PART 1 — THE BONNET
My father went when I was three. After that it was my mother and me for fourteen years.
Money was the thing we talked about constantly without ever once saying the word. Which bill could wait. What we did not need this month. Whether the car would get through another MOT.
Mum met Bevan when I was sixteen.
He already had Otto, who is eleven, and Mabel, who is nine, every other weekend. So a house that had been two people became five.
It did not get easier when Bevan arrived. It got more expensive.
And not once in eighteen months did that man make me feel like the extra one.
He came to every single game, including the season I was on the bench for eleven of them.
He sat opposite me at the kitchen table doing chemistry he understood no better than I did, and one night at about eleven I shoved the book away and said I was dropping it.
