It was a system failure. A rota running two short on a Saturday night. A second signature required by policy with nobody available in the building to give it.
Three weeks, he had had that letter. Three weeks of still getting up at ten past seven.
I have asked him about those three weeks more than about the other eleven months.
Because the eleven months I understand. Eleven months is a man in a hole digging.
Three weeks is a man with a ladder.
And what he has told me, eventually, in the July, is that he read that letter in the car outside the hospital and then he sat there for about forty minutes.
And what he was working out was not how to tell me.
It was how to explain the eleven months.
Because the day the letter arrived, the thing he had been protecting me from stopped being the suspension and became the lying.
He said: I had something I could survive telling you in March. By January I didn’t.
PART 4
And that is why Cassian was crying in a hospital corridor in front of twenty people.
Because Soren put it in writing. Three times. About the staffing on those weekend rotas, before any of it happened.
The November before. The January. And eleven days before the Saturday.
And the person he sent all three of those letters to was Cassian.
Head of department.
He did not pass them up. Not out of malice — I have had this explained to me twice and I believe it. Because the budget round was in the February and because he was told to sit on anything that looked like a complaint until it was over.
So a man sat on three letters, and then watched his colleague be suspended for the exact thing those letters described, and then watched him not be cleared for eleven months.
He said to me, in a stairwell, sitting on a step, about ten minutes later: I’ve been waiting for somebody from your house to walk in here for the better part of a year.
He said he had rehearsed it. That he had a version of it ready in case it was me and a shorter version in case it was Soren’s mother.
Then he said: I was going to tell you in the spring. And then it got easier not to. And then it got harder.
And then he said the thing that made me put the lunch box down on a step.
He said: he asked me not to. In the April. He came in and he asked me not to tell anybody, in case it got back to you.
There is a second thing about that department that I found out later and that nobody at that hospital has said out loud.
Everybody knew.
Not about the warehouse. About the suspension.
Twenty people in that corridor, and a good half of them had known since the spring that Soren was not working there.
And for eleven months, not one of them rang me. Not one of them stopped me in a supermarket. Nobody’s wife sent a message.
That is not cruelty and I have stopped reading it as cruelty. It is the same thing every time.
Everybody assumed somebody closer had already done it.
The nurse whose christening I went to told me in the August that she had picked up her phone twice.
She said: and then I thought, well, she’ll know. She’s his wife.
PART 5
