Condition Seven

The hearing was on the ninth of July in a committee room with a carpet the colour of gravy and a councillor who kept saying “through the chair” to people who were already talking through the chair.

We were item six. Items one to five took two hours and twenty minutes, and included a dispute about a dormer window in which a man read out a poem.

I had not slept.

Daniel arrived in a suit, which I had never seen, and which made him look like a slightly different man — a man from a bank, a man who owned a boat — and I told him so, and he said “I know, I hate it, it’s my divorce suit,” and that was the last normal sentence either of us said for four hours.

Hester came, which she does not do. Kwame came with the bundle in a crate.…