Chapter 79: Twenty-Seven Doors
You go in through a porch with two doors, and the second one does not open until the first one shuts.
Then the mat. Coir, worn through in the middle to the backing.
Reception on the left. Bernie.
The visitors' book on the lectern to the right, pen on a string.
Time in. Name. Who you are visiting.
I always wrote the same thing in the third column. General.
Then the corridor.
I did it with my eyes shut, on the floor of a rented flat, at half past ten on a Thursday morning.
I made myself go at walking pace.
Not remembering pace. Walking pace.
Door one on the left. Mr. Attah, who had been a bus inspector and still checked his watch against yours.
Two, on the right. Empty that whole last year.
Three. Four. Five, which had a wind chime the manager kept asking about. Six, seven, eight.
Nine. Doreen.
Ten to fourteen, four of them on the left and one on the right, because the linen cupboard takes a space where a door should be.
Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen.
Eighteen and nineteen, which are the two big rooms by the bend, because the bend gives them an extra window.
That is the bend. Fifteen degrees, about two-thirds of the way along. From the hall you cannot see past it.
Then the short arm.
Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. Twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven.
Then the fire door with the green man on it and the push bar that squeaked.
Nineteen doors to the bend. Eight after it.
Twenty-seven.
I opened my eyes and said it out loud in an empty room.
Because I had heard that number before, in that building, in my own voice.
Doreen asked me once how many of them there were down our end.
She meant it the way people mean it when they are working out whether they matter.
The trolley was parked outside her door with the top drawer open and nobody standing at it, so I counted the folders while I answered her.
They stood upright, spines out.
A name label and a photograph on each, taken on the day the person moved in.
Twenty-seven folders. One per door. I told her twenty-seven and she said, well, that is a lot of us, and I said yes it is.
That was in the second year. Possibly the spring.
The round came down the corridor at ten past two.
Steel trolley, waist height, dark blue drawer fronts, and a plastic wallet cable-tied to the handle with the week's rota laminated inside it.
It curled at one corner where the lamination had failed. It was replaced every Monday.
It had always curled again by Wednesday.
At each door the folder came out of the drawer and went flat on the top of the trolley, open.
I have seen that grid four hundred times.
Days across the top. Drug names down the side.
A box for each one. Morning, midday, teatime, night.
And in each box, initials.
Not signatures. Initials, in biro, in a hand made small by hurry.
Three sets came up more than any others, and I knew them the way you know a bus route you do not use.
K.H., looping, with the H made in one stroke. A.J., pressed so hard it embossed the sheet underneath.
T.D., always in green, because there was a green pen kept in the tray and one person used it.
Now the rota, which I had also read four hundred times, standing there with my hands on the back of somebody's chair, because I am the kind of person who reads whatever is in front of her.
K.H. was on Tuesdays and Fridays. Never a Wednesday. Not once, in three years, on any laminated sheet I ever stood next to.
A.J. was nights. Ten till eight.
And T.D. came off the rota in the summer of my second year.
There was a leaving card in reception. I signed it. I remember signing it, because the pen on the string would not reach.
The green initials went on appearing in the boxes through the autumn.
I lay on the lino with my hands flat on the floor either side of me, and it came in one piece, the way a name arrives ten minutes after you needed it.
Doreen at three o'clock, in her chair, saying they had not been round yet today, love.
Me saying they will have.
Her saying, no.
Twenty-seven folders in a drawer.
Twenty-seven people behind twenty-seven doors, with boxes ticked at two o'clock on a Wednesday by three people who were not in the building.
I had watched that happen every week for three years.
And every single week, at four o'clock, I had got into a car and driven back to a house where I would be told at some point that evening to kneel down, and I had put the stone back on the beach.