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pencils, a box of paper-clips, three notebooks. They were the type Nancy used: blue-lined reporter’s pads, nothing special. She’d always carried one with her when she was writing, filling it with thoughts or sights that struck her, overheard conversations – that sort of thing. I flicked through one, but didn’t give it much attention. It was the manuscript underneath the notebooks that interested me. I picked it up. ‘Untitled’. Someone else’s work, I presumed, because Nancy always came up with her titles first, and it was dated long after I knew she had stopped writing. Was it Jonathan’s? I turned the page. But no, this manuscript was dedicated to Jonathan. He hadn’t written it. To my son, Jonathan , I read, and then my wife’s name typed at the bottom of the page: my wife proclaiming her authorship. A book, written in secret and locked away from my prying eyes.
    Sticks and stones, I told myself, yet I feared the words on those pages might actually break me. I wasn’t ready for them. There were other objects rattling around in that drawer, cuddling up to my wife’s manuscript: a Swiss army knife; a half-empty pack of cigarettes and a can of deodorant with a cheap, erotic name. I grabbed the deodorant and marched around the flat like a crazed pest controller, shooting Wildcat! into the air, covering up the stench of dead animal and everything else that offended my senses. When I was calmer, I put the can back and picked up Nancy’s untitled work, holding it against my chest as if it was a small, trembling creature. I shouldn’t have taken it, it wasn’t mine to take, it was Jonathan’s. But I did take it. I left the notebooks and took the manuscript. Jonathan would never know I’d been there, and I promised myself that I would return it as soon as I had read it.

9
    Spring 2013
    ‘Mum, what do you want me to do with this stuff?’
    Catherine finishes her glass of wine and closes her eyes in irritation. Drinking at lunchtime is never a good idea but Robert had opened two bottles of their best wine, and she had been determined to join him and Nicholas in drinking it.
    ‘Just take what you want and I’ll sort the rest,’ she shouts. Silence. She hears the thump of books and files being dumped on the floor of the spare room. She pushes her chair back, the impatient grind of its legs on the stone setting her teeth on edge.
    ‘Coffee?’ she hears Robert call to her retreating back.
    Nicholas is sitting on the floor in the same position Catherine had been in at dawn.
    ‘I don’t know what to take.’ He looks bewildered.
    ‘Take whatever you don’t want thrown out. We haven’t got the space any more, Nick.’ He nods, as if understanding, but she can tell he doesn’t quite get it.
    ‘Don’t you want any of it?’ And she hears the hurt in his voice. She has done it again. She has hurt him with her impatience and her brisk efficiency.
    ‘Well,’ she says gently, sitting down next to him, ‘let’s see.’ She picks up a large manila envelope and peers inside. It’s full of Nicholas’s primary-school reports, bound together with an elastic band. Should she take one out and read it? Would he like that? Nicholas’s school reports had always left her with a sinking feeling. What does it matter now though? He is twenty-five. Maybe now they can laugh about it, and she overcomes her resistance and reads a comment from Miss Charles. How well she remembers the permed head and thin lips of Nicholas’s form teacher. It was his last year at primary school and Catherine chooses the comment carefully.
    ‘Nicholas is a popular member of the class, with both sexes,’ she smiles, leaving out the end of Miss Charles’s sentence: ‘… but he struggles to settle down to his tasks and his work suffers as a result.’ For years, always the same story. Disappointing; more effort needed; he struggles to stay focused. Still, at least in those days he had friends. There seem to have been fewer and fewer of them