The form came through at quarter past ten.
Wendy opened it, read down to the referral type, tabbed across to the presenting injury. Broken wrist, right-hand dominant, mechanism of injury given as a fall on uneven paving. A&E Thursday night. Nurse note: safeguarding screen completed, concern flagged, refer for follow-up. The address was on Whittington Moor.
She logged it, assigned it to Sharon, closed the file. Forty-three seconds. She knew because she’d started timing herself three years ago, when she’d realised she was getting faster and faster and that this was not a good sign.
The next one was already in the queue.
By half eleven she’d processed fourteen. She kept a tally on a Post-it note in the bottom left corner of her screen — not because the system didn’t count them, but because the system’s number felt like someone else’s. Fourteen. She knew what fourteen meant in real terms. The way she knew what the referral types meant.
Her phone buzzed. Sophie. *Just confirmed the flowers. Pale pink roses and gypsophila. You’ll love them Mum.*
Wendy looked at the message for a moment, then put the phone face-down on the desk.
She knew what she would say when she saw the flowers. She knew what her face would do. She’d been practising.
The problem wasn’t the flowers.
She ate outside when the weather allowed, which in Chesterfield meant less often than she’d like. Today it was cold but dry. She took her sandwich and her flask and walked the ten minutes to the bench by the Crooked Spire.
She’d been eating here for nine years. She didn’t look at the spire anymore. It was a thing other people looked at — tourists, people who’d just arrived. Wendy had arrived nine years ago and stopped looking at it within the first month. The bench was what she came for. The twenty-five minutes.
There was a man already at the other end. He was there most days — she’d registered him the way you registered regulars without processing them properly. Seventies, she thought. Paper bag on his lap. He threw bread to the pigeons in a particular pattern, methodical, working from left to right along the pavement in front of him.
A pigeon landed close to his feet and stopped. It didn’t eat. Just stood there.
He waited. It didn’t move.
*She’ll do what she wants,* he said.
Wendy looked up.
He wasn’t talking to her. He was talking to the pigeon. His eyes were on the bird. She’d thought for a moment, from the timing of it, that the words were addressed to her — the way you thought you’d heard your name in a crowd and turned, and hadn’t.
The pigeon walked two steps to the left and began eating. The man threw another piece to compensate.
Wendy looked back at her sandwich. She’d said as much to Paul last week. Sophie was thirty-one. Sophie had been making her own decisions since she was sixteen, and this was a decision she had made and was going to keep making.
She’d met him four times. Each time she’d come away with the same feeling — a particular quiet in the flat, the way he spoke about Sophie’s job, a small correction he’d made at dinner that Sophie had absorbed without flinching.
That was the thing. Already.
She folded the empty sandwich bag and put it in her coat pocket. Four minutes left. The spire was behind the bench, the way it always was. She never looked at it. She was looking at it now.
The man on the bench threw the last of the bread. He folded the paper bag and put it in his pocket carefully, the way you’d put something away that you meant to use again. Then he sat with his hands on his knees and looked at the square.
Wendy got up.
Sixteen in the afternoon. She added them to the Post-it. Thirty in total. The system had thirty-one — she’d miscounted somewhere in the morning and she wasn’t going to find it now.
At half three her phone buzzed again. Sophie. *Have you thought any more about the reading?*
Wendy typed: *Yes. I’ll do it.*
She would stand at the front of a church in five weeks and read whatever Sophie had chosen and her voice would be level. She was good at that. Twelve years of practice.
She put her phone down. Opened the next form.
A boy in a borrowed car on Chatsworth Road. Both windows up. The police scanner on. He knows the voices by frequency, by the flat tone of routine. Today the call is about him.
The police came and went. Jan stood at the counter with both palms flat on the surface. Procedure finished. What didn’t finish was the girl’s face when she came back.
That evening, Keith told Sue what he’d seen through the roller door — the car, the girl, the volunteer at the counter. He described it the way he’d describe a fault. Sue asked the question he hadn’t asked himself.
A council admin worker processes safeguarding referrals. Forty-three seconds each. She keeps her own tally. At lunch, a man on the bench by the Crooked Spire says something she mishears.