My grandad ra:ised me on his own and told me for twelve years that we couldn't afford things. Two weeks after the funeral a woman rang from a number I didn't know and asked if anyone was in the house with me.
PART 1 — THE CHAIR
I'm eighteen and I'm writing this three weeks after it happened, which everyone keeps telling me is too soon.
They're probably right. I don't care.
So. My parents went out on a wet Thursday night in November when I was six and a man came across the carriageway on the Pernant road and that was it.
That's the version I've said about four hundred times. I can do it in one breath. You get good at it.
What I actually remember is our kitchen full of grown-ups and the word fostering, which I didn't know, and which I asked my auntie about and she said never mind.
And I remember my grandad putting his hand down flat on the table so hard a cup went over, and saying, "She's coming with me. That's it."
He was sixty-five. He'd been retired eleven months. His back had been ruined since about 2004 and his knees were going and he'd just lost his son.
He gave me his room because it had the better window. He slept in the box room at the back for twelve years in a bed that was six inches shorter than he was and when I worked that out at about fourteen he got annoyed with me for mentioning it.
He learnt to plait hair off the internet. He was unbelievably bad at it for about two years. There are school photos.
He came to everything. Every parents' evening, in those chairs they put out at primary school that come up to your shin, knees round his ears, writing in a notepad like he was at work.
And we had nothing.
No holidays, ever, except four days in a caravan near Brackwater in 2017 which I now know was not a holiday at all.
No takeaways. No parties. Nothing just because.
And every single time I asked for anything, he said the same thing.
"We can't afford that, kiddo."
I hated that sentence so much. I can't describe it to you. It wasn't even the stuff — it was being the person who always had to be told it.
Other girls had new phones. I had one with a crack across it for three years that I used to hold at an angle in photos.
I had my cousin's coat. I had my mum's old school bag, which I pretended was a vintage thing.
And I was angry at him. Not now and then. From about eleven to about sixteen, constantly, in the way you can only be angry at the one person who's actually there.
I used to lie in bed and plan our whole life if he'd just try. Get a job. Sell the car. Stop being tired all the time.
I said things to that man in our kitchen at fourteen that I'm not going to type out.
I'll do one, though, because it's not fair to say that and then hide.
Year Ten, February, there was a trip to France. A hundred and eighty quid, in instalments, and I'd known about it since the October and I'd been building up to asking.
I asked him on a Sunday night and he said no before I'd finished the sentence. Which was the worst bit. He didn't even do the face.
And I said, "I bet you have got it. You just don't want to spend it on me."
He didn't say anything. He went out and stood at the sink for a bit with the tap not on, and then he came back in and asked me what I wanted for my tea.
I remember being pleased. I'd got him. Fourteen-year-olds are like that.
I've seen the bank statements now. Auntie Dessa made me stop looking at them in the end.
On that Sunday he had about four hundred pounds. And on the third of that month, nine hundred and ten had gone out to Brackwater.
Then last year he started being ill, and the man who could carry everything couldn't get up our stairs without stopping on the fourth one.
His hands went. He'd put a cup down with both hands, carefully, like it was somebody else's.
His voice got thin. That frightened me more than anything a doctor said, because you don't expect a voice to go.
He died on the ninth of September. He was seventy-seven.
After that I didn't do much.
I slept on the sofa with the telly on and no sound, because all three rooms upstairs were wrong. I ate toast. I didn't open things.
Auntie Dessa kept coming round and doing cupboards and I kept letting her because I couldn't.
I found his reading glasses down the side of a cushion on day eleven and sat on the floor holding them for about an hour, which is the sort of thing that happens and that nobody warns you about.
And I sat in his chair.
It's a horrible chair. Brown, shiny on the arms, Auntie Dessa's been trying to get rid of it since 2018.
There's a dip worn into it that I don't fill. I'm five foot four and I never will.
That's where I was, about four on a Tuesday afternoon, two weeks and four days after the funeral, when my phone went.
