That is true and it is not the whole of it.
The other part — which took until this year to be able to say — is that I wanted them to see, every day, that he had once been that. That there had been a man on a beach with two babies strapped to him, and that he had chosen, later, to stop being him.
I told myself I was giving them their father.
I was, for eleven years, quietly presenting the case for the prosecution on a shelf at eye level in my own front room.
Cai moved it in the September. Not away — across, to the lower shelf, behind the football trophies, where you can still see it if you look.
He did not announce it. I noticed about a fortnight later.
And when I asked him he shrugged and said: “It’s just a photo, Mum.”
And the last thing.
The last page of that letter.
Four sides, 2018, and the last paragraph is the one I have thought about for eight years.
It says that he knows he has been useless. It says he will do whatever anybody wants. And then it says, in the last two lines, that he hopes the boys will understand one day that some situations are made impossible and that he was never given a fair chance.
And underneath, his name, and then a P.S. about the hearing on the nineteenth.
A postscript about the hearing.
Idris read that paragraph out loud at my kitchen table on the twenty-ninth of June, and then he looked up and said: “You were right.”
And I said I did not think it was that simple.
And Cai — who says about a third as much as his brother and whose one third tends to land — said:
“No, he’s right, you were right about what it was.”
