He Told Her Everything, Badly, and Out of Order

They sat in the kitchen until it got dark, and neither of them put the light on, which Nell noticed at about half past seven and decided not to do anything about.

He told her the things she had not had for two and a half years, and he told them badly and out of order, because he had been carrying them alone and had never had to put them in a sequence for anybody.

---

That Michael had been unwell. That was the first thing, and he led with it because he knew it was the one she would want first, and Nell had to make him stop and go back twice.

Not immediately after Boxing Day. About four months after. Badly enough that there was a period of some weeks that Barry described in very few words and about which Nell has never asked for more detail, because she decided that afternoon that she would take the version Michael wanted her to have, whenever he wanted to give it to her.

That he was better. That had been eighteen months ago now, and it had been a slow proper recovery rather than a sudden one, and there was a doctor and there was medication and there had been a course of something with a name Barry could not remember.

---

That there was somebody called Dev.

A sound engineer, thirty-six, from Bradford. They had been together about three years, which meant — Nell did the sum in the dark — since before Boxing Day.

That Barry had met him. Twice.

In a Wetherspoons near the station in Leeds, on days that Barry had told Nell he was at the cricket.

---

“Twice,” said Nell.

“Twice.”

“What’s he like?”

Barry took a moment.

“He’s quiet,” he said. “He’s — he doesn’t fill in. You know how some people fill in? He doesn’t. He let Michael do the talking both times and he only said about six things and all six of them were funny.”

Nell put her hand over her mouth and kept it there for a bit.

“That’s good,” she said, when she could. “That’s — that’s good, isn’t it.”

“I thought so,” said Barry.

---

Then the thing that broke it open.

“He asks about you,” Barry said. “Every single time. Every call.”

“What does he ask?”

“Whether you’re well. What you’ve been doing.” He stopped. “He asked me at Easter whether you’d had the knee done.”

“I had the knee done in March.”

“I know,” said Barry. “I told him about the knee.”

---

Nell sat in the dark kitchen and understood that for two years there had been a running account of her life going up the M1 in twenty-minute instalments, and that her son had known about her knee, and that she had known nothing at all.

“He’s never asked you to pass on a message,” she said. “Has he.”

“No.”

“Not once.”

“Not once,” said Barry. He had his hands flat on the table. “And that’s not nothing, Nell. That’s not him being cruel. If he sends a message, he has to hear what comes back, and he’s not — ”

“He’s not ready. You said.”

“He’s not ready.”

---

She was angry for a long time after that afternoon.

Not in the way people imagine. There was no shouting. Nothing got thrown and nothing got said that could not be unsaid, which she is glad about and which she attributes entirely to the fact that they had spent four hours in the dark first.

It was colder than that, and more administrative. She moved into the back bedroom for five weeks. She stopped doing his washing separately, which sounds petty and which was, she says, the single most effective thing she did.

---

She told her sister, who was magnificent and furious on her behalf for about three weeks.

And then, at the end of those three weeks, on the phone, her sister said carefully: “Can I say a thing you won’t like?”

“Go on.”

“He’s been on his own with that for two years,” she said. “Whatever else he’s done. He’s been sat in a shed on his own with it, in the cold, so that his son would keep ringing.”

---

Nell had considered it.

That was the problem. She had considered it from about day four, and considering it did not make it hurt less. It just made it harder to be cleanly angry, which she would have very much preferred.

“You can’t stay furious with somebody,” she says, “once you’ve worked out what they were doing it for. You can stay hurt. Hurt’s fine. Hurt lasts. But the fury goes, and you miss it, because the fury was the bit holding you up.”

---

She wrote to Michael in November.

A letter, posted, because a letter can be put down and picked up again later, and because it does not require an answer on the spot.

It was four lines long.

It took her nine days.