And in 2004 she was the patient, and Walter sat with her.
And in the March of 2006 he sold the family house on Verrin Lane and moved into a bedsit eleven minutes’ walk from St Ansgar’s, and he did her Tuesdays for nineteen years.
And his children thought he had lost his mind.
There was a row in the April of 2006, and Lorcan said one sentence.
It is in the notebook for that year, which is the only place in twenty-two books where Walter Pryce writes about himself, and it is four lines long.
Lorcan said: “You’re collecting dead people because you couldn’t handle one.”
Walter was fifty-three. He wrote it down and he never mentioned the volunteering to either of his children again.
Nineteen years.
They knew he had sold the house. They knew he lived in one room. They did not know what he was doing with his time and they had decided, somewhere around 2008, that it was drink or depression or both, and after a while it was just how things were.
Fenella sent a card every Christmas. He kept all of them and they are in the box file.
The box file.
Four hundred and eleven index cards. One per person.
Name, ward, dates on the front.
And on the back of each one, one line: whether anybody came.
Not a judgement. Just a fact. *Nephew, twice, final week.* *Nobody.* Neighbour — Wednesday only.
And on the inside of the lid there is a tally in pencil, updated in about nine different pens over nineteen years.
Of four hundred and eleven people, sixty-eight had somebody turn up in the last week.
Sixty-eight out of four hundred and eleven.
I sat on the floor of my own flat and did that as a percentage on my phone and then had to put the phone down.
And the last card in that box.
It is blank on the front except for a name, written in a different pen from all the rest, because he wrote it himself.
***WALTER PRYCE.***
And on the back, where the line about visitors goes, there is one character.
A question mark.
