At prom one boy asked me to dance and everybody else in that room spent three hours not looking at me. Thirty years later he mopped up my spilled coffee in a hospital cafe in worn scrubs, counted the last coins in his pocket to buy me another, and did not recognise me at all.
That was three years ago.
Rye left the ambulance service eleven months after that, because a rota that puts you on nights cannot be run alongside being the only care a young man has, and because the care package they were assessed for covers four hours a day.
He has been mopping floors at Corwen General for two years because it is days only, it is eleven minutes from their house, and he can get home.
And here is the thing that made me put my coffee down when Delph told me.
Their house has three steps at the front.
They applied for a ramp in the first year and were refused, and appealed, and were refused again, and the second refusal was about a technicality with the tenancy.
So for three years Rye Colvin has been lifting a twenty-two-year-old man up three steps twice a day.
His hip is not from the accident. His hip is from the steps.
He has been on a list for a replacement for three years and has deferred it twice, and the form Noreen Sackville took out of his hand in that canteen and put under her elbow was the third deferral.
He cannot have that operation. It is twelve weeks and there is nobody else.
And Ozzie’s chair is wrong. I did not need to be told this; I saw it in their hallway eleven days later and I knew the model and I knew the year and I could have told you what it was doing to that young man’s shoulders inside about four seconds, because that is literally my job.
It was prescribed through a process that starts with a budget and works backward, and it is four kilos too heavy for him, and the seat is wrong for a person with his level and build, and he had been in it for three years.
