The Names the Lights forget

THE NAMES THE LIGHTS FORGET

by Matthew McConville

The letter was under the door of the bedsit when Lucinda got back on the Monday, addressed to THE OCCUPIER, printed on paper that had gone soft where it had lain against the mat. Pressure on the national electricity network. Exceptional seasonal demand. A managed reduction of seven minutes each evening at twenty hundred hours for the duration of the cold period, affecting properties across the DE4 postcode area. There was a snowflake graphic at the bottom that somebody had presumably been paid for. She put it beside the kettle. The electric was in the landlord's name and she had never seen a bill.

The bedsit was over a shop that sold vapes and phone cases. One room, a sink, a shower cubicle put in by somebody who had not measured first. She had it Monday to Thursday and drove home on the Friday, ninety-one miles, then came back in the dark on the Monday with a bag of food out of her own fridge because the shop downstairs sold nothing you could make a meal from.

The same letter was pinned up in the staff room at Kesterton House, next to the fire assembly points.

"Seven minutes," Bev said. Bev was the physio and had been there nine years. "They could've made it ten and had done."

"Does it affect us?"

"Generator takes the vents and the doors. Everything else goes off, and every alarm in the building goes with it." Bev was already getting into her coat. "You've not been here at eight, have you? It's a racket. Can't hear yourself."

Kesterton was eleven beds for acquired brain injury in a building that had been something else first. The corridor turned a corner it did not need to turn. The lift barely took a wheelchair and a member of staff without somebody having to shuffle sideways. By it was an orientation board with the day and date and weather and the names of the staff on shift, written up every morning in a nurse's handwriting. Lucinda had been there four months and had never been on it. Agency didn't go on the board. Agency went on the invoice.

Dean Rudge was in four.

He was twenty-three and had been ventilated for fourteen months, weaning by inches. Tracheostomy. Cuff inflated most of the day, which meant no air passed his vocal folds and he had no voice. Cuff up, he had a board and a look he did for yes. Cuff down, air leaked past the tube and up through the larynx on the way out, and he could speak. Breathy and low. Two or three words before he needed the next breath.

That was her job. Suction first, then again from the subglottic port, then Bev or Kath at the ventilator adjusting for the leak. Cuff down. Clock started.

Four minutes in October. Six by the middle of November. Eleven on the third of December, and she wrote it up that evening with her coat still on because the heater in the bedsit took an hour to do anything.

Cuff deflation tolerated 11 mins. Phonation achieved on exhalation, breathy, 2–3 word phrases, intelligibility good in quiet. SpO2 maintained 96–98%. Pt in good spirits, keen to continue.

She was proud of him and would not have written that anywhere.

---

On the Thursday of that week she was late off the unit and still on the corridor at eight when the lights went. The corridor turned orange from the emergency boxes over the doors, which lit most of it and left the bend by the linen cupboard black, and every alarm set to complain about a mains change started at once. It was not a noise you could think through. Kath came up the corridor cancelling them, one and then the next, not rushing. Somebody in seven was calling out and did not stop when Kath went in.

Lucinda put her head into four. Dean was awake, watching the ceiling.

"It's just the electric," she said. "Does it every night."

She gave him a thumbs up. He did not give her the look he did for yes.

The lights came back partway through the news in the day room, and the drinks machine hummed and clicked through its startup, and somebody laughed in the office. Lucinda went out to the car park and sat in her car for a few minutes before driving the mile back to the bedsit, and could not have said what she was waiting for.

---

She drove home on the Friday.

On the Monday, Hazel was not in five.

Hazel was the one who sat with the crossword she never wrote in, who had told Lucinda twice about a caravan at Mablethorpe. Five had somebody else's name on the door and a woman in the bed who had come in over the weekend. The handover sheet said transferred.

"She went Friday," Bev said. "There was a bed nearer her sister, I think."

"She never mentioned a sister."

"They don't always." Bev was pushing the trolley already. "You get four days a week, duck. Half of it happens on your Fridays."

Terry from nine stopped Lucinda outside the day room that afternoon. There had been a man who sat in the chair by the radiator, a tall one, and he had gone. Nobody would tell Terry where. Terry wanted her to know it had happened before and it happened at night.

