He is proud of it. It is the closest thing our family has to a philosophy.
So I grew up extremely good at being underestimated. I am better at it than almost anybody I know.
And completely unable to tell the difference between somebody getting me wrong by accident, and somebody doing it on purpose, with a plan, over two years.
I had a lifetime of practice at the first one.
I had none at all at the second, because in our house being underestimated was always the safe position. It was never the thing that was about to cost you an apartment.
That is not my father’s fault and he has taken it as though it were, which has been the hardest conversation of the last year.What I did that
night was not what people expect.
I did not go downstairs at one in the morning and play that recording to a function room.
I did not throw anything, and I did not wake anybody, and I did not post a single word.
I slept in that room. Next to him.
That is the detail that people find the most difficult and it is the one I am least sorry about.
Eleven days I said nothing, while solicitors did what solicitors do and while a woman in Leeds went through nine years of estate accounts.
I smiled at his mother twice in that time. I let her adjust my collar at a lunch.
And after my father, the first person I rang was his sister.
She let it go to voicemail. She rang back forty minutes later and did not say hello.
She said: you told him, didn’t you. In
March.
And I said: yes.
And she said: okay. And then she cried, and then she said: right, what have you got.
It has been fourteen months.I am divorced. There is a separate matter about the estate that is ongoing and that is hers, not mine, and I am a witness in it and nothing else.
The apartment on the coast is mine and I have sold it, because I could not walk into that kitchen.
