Chapter 46: Sixteen Wednesdays
I had not been inside Willow Bank since the twenty-fourth of December, which was a Wednesday.
By the fifteenth of April there had been sixteen more.
I counted them without meaning to, the way you count anything you cannot stop counting.
In January I wrote to the home. Not to Damon. To the manager, Susan Ferry.
I said I knew I could not enter the building.
I asked whether I might be told when the residents I sat with had birthdays.
The reply came on Ashford Care Group letterhead, from an office, not from Susan.
Four lines. It thanked me for my past support.
It confirmed that my volunteer registration had been closed on the twenty-ninth of December.
That is four days after the twenty-fifth. I was in a cell for all four.
On the fifteenth of April I took the number 4 bus and got off at the stop opposite.
I want to explain what I did the Sunday before.
I went out there when the building was quiet, and paced the pavement.
Five hundred feet is a hundred and fifty-two metres.
The order puts no distance on Willow Bank. It says do not enter.
I paced it anyway, from the gate, along the road, to the shelter opposite.
One hundred and sixty-eight metres. I counted twice, then walked it again to be sure.
There is nothing to say about that except that it is what fear does to an accurate person.
So on the Wednesday I stood in a bus shelter a hundred and sixty-eight metres from that door.
It was raining in the way that is not quite raining.
The day room is on the ground floor at the south end, four windows onto the road.
At ten past ten the light goes on in there even in April, because of the trees.
Mr. Adeyi sits in the second chair from the left, by the radiator.
It is the only chair with a table at the right height for a folded newspaper.
The second chair from the left had a woman in it. I did not know her. Blue cardigan. Asleep.
That means nothing. People move chairs. He may have been at breakfast.
I stood there and made myself say that to myself twice.
Mrs. Lowry was at the third window. She is ninety-one.
She sits at the window because she likes to see the road.
She cannot see the road. She has about two metres of vision and will tell you so.
She sits there anyway, facing out, for two hours at a time.
I sat beside her for three years while she looked at a road she could not see.
Every week she asked me what the blue tablet was for.
I never knew. I said ask Cherie on the round. She said she had, and asked me again.
At twenty past ten a woman came out of the side door with a cigarette and a fleece over her uniform.
Cherie.
She stood under the overhang and looked across the road the way you look at a bus shelter.
Then she stopped looking at nothing.
She was a hundred and sixty-eight metres away and I saw the exact moment her chin came up.
She lifted her hand.
Not a wave. A hand, up, at about shoulder height, held there.
Here is what I did.
I stood there with my hands in the pockets of a fleece with a broken zip, and I did not move either of them.
There was reasoning. It was fast and it was cold.
Cherie is an employee of Ashford Care Group.
Condition four says indirect contact includes messages passed through any third party.
A raised hand is not a message. Any lawyer would tell you so. Ruth would have laughed at me.
But I did not know it at nine hundred per cent, and that is the number you need when the alternative is a cell.
So I let a woman who had made me tea every Wednesday for three years hold her arm up in the rain.
She held it about four seconds. Then she put it down, finished the cigarette, and went back inside.
That was the whole event. Eleven minutes, bus to bus.
I have been arrested, restrained, photographed, and had my knees measured with a ruler by a nurse.
None of it did what those four seconds did.
On the bus I got out the pad and wrote the date, the time, and what I had seen, with no opinion.
Wednesday 15 April. 10:20. C. came out for a cigarette. Raised her hand. I did not raise mine.
Read back, it looks like nothing. It looks like a woman noting down that she did not wave.
That is exactly what it is.
There are forty-one pages in that pad and this is the only entry I could not read aloud to anybody.
Twenty-six days to trial.