And the reason is not that I did not trust him. I need to be exact about that because it is the easy answer and it is wrong.
The reason is 1999.
My mother is Delphine Tallow and she is sixty-nine.
In 1994 she put my stepfather on the deeds of the house she had bought on her own in 1988, because they had been married two years and because he said something reasonable to her on a Sunday morning in a kitchen.
In 1999 that marriage ended, and the way it ended is not mine to write about, and the house went.
I was twelve.
I remember the afternoon in the March of 2000.
We were in her Fiesta on Ardwell Road, parked about four doors up on the opposite side, and we had been there about twenty minutes.
I had asked to go. That is a thing I have never told her. It was my idea; I said I wanted to see it, and she said no twice, and then on the third time she picked her keys up off the hall table without saying anything and we went.
There was a skip outside. There was a man on a ladder doing something to the guttering.
And at some point while we sat there, a woman came into the front upstairs window — my window — with an armful of curtain, and got up on something, and started putting it up.
Pale yellow. I remember the colour of somebody else's curtains from twenty-six years ago.
My mother did not cry. She sat with both hands on the wheel at ten and two, the way she drives, as though we were waiting at a junction.
And after a while she said one sentence to me, which I have never repeated to anybody and am not going to put here, and then she started the engine and drove us to her sister's in Brannock and we had fish and chips out of the paper on our knees.
I was twelve years and four months old.
The solicitor in 2021 was a woman called Odile Rennie on Carrow Street, and I booked that appointment myself, on a Tuesday, with no prompting from anybody.
I want that in, because the version where I was always refusing is not true.
I went in and I told her what I wanted and she drew it up, and it came in the post eleven days later with two little tabs on it where the signatures go, and a covering letter saying I could pop in any time or use my own witness.
