Chapter 117: Five Forty
The alarm goes at four fifty.
The bike is in the hall.
The towpath is unlit for the first two kilometres and lit badly after that.
Clock in at five thirty. On the floor by five forty.
Fairholme does hotels, two hospitals, and a chain of care homes.
That is a fact I noticed in my first week and have never mentioned to anybody there.
The work is this: load, run, unload, feed the roller iron, fold, cage, tag.
A full cage is ninety kilos on four castors and you move it by putting your hip into the corner and walking.
I am good at it. That is not a small thing to be able to write down.
In the January after the trial I asked for more hours and got eight, which took me to thirty-eight.
In the June I was made a shift lead on the flatwork side. Forty pence an hour and a clipboard.
I paid Priya back in four instalments and she took the money because I asked her to take it properly.
I want to be clear that I did try to go back.
In the February I applied to three domiciliary care agencies and one care home in the next town.
Care work pays about the same as a laundry and it is the only work I have ever been good at that involved other people.
All four required an enhanced check.
The first two rejected me at the application stage.
The standard question asks about unspent and spent convictions, which for that kind of post means all of them.
The third interviewed me. I brought my nine pages.
The manager read them in front of me and said she had no problem at all.
Then she said the decision was not hers alone.
The check came back with the conviction and with the acquittal, which the chief officer had considered relevant and had disclosed.
She telephoned me herself, which she did not have to do, and said the words “in the current climate”.
I said I understood. I did understand.
The fourth never replied.
So that was that, and it is not a scandal and I do not present it as one.
An organisation looking after people who cannot get out of a chair is entitled to be careful.
The system worked exactly as designed.
It worked as designed in December, when Margot rang the police, and in October, when twelve people acquitted me.
It is not a machine for producing justice for Nadia Volkov.
It is a machine for weighing risk. I am a risk. That is simply true.
What that means practically is that I will fold sheets.
I moved off Carrow Street in the March, into a two-bedroom flat above a car parts shop.
My flatmate is called Ronke and she works nights at the sorting office.
We overlap for about forty minutes a day. It has been the least difficult domestic arrangement of my adult life.
I have a bedroom eleven feet by ten and there is room to put a mat down and lie flat with my arms out.
I bought a proper one in the April. Two metres by one, four centimetres, seventy-eight pounds, delivered.
It is the single most expensive object I own.
In the May I turned thirty-five in a laundry.
Priya came at eight in the evening with a cake in a box, and we ate it out of the box with two forks.
She has a daughter now, adopted, who is seven and who calls me the tall one.
Priya works four days at the hospital and one at a service that reviews medication for people in care homes.
She moved there in the spring and would not discuss it with me for four months, in case it looked like anything.
She would not take credit for it and I stopped trying to make her.
Tobias lost the small hall in the November after the trial.
The council sold the building. There was a consultation, which is a word for a form on a website.
He had been teaching in that hall since 1994 and he had eleven weeks to find somewhere.
He rang me at ten at night, which is not his hour, and did not ask me for anything, which is his way of asking.
The unit on Bevin Road was a tyre-fitting bay with a roller shutter, a concrete floor, and no heating.
Eighteen metres by nine. Ceiling four and a half.
He measured it with his boot, heel to toe, which I have watched him do since I was twelve.
Two hundred and eighty a month. He had eleven hundred pounds.
“How much are mats,” I said.
“New, for that floor, eleven thousand.”
“And not new?”
He looked at me for a while.
“There is a school in Thurnley closing its judo club,” he said. “They have sixty second-hand tatami and a caretaker who wants them gone by the end of the month.”