She did not answer me with words. She looked at the window.
There is a car park behind my unit with eleven spaces and a lamp that has been out since 2022.
A silver estate car, Q registration, parked in the furthest corner with a sunshade folded against the back window.
It had been there every Tuesday since September and I had looked straight at it every week for eight months.
Their mother died in the June before. Pancreatic, eleven weeks.
There is no father on either birth certificate and no grandparents in this country.
Juniper turned sixteen in the August and she did not tell anybody her mother had died until she had to, which was the school, in September, by letter.
She wrote the letter herself. She signed it in her mother’s name.
They had the flat until the October and then they did not.
From October to May, a sixteen-year-old and a seven-year-old slept in a car in my car park and in two other car parks on a rota, because she had worked out that staying in one place gets you noticed.
Her whole system was built on one thing: Fen had to arrive at school looking exactly like every other child, and she had to arrive at St. Aubyn’s looking exactly like every other girl.
Because the day a teacher looks twice is the day somebody makes a telephone call and they are separated.
That is what the blazer was. That is why it was folded like that.
She was not keeping it nice. She was keeping them together.
I did make the telephone call. On the Wednesday morning, from the back room, and I told her I was going to before I did it.
She begged me not to and I did it anyway and she did not come the following Tuesday and I thought I had destroyed everything.
The woman who came out on the Thursday is called Perpetua Oyelaran-Smit and she has been doing that job for twenty-six years.
The first thing she said to Juniper, in my back room, was: “Nobody is taking your brother anywhere today.”
And then she sat on a plastic chair for two and a half hours and did not once write anything down until Juniper asked her to.
They were not separated. That is the part I was most frightened of and it did not happen.
They went to a woman called Theodosia in Marchmont Row who has fostered for nineteen years and had two rooms.
Juniper sat her exams eleven days later. She got four of what she needed and missed one.
She is eighteen now. She works Saturdays at the pharmacy on Pellinore and she is doing her second year at the college in Ardwick.
Fen is nine and still at the same school, which was the one thing she asked for and the one thing Perpetua fought for.
They come in on Tuesdays. Not to wash anything. Theodosia has a machine.
They come in at about half past four with the shopping and Fen does his reading out loud at the folding table because the acoustics are good and he likes the noise.
I have never asked Juniper to forgive me for the eight months and she has never offered.
What she said to me, once, in the summer, with her back to me while she was filling the kettle:
“You left the heater on.”
Machine twelve is still the end one by the window.
I have not put anybody else’s wash in it on a Tuesday night since the fifth of May, and I could not tell you exactly why.