Chapter 82: A Person With No File
Priya Raman came on the Saturday with a bag of oranges and a folding chair, because she had been to the flat before and knew there was only one seat.
She is forty-one. She is five feet two and she takes the stairs two at a time and arrives not breathing hard, which annoys me.
She works in a benefits office for the county. Eleven years. Housing costs, mostly.
She spends her working life inside forms, and inside the parts of forms that do not work.
I had not intended to tell her.
I had intended to make tea and ask about her mother and let her sit in my flat for an hour. Since October she had been the only person who came without an agenda.
She put the oranges on the laminate table and looked at the notebook, which was open, because I had not thought to shut it.
“Twenty-seven doors,” she read.
“Don't.”
“All right.”
She sat down in her folding chair and peeled an orange and did not ask me anything for four minutes.
That is a very long time. I have counted many four minutes.
Then I told her.
All of it, in order, the way my solicitor had made me do it, with the I-do-not-knows left in.
The trolley. The folders. The grid. Three sets of initials. The rota in the plastic wallet. The green pen. The leaving card I had signed for T.D. in the summer of the second year.
Doreen at three o'clock.
And clause 9.2, which I put in front of her, because by then I could recite it and I wanted to see it land on somebody else's face.
She read it twice.
“Voluntary or unpaid capacity,” she said.
“Yes.”
“That's not a family clause.”
“No.”
She put the orange peel in a neat spiral on the table. She does that. She cannot help making things tidy.
“You can't be the one who reports it,” she said.
“I know.”
“Do you know why, or do you know because your solicitor told you?”
“Both.”
“Then say why.”
I had not expected to be examined in my own kitchen.
“Because I'm a defendant,” I said. “Because I'm negotiating with him. Because I have a conviction, and because the first thing anyone will say is that I made it up to get out of a trial.”
“Right,” she said. “So it's me.”
“No.”
“Nadia.”
“No. I'm not going to do that to you.”
She put down what was left of the orange.
“Do what to me?”
“Use you.”
“Ah,” she said.
She got up and looked out of my window, which shows a wall, a drainpipe, and about a foot of sky.
“Twelve years ago,” she said, “a man had hold of my arm and was walking me backwards towards a car with the door open, and a girl of twenty-two came off the pavement and put him on his back on the road.”
“Priya.”
“And then she ran, and I spent twelve years finding her, and when I found her she said sorry to me. She said sorry.”
“That isn't the same as this.”
“It is exactly the same as this,” Priya said. “You have got it into your head that you are a person things are done through. You are not. You are a person who does things and then apologises for them.”
I did not have an answer to that and I have not entirely found one since.
“I have no conviction,” she said, sitting back down. “I have a job with a council. I have eleven years of writing things down in a way that survives being read by somebody who does not like me.”
“They will find out who you are.”
“Eventually. Not on day one.”
“And if it costs you your job?”
“It will not cost me my job. I am not reporting my employer. I am a member of the public reporting a concern about a care provider, which anybody may do.”
She said it exactly like that. Like a sentence she had read off a screen a thousand times and never before needed.
“There's a condition,” she said.
“Name it.”
“I write what I actually have. Not what you saw. What I have is: a named person told me, on this date, that she observed the following over three years. That is what I put down, and I put your name in it, because a concern with a source is worth ten times an anonymous one.”
“Then it comes back to me anyway.”
“It comes back to you as a witness,” she said, “instead of as a rumour.”
She started a second orange.
“You have been carrying this on your own for three years and you did not even know you were carrying it,” she said. “You can put it down on my table now. That is all that is happening here.”