There is no version of my husband was suspended and worked nights in a warehouse and could not tell me that I get to be angry about in front of anybody.
I only get to be sad about it, and I only get to be sad about it because of the part I did.
That second and a half is the most shameful thing in this account and it is also the truest, and I have since been told by a woman on Wednesdays that almost everybody has it and almost nobody says it.
PART 3
My husband had not worked at that hospital since the March.
Eleven months.
The badge he clipped to his pocket every single morning, in front of me, at the kitchen door, had not opened a door in that building since the spring.
He had been getting up, showering, putting on a clean shirt, and leaving at ten past seven for eleven months.
So where was he going?
A distribution warehouse out at Brackley Cross, twenty-six minutes away.
Eleven at night until six in the morning. Eight months of it. Under his own name, on a payroll, with a locker and a number.
Because after the third month, suspension stops being paid.
I did not know that. I had no reason to know it and I have since found out that almost nobody does.
The money is the part nobody asks about, so I will put it down.
Our outgoings are four thousand one hundred a month. That is the mortgage, the car, her swimming, the lot.
A night shift at Brackley Cross, on the rate he was on, is about two thousand two hundred a month after tax.
He made up the difference out of an account I have never had a card for, which turned out to be his father’s money from 2017, and which he had been keeping for a deposit for her one day.
It is gone. All of it. That is the actual cost of eleven months of not telling me, and it is not the mortgage, it is a nineteen-year-old in 2036 who will not be getting a flat.
The rough nights. The nights he did not come home at all. A forty-four-year-old consultant surgeon in a hi-vis vest, loading pallets, on the shift nobody wants because it pays eighty pence more an hour.
Here is what happened in the March.
A twelve-year-old patient, and I am not going to write about that child beyond saying that she is alive.
He was suspended pending an investigation.
And when that investigation finally reported — three weeks before I walked into that corridor with a lunch box — it found no fault on his part.
None. It is in writing.
