My mother still sends me the local paper.
Every week it arrives on my doormat, even though I’ve not lived in Devon for ten years and almost all of the names mean nothing to me. But this week it was different. There, in Births, Marriages and Deaths, was a name I recognized: Charlie.
I was only a baby when she first told me about Geoffrey.
The story goes that, two weeks after my father left, I dropped my dummy on to the kitchen floor. When I reached down for it and attempted to put it back between my lips, Mother slapped my hand away and delivered to me these words, the words that would become the soundtrack of my morality.
‘Geoffrey says only bad boys put dirty things in their mouths.’