PART 1 — THE STAIRS
I am thirty-five.
I came home in the April of 2022 with a prosthetic below the left knee and eleven months of rehab behind me, and the only thing that had got me through the eleven months was a photograph of two babies and a woman holding them.
Iris and Senna were nine weeks old when I went out. They were fourteen months old when I came back.
I did not tell Darcey I was coming early. I had four days in hand and I wanted to walk in.
I want to say something about the leg before any of the rest of it, because people get strange about it.
It is a leg. I have had it four years. I run on a different one. The only time it comes into this story is on a staircase on that afternoon, and then it goes away again, and I would like it to stay gone.
I got the taxi to drop me at the end of the road because I had an idea in my head about walking up to my own door.
The curtains were open. That was the first thing. We never had the front curtains open.
I got the key in and the door opened onto nothing.
No hall table. No coats. No rug. The carpet gripper was up and there were squares on the wall where the pictures had been, and the whole place had that sound a house makes when there is nothing in it.
I stood in my own hallway for about ten seconds and could not make it mean anything.
I thought: wrong house. I actually thought that, with my own key in my hand.
And then I heard crying upstairs.
Two of them. Both of them.
And I have done a lot of things, and getting up those stairs that afternoon is the worst of them, because I was four months into that leg and I was not good at stairs yet and I went up on my hands for the last five.
The nursery had the two cots in it and nothing else at all.
My mother was in the middle of that room on the floor with Senna against her shoulder, trying to get a hand to Iris in the other cot, and she was grey.
She was sixty-one. She had been there since Tuesday.
“Mum?”
She looked up and made a noise.
“Mum. Whose furniture is this? Where’s everything gone?”
And Enid Odell said, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, love,” and she said it about nine times and she could not say anything else for about a minute.
“Mum. Where’s Darcey?”
And my mother said: “There’s a note. On the dresser.”
There was no dresser. There was the shelf where the dresser had been, and a sheet of paper on it, folded once.
I’m too young to spend my life on a broken man and nappies. Marek can give me more. The babies are yours — keep them.
Marek Thane. I was best man at his wedding in 2016 and he was best man at mine in 2018.
I sat on the floor of that nursery with my back against a cot and a baby in each arm, at about six o’clock in the evening.
Senna stopped first. Iris took about twenty minutes and then went off so suddenly it frightened me.
And I sat there for an hour and a half after they had both gone, because standing up with two of them was not a thing I could do yet, and because I did not want to.
My mother brought me a cup of tea at some point and put it on the floor beside me and went out again and shut the door, which was the correct thing to do and which I have never thanked her for.
That night, when they were down properly, she told me the rest of it in a kitchen with no table in it. We sat on the floor with our backs against the units.
Darcey had gone on the Tuesday. My mother had come on the Tuesday afternoon because Darcey had rung her and said she was going out for a few hours and could she sit with the girls.
And then she did not come back.
My mother had been in that house four days. On her own, at sixty-one, with two fourteen-month-olds, no car, and a shop eleven minutes’ walk away.
She rang Darcey about thirty times. She rang Darcey’s mother, who said she did not know where she was and then stopped answering.
And she did not ring me.
I asked her that night and I have never asked her again, because the answer took about four seconds to arrive and about four years to stop hurting.
She said: “You were coming home on the Monday, love. What was I going to say to you on a phone?”
Four days. That woman sat in an empty house for four days with two babies rather than put it into a man’s ear while he was still in another country.
And I made the only promise I have ever made out loud to myself, sitting on that floor.
They were never going to feel that twice.
PART 2 — THREE YEARS
I am not going to do the three years properly because nobody who has done them needs it.
Four things, and then I will move on.
My mother moved in on the Friday and stayed fourteen months.
I did not work for the first nine of them. The injury payment covered us and then it did not, and I got a job in logistics scheduling in the January of 2023 that I could do from a chair at the kitchen table at six in the morning, and I have been doing it ever since.
There was a stretch in the winter of 2022, about eleven weeks, where both of them had the same thing one after the other and I slept in a chair and I was, I now understand, not well.
And the leg. The stump does not like being up all night and down all day, and in the February of 2023 it went bad enough that I was told to stay off it for a fortnight, and I did not, because there is no staying off it with two of them at eighteen months.
I have not mentioned that to anybody since. I am mentioning it once and then it goes back in the box.
There is one afternoon I will put in properly, because it is the only one from those three years that I ever tell.
The twenty-second of March 2023. A Wednesday. They were about twenty-two months.
I had got them both in the double buggy to go to the shop, which took about twenty-five minutes at that stage, and I got to the end of our road and the front wheel went into a drain cover and jammed.
And I could not get it out.
I could not kneel down properly on that side and I could not lift the front with one hand and hold the brake with the other, and Senna started, and then Iris started because Senna had, and I stood on a pavement at four in the afternoon in March with two screaming children and a stuck buggy and I genuinely did not know what to do next.
And a man came out of number nineteen.
About seventy. I had said good morning to him for four years and did not know his name.
He did not ask me anything. He bent down, lifted the front of that buggy out of the drain, put it down, and said: “They’re a pair, aren’t they.”
And then he walked back into his own house.
His name is Vernon. He has had Christmas dinner with us twice since.
That is the three years. It is not the hospital and it is not the leg. It is a drain cover and a man who did not make me ask.
And there are the books.
My mother bought two baby books before they were born. The ones with the spaces in. First smile, first tooth, that sort of thing.
At the christening in 2021, nine days before I deployed, I had them out on the table and I was doing the pages, because I was going away and I was not going to be there for about nine of the firsts and I was being sentimental about it in front of about twenty-five people.
I had got about four pages done. I was doing the one that asks what was happening in the world the week they were born, which is a stupid page and which I was taking seriously.
My uncle Dessie was taking the mickey out of me about it and I was giving it back, and about four people were watching and enjoying it.
And Darcey came past behind my chair and took them off the table.
Both of them, in one hand, out from under my pen.
“Give me that, you’re not doing that at the table.”
And then, to the room, with the little laugh:
“Honestly, Raff. Nobody fills those in.”
And she put them under her arm and said: “They can go in the loft with the rest of it.”
And about twenty-five people laughed, including my own mother, because it was funny — a man doing a baby book at a christening is funny, it is a funny thing, there is nothing wrong with any of them for laughing.
I laughed too.
And I did not ask for them back, and nine days later I went away.
They were in the loft.
