That is not a noble reason. That is vanity with a coat on.
The second time was at about half past three, and that one was real.
I lay in a hotel room and worked out that I had sat one table away in that canteen with a sandwich in my hand and said nothing, and that there was no version of the following morning in which I was a person who had behaved well.
If I went back, I was a woman doing something about a thing she had watched happen and not stopped.
If I did not go back, I was a woman who had watched it happen and gone home.
There was no clean option left by half past three and that is what got me out of that bed, and I would like anybody reading this to notice that the thing that moved me was not kindness.
It was that I had already failed once by then and there was only one direction left that was not worse.
So what I had decided by about four in the morning was that I would not offer him anything. I would say one sentence and see what he did with it.
I went up to him in that corridor and I said his name, and he turned round with a bin bag in one hand.
And I said, “Then we’ll find another way.”
His hands stopped. Both of them, in mid-air, with the bag hanging.
He looked at me for about six seconds and I watched thirty years arrive on a man’s face in real time.
Then he said, “Immy?” which is a name that has not been used about me since 1996.
We sat in the smokers’ shelter for forty minutes because it was the only place with a bench.
He said no to everything.
I did not offer money. I offered an assessment for Ozzie, which Vantry does free for eleven people a year and which has a waiting list, and he said no.
I said I would write to the housing association about the ramp, and he said they had been through it and it was finished.
