Chapter 88: The Visitors' Book
My solicitor took eleven minutes to tell me what I could and could not do, without once asking why I wanted to know.
My bail conditions name two people and one house. They do not name a building on Sunnyside Road.
Visiting a resident in a care home is a lawful thing that any member of the public may do at the invitation of that resident.
“But hear the rest,” she said. “You do not ask staff questions. You do not touch a document. You do not photograph anything. If Damon Ashford comes through that door, you leave immediately, by the nearest exit, and you telephone me from the car park.”
“Understood.”
“Say it back.”
I said it back.
We went on a Thursday, because on Wednesdays there used to be a grey estate car in the second bay from the wall at four o'clock, and I was not going to gamble on habits.
Two ten in the afternoon. Priya drove.
She parked facing out, without being asked, which is the sort of thing she does.
The laurel hedge had been cut back hard over the winter and the building looked bigger for it.
Porch. Two doors, the second not opening until the first has shut.
Coir mat, worn through in the middle to the backing.
The heat came at us the way it always did, and the smell with it.
Toast and laundry and hot metal.
Three years of Wednesdays got up my throat in one go and I had to stand still for a second inside the second door.
Bernie was on reception.
She looked up, and her whole face went one way and then the other, and she said, “Oh.”
“Hello, Bernie.”
“We heard,” she said.
Two words. Not unkind. Just the sound of a building deciding what to do about you.
“This is my friend Priya,” I said. “We've come to see Doreen in nine.”
There is a lectern to the right of the desk with the visitors' book on it, and a pen on a string that is too short.
We signed. Priya first, then me.
My own name, my real one, in a book that stays in a building.
Time in: 14:12.
I want to be clear that I understood exactly what I was doing when I wrote that. So did Priya. We had discussed it for an hour and decided that a name in a book is a person with nothing to hide.
Bernie did not stop us. She looked at the phone on her desk and then did not pick it up, and I have thought about that decision of hers many times since.
Then the corridor.
Vinyl, one piece, no seam.
Handrails at waist height, pale wood, warm to the hand.
Door one on the left. Mr. Attah's name card was gone. A new card, a name I did not know.
Two, on the right, occupied now. Three. Four.
Five had no wind chime. Six, seven, eight.
Nine.
The name card on nine said M. OKONJO.
The door was ajar.
Inside, a made bed, a stripped chair, a window with the blind at half, and a stranger's photographs on the sill.
Priya was two steps behind me and she put her hand on my back, low, between the shoulder blades, and held it there.
A carer came past with an armful of towels and I asked her, in the lightest voice I have ever produced, whether Doreen had moved rooms.
“She's not on this corridor now,” the woman said, and kept walking, and did not look at me while she said it.
I did not ask a second question.
I want that written down, because it is the worst thing I did that year.
I stood in a corridor I had walked two hundred and forty times and I did not ask where an eighty-eight-year-old woman had gone, because a woman who asks questions gets remembered, and I had nine minutes left.
We went on.
Ten to fourteen, four left and one right, the linen cupboard where a door should be.
Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Eighteen and nineteen at the bend.
Then the short arm.
Twenty to twenty-seven, and the fire door with the green man on it.
Twenty-seven doors. Nothing had changed about the doors.
At two twenty-one the trolley came round the bend.
Steel, waist height, dark blue drawer fronts, and a plastic wallet cable-tied to the handle with a laminated sheet inside it, curling at one corner.
I crouched to retie a boot that did not need retying, four feet from the near castor, with my head at the height of the handle.
WILLOW BANK GROUND FLOOR. WEEK ENDING 21 MARCH.
Seven columns. Three shifts. Names, not initials, in full, in a table.
I read the Wednesday column twice. That took about six seconds.
Then I stood up, thanked a carer who had not done anything for me, and we walked out past the lectern.
Time out: 14:23.
Eleven minutes.