Twenty-two years. A woman and a baby and a nineteen-year-old gone out of his house, and at twenty to eleven at night the thing that surfaced in that man was the bins.
I think that is the truest forty seconds of audio anybody has of my marriage.
Danika.
She is twenty-seven now.
Everybody expects me to hate that woman and I have been asked about it directly eleven times, mostly by people who want a particular answer.
She was twenty-three when he started on her. He told her he was separated, then divorced, then that it was complicated, in that order, over two years, which is the oldest sequence there is.
She found out in the September of 2024 and her first act — pregnant, twenty-six, in a flat she could not afford on her own — was to go and find a teenager she had never met because she had heard that teenager had been put out of a house.
I have not got it in me to hate her. I have tried, on about four occasions, usually late.
We are not friends. We are two women in a complicated arrangement about a small boy, and we speak most weeks about logistics and never about him.
And in the November, when we had been in the same flat for seven months, she said one thing to me in a kitchen that I have kept.
She said: “He told me you’d stopped looking for her.”
He told her that. In the summer of 2024, while I was ringing hostels, that man told the woman he was seeing that Tess’s mother had given up.
He was running the same story in two directions, to keep two women still, and he nearly got away with it, and the thing that ended it was those two women being in a room together.
Terry.
He has been charged with nothing. There is nothing to charge him with.
That has been the hardest thing for Tess and it took us about six months to get her to a place where she can hold it.
He put a girl of eighteen out of a house with eleven hours’ notice. He lied to two women for two years. He told a child that her mother would be made homeless if she spoke.
None of that is a crime. All of it is just a man.
The divorce is going through. He has seen Jude four times, supervised, by arrangement with Danika’s solicitor.
He has written to Tess once. She has not opened it and it is in a drawer in the flat and she has told me she will open it when she wants to and not before, and I have made myself say nothing about it, which has been one of the harder disciplines of my life.
Tess.
She is twenty.
She did eleven weeks at Bramble House, which was the worst period, and which she has described to me twice and which I have decided not to put in this.
She is at college now doing the thing she was going to do before all of it, two years late.
And in the August she said the thing I had been dreading and waiting for, in a kitchen, not in a serious way at all — she was looking for a charger.
She said: “You know the bit I actually can’t get past?”
And I said no.
And she said: “It’s not that he put me out. It’s that you never asked him where I’d gone.”
And I started to say that I had rung everybody, that I had the call log, that I had been to the police twice.
And she said: “I know. I know all that. But you never asked him. He was right there, Mum. Every night. For a year.”
Which is the exact sentence I had already said to Halla in the February, almost word for word, and I had been hoping very much that my daughter had not got to it on her own.
She had. She got to it in about a fortnight, in 2024, at eighteen, in a room at Bramble House.
And Jude, who is eighteen months old now and who is the only person in this with no view about any of it.
He is enormous and he has his father’s hands, which is a thing I notice about four times a week and have never said out loud to his mother.
He calls me by a name he invented, which is not Nana and is not Averil and which I am not going to write down because it is his.
And the arrangement — which took a mediator and eleven months and which nobody reading this will think is normal — is that I see him most weeks, because Danika asked me to and because Tess wanted it.
I am not his grandmother. I am my husband’s wife and his mother is my husband’s girlfriend and there is no word for what I am to that child.
What I am, in practice, is a woman of forty-eight who does a Tuesday afternoon so that a woman of twenty-seven can do a shift.
I asked Danika in the spring why she wanted it, because I had assumed for months that she was being polite and would stop.
And she said: “Because you’re the only other person who knows exactly what he’s like, and one day Jude’s going to ask, and I’m not doing that on my own.”