Unknown number. I'd been ignoring them for a fortnight because of the people you get after somebody dies.
I don't know why I picked up.
A woman, about fifty, careful with her voice in a way I'd heard eleven different people be careful with me that month.
"Is that Perrin Hallsey?"
"Yeah."
"Perrin, is there anybody in the house with you?"
PART 2 — VELL HOUSE
Her name's Ines Dray and she runs a nursing home at Brackwater, which is thirty-eight minutes away. I've timed it since. Four times.
She didn't want to tell me on the phone. She said so twice.
She asked if there was somebody who could be there in twenty minutes and she said she'd stay on the line until they came.
And I said, "Just tell me."
And she said she'd rather not.
And I said it again, and I think I shouted, and I've apologised for that twice now and both times she's gone "oh, don't."
So she told me.
There was a direct debit from my grandad that had been going out since March 2014. It started at six hundred and ten pounds a month and by this year it was nine hundred and forty.
It stopped on the third of October, because he died on the ninth of September, and it took their finance office three weeks to work out why and another one to find me.
I said, "I don't understand, who was he paying for?"
And there was this gap on the line. Three seconds, maybe.
And Ines Dray said: "Your mum's here, love. She has been since 2014."
I want to say I dropped the phone or screamed or something.
I didn't do anything. I sat in that chair and said "right" about six times.
She stayed on that phone for fifty-one minutes. I know because it's in my call log and I've looked at it a lot.
I wasn't talking for most of it. She just stayed. At one point she said, "I'm still here," and then didn't say anything for another two or three minutes.
She's fifty-two and she runs a sixty-bed home and it was a Tuesday afternoon.
My dad did die on that road. Everything I've ever been told about my dad is true.
My mum didn't. Her name's Alma and she was thirty-one and she didn't come off that road either, but she didn't die on it.
She's got a brain injury. The proper kind. The kind where they stop using the word recovery about eight weeks in and start using different words.
She can't speak. She's never once responded to a voice or a name or a photo, and she's been assessed four times — 2014, 2016, 2019, 2023 — and it's been the same every time.
She's thirty-eight minutes from the sofa I grew up on.
Thirty-eight minutes. I've done that drive in a car with my grandad about a thousand times going to the retail park.
I rang Auntie Dessa after. She came over.
She didn't know either. I watched her face while I told her and she sat down on the arm of the sofa halfway through, and she's his sister. She'd known him seventy-one years.
She kept saying "no" in a completely normal voice, like she was disagreeing about a football score.
Then at about nine at night she said the thing that got me, which was:
"He went out every third Sunday. I used to take the mick out of him about it. I said, who is she, Walt."
Twelve years of his sister making a joke about him having a woman at Brackwater.
He never said anything back. She says he used to just go "ha" and change the subject.
The next two days were mental and I'm going to put them in because nobody ever does.
I didn't tell anyone except Dessa for about thirty hours. Not my best mate, not school, nobody.
I went in on the Thursday. I went to school on the Thursday, two days after being told my mum was alive, and did a double of economics and said "yeah, fine" about nine times.
I don't know why. I think I thought if I said it out loud at school it would start existing in a way I couldn't take back.
Then at lunch I googled the home. Obviously. I sat on a wall and looked at photographs of a building I'd never been to, trying to work out which window.
There's a virtual tour on their website. I did the whole thing twice, clicking through corridors with my thumb, at lunchtime, on a cracked phone.
That's about the maddest thing I've ever done and I'd do it again.
And that night I didn't sleep. I sat up and did sums, which is apparently what I do.
Nine hundred and forty pounds a month. Twelve years. It goes up and down because of the increases but it's somewhere around a hundred and twenty thousand pounds.
A hundred and twenty grand, out of a pension and whatever he had, while I cried about a phone.
That's the bit, isn't it. That's what everyone wants me to say.
I'll come back to it. I'm not there yet.
PART 3 — MABRY
It took eight weeks before I went.
