There is no money in that backpack.
I want to say that as early as possible, every time, because everybody goes there immediately and it makes the rest of this impossible to explain.
There are files. Eleven folders, held together with two rubber bands, and one plastic wallet at the bottom.
I did not open it in that room. I got as far as the car park, and then I sat in my own car with the engine off and the bag on my knees for a long time, and then I opened it on the passenger seat in a hospital car park at about half past six in the morning.
The first folder is a schedule. Names down one side, dates down the other.
The seventh name on it is my mother’s.
Fenna Voort. Thirty-one years at Renner Salt & Mineral, starting in 1994 at the age of twenty-four.
She was still on that payroll the year she got ill, and she died at fifty-nine at Halloway General, in a room two floors below the one I had just walked out of.
Here is what those eleven folders are.
In 2019 there was a settlement. Eleven families, all of them people who had worked at that plant, all of them ill with the same thing or burying somebody who had been.
It was settled quietly. There was a payment schedule and there was an agreement that nobody involved would ever discuss any part of it with anybody, ever, including what they had been told about why.
My mother signed it in the March of 2019.
I found her copy afterwards, months later, in the back of a drawer with her passport, and I read it twice and could not work out what it was actually about, because there is nothing in that document that says what happened. That is the entire craft of it.
The money covered about nine months of a treatment she was not otherwise going to have.
She never said one word to me about any of it. Not one, in four years, and I sat next to that woman for eleven weeks at the end and thought she simply did not want to talk about work.
She could not. That is what she had signed.
My mother spent the last four years of her life legally unable to tell her own daughter what had happened to her, and she died still keeping it.
Absalom Renner ran that company for twenty-six years.
I want to describe the fourth folder because it is the one that did the actual damage and it is not the dramatic one.
It is internal correspondence. Nine pages, dated across 2011 and 2012, about ventilation in a specific part of that plant.
It is extremely boring. It is the most boring document I have ever read and I have read it perhaps sixty times.
There is no villain in it. Nobody writes anything monstrous. Four men discuss a cost, over about fourteen months, in the tone people use about a cost, and the thing they are costing is a piece of equipment.
And on page six somebody writes a sentence about the affected area being low occupancy.
My mother worked in the low occupancy area from 2008.
She used to say it was the quiet end and that she liked it because she could think. She said that to me at a kitchen table. She thought she had got the good posting and in a way she had, because it was quieter, and that is why it was cheaper not to fix.
I sat in a car park and read all of that and then I was sick in a drain.
Then I drove home with a dead man’s backpack on the passenger seat and went to bed at eight in the morning and slept for nine hours, and woke up at five in the afternoon in the dark not knowing which day it was.
PART 3
