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.

She said: you were always the one who managed. He’s never been able to stand that.

So a man let his brother’s daughter eat half a bread roll for five years rather than make one telephone call in which he would have had to be the one asking.

And a woman of seventy-one decided that her job was to protect the son who could not ask, from the son who could.

That is the whole machine and it has been running in that family since long before any of this.
PART 5

Now the detail, and this is the one that took me another eleven days and a woman in a records office to find.

The first hardship application at that school is dated the ninth of the March.

I flew out on the twenty-fourth of the May.

Eleven weeks.

Eleven weeks before I left the city, while I was still sleeping in my own house and still saying goodnight to my daughter in person, somebody had already filled in a form at her school saying that her father made no regular financial contribution.