Part 5 of 9 · 2 minWhat I Did

This is the part I have practised least, so I will do it plainly.

In 2021 I was the safety officer at the Uppal warehouse. Safety officer is a large phrase for a man with a clipboard and a rubber stamp. The job was to walk the racking on the first Monday of the month and sign that the pallet beams had been checked.

I signed for eleven months without walking anything.

Not out of malice. Out of the ordinary rot of a job nobody checks: the first month I was busy, the second month nothing had happened in the first, and by the fourth it had become the thing I did — sit in the cabin at eight in the morning and sign a form about racking I could see perfectly well from the window.

On the fourteenth of June a beam on aisle four let go while a loader was under it.

He did not die at once. He died on the Thursday.

I wrote the incident report. I wrote that the deceased had been observed climbing the racking to retrieve a carton, contrary to instruction. There was one witness who might have said otherwise and he was on a contract that ended in August and was not renewed, and I did not have to arrange that. It arranged itself. That is what I told myself. It arranged itself.

The company paid something. Not what it would have paid. There is a difference between a death caused by a failure of maintenance and a death caused by a man doing a stupid thing, and the difference has a number attached to it, and I moved that number with a sentence.

Ravi Kumar. Twenty-nine. I have never forgotten the name and I have never once said it out loud.

His widow's name was in the file too. I read it four years ago and did not retain it, because you do not retain the names of people you are not going to have to look at.

I know it now.

She had been cooking for me for six weeks.

And I had been cooking for her — carefully, gladly, better every week, lying awake at three in the morning working out how to please her — for five.

That is the thing. That is the whole thing. She did not have to make me do anything.

She only had to let me.