A nine-year-old boy signed himself into my care home thirty-eight times in one year, and not one of those thirty-eight entries has an adult’s name written beside it.
I am on the front desk at Thorncastle Lodge. Forty-one residents, three floors, and a visitors’ book on the counter that nobody reads except me and the fire officer.
My name is Lavinia Oduya-Marchetti and I am sixty-three.
The book has four columns. Name. Who you are visiting. Time in. Time out.
People write rubbish in it. They put initials, or they put “family”, or they put nothing and sign the wrong line.
His entries are the neatest in the whole book and they always have been.
Printed capitals. Full name. Full name of the resident. The time to the minute.
And on the way out, which almost no adult ever bothers to do, the time out, filled in, correctly.
His name is Fenwick Oyelowo-Strand. He was nine when he started and he is ten now.
Always a Tuesday. Always between twenty-five to four and four o’clock.
He is visiting Mr. Alaric Strand on the second floor, room 2.14, who is eighty-one and who is his grandfather.
Here is the thing I should have stopped on the very first Tuesday, and did not stop on for eleven months.
Nobody came with him.
Not in the doorway. Not in the car park. Not sitting in the lounge with a magazine while he went up.
Thirty-eight Tuesdays and I never once saw an adult belonging to that child.
Now. Our policy, written down, in a folder behind me, says a visitor under sixteen must be accompanied by an adult.
And I want to be honest about why I did not enforce it, because “I forgot” would be a lie.
The first Tuesday, he came in and he stood at the counter with his chin about level with the top of it and he said, very politely, “I’ve come to see my granddad, he’s in 2.14, is that all right.”
And I asked him where his mum was.
And he said, “She’s parking.”
And I let him sign the book and go up. And at twenty past four he came down, filled in his time out, said goodbye to me by name because he had read my badge, and walked out of the front door and down the hill on his own.
Nobody was parking.
By the fourth Tuesday I had stopped asking, and I had started doing something much worse, which is that I had started making it easy for him.
I propped the inner door, which is heavy, at half past three on Tuesdays.
I put a biscuit tin on the end of the counter at twenty-five to four, and I did not put it there on any other day of the week.
I wrote “ACC. BY FAMILY” in the margin of the book in my own handwriting next to his entries, thirty-eight times, which is falsifying a visitors’ record, and I will say that out loud because it is true.
I told myself what you tell yourself. That an eighty-one-year-old man with nobody else coming was getting a visit. That it was forty minutes. That the alternative was turning a nine-year-old away at a door.
