Chapter 34: Four Ruled Lines
I applied for nineteen jobs in eleven days. I kept the list, because I keep lists.
Supermarket nights. A school kitchen. Two hotels. A car wash. A packing line. A cleaning contractor above a tyre place.
And a home care agency called Bellrose, which is the one that matters.
Applications are all the same now. A form on a library terminal with a forty-minute limit.
Name. Address. I put Kestrel House, which has a postcode that people in that town recognise.
Employment history. That was the part I could not solve.
Two years in a bar off Aldon Street, twelve years ago, cash in hand, the owner dead since.
Four years casual at a builders' yard. No contract. Paid weekly.
Then nothing. Three years of nothing, because I was married.
There is no word for what I did in those three years that fits in a box on a form.
I ran a house. I hosted. I sat where I was put and stood when I was told.
The form wants dates, a company name, and a supervisor's telephone number.
Bellrose called me on the twelfth.
The interview was in a portacabin behind their office. Fifty minutes, and the best fifty minutes since Christmas.
The manager was called Nirupa. She had a lanyard and a cold.
She asked me why care work.
I told her about Wednesdays. The visitors book. The drawer that sticks.
I said Mr. Adeyi will not accept help with the crossword but likes you there while he refuses it, and that this is the whole job in one sentence.
I said I could get a woman of ninety-one out of a chair without hurting her shoulder or mine, and that it is not strength, it is where you put your feet.
She stopped writing. “Where did you learn that?”
It was the first time in three years anybody had asked where I learned something.
“I used to compete. You spend ten years learning how another person's weight moves.”
She said it was the best answer she had had all week.
At the end she said, “I can offer you sixteen hours to start. It goes to thirty inside a month.”
Sixteen hours at nineteen dollars is three hundred and four a week.
I did that arithmetic in the portacabin and kept it off my face. Then I walked to the bus stop, and it reached my face.
The forms came by email the same afternoon. There were six. The sixth was the one.
Disclosure of criminal convictions and pending proceedings.
It is a single page. A paragraph explains that the role is exempt from the usual rules, because it involves vulnerable adults.
Exempt means everything. Spent, unspent, cautions, charges not yet heard. Everything.
There are two boxes. Yes and No.
Underneath, four ruled lines, for details.
I sat in the library with the printout and did not put the pen down for eleven minutes.
Not because I was deciding. There was nothing to decide. Lying on that form is itself an offence.
It was because of the four ruled lines.
Four lines to explain twelve years.
I wrote: Assault. Age 22. Guilty plea. Two years probation, completed. Currently charged with assault in the second degree, matter pending, no trial date.
That took two of the lines. I could think of nothing for the other two that would not make it worse.
So I left them blank, and that has bothered me ever since. It looked as though there was nothing to say.
Nirupa rang me on the twentieth at ten past nine in the morning.
I was on the bus. I got off at the next stop to take it, which cost me a fare.
She was kind. I want to be exact about that, because it did not help.
She said: “I have to withdraw the offer.”
She said: “It isn't my decision. With a pending matter, our insurer won't cover the placement.”
She said: “If the charge goes away, please call me. I mean that.”
She said: “I'm sorry, Nadia.”
Four sentences. I have never been able to fault one of them.
I said thank you and that I understood, and I did understand, and then I stood at a bus stop at quarter past nine.
It was raining in the way that is not quite raining.
Here is the thing I worked out standing there.
The charge did not have to be true. It did not have to be proved. It did not even have to be heard.
It only had to be pending.
A pending charge is not an accusation. It is a condition you live in, and it removes you from every building where somebody is vulnerable.
Old people. Children. Hospitals. Schools.
Every place where I am any good.
I got the next bus back to the library and applied to pick orders in a warehouse at night.
That form had one question about convictions and no lines underneath it.