I buried my eight-year-old daughter. Eight years later a new student walked into my classroom with her face, and when I finally called that girl’s parents in for a meeting, the door opened and my own husband was standing in it.

PART 1

Iona was eight when she woke up with a fever.

We took her in that morning. It was a Tuesday and I remember being annoyed about a meeting I was going to miss, and I have never been able to do anything useful with that memory.

Twelve days.

Every test anybody could think of, in two different departments, and at the end of it not one person could tell us what it had been.

My daughter died on the thirteenth of March.

There has never been an answer. There is a phrase on the certificate and it is a phrase, and Dr Adisa told me eight years later that it means nobody knew, and I already knew that.

I never had another child.

After Iona I could not put myself anywhere near it again, and that is a decision I made in about the fourth week and never revisited, and Gethin agreed with it, and we learned to be two people instead of three.

It does not go away. After eight years I had got as far as being able to carry it, which is not the same thing as it going away and which is as far as anybody gets.