they were wrong and both matter.
They were right that a nine-year-old was suffering and that adults were admiring it.
They were wrong about the reason, entirely, and one of them said it about a dead woman in front of her daughter.
And here is the thing I keep coming back to: they had no way of being right about the reason. Nobody did. The reason was a promise in a hospice, filtered through a story from 2006, converted into a number by a man who was not sleeping.
You could not have guessed it. You could only have asked.
And asking would have taken one person, in a kitchen, with a cup of tea, saying can I ask you about her hair, and will you let me get it wrong.
That sentence took
me two years to say and it is eleven words long.
And Roz, who I have to be fair about, because being unfair to her would be the easiest paragraph in this.
She came to my door in the February, four days after the salon, having heard — because it is a village school and there are no secrets — that the hair had gone.
And she said: “I was right, then.”
And I said: about the child, yes. About him, no. And then I told her about the notebook, because she was going to hear a version of it anyway and I would rather she heard the true one.
And Roz stood on my step and went a colour I have not seen on her before, and said: “I said that in front of her. About her mum.”
She wrote him a letter. An actual letter, posted. I know because he
told me, and because he was bewildered by it.
Two sides. She apologised for the way and the place, and then — and this is the bit I did not expect — she did not withdraw the substance. She wrote that she still thought the child had been struggling and that somebody had needed to say so.
Education
And Mattie said: “She’s right. She was right in the corridor and she’s right in the letter. She was just right at me instead of to me.”
