Mr. Strand has vascular dementia. He came to us in the February of the year before and he is not going anywhere else.
He had three visitors in his first eleven months and two of them were a social worker.
Then the Tuesdays started.
I used to listen on the stairs sometimes, which I am also not proud of.
They watch the snooker. There is a little television in 2.14 and the boy puts the snooker on and he sits on the arm of the chair.
And his grandfather talks to him. Properly, in long sentences, about things that happened in 1968, and about a dog called Mustard, and about a job in a paint factory.
And every single time, about ten minutes in, he calls the boy Peter.
The boy’s name is Fenwick. Peter is his father.
He says, “Peter, turn that up a bit.” He says, “You’ve grown, Peter.”
And the boy says yes. Every time. For a year.
He has never once corrected him. Not in thirty-eight visits. I have listened to it from the landing and I have had to go back down the stairs twice.
What finally ended it was not me doing my job properly.
It was a Tuesday in the October when he did not come.
First time in thirty-eight. Twenty-five to four, no boy. Four o’clock, no boy.
And I stood at that desk with the biscuit tin out like an idiot and I realised, at about ten past four, that I had no telephone number for anybody connected to that child.
Not one. Because he had never been signed in by an adult, so there was nothing on any form.
I had let a nine-year-old come into my building thirty-eight times and I did not know a single way of reaching his family.
So I went up to 2.14 and I sat down opposite Mr. Strand and I asked him, on an afternoon when he was fairly clear, who the boy was and who brought him.
And he looked at me and he said something that took me a moment to get hold of.
He said: “Does Elspeth know he comes?”
Elspeth is the boy’s mother. She is thirty-six.
No. She did not know.
She had not known for a year, and when I finally got hold of her, through the school, on the Thursday, she did not believe me for the first four minutes of the telephone call.
Here is the shape of it, and it is sadder and more ordinary than anything I had imagined.
Elspeth stopped visiting her father in the April of the year before, after a row in the car park of this building that I was not here for and that two of my colleagues were.
It was about money, and about a house, and about her brother Peter, who has not been in the country since 2019.
She told her son that Granddad was poorly and that they would go when he was better, which is the thing people say when they do not intend to go at all.
And a nine-year-old boy worked out, on his own, the following things.
That the 17 bus goes from two streets from his school to the bottom of our hill. One fare, child, ninety cents.
