The night carer lays the dining room for breakfast at five, one place per resident, and the kitchen's system prints a card for each meal served so the dietitian can check intake. Every morning there is one more place laid than she set, at the same table, and the kitchen prints a card for it, and the card has a name and a diet on it, and the plate, when it is cleared, has been eaten from.
I am the night carer who lays breakfast at a care home, and I have laid it for thirty two people every morning for three years and found thirty three.
The laying.
Five o'clock, the dining room. A place for each resident who eats in the dining room, which is all of them who can, and the places have names on cards because people have their seats and a person in the wrong seat can set a morning off for everybody. Cutlery, a cup, a napkin. I count them. Thirty two.
At seven, when the day staff come in, there are thirty three.
The extra place.
Table four, the window end, the seat that faces the garden. Laid the way I lay, cutlery square, cup to the right, and a name card, in the home's card, in the home's printing, with a name on it that is not a resident's.
The kitchen system prints a meal card for every breakfast served, with the resident's name and their diet, and it prints one for that name. Soft diet, no sugar. The card is on the trolley with the others. The plate that goes out to the place comes back to the kitchen with food gone from it, and the intake chart for that name says breakfast taken, and there is no chart for that name, and the dietitian has never seen it because she looks at charts for residents.
What has been checked.
Me. I have counted, written down, photographed, and laid thirty two, and gone back at seven to thirty three.
The camera in the dining room. Between five and seven the room is empty and the lights are off. At about twenty to six, at table four, the window seat, the things on the table move. Not from somewhere. They are not there, and then they are, over about a minute, the way a place appears when somebody lays it, one thing at a time, the knife, the fork, the cup, the card, and nobody lays it.
Then the chair moves. Out from the table, a little, the distance a chair is pulled out by a person who is going to sit down and has not yet.
The name.
It is not on any record we have. It is not a past resident, not staff, not a family member on any file. I asked the residents, carefully, at breakfast, one at a time, over a few weeks, whether they knew anybody of that name, and most did not, and one did.
A lady at table four, in the seat next to the window seat. Ninety four. Sharp. She said, yes, that's my sister, she sits there, and she went on with her porridge.
Her sister died in 1998. It is in her file. Her sister never lived here. Her sister, the lady said, when I asked a little more, had promised to come and have breakfast with her every morning when they were both in a home, and they had laughed about it, and then her sister had died first and she had come in alone, and she said, she comes anyway. She said it as a person says the post comes.
What is done about it.
The kitchen prints thirty three cards and the catering contract is billed for thirty three breakfasts and the finance office has queried it twice and the kitchen has said the system prints what it is given, and nobody has found who gives it.
What I do.
I lay the tables.
I lay thirty three now. I put the card out myself, in the home's printing, which I asked the kitchen for, and I put the cup to the right and the napkin under the fork, and I pull the chair out the small distance it was pulled out on the camera, because if somebody is coming to breakfast every morning for twenty eight years to keep a promise they made in a kitchen in 1990, they should not have to lay their own place.
The camera has changed. The place does not appear any more, because it is already there. The chair does not move, because I have moved it. What happens instead, at twenty to six, is that the lady's chair, the one next to it, moves. The same small distance. And her place, which I have laid, is touched. The cup is turned a quarter turn, the way she turns it, and the napkin is moved a little to the left, the way she likes it, and I did not know, until I saw it on the camera, that somebody had been getting her place ready for her every morning as well, and I have started leaving that to them.