Not because anybody was difficult. There's a process, and there were two meetings first in a different building where basically nothing happened except talking, and there was a woman from an organisation who was with me the whole way and who was brilliant.
I went on the ninth of November.
Ines Dray met me in the car park instead of at reception, which she didn't have to do.
I sat in that car for twenty minutes. She stood outside it the whole time and didn't knock on the window once.
I'm not going to describe my mum and I'm not going to describe that room. She's a person. She's not a thing that happened to me.
I'll tell you what I did, though, because that's mine.
I was in there eleven minutes the first time and I spent about nine of them looking at the wall.
I'd planned things in the car. I had a whole list. I was going to say who I was, and about my exams, and I'd brought a photo of me at prom in a bag and I didn't get it out.
What I actually said, after about four minutes, was "hiya."
That's it. That's what came out. Hiya, like I'd walked into my mate's kitchen.
And then I sat in a chair with my coat still on and couldn't do anything else, and the radiator made a noise, and somewhere down the corridor a trolley went past.
The woman from the organisation was outside the door the whole time and never came in, which I'd asked for and which I was furious about for the first five minutes and grateful for after.
What I'll tell you about is Mabry.
Mabry's been on days at Vell House for nine years. She's about sixty, she's got a bad hip, and she talks the entire time she's working.
She was in that room when I came in and she just said, "Oh, you're the granddaughter," like I'd popped in.
Nobody had told her that I hadn't known.
So for the first ten minutes she talked to me like somebody who'd been visiting for years. She told me about a hedge dispute with her neighbour. She asked if I'd done my exams.
And then she said, "Your grandad used to sit where you're sitting."
And I started crying so hard I had to go out into the corridor, and that poor woman came after me with a box of tissues going, "Oh, love. Oh, love, what've I said."
We ended up in a kitchen off the ward and she made me tea and told me things nobody else on earth could have told me.
She said he came every third Sunday. Half ten, out by half twelve.
She said he brought the good biscuits for the staff and that he knew everyone's names and their kids' names.
She said he talked to my mum the whole time he was in there. About me, mostly. Every single week. My school, my exams, a boy called Eli I liked in Year Ten who I have definitely never mentioned to a living adult.
She said, "I know your whole life, love. I've been hearing it for nine years."
That's when I had to put the tea down.
She knew I did my GCSEs in that room before I did. She knew I'd had a bad patch in Year Nine with a girl called Cerys and she knew how it got sorted.
She knew I wanted to do law and she knew I'd gone off it and she knew what I'd gone off it for.
She called me Perry. Nobody calls me Perry except him and two mates.
At one point she said, "He used to do your voice."
I said what.
And she said he'd do impressions of me complaining. He'd sit in that chair and go, in a voice, "Grandad, everyone else has got one" — and then he'd laugh at himself, every single time, like it was new.
I don't know what to do with that. I still don't.
Twelve years of a man driving to a room to do an impression of his granddaughter moaning about a phone, to a woman who can't hear him, and laughing.
And then Mabry said: "He was going to tell you at Christmas."
I said, "What?"
And she said he told her that in the summer. July, she thinks. He was already ill by then.
She said he said it like he was telling her a plan he'd finally settled on. She said: "He told me, he said, I'm doing it at Christmas, Mabry, I've left it long enough."
And she said she told him he should do it sooner.
And he said he knew.
He died on the ninth of September. Christmas was fifteen weeks away.
Mabry's the one who told me the photograph thing too, and I'm putting it in even though I can't really look at it.
There's a photo on the shelf in that room of me, about five, on the beach at Brackwater in a red swimming costume, squinting.
It's been on that shelf since 2014.
It's been replaced twice because the sun gets them through that window. The one in there now is the third print.
He went to a shop in Pernant, twice, over twelve years, and got a photo of me reprinted so it wouldn't fade, for a room I didn't know existed.
