And then, about four seconds later, I remembered the money.
I have worked since I was fifteen years and about four weeks old.
Shelf-stacking, four evenings a week, from six until ten.
Washing up in a pub kitchen on Saturdays and most of Sunday, for a man called Pell who paid me in cash and never once took anything off it.
Three years of weekends. Four hundred-odd shifts.
A little over three thousand dollars, in an account I opened myself at sixteen with a form I filled in at a counter on my own.
That was going to be the thing that kept me alive after June.
“Where’s my money?”
My father did not react at all. Not a flicker, not a pause, not a glance at his wife.
Which told me he had been asked that question in his head about four hundred times already and had the answer ready.
“We used it. Applications, fees, things your brother needed. Call it rent.”
Call it rent.
Eighteen years in that house. Four of those years working. And the first time the word rent was ever said to me in it was the morning they put me out.
I asked him when I was supposed to have agreed to that, and he said: you lived here, didn’t you.
I carried three carrier bags out to my car in four trips, because two of them split.
And I promised myself I would not cry until the door was shut.
I lasted about ten seconds.
Not in the house. In the car, with the door shut, on the drive, about four feet from the kitchen window.
PART 3
