It will take precisely eight months and four days for Cerys Evans to get over her son’s appearance on Britain’s Most Bungling, as four million viewers watch the ninety-six nails of Cardiff’s police stinger shred every tyre on Cerys’s Cortina. But as Kyle is dragged out in a swirl of blue lights, only Cerys will recognise how it’s the laddered leg of her 60 denier chocolate tights, squishing Kyle’s face into a bank robber’s scowl.
But like so many mothers, she’ll blame herself, ‘Where did I go wrong?’
Yet four months later Cerys will overcome her self-berating, do a V-sign to the neighbours, take a train and three buses to get first patted down, sniffed by a Spaniel, so she can confront her son across a numbered table.
But is it the lump in her throat that stops her accusing the pasty-faced lump in his bolted down chair?
And instead, Cerys weeps, head in her hands.
What did she do to cause this?
But fresh from his course on community reparation, Kyle tells Cerys how he’s sick of both stigma and the mother-blaming narrative, but having dropped out of school and been raised in an area of high deprivation, he’s learned, statistically, he’ll make at least one bad decision.
‘However,’ Kyle whispers when the screws aren’t listening and he hisses to Cerys how the cocaine was never found after the Feds ribboned her tyres, yet it’s still in its biscuit tin, buried in a hedge at the back of the Co-op.
And now Kyle’s had the time to calculate how that stash of powder is more than enough to buy them a new start, so when Kyle comes out (in eighteen months, twelve days and thirteen hours) Cerys had better get thinking what she’d like to pack
for Barbados.
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