I felt enormous.
That is the word and I am not going to find a better word for it by being careful about it.
Sitting in a nine-year-old car. In a supermarket car park. In an old jumper, with a baby in the back who needed a feed in about forty minutes and a card in my purse that did not work.
And I felt the size of a building. For about eleven seconds I was the largest thing in that county, and I knew it, and I would be lying if I said I did not enjoy it.
That evening Garrick came into the kitchen like a man who had finally got hold of something.
He had been downstairs about an hour. He came up at nine, and he was pleased, and he tapped one finger on my nose.
He has never done that. Not once in six years. It is not a thing that man does and it is not a thing anybody in his family does.
He had got it from somewhere — from a film, or from an idea of what a man in charge looks like — and he had practised it downstairs, and he did it to a woman he had told to walk out of a shop four hours earlier.
And then he explained the arrangement he had made for me.
He said: from now on I handle the allocations. You get five hundred a month. If Juno needs a clinic visit, send me the invoice and I'll look at it.
I'll look at it.
Four words about a clinic invoice for an eight-month-old. He had that one rehearsed too.
And I smiled at him and I said: thank you, Garrick.
I have thought about that smile more than about anything else in this entire account.
It was not submission and it was not even really hatred. It was the face of somebody who already has the answer sheet watching a man read out a question, and he could not see it, and I knew he could not see it, and that was the pleasure of it.
He took that completely. He was satisfied by it. He went back downstairs with his shoulders down for the first time in about four months and I heard the basement door click.
And I opened the laptop.
The portal was still up. The trust had been released at 4:51 that afternoon.
