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 the load-bearing line. That is what it actually is.

It is the sentence that made a man two thousand miles away feel like he was doing the responsible thing, and it was written by somebody who needed him two thousand miles away, and it worked perfectly, for five years, and it cost about eleven words.
PART 6

I went to see him on the Thursday.

I am not going to write down what was said in that workshop because most of it was mine and none of it was useful.

What I will put down is the only part of it that mattered, and it came at the end, when he had stopped defending himself and had sat down on a stack of pallets.

I asked him whether he had known, in the March, what he was doing.

And my brother said: not the way you mean.

Then he said: I needed eight months.