I photographed six weeks of my own chart on my phone in the bathroom at twenty past two in the morning.
Then I emailed it to myself, and to a solicitor whose name I got off a leaflet in a doctor's waiting room in the town, with four sentences of explanation and no accusations in it at all.
Then I went back to work and made breakfast for two people and behaved completely normally for eleven days.
That is the whole heroic act. A woman in a bathroom with a phone and no flash on.
Christo has not been in that house since the March of that year. He wrote to me once, four lines, and the only interesting thing about it is that he spelled my name wrong.
I do not work there any more. Rendel offered and I said no, and it took him about five months to understand why, and he does now.
I work in an office. It is dull and it is thirty-one thousand a year and there is a woman called Prue who brings in a cake nobody likes.
I have a flat with two bedrooms in it and Theodric has the one with the window over the road, and he is two and a half and he is loud.
He has a bed with a rail on it and there is nobody who can ask us to leave.
Rendel comes on a Sunday, most Sundays. He brings the wrong sort of biscuit every single time and I have stopped correcting him.
We are not what people assume. He is not a father to me and he is not anything else to me either, and there has been a certain amount of nudging from one or two people and it is wide of the mark.
What we are is two people who spent one night in a room getting a system down to four seconds.
He paid for something once, in the first year, without asking me, and I gave it back, and it was the only serious argument we have had.
He said: I can afford it.
And I said: that is exactly the problem, and it took him about a fortnight to understand what I meant and he has not done it since.
And Theodric does not know any of this. He knows an older man who walks slowly, and who always gets down onto the floor with him — which takes that man the better part of a minute, and which he does anyway, every week.
Here is the only thing I have.
Everybody wants this to be about a baby who woke a man up.
It is not. It is about a woman who noticed something in week two and did nothing about it until week six, and who is celebrated for the six weeks and not asked about the four.
Nobody has asked. Not one person, in two years, including the ones whose job it was.
Everybody wanted the baby on the chest. It is a better shape.
Nothing happened in those four weeks that could not have happened in week two.
The same case went out of that house twelve more times while I decided I could not afford to say anything.
If you have noticed something at work that does not add up —
the reason you have not said it is almost never that you are not sure.
You are sure. You have been sure for a while. What you are actually doing is pricing it, in rent, and in whether your children move schools.
I am not going to tell you that price is nothing. It is not nothing. It was the roof over my son.
But say it anyway, on the day you notice it, in writing, to somebody outside the building.
Because the price does not go down while you wait.
The only thing that goes down is the number of days left for the person it is happening to.
I had twelve visits' worth of that, and I very nearly spent all of them.
And the only reason I did not is that my son got a tooth.
That is not a moral. That is luck, and it is somebody else's four hours of counting pipes, and it is a bedroom at the wrong end of a corridor.
