PART 1
Iona was eight when she woke up with a fever.
We took her in that morning. It was a Tuesday and I remember being annoyed about a meeting I was going to miss, and I have never been able to do anything useful with that memory.
Twelve days.
Every test anybody could think of, in two different departments, and at the end of it not one person could tell us what it had been.
My daughter died on the thirteenth of March.
There has never been an answer. There is a phrase on the certificate and it is a phrase, and Dr Adisa told me eight years later that it means nobody knew, and I already knew that.
I never had another child.
After Iona I could not put myself anywhere near it again, and that is a decision I made in about the fourth week and never revisited, and Gethin agreed with it, and we learned to be two people instead of three.
It does not go away. After eight years I had got as far as being able to carry it, which is not the same thing as it going away and which is as far as anybody gets.
That was when I started teaching English at Calderhill High. I had taught before, years earlier, and then I had not for a long time, and then I could again.
And then one morning in the September a new student turned up at my classroom door.
She said: sorry I’m late, I’m Etta.
And while she said it she tucked a curl behind her ear.
I dropped the marker.
The eyes. The small crease at the side of the mouth that is not a dimple and that I have never been able to describe to anybody. Even the thing with the hair — the same hand, the same movement, the same speed.
That is what Iona would have looked like at sixteen.
Not similar. Not a reminder. That.
I cried in the staff toilets at lunch and then washed my face and went to my afternoon classes, and in the car afterwards I said the sensible thing out loud to myself, which is that Etta was not mine.
Iona would have been old enough to remember me. Iona was buried at Wrenfield and I had chosen the stone and I had been to it that January.
There is no version of any of this in which my daughter is alive and I have never once let myself go near that idea, not for a second, and I want that in the record because of what people assume about women in my position.
But I could not stop looking at her, and I have had to be honest about that with a woman in Corliss Street for over a year.
I never put one ounce of it on that girl.
That is the only thing in this whole account that I am certain I did right. She did not know. She never saw my face do anything. I taught her the way I taught the other twenty-eight.
She was funny in a dry way that sixteen-year-olds usually are not. She was careful with the quieter ones. She could not spell and did not care.
And she left book recommendations on my desk — actual books off her own shelf, with a torn corner of paper in the front and one line of handwriting on it.
Within about six weeks I cared about that child a great deal.
I mentioned her at home once, in the October, in the most ordinary possible way — a thing she had said about a poem.
And my husband’s face closed.
He said: please stop. Every time you compare her to Iona I lose our daughter again.
I apologised. I want that noted. I apologised to him, in my own kitchen, and I did not say her name in that house again for four months.
I have thought about that October evening more than almost anything else in this account.
Because I had told him three things about that girl over about six weeks — her first name, that she was new, and that she was in Year Eleven.
Three facts. And a man who had a sixteen-year-old daughter called Etta Brann sat at my kitchen table and said a sentence about grief that made me apologise.
He did not lie to me that evening. He did not say I don’t know who that is. He never said one false sentence about her in four months and I have checked, because I have gone through every conversation I can remember.
What he did was reach for the one thing in the world that would make me stop talking, and it was our dead daughter, and it worked in about four seconds.
Four months. From the October to the February.
Every single week of those four months he knew his daughter was sitting in my classroom, and he let her, and he did nothing at all, and I do not think he had a plan.
I think he postponed it. That is all he has ever done. He postponed it on a Tuesday and then again on the Thursday and then it was Christmas.
