Every hour through the night a carer looks in on every resident and initials a sheet, and the sheet is printed each evening from the resident list. Ours prints with fifteen rooms. There are fourteen. The fifteenth is initialled every hour, in pen, in a hand none of us has, before any of us gets to the sheet, and what is written in the comments column is about somebody who is not well.
I am a night carer at a small residential home, fourteen rooms, and I do the hourly checks.
The sheet.
Printed at eight from the resident list. A row per room, a column per hour, and you initial the box when you have put your head round the door and seen the person breathing, and there is a comments column for anything to hand over. It is a simple thing and it is the thing the coroner asks for.
Ours prints with a room fifteen on it.
Room fifteen.
The home has fourteen rooms. The printer prints fifteen rows. The fifteenth has a name in it, a woman's, and a date of birth that would make her a hundred and three, and the row is there every night and the resident list on the computer, which the sheet is printed from, has fourteen people on it.
The boxes for fifteen are initialled. Every hour. In blue pen, in a small neat hand, with the time beside each one, and the time is always about five minutes past the hour, which is when a careful carer finishes the round. The initials are the same every night. They are not anybody's here.
The comments column, most nights, says settled. Some nights it says restless. One night in about ten it says, chesty, will ask GP, and on those nights the handwriting is smaller.
What has been checked.
The printer, the template, the list. Fourteen rooms, fourteen rows, and the sheet comes out of the printer with fifteen, and the fifteenth is blank when it comes out, and by nine it is initialled for eight.
The sheet, watched, by me, on the desk, at five past ten. The pen I keep on the clipboard moved. It did not lift. It lay on the sheet and it moved, the way a pen moves when a hand is holding it that is not there, and the initials appeared, and the time, and under comments, settled, and the pen stopped.
I did not touch that sheet for the rest of the night. The boxes filled in anyway.
The name.
The home opened in 1987 in a house that had been a private nursing home before that, run by a matron, and the matron's records are in a box in the loft, because nobody throws anything away in a care home, and I went up with a torch.
She is in them. A resident of the old nursing home, in what was room fifteen, which was the room at the end of the top corridor that became the linen cupboard when the home was refitted. Admitted 1983. Chest trouble. The matron's night book has her checked every hour, in blue pen, in a small neat hand, settled, settled, restless, chesty, will ask GP, for two years, and then, one night in 1985, nothing after the two o'clock check, and the next page is about the funeral.
The initials on our sheet are the matron's.
What is done about it.
The sheet goes in the file with the fifteenth row on it and nobody has questioned it, because nobody reads a night check sheet until somebody has died, and nobody in room fifteen can.
What I do.
I do the checks.
I go to the linen cupboard now, at five past every hour, after the fourteen. I open the door. Shelves, towels, the smell of the laundry. I look in, the way I look in on anybody, long enough to see, and I close the door, and I go back to the desk, and the fifteenth box is initialled in blue and the comment says settled.
Except that on the chesty nights, it does not. On those nights the box is empty when I get back. It waits. And I have come to understand that on those nights the matron wants it witnessed, the way a second nurse witnesses a thing that matters, and so on those nights I initial fifteen myself, under hers when hers comes, and write in comments, checked, settled, and the box is then initialled by her as well, above mine, and the time she writes is a minute after mine.
She has been checking on a woman who died in 1985 every hour for forty years, and she has needed, on the bad nights, for somebody else to look too. I look. I do not know what I am looking at. It is towels. I look anyway, because she did, and because the sheet is the proof that somebody did.