Chapter 87: Eleven Minutes
The woman who called Priya back was a safeguarding coordinator named Gail Rooney and she had twenty-two minutes before her next meeting.
Priya put her on speaker in a car park with the engine off and wrote for the whole call.
I got the notes that evening. Four pages, in a hand that gets worse as it goes.
Rooney was careful.
She said at the start that she could not discuss what the local authority was or was not doing.
Then she asked for more.
That is how you know something is alive. Nobody spends twenty-two minutes gathering detail on a file they have closed.
She wanted room numbers.
She got them. One to twenty-seven.
She wanted dates.
We had ranges, not dates. She took the ranges without complaint and read them back.
She wanted to know whether the initials belonged to people who administered medication, or people who checked it, or both, because on a chart those are different columns.
I had not thought about columns.
I could see the grid in my head and I could not tell her whether the box I was remembering was the giving box or the checking box, and I said so, and Priya wrote I do not know in the margin and underlined it.
Then Rooney asked the question that changed the month.
She asked whether the rota was a document that was displayed and retained, or a print-out that got thrown away.
Priya looked at the phone.
Priya did not know. Priya had never been in the building.
“I'll find out,” she said.
“Please don't do anything that puts you in a difficult position,” Rooney said, in the flat way people say that when they very much want the information.
Afterwards she sat in the car park a while, then drove to Ferris Street instead of to work.
She told me all of it standing in my doorway with her coat still done up.
“She asked about the rota twice,” she said.
“Why twice?”
“Because it is the only thing in your whole account that is not you.”
I did not follow.
“Everything else is your memory,” Priya said. “Your memory of initials, your memory of days. All of that can be attacked and you know it can.”
“And the rota?”
“A laminated sheet in a plastic wallet is an object. Objects have dates on them. They get replaced weekly, and the old ones get binned or filed.”
“And if it's filed.”
“Then somebody can put your Wednesday next to their Wednesday. That is not a memory any more. That is a comparison.”
I sat down on the arm of the one chair.
“There's a problem,” I said.
“Go on.”
“I left in December. It is the middle of March. Eleven weeks.”
“Yes.”
“Everything I have is eleven weeks old. If the round has changed, if the rota is printed differently, if the trolley is a different trolley, then every single thing I have said is about a building that does not exist any more.”
Priya undid her coat, which meant she had decided to stay.
“And there's a second problem,” she said. “When the council makes an enquiry, they go to the provider. That is the whole design. They have to.”
“Which tells Damon.”
“Which tells Damon. Not next month. The week they do it.”
We sat with that.
Outside, a woman was arguing with a parking machine.
I have thought since about how strange it is that the most frightening sentence of that entire winter was said by a friend, sitting on my one chair, with her coat undone.
“So whatever is in that building,” Priya said, “is in it for a very short time longer.”
I got up and walked the four strides, and turned, and came back.
“There is a thing I could do,” I said.
“Say it out loud slowly, because I am going to argue with it.”
“I need to know three things. Whether the round still goes down that corridor at ten past two. Whether the rota is still in the wallet on the trolley handle. And whether it still has a week ending date printed at the top, which I think it does, and which I would swear to and cannot.”
“That is inside the building.”
“That is inside the building.”
“How long?”
I did the walk in my head again. Front door, porch, mat, book, corridor, bend, short arm, back.
At my old pace, with a chair to push, it was forty minutes and a cup of tea.
Without one, with nothing to do but look, and count, and read one laminated sheet on a trolley handle without being seen to read it, it was eleven minutes.
Eleven.
I had given that building two hours a week for three years and now I needed eleven minutes of it, and every single reason I had for going through the door was gone.