He Rang on the Twenty-Second of December, on the House Phone

The four lines took nine days because she wrote about eleven pages first.

She wrote the version with the explanation of Boxing Day, and burned it, genuinely, in the garden, in a bucket. She wrote the version that said whatever you have been told, and did not burn that one but put it in a drawer and then took it out three days later and read it and was frightened by it. She wrote a version that mentioned Barry and the shed, which she decided was not hers to put in a letter.

What she sent said, roughly, that she had found out that he had been talking to his dad, and that she was glad, and that she was not asking him for anything at all, and that she loved him and would be there whenever, if ever.

And then, at the bottom, because she could not help herself:

The knee is much better.

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He rang on the twenty-second of December.

Not on the shed phone. On the house phone, at ten past seven in the evening, while she was doing the washing up and the radio was on and Barry was in the other room.

She answered with wet hands and said “hello” in her telephone voice.

And Michael said, “Hiya, Mum.”

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She stood in the kitchen for fifty minutes.

She did not sit down. She did not turn the tap off properly for the first ten minutes. At some point Barry came to the doorway, and worked out what was happening, and went away again, and she heard him go upstairs and shut a door, which she thought at the time was to give her privacy and which she later found out was so that she would not hear him.

They talked about nothing at all. That is what she tells people, and it is not a complaint. They talked about Dev’s van, and about a series she had watched, and about his sister’s baby, and about the knee.

Neither of them mentioned Boxing Day. Neither of them mentioned the two years and seven months.

At the end he said, “I’ll ring you after Christmas,” and she said, “All right, love,” and then she stood in the kitchen with the phone in her hand for a while.

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He did ring after Christmas.

It has been two and a half years now. He rings roughly every fortnight, on a Sunday, and it is usually about twenty-five minutes, and about once a month it is much longer.

They came down in the April of the first year, both of them, for one night, and Dev was quiet and said about nine things and all nine of them were funny, which Nell reported to Barry afterwards with a certain amount of satisfaction.

Boxing Day has been discussed exactly once, in a car, with Michael driving, about eighteen months in. It took eleven minutes and it did not fix anything and both of them have said since that they are glad it happened.

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Nell and Barry did four months of counselling, in the second year.

She has mixed feelings about it and has said that the useful part was not the sessions but the drive home. Forty minutes each way, twice a month, in a car, where neither of them could leave the room and neither of them had to look at the other one.

The thing that came out of it, in the end, was not about Michael at all. It was about the fact that Barry had spent thirty years handling things so that Nell would not have to, and had been praised for it by everybody including Nell, and that the shed was simply the largest version of a thing he had been doing since 1994.

“He thought he was protecting me,” she says. “He was. That’s the annoying bit. He was protecting me, and it cost me two years.”

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The phone is not in the shed any more.

It is in the drawer in the hall, with the keys that do not open anything and the batteries and the fuses. It is dead. It has been dead for about two years and nobody has charged it.

Barry offered to get rid of it in the spring of the first year. He was doing a tip run and he stood in the hall holding it and said, “Shall I?”

And Nell said no.

She could not explain why at the time and she cannot entirely explain it now. The nearest she has got is this:

It is the only object in that house that knows exactly how long she was not told.