Chapter 73
He began the third book when he was forty-five, knowing before he started that it was going to be the most difficult one.
The first book was about teaching. The second was about the programme. The third was about everything else about what it meant to be between places, to be formed by distance and return, to carry multiple homes in the same body.
It was autobiographical in a way the first two were not, or not overtly. He was forty-five and he had enough perspective to see the shape of his life from a distance that allowed analysis, and enough proximity to the real things to keep the analysis from becoming abstraction.
He wrote about Kingston and Wolverhampton and Birmingham. He wrote about the cold bus stops and the canal path and Auntie Beverley's kitchen and the smell of her air freshener which he could still recall exactly, thirty-five years later, without trying.
He wrote about the shoebox of letters. He wrote about his mother's notebooks and what it meant to be written about, to be someone's subject, someone's ongoing project of attention.
He wrote about the mango tree.
Nia read the first chapter and said: 'This is better than the other two.'
'It's more honest,' he said.
'It's more vulnerable,' she said. 'That's the same thing for you.'
He wrote it over three years, in the early mornings before the run, in the way he had learned to write in the margins of the real life, until the margins became the main text.
He dedicated it: 'For Diane, who held the pen first. And for Elise and Joseph, who will hold it after.