PART 4 — THE CORRIDOR
Here's what actually happened in 2013, which took me until about December to get straight, and which I got from Ines Dray and from the medical stuff and a bit from Auntie Dessa.
My mum was in a unit at Pernant General for eleven days.
Auntie Dessa was there for most of them, which I didn't know either until December, because nobody ever talks about those eleven days in our family. They talk about the funeral and they talk about me moving in and the middle bit just isn't there.
She says he didn't go home once. Eleven days. He slept in a chair in a relatives' room and she brought him clean shirts.
She says he was doing everything. The police, the coroner's bit for my dad, somebody from the council about me, and the hospital.
And she says — and this is the one that made me have to go and stand in her garden — she says that on about day three he asked her whether she thought he was too old.
Not out loud to anyone else. To his sister, at two in the morning, in a corridor.
Sixty-five, both knees gone, son dead, and the thing he was frightened of was that they'd look at him and say no.
In that eleven days he was told twice by consultants that my mum wasn't going to survive it. Not might not. The second time it was written down.
He'd had his son die four days earlier.
And on day four, in a corridor, a six-year-old asked him where her mum was.
And he said what he'd been told was going to be true by the end of the fortnight.
He said she'd gone too.
And then she didn't go.
She came off the ventilator in December. She was moved in February. She went to Vell House in March 2014 and she's still there.
Nobody plans that. That isn't a man deciding to lie to a kid for twelve years. That's a man in a corridor on four days' sleep with the only information anyone had given him, and then being wrong in the one direction nobody's ever wrong in.
And then he had to decide whether to go back and change it.
I've tried to put myself in that December about a hundred times and I can't make it come out different.
She's six. She's been told her mum's dead. She's finally started sleeping, in your bed, with the light on.
And you're sixty-five and you've got to go in and say: actually she's alive, she's in a building, she doesn't know you, she's never going to know you, do you want to go and see her.
What does a six-year-old do with that? At seven? At nine?
I'm not saying it's good enough. I'll say that properly in a minute.
I'm saying I get it. I don't like getting it.
Auntie Dessa says he was protecting me and she's going to say that until she dies.
And I think that's true for about the first four years and I think after that it stopped being true, and he was protecting the version of himself that hadn't told me yet, which is a completely different job and a much easier one.
Because here's what I actually can't get round. It isn't the lie.
It's the Sundays.
Every third Sunday for twelve years. That's about a hundred and forty-four of them.
A hundred and forty-four times he got in that car on his own, drove thirty-eight minutes with the passenger seat empty, sat in a room for two hours, drove back, and made my tea.
And on every single one of those drives, there and back, he decided again.
It wasn't one decision in a corridor in 2013. It was one decision in a corridor and then a hundred and forty-four renewals of it, in a car, by himself, with Radio 2 on.
I asked Mabry if he ever seemed like he was going to crack.
And she said: "He came in bad once. About four years ago. Sat in there an extra hour."
I said, what happened.
And she said, "Nothing. He came out and he went home."
There's one more thing about the Sundays that I only worked out in January, and it's about my mum's family.
She's got a brother. He's called Petyr and he lives in Ardmere and he came to my grandad's funeral.
He came to my grandad's funeral and stood at the back and shook my hand and said he was sorry for my loss.
He's known the whole time. Obviously he has — she's his sister.
I rang him on the fourth of January and I was not nice to him on that phone for about the first ten minutes.
And eventually he said: "Perrin, I thought you knew. I thought you'd been told years ago and you didn't want to come."
Twelve years. He thought I was a kid who'd been told and had chosen not to visit her own mother.
He'd been sending cards to that room every Christmas since 2014 and assuming I just didn't fancy it.
So that's two of them. My grandad, who knew I hadn't been told. And my uncle, who thought I had.
And neither of them ever said one word to the other about it in twelve years, because that's what men in both halves of my family do, apparently, and I've got about four hundred things to say about that and nowhere to put them.
PART 5 — SEPTEMBER
I remembered something in the car park at Vell House and I'm still not completely over it.
