I stood up and turned to face her. I didn’t know if I would have preferred to turn and run myself, so vast was the chasm between us, but then she held

out her arms. ‘Chrissy darling,’ she said, the plastic bracelets that hung from her wrists clattering into each other. ‘I’ve missed you. I’ve missed you so

fucking much.’ The weight that had been pressing down on me somersaulted, lifted and vanished, and I fell sobbing into her arms.

For the briefest of moments I felt as if I knew everything about her, and everything about myself, too. It was as if the emptiness, the void that sat at

the centre of my soul, had been lit with light brighter than the sun. A history – my history – flashed in front of me, but too quickly for me to do anything but

snatch at it. ‘I remember you,’ I said. ‘I remember you,’ and then it was gone and the darkness swept in once more.

We sat on the bench and, for a long time, silently watched Toby playing football with a group of boys. I felt happy to be connected with my unknown past,

yet there was an awkwardness between us that I could not shake. A phrase kept repeating in my head. Something to do with Claire.

‘How are you?’ I said in the end, and she laughed.

‘I feel like hell,’ she said. She opened her bag and took out a packet of tobacco. ‘You haven’t started again, have you?’ she said, offering it to me,

and I shook my head, aware again of how she was someone else who knew so much more about me than I did myself.

‘What’s wrong?’ I said.

She began to roll her cigarette, nodding towards her son. ‘Oh, you know. Tobes has ADHD. He was up all night, and hence so was I.’

‘ADHD?’ I said.

She smiled. ‘Sorry. It’s a fairly new phrase, I suppose. Attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. We have to give him Ritalin, though I fucking hate

it. It’s the only way. We’ve tried just about everything else, and he’s an absolute beast without it. A horror.’

I looked over at him, running in the distance. Another faulty, fucked-up brain in a healthy body.

‘He’s OK, though?’

‘Yes,’ she said, sighing. She balanced her cigarette paper on her knee and began sprinkling tobacco along its fold. ‘He’s just exhausting

sometimes. It’s like the terrible twos never ended.’

I smiled. I knew what she meant, but only theoretically. I had no point of reference, no recollection of what Adam might have been like, either at

Toby’s age or younger.

‘Toby seems quite young?’ I said.

She laughed. ‘You mean I’m quite old!’ She licked the gum of her paper. ‘Yes. I had him late. Pretty sure it wasn’t going to happen, so we were

being careless …’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You mean …?’

She laughed again. ‘I wouldn’t say he was an accident, but let’s just say he was something of a shock.’ She put the cigarette in her mouth. ‘Do you

remember Adam?’

I looked at her. She had her head turned away from me, shielding her lighter from the wind, and I couldn’t see her expression, or tell whether the

move was deliberately evasive.

‘No,’ I said. ‘A few weeks ago I remembered that I had a son, and ever since I wrote about it I feel like I’ve been carrying the knowledge around, like

a heavy rock in my chest. But no. I don’t remember anything about him.’

She sent a cloud of blue-tinged smoke skyward. ‘That’s a shame,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. Ben shows you pictures, though? Doesn’t that help?’

I weighed up how much I should tell her. They seemed to have been in touch, to have been friends, once. I had to be careful, but still I felt an

increasing need to speak, as well as hear, the truth.

‘He does show me pictures, yes. Though he doesn’t have any up around the house. He says I find them too upsetting. He keeps them hidden.’ I

nearly said locked away.

She seemed surprised. ‘Hidden? Really?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He thinks I would find it too disturbing if I were to stumble across a picture of him.’

Claire nodded. ‘You might not recognize him? Know who he is?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I imagine that might be true,’ she said. She hesitated. ‘Now that he’s gone.’

Gone, I thought. She said it as though he had just popped out for a few hours, had taken his girlfriend to the cinema, or to shop for a pair of shoes. I

understood it, though. Understood the tacit agreement that we would not talk about Adam’s death. Not yet. Understood that Claire is trying to protect me,

too.