She arrives on the Monday with a new notebook, a lunch in a box with compartments, and shoes that are not yet worn in.
I am to show her the job. She is with the team until the spring. She is with me for the first week, until her practice educator is back from leave, and then she goes to somebody who knows what they are doing. I say that to her as a joke and she writes it down.
What she notices
Everything. It is exhausting.
She notices that I say “bear with me” on the phone when I mean “I have lost the piece of paper”. She asks why I park facing out. She wants to know why I took my coat off in one house and kept it on in the next, and I have to think about it, because I did not know that I had.
(The first house was cold and the woman in it was ashamed of that. You do not sit in your coat in a house where somebody is ashamed of the cold. In the second, I was not sure yet how long I would be staying.)
I tell her. She writes it down. I watch her do it and I think, that was not in any book I was given. It must have come from somebody who once let me follow them about.
What I notice
That I have stopped noticing.
On Wednesday she asks why the form has the question about the child’s wishes and feelings on page seven, after the housing and the income and the immunisations. I start to explain and find that I cannot. I have filled in that form several hundred times. It is a fair question.
I write it in the back of my diary. It is still there.
Thursday
In the car, after a long morning, she is quiet. Then she says, “Do you ever get used to it?”
I think I know the answer she wants. She wants me to say yes, so that there is a day to look forward to when it stops costing anything. I think she would take a no as well, because it would mean she is not soft.
“You get used to the forms,” I say. “You get quicker. The rest of it I hope not.”
She does not write that down. She looks out of the window at a retail park, and eats a grape.
Friday
She gives me a card. It has a badger on it. Inside she has thanked me for the week, and at the bottom she has put: PS you say “right then” before you knock on every door. Out loud. I don’t think you know.
I did not know.
I have tried since to stop, and I cannot. I stand on the step and I hear it come out of me, quietly, to nobody. It is what somebody said on the steps I stood on when I was the one with the new notebook. I had been carrying it all that time and it took a student to hear it.
She qualifies in the summer. I hope she parks facing out. Some afternoon on a doorstep she will hear herself say “right then”, and I hope she does not mind too much where she got it.
This is a scene, and it is made up, like the book. Nobody in it is a real person.
Maisie x
Next in the notebook: Sunday night