And I did not mention it to anybody. Not to my mother, who was outside. Not on the eighth. Not on the ninth, on that doorstep, to a man on his knees telling me about hearing loss in his family.
He told me the whole of it and I stood there with a result from the previous morning in my head and said nothing about it for another two days.
Why: because on the ninth of October I was not able to hand that man one single thing. Not a fact, not a result, not a piece of help.
It was the only thing I had that he did not, and I held it for forty-eight hours, in a week when a clock was running on my daughter's kidneys.
It made no difference to anything clinically. The scan was already being arranged.
It made a difference to me, and I knew what I was doing at the time, and that is the smallest and meanest thing in this entire account.
