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.
I went up to him in that corridor and I said his name, and he turned round with a bin bag in one hand.
And I said, “Then we’ll find another way.”
His hands stopped. Both of them, in mid-air, with the bag hanging.
He looked at me for about six seconds and I watched thirty years arrive on a man’s face in real time.
Then he said, “Immy?” which is a name that has not been used about me since 1996.
We sat in the smokers’ shelter for forty minutes because it was the only place with a bench.
He said no to everything.
I did not offer money. I offered an assessment for Ozzie, which Vantry does free for eleven people a year and which has a waiting list, and he said no.
I said I would write to the housing association about the ramp, and he said they had been through it and it was finished.
And then he said the thing that I have repeated since to about nine people in that industry.
He said, “I’ve had three years of people being kind for a fortnight. Then it’s somebody else’s turn to be kind about something and we’re still on the steps.”
That is the actual problem and he described it better in one sentence than any policy document I have read.
So I did not argue with him and I did not persuade him. I did the only thing I have ever known how to do, which is paperwork.
I put Ozzie’s existing prescription in front of the panel I sit on, anonymised, as an example of a seating outcome, which is a thing that panel exists to look at.