Not while I was in there. Afterwards, sitting in the car on my own with the engine off, about twenty minutes after I'd left that room.
September 2022. I was fifteen.
I've remembered that night for three years as the night I didn't get a phone.
That's where my brain filed it. Under phones.
He came and sat on the end of my bed, which he basically never did, and started saying something.
And I was fifteen and I'd spent four days working up an argument about that phone and I wasn't letting him get past it.
I can nearly hear what I said. I think I said, "Is this about Mum?"
And he must have gone to say yes.
And I think I said, "She's dead, Grandad."
Not horribly. I wasn't being horrible. I'd been told that since I was six and I thought he was doing the thing old people do where they bring up your dead parents because actually they want to talk about theirs.
And he took the gap. He was seventy-four, he'd been building up to it, and this kid handed him a way out and he took it.
He tried again at Christmas, probably. Mabry says he said something about Christmas that year too, now she thinks about it.
He didn't do it. And then he was ill, and then it was July and he told a care assistant he'd finally made his mind up, and then it was the ninth of September.
I'm angry with him.
I'm putting that here because about six different people have told me since October that I have to understand, and I do understand.
I understand it better than any of them, because I'm the one who's sat in that room and met Mabry and seen a photo of myself that's been reprinted twice.
And I'm still angry, and I've stopped apologising for being both.
He had twelve years. He had a hundred and forty-four Sundays. He had the night I was fifteen and he had three Christmases after it.
And he let me grow up thinking I had nobody left, because he decided I couldn't carry it.
He never asked me if I could.
That's it. That's the whole of what I've got against him. He decided, in a corridor, on no sleep, when I was six — and then he never went back and asked the person it was about.
Some practical bits, because when I was googling at lunchtime on that wall in October this is what I wanted and couldn't find.
The money's being sorted. There's an assessment going through and Ines Dray has been on the phone to people on my behalf about nine times and it's going to be fine. Nobody's being thrown out of anywhere.
I'm eighteen so I'm not anybody's next of kin by default and there was a fortnight where that was a problem and now it isn't.
School know. I told my head of year in November and she was better about it than I expected and I've got a thing in place for if it goes wrong in a lesson, which it did once, in March, in economics of all things.
I've told three friends. Not the whole year, three. That was advice I got and it was good advice.
The first one I told was Nish and she cried before I did, which was annoying and also exactly what I needed.
I've been to Vell House four times now.
I go on a Sunday. His Sunday, the third one, because the slot was already there and nobody's changed it.
First time I lasted eleven minutes. Second time about forty. Fourth time I was there an hour and a half and did her nails, badly, because Mabry asked if I wanted to and I couldn't think of a reason to say no.
I talk to her now. About school, about the car I'm saving for, about Auntie Dessa's hip. About him, a bit.
All four assessments say none of it goes anywhere. I know that. Everyone's been very straight with me about it and I'd rather they were.
Mabry said something in the car park in December that I'm keeping.
She said: "You're not doing it for her, love. Nobody said you were."
The other thing I've started doing, which I haven't told Auntie Dessa about, is that I talk to my mum about him.
Not nice things, necessarily. In February I sat in that chair and told her what he'd done, all of it, out loud, in a room with her in it.
I said he told me you were dead and then he came and sat here every third Sunday for twelve years and never once said anything.
I said it out loud and then I sat there for about ten minutes feeling like the worst person who's ever lived.
And then Mabry came in with the tea trolley and went, "All right, Perry," and it was just a Tuesday again.
I don't know if that's healthy. The woman I see on Thursdays says there's no wrong way to do it, which I think might be something she has to say.
I'm still sleeping on the sofa. I've still not changed his bed.
I sit in that chair most days and I still don't fill the dip in it, and I'm not going to, and I've told Auntie Dessa that chair is staying.
May you like
And on the third Sunday I get in a car and do thirty-eight minutes with the passenger seat empty.
THE END
