She pointed at him.
“I know him.”
“What did you say, love?”
She looked round at me.
“He told me not to forget him.”
And Pete came through with a tea towel in his hand and the two of us stood there and looked at each other.
“How do you know him, sweetheart?”
And she said, in the flat way six-year-olds say things that take your legs off:
“He got me out of the car.”
What we did with that for four days.
Nothing sensible.
I want to be honest about the four days, because the version people prefer is that we sat down and gently and lovingly got to the bottom of it, and what actually happened is that I did not sleep and Pete went out to the shed at eleven at night and came back at one.
Because a six-year-old cannot say a thing like that in your front room and have it mean nothing, and the only two explanations available to me on that first night were both unbearable.
