I am going to set out exactly what saying something would have cost, because I could have lost my job is too clean and it lets me off.
The agency has a whistleblowing line. It is on a poster in their office, which I have been to twice.
If I had rung it in week two, here is what happens — and I know this because I have since spoken to somebody it happened to.
They open a file. They notify the client, which is the family, which is Christo. They put you on paid suspension for two weeks while they look into it.
Paid suspension means no live-in placement. Live-in placement is the room.
So the honest sentence is not I could have lost my job.
It is: my son and I would have been in a hostel by the Friday, with a file open, with a reference that says ongoing matter, and I would have found out four weeks later whether I had been right.
That is the actual price and I want it on the page, because women in my job are told to speak up by people who have somewhere to sleep on Friday.
Because that job is the only one that lets me keep my son with me, and losing it means losing the room we sleep in, and I have been in the other version of that and I am not going back.
I did not stay quiet because I was frightened of those men.
I stayed quiet because I was standing in a room with a bed in it for my child, and I did not have another room.
And it goes one step further than that, and this is the thing I have said out loud exactly twice.
The night I laid Theodric on that man’s chest, I did not do it out of tenderness.
I did it because it was three hours, and I was finished, and I needed the baby quiet — because if he cried through one more night I would be out.
Christo had said it to me that afternoon in that exact sentence.
So I put a nine-month-old on a dying man to keep a job.
Saving that man’s life was a by-product of me trying to keep a bed for my son.
And I have been thanked for it in print, twice, by people who did not ask me that question.
The first time somebody used the word instinct about me I let it stand, in a room, in front of about nine people, and I have not been able to put that down since.
I let a stranger describe me as a woman who followed her heart into a room.
I followed a corridor. I followed a corridor because it was the far end and because I had been told that afternoon what would happen if that baby cried again.
There is no heart anywhere in the actual sequence of that night until about four in the morning, and by then he was already awake.
It has been two years.
Rendel walks now, slowly, with a stick, and his left hand does not do what he asks it to and probably will not.
There was a process about Halloran and there is another one still running about the loan, and I gave evidence twice and I am not going to write about either, because neither of them is finished and because the useful part was never in a courtroom.
The useful part was a chart with blank lines on it, kept by somebody nobody thought was reading.
What I actually did, in the end, was not brave and took about nine minutes.
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.
