PART 5 — WHAT SABINE KNEW
The identification took nine days. It was dental in the end.
Ivor Pellier was thirty-two. He had a name and a date of birth and a placement history and a social worker who had been trying to reach him since the August.
She came to the funeral. There were eleven of us.
Sabine Pellier did not come.
She has said one thing to me about all of it, in the November, on her own doorstep, and it is the reason I have not been back.
She said, "I lost him in 1997."
And I said that he had died in the February.
And she said, "No. In 1997."
She has not been prosecuted and there is nothing to prosecute. It is not an offence to stop visiting. It is not an offence to let people believe something and never correct it.
Cassian and I are still married and it has been the worst year of my life and I am not going to write about most of it.
He lied to me for eight months about a living man in our apartment, and he put something in my drink, and he did both of those things while telling himself he was managing it, and he has never once tried to sell me a version where he was not.
What he says, and what I believe, is that he could not work out how to say the sentence.
He grew up in a house where a child was made not to exist, and at thirty-two he had his brother asleep on his sofa and no language at all for what that was, because the only model he had ever been given was his mother's.
He is in therapy and has been since the March. I go to some of it.
There is a photograph of two four-year-olds on a step on our hall wall.
I took it out of my bag the day after the funeral, still in the envelope it had been in since Sabine's seventieth, because I had never put it back in that shoebox.
My brother died when he was four, and we don't do that at my mother's table.
He said that in front of thirty-five people with his palm flat on the back of a photograph, and he knew it was not true when he said it, and he had known for five years.
And thirty-five people heard a man say his brother had died, in a room containing that man's mother, and every single one of them let it stand.
His mother was eleven feet away holding a serving spoon.
