Chapter 45: The Third Column
I went to work that night. I want that on the record before anything else.
The invoice was read at twenty past eleven in the morning. I clocked in at two minutes to ten that night.
One hundred and thirty-six picks an hour. Nobody said anything and there was nothing to say.
An aisle at three in the morning is a good place to think, because you can do nothing with it.
Here is what I did with it, and it is not what people expect.
I did not think about Margot. I have thought about Margot a great deal since, and hardly at all that week.
What I did was go back to the dates.
I had eleven, and I had never written them down, because a written thing can be found.
That night, in a break room with a laminated poster about lifting, I wrote them down.
It took forty minutes. I got all eleven without working at any of them.
Then a second column, which was the reason I had been given at the time.
The salt. The fish knife. A napkin folded wrong. Interrupting. Laughing at the wrong moment. A telephone number.
Then a third column, which I had never let myself write, and which took two more nights.
The third column is what actually happened on that day.
The second of November. The fish knife. That morning I had spoken to a supplier on the telephone in Russian for six minutes, and Margot came in halfway through.
The fourteenth of March. The napkin. That afternoon a photographer at a charity lunch took my picture, asked my name, and wrote it down.
The nineteenth of August. Interrupting. I corrected a guest about a knee injury, correctly, and he said, and how do you know that.
The twentieth of May. A telephone number. I gave mine to a woman at a school fete who wanted help with a raffle.
The fourth of September. No reason given at all, which happened twice.
That was the day the home sent a card with fourteen signatures on it, for two years of Wednesdays.
The fourteenth of October. The salt. That week I had been offered a paid shift at Willow Bank, four hours.
I told nobody. But I had said the words out loud in a corridor to a woman called Cherie.
I want to be careful here, because I know what this sounds like.
It sounds like a woman finding a pattern because she was handed a document and needs one.
So I did it the other way round, the way you test a pattern you do not trust.
I asked what the eleven days have in common that has nothing to do with mistakes.
On every one of those days, somebody outside that family had noticed me.
A supplier. A photographer. A guest. A woman at a fete. Fourteen signatures. Four hours of paid work.
The mistake was never the reason. The mistake was the paperwork.
A napkin is available every single evening. Nobody counts napkins unless they are looking for one.
I sat in that break room with three columns and saw the shape of three years.
It was not a temper. It was not a difficult mother-in-law. It was not old money.
It was maintenance.
Every time I became visible to somebody who was not them, there was a floor.
A woman who has recently been on a floor does not organise anybody's raffle. She is busy being careful.
By the fourteenth of April there were forty-one pages in the pad.
I took it to Ruth on the twenty-first, after supervision.
She read two pages, stopped, put it down squarely on the desk, and laid her hand flat on it.
“How long did this take you?”
“Nine nights.”
“On your breaks.”
“Yes.”
Then she said something I did not expect and did not want.
“Don't give me this yet.”
I asked why not.
“Because it is not a defence.”
“It explains everything.”
“It explains everything and it defends nothing. On the eleventh of May a jury will be asked one question.”
“Which is what.”
“Whether, when a man took hold of your dress, you should have taken his wrist.”
“Every word in that pad is about the three years before that second.”
“Yes. And the jury is not getting the three years. Context is for trial, and at trial context becomes relevance, and relevance is a door that only opens so far.”
Then: “Keep writing it. Write all of it. But you are charged with a felony in twenty days, and the only afterwards you get is the one where you are not in prison.”
I asked her whether there was an afterwards.
She did not answer that, which I appreciated, because the alternative was a kind answer.
She wrote a number on a card and gave me that instead. Her direct line, and underneath it: any hour.