I didn’t clock all of this the first time I met him, obviously. When I first met him I was still a child and just thought he was kind of cool-looking, in a Dr Who kind of way.
He looked at a notebook for quite some time before he looked at me.
‘Saffyre,’ he said. ‘That is a tremendously brilliant name.’
I said, ‘Yeah. Thanks. My mum chose it.’
It’s totally a name a nineteen-year-old mum would choose for a baby, isn’t it?
Then he said, ‘So, Saffyre, tell me about yourself.’
‘Like what?’ Everyone knows you shouldn’t ask kids open questions. They suck at answering them.
‘Like, tell me about school. How are you getting on?’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’m getting on good.’
Here we go, I thought, some bloke ticking boxes, filling in forms, going home to watchGame of Thronesand eat quinoa or whatever with his wife. I thought: This is not going to work.
And then he said, ‘Tell me, Saffyre, what’s the worst, worst thing that ever happened to you?’
And then I knew we were going to get somewhere. I didn’t know where yet, I just knew that I was at a point in my life whenI needed someone to ask me what the worst thing that ever happened to me was, rather than ask me if their eyebrows were on fleek or if I wanted chicken or fish for dinner.
I didn’t answer him immediately. My head flooded. The obvious thing came first. The thing that happened when I was ten. But I didn’t want to tell him that. Not yet. He waited, a good minute or so, for me to answer. Then I said, ‘All of it.’
‘All of it?’
‘Yes. All of it. My mum died before I knew her. And my grandma. My granddad was a single dad raising three children and a grandchild, then he got so ill that my uncle had to look after all of us from when he was like, my age. So he had no proper life. Ever. We had a budgerigar. It died. The lady next door who used to fix my hair for me, her name was Joyce – she died. My favourite teacher at primary school, Miss Raymond, got cancer and died just after she got married. My granddad’s got arthritis and is in pain nearly all the time.’
I stopped abruptly, just short of the defining event of all the bad events, the event that had brought me to his door. I stared at him, at the blue, blue eyes that reminded me of one of those dogs that look like wolves. I wanted him to go, ‘Oh, poor you. No wonder you’ve been cutting yourself all these years.’
Instead he said, ‘Now tell me the best thing that ever happened to you.’
I was taken aback, to be honest; it was like nothing I’d just said meant anything. Like maybe he hadn’t even been listening.
For a moment I didn’t even want to answer him. I just sat there. But then something suddenly came into my head. Therewas a girl at primary school called Lexie. She was very popular, very kind; all the teachers loved her and all the children loved her. She lived in a nice house on a nice street with crystal chandeliers and velvet sofas and she always invited the whole class to her birthday parties, even me, who wasn’t really one of her proper friends.
One year she had an animal party. A man with white hair came with a van full of boxes and cages and in each box and cage was a different animal, and we were allowed to touch them. He brought a chinchilla, a snake, some stick insects, a vole, a ferret, some birds, a tarantula. He also brought a barn owl. It was called Harry.
The man with the white hair looked around at all the children and he saw me and he said, ‘How about you, would you like to hold Harry?’
He brought me to the front and gave me a big leather glove to wear and then he put Harry the owl on my outstretched arm and I stood there and Harry turned his big head and looked at me and I looked at him and my heart just blew up with something warm and velvety and deep and soothing. It was like I loved him, like I loved this owl. Which was just stupid because I didn’t know him and he was an owl.
So I looked at Roan Fours and I said, ‘The time I held an owl at Lexie’s birthday when I was nine years old.’
And he said, ‘I love owls. They’re extraordinary creatures.’
I nodded.
He said, ‘What did it feel like when you held the owl?’
I said, ‘It felt like I loved him.’
He wrote something down. He said, ‘Who else do you love?’
I thought, Hmmm, aren’t we supposed to be talking about owls? Then I said, ‘I love my granddad. I love my uncles. I love my nieces.’
‘Friends?’