Terry had a documented confabulatory presentation and had previously told Lucinda about a brother in the army and about working the trawlers.

Pt approached writer with confabulatory content re: another resident. Redirected. No distress.

She stood in the office for a while after she wrote it.

---

Mr Aziz went from six the Friday after. The bed was square on the Monday. There was a note in the file and a destination that existed, with a website, with a photograph of a garden and a row of smiling people in matching polo shirts. Lucinda rang the number from her car on her break and a woman answered, and Lucinda asked for Mr Aziz.

There was a pause, then the woman said they didn't have anyone by that name.

"Transferred Friday?"

"No, love."

Lucinda checked the place name. The woman checked again.

"There's a few homes with similar names round here," she said. "You sure you've got the right one?"

Lucinda said she probably hadn't, and apologised. There were four homes in that county with nearly the same name, and two of them were less than a mile apart.

Hazel's name had come off the orientation board and off the door of five. The little labels were printed on the machine in the office, and when somebody left, you simply didn't print theirs again.

---

Shauna was nineteen and did the teas and the beds and was not agency but was not far off it. She was outside the fire door at the back on the Tuesday with a vape when Lucinda came out to move her car.

"You're here late Thursdays," Shauna said.

"Sometimes."

"Don't be."

Lucinda stopped. Shauna was looking at her phone.

"What?"

"Don't be here Thursdays at eight."

"Shauna."

"I've not said owt." She slipped the vape into her sleeve. "You're agency. You're not even on the board." She pulled the fire door open. "Nobody'd know to look."

She held the door for Lucinda, then went back inside.

Shauna was not there on the Wednesday. Moved to the Chesterfield site, the office said, which was a thing that happened to bank staff all the time, and did.

---

The week before Christmas Lucinda got Dean to nineteen minutes, the best he had ever managed, and he spent nearly all of it on names.

It started as a list and she waited for it to turn into something.

Hazel.

A breath.

Hazel Bardon.

He waited for the ventilator.

Mr Aziz. Six.

Then a name Lucinda did not know. Another. A woman's name twice, with a number after it.

"Dean, what are you doing?"

He kept going. She could see the work in it now, each word pushed onto the end of an exhalation, his breaths shortening and the leak getting harder for the ventilator to compensate for.

"Dean. Slow down. You're fighting it."

Colin.

He swallowed.

Four.

Lucinda looked at him.

Before me.

"Nobody was in four before you."

Dean looked straight at her.

Thursdays.

The ventilator cycled.

Eight.

Then he tried to say something else and it fell apart before it became a word, and his sats dropped to ninety-four.

Kath put her head around the door. "You all right?"

"He's tiring."

She reinflated the cuff. Of course she did.

Dean was angry afterwards. The board took him four minutes to spell THEY DONT LEAVE, by which time his hand was shaking and he was exhausted.

"We'll pick it up tomorrow."

He shut his eyes.

On her way out she stopped at the door of four. DEAN RUDGE, in the machine's grey capitals, one corner lifted where the cleaners wiped it. She put her thumbnail under it.

There was another label underneath. COLIN, and the surname had come away with the glue. Under that, the ghost of a third. Just the sticky square where it had been.

She pressed Dean's back down and smoothed it with her thumb until it held.

She wrote up the session in the bedsit that night and read the entry back twice before filing it.

Cuff deflation trial 19 mins (PB). Excellent respiratory tolerance to approx 15 mins, then increased WOB, SpO2 94%, cuff reinflated. Phonation clear. Content: repetitive listing of names, incl. discharged residents and names not known to writer. Pt distressed following reinflation.

Her cursor sat after content for a while. She had nearly written perseverative. She deleted it.

---

It was the sixteenth when she sat on the end of the bed with her phone and read the supplier alerts in a row instead of one at a time.

To protect supply, managed reductions will continue. We are grateful for your patience.

Thank you for helping us reduce non-essential load across your area.

Non-essential load in your area has reduced by 4%. Every home makes a difference.

Lucinda looked at the number at the top of the messages. She had never given them her mobile number.

She sat with that for a bit. Then she looked at the microwave. 20:11, and the clock was not flashing. She had been in the bedsit at eight o'clock thirty times, perhaps more, and she could not remember the lights ever going out.

