Chapter 30: Seventeen
I did it at one in the morning on the twenty-fourth of September, on the floor of a room eight feet by eleven, with the graph paper taped to a box.
Nineteen rows on my knees. One hundred and seventy-six on the sheet beside them.
I want to describe the method, because the method is the only reason anybody believed any of it later.
I built the table before I looked at it.
Column one, date. Column two, time of onset. Column three, duration in seconds.
Column four, was Victor Blackwood in this house that night.
Column five, was Serena Montigue.
Column six, guests. Column seven, which of the staff slept in. Column eight, alarm schedule.
Column nine, temperature at onset, because I had taken one every single time.
Column ten, teething. Column eleven, season. Column twelve, who recorded it.
And then a wide column down the right-hand edge, which I ruled last and headed INNOCENT.
I filled the innocent column first.
That was deliberate. If you write the alarming explanation first, you spend the rest of the night defending it.
So: he is a baby with a small airway, and babies with small airways have bad nights.
So: March to September is pollen, then air conditioning, then pollen again.
So: four teeth came through between April and July, and teething wrecks sleep.
So: I am the person who wakes at two, and a thing nobody observes has not happened.
So: when the master bedroom is empty the house runs on the away schedule, and the air handling changes with it.
I wrote all five in ink before I wrote anything else. Four of them I could not exclude.
Then I filled the table.
It took forty minutes, because I checked every row twice, against Roz’s book and against the file names on the recorder.
Then I sat back on my heels and looked at column four.
Seventeen.
Seventeen of the nineteen happened on nights when Victor Blackwood did not sleep in that house.
The other two were the ninth of April and the eleventh of August.
I did not cross them out. I put them in a box at the foot of the sheet and wrote DOES NOT FIT.
Then I did the part that mattered, and I only knew to do it because of a lecturer called Halloran in my second year.
You have to ask how often the condition was true on the nights when nothing happened at all.
Victor Blackwood was away sixty-one nights out of the hundred and seventy-six.
That is thirty-five percent of the nights.
And eighty-nine percent of the episodes.
I did the division three times, on the back of the bank statement, because I did not trust my own hand.
Then I tested the other columns the same way, because a number that only points one direction is a number you have not tested.
Serena Montigue slept in that house on one hundred and sixty-eight of the hundred and seventy-six nights.
She was there for all nineteen. She was also there for the hundred and fifty-seven nights when nothing happened.
That column proves nothing about anybody, and I wrote NO DISCRIMINATION beside it in the margin.
Guests: no pattern. Staff sleeping in: four different people, no pattern. Temperature at onset: nineteen readings, the highest 37.1.
Not one fever. Not once in six months.
Teething: the four dates I had did not sit near the episodes.
Season: they run from March to September at a rate that does not change when the trees do.
Then time of day.
This is the one I had been looking at for six months without seeing.
Earliest onset 01:20. Latest 03:11.
Nineteen out of nineteen between one o’clock and half past three in the morning.
He naps twice a day. He has napped something like seven hundred times since March.
Not one episode in daylight. Not one.
I sat on that floor with the pen in my hand and I was very cold, and it was not the room.
Asthma does not consult a calendar.
It does not check whether a man is in Houston.
I wrote that sentence on the sheet, and then I made myself write the next one underneath it.
Because this is exactly where a person like me goes wrong, and I knew it even then.
I did not know what was happening to that child.
I did not know whether anything was being done to him at all.
I had no mechanism. I had no substance. I had nobody’s hands on anything.
I had a correlation, drawn by an interested party, from data collected by that same party, with the same observer sitting in every single row.
In the last column of all nineteen the entry was identical. Recorded by: L. Carter.
So at the bottom of the sheet I wrote the only sentence I was entitled to write.
SEVENTEEN OF NINETEEN OCCURRED ON NIGHTS WHEN THE CHILD’S FATHER WAS NOT IN THE HOUSE.
And under it, in the same ink: I DO NOT KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS.