That school finishes at ten past three on a Tuesday because Tuesday is the day he does not have football.
That his mother gets in from work at twenty past five.
That the gap is two hours and ten minutes, and that forty minutes of it fits inside a visit, and that nobody counts the rest.
He bought the bus fare out of lunch money. Ninety cents each way. Thirty-eight Tuesdays. Sixty-eight dollars and forty cents of a child’s lunch money, over a year, to sit on the arm of a chair and watch snooker.
And he let an old man call him by his uncle’s name for a year, every single week, because the one time he had tried to say “I’m Fenwick”, in the second or third visit, his grandfather had become distressed and had asked him to leave.
So he stopped being Fenwick on Tuesdays. At nine years old. That was his solution.
The reason he did not come that October Tuesday is that he had tonsillitis and a temperature of thirty-nine, and he had cried in his bedroom about it, and his mother had assumed it was the temperature.
She rang me back on the Friday after she had spoken to him.
She said: “He’s got a notebook.”
He writes it down after every visit. What his grandfather told him. The dog called Mustard, the paint factory, a man called Big Kenneth who lost a finger in 1971.
Sixty-odd pages of an old man’s life, taken down in pencil by a nine-year-old, because he had worked out something that his mother had not, which is that there is a clock running on the stories in that room and when it stops there is no getting them back.
Elspeth came the following Tuesday. She came with him, on the 17 bus, because he would not get in the car; he wanted to show her the way he goes.
She signed the book. Her entry is on the line under his, in the proper column, for the first time in nineteen months.
Her father called her Elspeth. He got that right. He did not get much else right that afternoon but he got her name.
She has been every Tuesday since. Eleven weeks now. Sometimes her husband comes.
Mr. Strand died on the ninth of August this year, at about four in the morning, with nobody in the room, which is how it happens for most of them whatever anyone tells you.
At the funeral the boy read out four things from the notebook. He is ten. He stood at the front and read about Mustard and about Big Kenneth’s finger and about the paint factory, and he did not cry and almost nobody else managed it.
I have changed one thing on my desk.
The visitors’ book has a fifth column now. I drew it in with a ruler and the head of care has signed it off.
It says: WHO KNOWS YOU ARE HERE.
Because thirty-eight times I watched a child write his name in that book in beautiful printed capitals, and the one piece of information I actually needed was the one thing nobody had ever thought to ask him for.
