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.

It is my brother’s.

Pike is four years older than me. He has a workshop out on Vane Road that he has had since 2011 and that has been going under since 2019.

And that is where five years went.

Not into that house. My mother has not been living well and I want that understood, because it is the thing that made the whole arrangement so hard to see from the outside.

She has the same three-piece suite she had when I was at school. Her car is a 2013 and it does not always start. She has not been on a holiday since my father passed.

She was moving it on within about a week of every transfer. Five years.

Some of it went into that workshop as cash and some of it went against a debt Pike took on in 2019 that I knew nothing about and that I am still finding the edges of.