I sat on the floor of that little room with the chart photocopies I had taken on my phone and a piece of paper, and I did it properly, the way you do a bank statement when something has gone.
Six weeks. Eighteen shifts a week between two of us. Every medication on that sheet appears between forty and a hundred and twenty times.
Every single one is initialled. Mine are C.A. The other carer's are a squiggle.
And then there is one thing that has been going into that man since the September that appears zero times.
Not once. Not in a margin, not as a note, not in the incident log, which I have also kept and which has eleven entries in it about a draught in the hallway.
A medicine that exists in the room and does not exist on paper is not a medicine. It is something somebody is carrying.
And here is the part that I have not stopped thinking about since, which is about my son.
He did not wake up because I put a baby on his chest.
There is a version of this that has gone round where a child's heartbeat brought a man back, and it is a lovely story and it is not what happened and I am not going to let it stand.
He had been waking up for weeks.
Whatever it is wears off. And each time it does, he gets about four hours.
Those four hours always land in the middle of the night, because the visits are at four in the afternoon.
And in the middle of the night, there is nobody in that room.
Two months of a conscious man alone in the dark for four hours at a time, with a monitor beeping and a door nobody opened.
I asked him about that, later, when he could say more than a few words at a time.
I asked what he did in those hours.
And he said: counted the pipes.
There is a run of four pipes in the corner of that ceiling where the bathroom was put in, and he counted them, and then he counted the cornice, and then he did his suppliers in alphabetical order, and then he started again.
Fifty-six nights of that, and a forty-six-year-old man says it evenly, and then asks whether I want another cup of tea.
He does not say it dramatically. He says it the way you would describe a long flight.
Until one teething baby kept a woman walking for three hours, and she carried him into the only room in that house that nobody goes into at two in the morning.
That is all it was. A gap in a rota and a sore gum.
And one more thing, which I have not seen anybody mention when this gets retold.
I went into that room at about ten past two because it is the far end of the floor.
If the house had been laid out differently — if the sick room had been near the stairs, or next to the kitchen, or anywhere that a crying baby would have carried — I would not have gone in.
I would have walked that corridor for another hour and gone back to bed at four and been sacked in the November for a different reason.
A man survived because of where somebody in 1981 decided to put a bedroom.
PART 5
The nephew is not the one who thought of it. I want to be fair about that, and it is not much of a defence.
He is the one who signs.
I have watched that man for six weeks and I would put money on him not having asked a single question at any point.
He is thirty-four. He came into that house three or four times a week and stood at the foot of a bed with his phone in his hand and asked a carer how his uncle was, and never once looked at him.
That is not a man executing a plan. That is a man avoiding a room.
Somebody else built the thing. Christo's entire contribution was to not look, professionally, for two months, while signing whatever was put in front of him — which is a real thing to have done and which is worse than it sounds, because it is the part anybody can do.
There is a loan, secured against his expected inheritance, and it falls due in the April. He took it in 2023 to cover something that had already gone wrong.
Who lent him the money is the part that took the longest to establish and that is not mine to set out here.
Then there is Halloran, and this is the one I was not ready for.
He is not doing it for money. There is money, but the money is not why.
Eleven years ago the man in that bed ended that doctor's career with one letter to a medical board.
And the letter was correct. I have read the summary and there is no version of it where Rendel was wrong.
Rendel does not know his face. He has never known his face; he wrote a letter about a hospital contract in 2014 and forgot it inside a fortnight.
