And I said: what if they move it all in the meantime?
And she said: “Then they’ll move it into the same three companies they’ve been using for two years, and we’ll have that as well.”
She had been a step ahead of me all the way through, because she had spent twenty-six years being a step ahead of my grandmother, who was the most step-ahead person I have ever met.
What my grandmother knew.
And now the part that is mine.
In the March of 2021 my grandmother said something to me in her kitchen.
I had carried her shopping in. She was drying a pan, and she said, without looking up: “That man asked me for money in the February. Two hundred thousand, for a bridge on some deal of his. I said no.”
And then: “I’ve had somebody look at him, love.”
And I said — and I can hear myself saying it — “Gran. Don’t.”
That was the whole conversation. Eleven words from her, three from me, and then I asked about her hip.
I was thirty-one. I had lost a pregnancy the previous October. I was four months from starting treatment and I did not have room in my body for one more difficult thing.