The next evening she turned the lamp off at five to eight and sat at the little table beside the window.

At eight, nothing happened. At one minute past, nothing. Four minutes past, five, six. The shop sign opposite stayed on. The bypass beyond the rooftops held its orange glow. A car went past below and its headlights slid over the ceiling.

At ten past she went downstairs. The man in the vape shop was sitting behind the counter watching something on his phone.

"Bit random," she said. "Have you been getting power cuts at eight?"

He looked up. "What?"

"Like seven minutes. Every night."

"No."

"None?"

"I'd know, love. Freezer'd be fucked."

"Did you get a letter about it?"

He shook his head and went back to his phone.

The supplier's automated line took fourteen minutes before it put her through to a person. The man was very pleasant. There was no managed reduction scheme operating in her area. There had not been one that winter.

"Have you thought about reporting it?" he said.

"I don't know what they're trying to do."

"No." He did not have an answer for that.

She got the letter from beside the kettle after they hung up. Real paper. Real logo. Real registered address at the bottom. No phone number. She had walked past it every day for seven weeks.

Affecting properties across the DE4 postcode area. Nobody else on the street had got one, only her.

Kesterton had one too, pinned in the staff room next to the fire assembly points, where everybody saw it and nobody had any reason to read it closely. The explanation had been sitting there for weeks, before anybody had a reason to question it. It wasn't the lie she couldn't get past. It was how long ago somebody had told it.

---

Lucinda went in on the Thursday and worked her list. She wrote up her notes. At half four she said goodnight to Kath at the desk and walked out to the car park and badged out. Then she sat in her car.

The office windows stayed lit. Staff came and went. A delivery driver arrived with boxes for the kitchen. At six thirty the night staff started appearing, and she watched them smoke by the wall, check their phones, hurry in out of the cold.

At quarter to eight she got out. She went round the side of the building and in through the fire door Shauna used, still propped with the same wooden wedge that had been there since October, and up the back stairs to the storage bay on the first floor where the hoists lived, and sat down on the floor between a stacked wheelchair and the wall.

Nobody looked for her. She was not on the board. She was not on the fire roll. She was not on the rota after five. Her car was round the side by the bins where she always left it so as not to take a visitor space.

At eight the building went dark and started screaming.

The first time, she had been standing under the emergency lights with Kath. This was different. The orange barely reached the storage bay. Every alarm in the building seemed to be coming through the walls at once, and the hoist above her joined in with a low battery tone that sat underneath everything else.

She lasted about a minute on the floor.

Then she heard the lift.

That got her up. Nobody used the lift at night unless they had to. It was too slow, and the doors sometimes needed two attempts before they shut properly.

Lucinda stepped out onto the corridor. The emergency light did not reach the bend by the linen cupboard, so she stayed there with her back against the wall.

Forty feet away, the door to seven was open.

Kath came out backwards, pulling a wheelchair. A man from days was at the other end. Lucinda knew his face but had never needed his name. He lifted the footplates over the metal strip at the door.

Pauline was in the chair.

Nightie. Blanket over her knees.

Eyes open.

They were not rushing. Lucinda had expected rushing. Instead it took them nearly a minute to get from seven to the lift, and halfway there the blanket slipped from Pauline's foot and Kath stopped and tucked it back underneath her calf. She bent down and said something. Lucinda could not hear through the alarms. Whatever it was, Kath said it kindly.

The lift doors opened. They turned Pauline's chair.

Pauline saw her.

Lucinda knew she did. There was nothing wrong with Pauline's eyes. She was oriented to person and place. She knew the day of the week. Lucinda had reviewed her language eleven weeks ago and again on Monday and had written no expressive content and brighter in presentation.

Pauline looked straight at her from the other end of the corridor.

Her mouth moved.

Nothing came out.

Lucinda read mouths for a living. Three syllables.

It was her name.

The chair disappeared into the lift. The doors began to close, and Kath looked up the corridor, straight at the bend by the linen cupboard where the orange didn't reach.

Her face didn't change. She didn't reach for the button.

The doors closed.

The number over the doors went from 1 to G. Then to a B that Lucinda had never seen lit, because there was nothing below the ground floor but the plant room, and nobody went in the plant room.

