I flew home to tell my daughter off for wasting the money I’d been sending for five years. I found her at school eating half a bread roll — and then the counsellor told me she’d been registered as a low-income student since the year I left.

Because I had just watched that woman lie on a form, and lie to me for five years, and lie to a child every day for five years — and one member of staff said a boring true thing about a list and she folded in under two seconds.

That is what the whole arrangement was made of.

Not force. Nobody was frightened of her. It was five years of nobody ever saying a boring true thing out loud in front of her, and the moment one person did, in a reception area, it was over in about a second and a half.
PART 4

Now the phone number.

Three digits wrong is a typing error. That is what anybody would say and it is what I said.

It is a live number. I rang it from that car park at about four o’clock and it rang out and then a voicemail came on.