The plan was: Rafe would not say anything to his parents before the finals, because his mother had told him in the February that his father had “two older sons who don’t want anything to do with him”.
That is what Seren Farrow believed. I am fairly sure she still believed it in that foyer.
And Rafe — thirteen, in a blazer, in a car park — said to my sons: “Is that true? Did you not want to?”
And Cai said no.
And Rafe said: “Right.” And then he said: “I thought so, because you’re not like that.”
Thirty Thursdays on a headset were enough for a thirteen-year-old to know that the version of my sons he had been given at home was not real.
And the two weeks before the finals, which I have since had described to me by all three boys and which I would pay money to have watched.
The rosters went up on a Tuesday in the April. Real names, schools, ages.
Cai saw it first, at about eleven at night, and did not say anything to his brother until the morning, which for those two is an extraordinary act of restraint.
And what they did — and I want this on the record, because everybody assumes teenagers handle these things badly — is that they did nothing for four days.
Then they wrote to Rafe. Not on the squad chat, where the others would see. A direct message, from Idris’s account, and they drafted it together, and Cai has shown me the drafts because he keeps everything.
There are eleven versions of that message.
Version one is four paragraphs and begins We think we might be related to you, which Idris says he read back and decided sounded like a scam about an inheritance.
Version eleven, the one they sent, is two lines.
***Mate — is your dad Dominic Farrow? Don’t panic. We think we’ve got the same one. No stress either way.***
Two sixteen-year-olds spent four days and eleven drafts making sure a thirteen-year-old would not be frightened by it.
And he replied in about ninety seconds with one word, which was yeah, and then nothing for two hours, and then: are you the ones who don’t want to see him?
Seren.
She rang me on the fourth of June, about three weeks later.
I nearly did not take it. I am glad I did, and I am not going to make her into a villain, because the evidence does not support it.
She met Dominic in 2011 and she has been with him since 2012, and she knew there had been a first marriage and two children.
What she was told, and what she has been told consistently for thirteen years, is that I refused contact, that I had turned the boys against him, and that after a certain point he had decided — sadly, for their sake — to stop upsetting everybody.
She said: “He told me you’d had them told he was dead.”
I said: that would have been a strange thing to do, given they’ve had a photograph of him on their bookshelf since 2014.
And there was a silence on that phone that went on for a long time.
She asked me about the maintenance. I told her the truth, which is that between 2012 and 2019 he paid nothing at all, that the arrears were enforced in 2019 through the courts, and that it has been paid by direct deduction ever since and has never once been late, because it is not up to him.
She did not know any of that either.
And what the boys said to me in the car on the way home, which is the conversation I had been dreading since 2012 and which lasted about four minutes.
We were on the ring road. Cai was driving, on his provisional, with me white-knuckled in the passenger seat, which rather took the ceremony out of it.
And Idris said from the back: “Were you ever going to tell us he’d be there?”
And I said I did not know he would be.
And he said: “No, but — if you’d known.”
And I had to sit with that for about a mile, because the honest answer is that I would have told them on the morning, in the car park, at the last possible second, so that there was no time for anybody to decide not to go in.
So I said that.
And there was a silence, and then Cai said: “Yeah. That’s what we thought.”
Not angry. Just — filed. The way you confirm a thing you have already worked out about somebody.
Sixteen years old, and my sons had a working model of how their mother manages information, and it was accurate, and they had had it for a while.
I have thought about that more than the foyer, and considerably more than the stage.
What I have had to take.
And here is mine, because I am not going to write four thousand words in which one man is the whole problem.
In the January of 2018 Dominic wrote to my sons.
One letter, addressed to both of them, care of me, at the old house. Four sides, handwritten.
They were eight.
I did not give it to them.
I read it twice and I put it in the box file in the wardrobe with the court papers and I have moved house once since then and it came with me.
My reasons — and I have had to say all of these out loud to a woman called Halla on Wednesdays, which is a very different thing from thinking them — were as follows.
He had not seen them in four years. He had paid nothing in four years. The letter arrived eleven days before a hearing about arrears.
And there is a paragraph in it, on the third side, about how he would love to see them and how it has always been made impossible for him.
So I decided, at thirty-six, on my own, at a kitchen table, that it was a tactical document, and I did not hand it to two eight-year-olds.
I think I was right about the letter.
I know I was wrong to keep it for seven years after that.
Because whatever it was for, it was addressed to them. And every year I did not mention it, the not-mentioning became a bigger thing than the letter, until by about 2022 there was no version of telling them that did not require me to explain why I had not told them in 2018.
And that is exactly the shape of what his mother did, and what I have criticised that family for since 2013, and I did the same thing in my own wardrobe for seven years.
What I did with it.
I gave it to them on the twenty-ninth of June, three weeks after Seren’s phone call, with the box file on the kitchen table.
Not because I had become brave. Because Rafe existed now, and there was going to be a version of all this coming at them from the other direction, and I was not going to be caught.
I told them what it was, when it came, and that I had made a decision about it in 2018 that was mine and that they were entitled to be angry about.