Lucinda would never know whether Kath had seen her. She stayed where she was.

The alarms stopped. A few seconds later the ceiling lights came back and the corridor turned white, and the drinks machine in the day room clicked through its startup. 20:07.

She walked past seven. The room was empty and the sheets were already off the bed. She went down the main stairs and badged out at the front.

20:41. It logs the time.

She called the police from the car park and stopped halfway through giving the address, because she could still see Kesterton through the windscreen. She told the woman she'd ring back. Then she drove onto the A6 and pulled into a lay-by and called again, and the woman on the phone was calm and wrote everything down.

---

Officers attended that night, and the manager on call showed them Pauline's file. Transferred at 19:20 to a nursing home in Nottinghamshire, which existed, with a website and a switchboard and photographs of a garden. A discharge summary. A transfer checklist with every box completed and a Kesterton signature at the bottom. The member of staff Lucinda had described had been on shift and had assisted. There had been an interruption to the electricity supply, and a notice explaining it was displayed in the staff room.

Everything around the transfer checked out. The only thing that didn't fit was what Lucinda had seen. Nobody in the county could tell her what offence she was describing.

She put it in writing on the Friday morning to the unit manager and copied the agency, and she used the word safeguarding, because that is the word that starts a procedure. The procedure started. Everybody was very good about it.

The unit manager rang her at home on the Saturday. He was warm. He asked how she was sleeping. He said what she had seen must have been upsetting and he was glad she had raised it, because staff should always feel able to raise concerns. He said he'd been through the notes.

There was a pause.

Then he asked whether she had been aware of how much she had been documenting around other people's residents lately.

"I don't know what you mean."

"No criticism, Lucinda."

"I didn't think there was."

"No, no. I'm just looking at the wider picture."

She said nothing. He read back a line from one of her own entries. Content: repetitive listing of names, including discharged residents and names not known to writer.

"That's Dean's session."

"Absolutely."

"He said the names."

"I'm not disputing that."

"Then why are you reading it to me?"

Another pause. "I suppose I'm wondering if things have been getting on top of you a bit."

She laughed once.

He did not.

"The commute's a lot," he said. "Four nights away every week. Bedsit. No family up here. Christmas coming up."

"I'm fine."

"I'm sure you are." He waited. "Nobody's suggesting anything."

She heard him turn a page.

"Still at the flat over the vape place?"

She had never told him where she lived.

The call lasted eleven minutes.

---

The agency rang on the Monday morning, before she'd set off. The site had queried a badge-out at 20:41 on the eighteenth, when Lucinda was not rostered: a lone worker in a building containing eleven vulnerable adults, and no other member of staff aware she was there. It was not a disciplinary. They wanted to make that very clear. They thought she should take the rest of the week, with Christmas.

The placement would finish on the thirty-first rather than the fourteenth. The form had no box on it for why. There was a two-week in Mansfield if she wanted it, starting straight after New Year.

Lucinda said she'd think about it.

She went back in on the Monday after Christmas for her last three days and worked her list. She did not go near seven.

In four, Dean's cuff stayed up. The session plan had been reviewed. Cuff deflation was to be reduced pending respiratory review, and somebody with more letters after their name than Lucinda had signed it.

Dean watched her while she checked his board.

"Sorry, mate."

She put it on the stand where he could reach it. He looked at the board. Then at her. He did not use it.

For a few seconds she thought he was sulking.

Then she understood. Anything he spelled, she would have to write down.

She left just after five. Back at the bedsit she put the bag of food from home into the fridge. Milk. Leftover chilli. Half a pack of ham. Her mother had put a little tub of Christmas cake in there even though Lucinda had told her she didn't like Christmas cake.

She showered. She ate standing at the sink.

Just before eight she realised she had been looking at the microwave clock for several minutes. 19:59. She felt stupid. The shop sign across the road was on. A bus went along the bypass.

20:00.

The lights went out.

Lucinda did not move.

Outside, the vape shop was still lit. The bypass was still orange. Headlights passed below the window and travelled across the ceiling.

Behind her, the fridge had stopped humming.

On the stairs, somebody was coming up. Not rushing.