But the reason it got to five weeks is that Bran Kessel was holding a door open.
And every week he did not put that dress on was a week in which my son was still going to be well enough to see it.
And the only adult in that house who could have told him it was not going to go that way was me.
Soraya.
Bran’s sister, who is nineteen.
He did not borrow that dress.
He told the room he had borrowed it off his sister, and she was in that room, four rows back, and she let it stand.
He took it out of her wardrobe on the morning of the sixteenth of October without asking, because he could not face the conversation, and she found out when he walked into the kitchen.
And she drove him to the church in it.
And when he said I borrowed it off my sister at that microphone, she did not move a muscle.
I only know because she told me in the February, and she told me as a funny story about her brother.
And who read the eulogy, which is a question nobody has ever asked me and which has an answer.
It was meant to be Pat.
It was on the order of service. Eulogy — P. Thorne. Two hundred copies, printed on the thirteenth of October.
And on the morning of the sixteenth, at about half nine, Pat came downstairs and said he could not.
And I said that was fine and that I would ring the celebrant.
And then I said: “What about Bran?”
I said it. In a kitchen, at about twenty to ten on the morning of the funeral, four weeks after telling that boy not to come to my house.
And Pat rang Ilse and Ilse put him on and he said yes in about two seconds.
He had four hours.
He had four hours to write a eulogy for his best friend, and in those four hours he also decided to do the only thing that could possibly have made it harder for himself, and went into his sister’s wardrobe.
And I have told the story of that church for fourteen months as a thing that happened to us.
I put him at that microphone. At twenty to ten, off the top of my head, because it solved a problem.
What I did afterwards.
Nothing, for eleven weeks.
I did not go and see him. I did not ring that house. I did not write.
And in that eleven weeks I told the story of the red dress to about thirty people and I told it well, and it is a beautiful story and it reflects extremely well on my son.
And it reflects well on me, because of the way I tell the first half — the confusion, the whispering, Pat standing up — and then the turn.
People cry at it. Two women at my work cried at it.
And the boy it is actually about was four doors down the whole time, going to school.
And the thirty tellings, which started at the house afterwards.
That same afternoon.
There were about forty people back at ours and I told it twice before six o’clock, to my cousin and to a woman from Pat’s work, in my own kitchen, with sandwiches out.
And I had the shape of it by the second one. The confusion. Pat standing. The sleeve. And then the turn.
And it got the reaction. Both times. People put their hand on your arm.
And Bran Kessel was in that house. He had changed by then — his mother had brought him trousers — and he was in the back room with the other boys for about an hour and then he went home.
And I did not speak to him.
I was in a kitchen eleven feet away telling two adults the story of what he had just done, while he sat in my back room.
Four hours after he stood up in front of two hundred people and said he had broken a promise to my son.
And he came and found me on the way out and said thank you for having him.
The eleventh of January.
I went down in the end because Ilse asked me to.
Not about the dress. About something practical, a thing of Gabe’s that was still in their house.
And Bran came down and we were in that hall for about four minutes.
And I said that what he had done at the church was the best thing anybody did that day.
And he said thanks.
And then I said: “I’m sorry I asked you to stay away.”
And he said: “It’s all right. He was your son.”
Which is the sentence he has been using for a year, because it is the one that makes everybody feel better, and because he is sixteen and he has been managing adults since he was about eleven.
And then he said one more thing, at the door, not looking at me.
He said: “I wasn’t going to do it, you know. The dress.”
And I said what.
And he said: “Even if he’d lived. I’d have found a way out of it.”
And the recording, which I said I have watched eleven times.
It is nineteen minutes and somebody at the back did it on a phone and it went round about forty people on Ashcott Row within a week.
And I have watched it eleven times and I want to be exact about which part.
It is not nineteen minutes, eleven times.
There are two minutes forty in the middle of it that I have watched eleven times, and the rest of it twice.
And the two minutes forty is Bran at the microphone talking about the dare.
And at one minute fifty in that section, the camera moves, because whoever was holding it turned to see the reaction.
And it finds me.
Four or five seconds of the back of my head and the side of my face, leaning forward.
And I have watched those four seconds eleven times looking for what my face was doing — whether anybody in that room could tell that I was working out who had let him in.
You cannot tell. I look like a woman listening.
And every single time I have finished watching it, I have felt relieved.
That is what I have been doing with that recording for fourteen months. Not grief. Quality control.
And the last thing.
I have been round and round the five weeks, and the four reasons, and whether a boy of sixteen should have just put the thing on in the August.
And in the June I worked out the only bit that is mine.
It is not the seventeenth of September. That was wrong and it cost him sixteen days and it cost my son four requests, and I have said sorry for it in a hall and I will say it again.
It is the twelfth of September.
Because that is the message. You’re not going to do it are you. Nine o’clock at night.
And Gabe sent that from a bedroom in my house, upstairs, while I was downstairs.
And he had been difficult that week and I had put it down to the medication, and at about half eight that evening I had been up there and he had not wanted to talk, and I had said something about getting some rest.
And at eleven minutes past nine he picked up his phone and asked his friend whether he was ever going to do the one thing he had asked him for.
And then he put it down and waited four minutes for i am, promise.
And five days later I went down that road and made sure the answer was no.
And I did not know about the dare. Nobody told me, and there is no reason anybody should have.
And I have spent fourteen months saying that — I didn’t know, nobody told me — and it is true, and it is also what you say.
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