And here is the thing that made me put my coffee down when Delph told me.
Their house has three steps at the front.
They applied for a ramp in the first year and were refused, and appealed, and were refused again, and the second refusal was about a technicality with the tenancy.
So for three years Rye Colvin has been lifting a twenty-two-year-old man up three steps twice a day.
His hip is not from the accident. His hip is from the steps.
He has been on a list for a replacement for three years and has deferred it twice, and the form Noreen Sackville took out of his hand in that canteen and put under her elbow was the third deferral.
He cannot have that operation. It is twelve weeks and there is nobody else.
And Ozzie’s chair is wrong. I did not need to be told this; I saw it in their hallway eleven days later and I knew the model and I knew the year and I could have told you what it was doing to that young man’s shoulders inside about four seconds, because that is literally my job.
It was prescribed through a process that starts with a budget and works backward, and it is four kilos too heavy for him, and the seat is wrong for a person with his level and build, and he had been in it for three years.
PART 4 — THE NEXT DAY
I went back the next day and found him in a corridor on the third floor.
I want to be honest that I spent that night deciding not to, twice.
Because there is a version of what I was about to do that is a rich woman feeling something in a cafe and buying herself the feeling off a man who cannot say no, and I know what it is like to be the object in somebody else’s good deed and I have hated it every single time.
The first time I decided not to was at about eleven at night, and the reason was that I did not want to be the school friend who turns up thirty years later to find out he has come down in the world.
