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.
I would like there to be more in it than that.
There is not. There is a tooth, and a corridor, and a woman who was four weeks too slow.
