Chapter 32: The Box on the Form
Kestrel House is a converted school on Marrow Street, twenty-six beds, and a sign that says nothing about what it is.
You sign in before eight and sign out when you leave. Both books sit by the door where anybody can read them.
Three to a room. Mine had a bunk and a single. I took the top, out of habit.
The mattress was ninety centimetres wide, with a frame bar running under it at shoulder height.
I slept on my left for eleven nights and my hip took it badly. The right shoulder cannot do a hard mattress.
There is a locker at each bed. The padlock is not provided.
I bought one on the second day for nine dollars forty.
It was the first money I spent as a person with no income. I remember the weight of it better than the shop.
The women there were not what people assume.
One had been nineteen years at the same hospital laundry and lost a flat to a rent increase, not to a man.
There was a rota for the kitchen and one for the bathrooms. I put my name on both. I needed something to be for.
The thirty-first was a Wednesday.
Wednesday is not a day, for me. It has not been a day for three years. It is a place.
At ten I would have been signing the visitors book at Willow Bank and taking the lanyard out of the drawer.
The drawer sticks. You have to lift it a quarter of an inch and then pull.
At quarter past I would have been in the day room, which smells of toast until eleven and disinfectant after.
Mr. Adeyi does the crossword and refuses help, but likes you to sit there while he refuses it.
Mrs. Lowry, ninety-one, asks me every week what the blue tablet is for.
I never knew. I told her to ask Cherie on the drug round. She always said she had, and asked me again the next week.
At eleven I would have cut somebody's fingernails, because nobody in that building has time for fingernails.
At twelve I would have hung the lanyard back up and signed out.
Two hours. The only two hours in my week when anybody thanked me for a thing that had actually happened.
That Wednesday I sat in a laundromat from ten until twelve, because it was warm and nobody asks you anything.
I had no laundry. I watched a machine that belonged to somebody else.
That is the truest sentence I can give you about that week.
I bought a phone on the fourth. Forty dollars, prepaid, with buttons.
The first number I put into it was Ruth's office. The second was pretrial services.
I did not put Julian's in. A number you have to type is a decision. A number in a list is a habit.
I rang him on the fourth, the sixth, and the ninth.
Eleven rings. Eleven rings. Eleven rings.
On the eighth day a caseworker called Amara went through my intake form again. The first had been done at eleven at night.
Date of birth. Last permanent address. Are you currently employed. Do you have dependants.
Any criminal charge pending. Yes.
Is there a protective order in place. Yes. Against me.
She typed that without changing her face.
Then she came to a box near the bottom of the page and read it out.
“Are you fleeing domestic violence?”
The room was four metres by three. There was a radiator under the window that knocked twice a minute.
I will describe what happened in my body, because that is the only honest way to report it.
My hands were on my knees. On the denim, over the exact place a nurse had photographed five days earlier.
“No,” I said.
She looked at me for about two seconds.
“It isn't a trick question. It only changes which funding stream you come under.”
“I know. The answer's no.”
“All right.”
She ticked the box and moved on to the next question.
Here is what I would say to that woman now, if I could find her.
It was not a lie. I believed it entirely.
Nobody had hit me. Nobody had threatened me. Nobody had locked a door.
I had been asked, politely, at a dinner table, in front of my husband, to put my knees on a floor. Twelve times.
You cannot flee a thing you have agreed to.
That is the sentence I lived inside for three years. I had never had to look at it in daylight.
Amara printed the form and asked me to sign the last page.
I signed it Nadia Volkov.
It was the first time in three years I had written that name, and my hand did it before I decided to.
I looked at it on the page for a while, and then gave her back her pen.