He is forty-six. He built everything he has out of haulage companies and he had been in that bed for nearly two months, unable to speak or move a muscle.
Nine lorries in 2004. Four hundred and something people now. There is a framed thing in the downstairs hallway about it.
His nephew had already been discussing the funeral in the tone other people use for booking a restaurant. Flowers. Numbers. Whether the church was too far out.
I work as a live-in carer because I need the wage, and because no other job I have found lets me keep my son with me.
That is not a complaint and it is not a tragedy. It is a fact that arranges my entire life and that decided every single thing I did in that house.
The room we had was the small one at the end of the staff corridor, above the kitchen, so it was warm.
There was a bed and a chair and a chest of drawers, and I had put his travel cot between the bed and the window because that was the only place it fitted.
Two hundred and twenty a week and the room. That is the arrangement. It is legal and it is normal in that line of work and it means that the person who notices things in that house is also the person who lives in it on a week’s notice.
That night I sat down next to him just to rest my arms.
Theodric was still crying. So without really thinking about it, I laid him on the sick man’s chest for a few seconds.
