Then when Cai — who has my father’s exact build and Dominic’s exact face, and there is nothing anybody can do about that — turned round at the front of the stage and looked for me in the audience and grinned.
And I have been asked by four different people whether it was satisfying.
It was, for about eleven seconds, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
And then it stopped being, because a man two rows in front of me leaned over to his wife and said, “Who are they?” — and I realised that every single person in that hall had a better claim to ask that question than the man it was actually about.
The thirteen years, in the order they happened.
He left on the ninth of March, 2012. The boys were three years and one week old.
He did not leave for Seren, incidentally, whatever the version in Halbrook says. He left in the March and she came in about the December, and I have never blamed that woman for the marriage and I am not starting now.
He saw them four times in 2012 and twice in 2013. The last of those was a Saturday in the November at a soft play in Halbrook, and he was forty minutes late, and he took a work call for eleven minutes of the hour he was there.
Nothing in 2014. Nothing in 2015. A card each in 2016, posted late, with twenty pounds in each.
Then the letter in 2018, which I will come back to.
And nothing at all after that until a foyer in 2025.
What I was doing in the same period: the depot four days a week, and the shop on Saturdays from 2015, and a flat over a launderette in Gatley Bank until 2019, when I got the house.
My mother did Wednesdays until she died in 2021. After that it was a woman called Ivy two doors down, who took two eleven-year-olds in after school for four years and would not take a penny for three of them.
I am putting that in because the medals are the part everybody wants, and the medals were not built in that auditorium.
They were built by a woman two doors down, and a grandmother on Wednesdays, and about eleven hundred evenings at a kitchen table where somebody checked the homework.
What I did not know.
Here is the part that turned that weekend into something entirely different from the story people tell about it.
At about half six, in the car park, Rafe Farrow came over to my sons.
Thirteen years old, blazer, extremely nervous, and he said — and Cai has repeated this to me three times because I kept asking — “Are you allowed to talk to me?”
And Idris said: “Yeah. Obviously.”
They had known about each other for two weeks.
Not because of me. Not because of him.
Because all three of them are on the Northern Quiz League, which is an online thing that runs from September to May, where you are assigned to a squad by ranking and everybody uses a handle.
Idris and Cai have been on a squad with a boy called rafe_f_07 since the September of 2024. Thirty-odd Thursday evenings. My sons have been coaching a thirteen-year-old through algebra on a headset since the autumn, and calling him mate, and taking the mick out of his spelling.
And in the April the Merrow Prize published the finals rosters — real names, schools, the lot — and three boys sat in three different rooms and worked out what they were looking at.
And they did what teenagers do, which is that they said nothing to a single adult for two weeks and dealt with it in a group chat.
What the boys had decided.
They had a plan. They had a plan and it involved not telling me, which I have had to be reasonable about.
