Seventy-one years old.
Fern is two in February. She has Mrs Veck three days a week and the fund covers the days Mrs Veck cannot do.
And in fourteen months I have not once had to choose between my rent and my daughter’s safety, and before the sixteenth of October I had been choosing between them, quietly, about every six weeks, for nearly a year.
Nobody at that restaurant knew that. I never said. Not one word, to anybody, in nine months of working there.
That is the actual thing, and it is why the fund matters more than any of the rest of it.
Wim Stroud did not rescue me. He heard a baby through a floor.
Everything else — the corridor, the phone, the log, the eleven words — was a sixty-eight-year-old man spending about two hours making sure that one Thursday in October did not become eleven weeks in 1980.
He has never once mentioned the laundrette to anybody else in that building and he has asked me not to, and I have not, and I am not going to.
And he has never held her again.
He asked me, once, in the December, whether that was all right — whether he was allowed — and I said of course.
And he said no, actually, and that he had thought about it and he would rather not, because the last time he picked up somebody else’s child it started all that.
So he does not.
He asks after her about twice a week, by name, at the pass, in front of everybody.
And he has never touched her since ten past five on the sixteenth of October, and that is the most careful thing anybody has ever done for my daughter.
