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.

I had a child on a screen standing in a kitchen with the microwave gone, and I moved the conversation along, because the alternative was a conversation I did not want to have at the end of a fourteen-hour day.
PART 8

Most of it is gone.

I want to say that early because people want the part where it comes back and it does not. There is no van full of it and no cheque.

The workshop went in the February. There is a repayment arrangement against Pike that will run until roughly 2041 and that pays me a sum per month that would not cover a weekly shop.

There is a police matter. It is ongoing and it is slow and I am not going to write about it.

My mother is seventy-one. She has not been charged with anything and I do not know yet whether she will be, and I have been asked twice what I want and both times I have not been able to answer.