She said: Don’t worry, I’d do it again.
And I have not replied to that message.
Fifteen months.
Because there is a reply, and it has to start with the fact that I had eleven weeks in which I could have handled it quietly and did not, and that the longer it ran the more people there were in it.
And I have not been able to type that out to a woman who lost her job over it.
The photograph.
There is one and I have never put it anywhere.
I took it in that terminal, at about twenty past eleven in the morning, from where I was standing, before I put my hand up.
His arm round her waist, and her case, and the pair of them laughing.
And the thing I have told about four people is that I got it on instinct and I do not know why I did it.
I had my phone out of my bag before he was through those doors.
That is what I was doing when I say I was waiting. Not holding two babies and watching for a man. One of them was in a sling and I had my phone in my hand.
And the ship was fifty minutes late, and I stood there for fifty minutes with that phone in my hand.
And the ten seconds after she took Opal off me, which I have never described.
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He said “Mum” and then nothing happened for a while.
And in those seconds there was a thing available to me that I did not take.
I could have stopped.
His mother had Opal. He had gone the colour he goes. Jana was already half a step back with her case. The whole of it had landed and it had landed completely.
And what I did was say one more thing.
I will not put the whole sentence down. It was about four seconds long and it was about what sort of man his mother had raised, and it was said to him in front of her.
And it was the only part of that morning I had not planned.
Everything else — the tickets, the pillar, the line about the daughters — I had worked out over three weeks.
That sentence came out of me in a terminal with a baby on my chest and it was for me.
