Chapter 33: Eleven Hundred and Eighty
The card declined on the fifth of January in a supermarket on Marrow Street.
Twenty-two dollars sixty. Bread, eggs, oats, a bag of apples, painkillers.
The machine said REFER TO CARD ISSUER, which is the polite version.
There was a queue of four behind me. The girl on the till was nineteen.
I said I would leave it, and she said it happens all the time, which was kind of her.
I put back the eggs and the apples and paid four dollars ten in coins.
The bank was two streets over. I went in the next morning as it opened.
They give you a chair at a desk on the open floor, so whatever happens to you happens where people can see it.
The card was on the household account. My name is printed on the plastic, which is not the same as being on the account.
I was an authorised user. An authorised user can be removed by the account holder in about ninety seconds, online.
It had been done on the twenty-seventh of December at nine fourteen in the morning.
I asked her to read me the time again, and she read it again.
Nine fourteen in the morning, on the twenty-seventh.
I had been in a holding cell for thirty-three hours at that point.
That is the fact I have never been able to make sit down properly.
Not the arrest. Not the order. The nine fourteen.
Somebody had a coffee and opened a laptop and did an errand.
Then she looked at the second account, the one in my own name, opened when I was twenty-six and never closed.
One thousand one hundred and eighty dollars and forty-two cents.
It had been that for years, give or take. Not savings. The residue of a life before this one.
“Is there anything else linked to you?”
“No.”
She checked anyway, because she was new and thorough.
No credit card. No overdraft. No standing orders. No direct debits.
A person can be married for three years and leave no trace whatsoever inside a bank.
The health insurance ran through Julian's employer. A letter came about continuation coverage. Four hundred and ninety a month.
I read it twice, put it in the locker with the padlock, and never opened it again.
The car was registered to the company. I drove it for three years and it was never mine for one minute.
That evening I sat on the fire escape behind the shelter with a pen and the back of the conditions sheet.
I did the arithmetic the way you do a weight cut, the only budgeting anybody taught me.
You do not start from what you want. You start from the number and work backwards, and you do not lie in either direction.
Bed at Kestrel House, no charge for the first twenty-eight nights.
Food, forty a week if I was careful, and I am careful.
Bus pass, twenty-six a month. Phone credit, fifteen.
Padlock, nine forty. Already spent.
Boots, eighteen. Jeans, four. Three shirts, six. Underwear, eleven. A coat from the same shop, twenty-two.
Ibuprofen, four dollars for a hundred, which is the cheapest medicine there is.
I wrote it in a column, drew a line, and did the subtraction twice.
Forty-one days.
That is what eleven hundred and eighty dollars is, if you are not paying rent.
With rent it is eleven days, and after twenty-eight nights Kestrel House becomes a conversation rather than a bed.
Then I turned the sheet over and read the eleven conditions again.
Report Tuesdays. Do not leave the state. Notify this office within twenty-four hours of any change of address.
A change of address requires an address.
I have thought a great deal since about how those two things fit together, and they do not.
The system requires you to have somewhere to live and provides you with nowhere, and neither half of it knows the other half exists.
I sat out there until my hands went numb.
Below me was a yard with a skip in it and a section of scaffolding left up from a roof job.
There was a scaffold pole at about seven feet, horizontal, and I looked at it for longer than I want to admit.
I have not hung from anything since the sixteenth of March two years ago, when a carpenter fixed a strip of moulding along a door frame in my own house.
It was decorative. That is what Julian said when I asked him. It was decorative.
I did not touch the scaffold pole.
A woman on pretrial supervision with an assault charge does not get to be found doing pull-ups in a yard at midnight.
I went back inside and signed the book and put the sheet in the locker.
Forty-one days. I wrote the date at the top of the column, the way you write a weigh-in date.
The fifteenth of February. That was the day I ran out.