He was not sitting there for me.
He was sitting there for the building across the road.
His daughter works in it. Fourth floor, the entrance on the near side. She goes in at twenty to nine every morning and she comes out at about six.
He had not been allowed to contact her since 2011.
So he found a corner with a sightline, and he sat on it, and he watched a woman walk through a door twice a day for two years.
I have been back since. I have stood exactly where he sat and looked where he looked.
You can see the doors. You cannot see a face at that distance — not properly, not enough to know whether somebody is all right.
Two years of that.
And there is a line in the letter about it that I did not understand until the third reading.
He writes that he never once looked up at that building while I was there.
Two years. Eleven hundred mornings. A man kept his eyes on a coffee cup and on my face for four minutes at a time, deliberately, so that I would not follow his sightline and ask him what he was looking at.
That is the discipline in this that frightens me. Not the flat and not the cardboard.
Four minutes a day of not looking at the only thing he was there for.
Now the sign.
What he told me on that pavement was true. He did not want to go as a nobody and he did not want the city to put him in a hole with a number on it.
It was also about a third of the reason.
If he had gone with no next of kin recorded anywhere, the city would have looked for family. That is what they do and it is not difficult and it does not take long.
They would have found her inside a week.
And a woman of thirty-four would have picked up a telephone at her desk one afternoon and been asked to come and identify, and to decide, and to sign.
He married a stranger so that his daughter would never get that call.
That is the whole of it. That is what I signed on a Thursday in eleven minutes.
And then there is the liver, and this is the one I have not been able to put down.
He was on a transplant list in 2019.
He took himself off it. Not refused, not priced out — he withdrew, in writing, in the November, and the hospital has the form and I have seen a copy of it.
Because the assessment process requires a named family contact.
Somebody who signs. Somebody who gets telephoned. Somebody who comes to appointments and is spoken to by a consultant about what happens afterwards.
He would have had to write his daughter’s name on a piece of paper, and somebody in an office would have rung her.
He chose the other thing.
Six years ago, in a consulting room, that man sat down and decided that he would rather not be alive than make that phone call.
He does not say why he was not allowed to contact her.
There is one line about it and it is this:
I am not going to set it out, because setting it out would ask you to weigh it, and I have no right to ask you for that.
I have read that sentence about forty times.
I do not know whether it is the most decent thing in those four pages or the most cowardly, and I have decided that I am not the person who gets to rule on it.
She is.
