Chapter 40: Forty-Seven Minutes
I called the hotline on the Monday, the fifth of October, at ten past two in the afternoon, from a payphone outside a laundromat on Devon.
There are four working payphones left on the north side and I had looked all three up on the library computer, and I found the fourth by accident.
I used a payphone because I had been told twice in four days that everything I did would be known, and because my phone bill goes to an address I do not own.
I want to put down what that call actually is, because people talk about calling the authorities as though it were a single verb.
It is forty-seven minutes.
I know that because I put two dollars seventy in the slot and I watched the numbers go down.
The first eleven are a hold queue with a recorded voice explaining that if a child is in immediate danger you should hang up and dial emergency services.
I nearly hung up four times in eleven minutes, and each time I did the arithmetic of the twenty minutes it had taken me to get to Devon.
The screener was a man with a quiet voice and a keyboard I could hear.
He asked my name and I gave it. There is a way to report anonymously. As a mandated reporter I am not permitted to use it.
He asked my relationship to the child and I said nanny, currently suspended, and I heard him type for longer than that took to say.
He asked the child’s name, date of birth, address, and the names of every adult in the household.
He asked who had responsibility for the child at night.
He asked what I had observed.
He asked it in the voice of a man who has typed the answer to that question nine thousand times.
Here is where it went wrong, and it went wrong because I had prepared for the wrong conversation.
I had prepared a table. He wanted an incident.
“On what date did you observe the child being harmed?”
“The fourteenth of September. I saw his wrist pulled. I’ve given a police statement.”
“So that is already reported.”
“Yes.”
“And since the fourteenth of September?”
“Nothing has happened in front of me. I am not permitted to be in the room at night any more.”
Typing.
“Ma’am, I need to be clear about what you’re reporting today. Are you reporting an act, or are you reporting a concern?”
I said I was reporting nineteen breathing episodes over six months, seventeen of which occurred on nights when the child’s father was not in the house.
There was a pause of the kind you can hear a person’s shoulders in.
“Is a physician aware of the breathing episodes?”
“Yes. He has ordered an overnight study.”
“Has the physician made a report?”
“No.”
“Has the physician told you that he believes the child is being harmed?”
“No. He has told me it is not asthma.”
“That isn’t the same thing.”
“I know it isn’t the same thing. That’s why I’m calling and not him.”
He was not unkind. I want to say that. He read back what he had typed and he read it accurately, and he corrected two dates when I asked him to.
He asked whether the child was currently safe.
I said that I did not know, and that not knowing was the only true answer I had, and that I was not going to improve it for him.
“Ma’am, I have to ask it as a yes or no.”
I said no.
He asked what specifically I feared would happen.
I said I feared it would happen again on a night when nobody was writing anything down.
More typing.
Then he gave me a reference beginning with an S and told me to keep it somewhere I would not lose it.
“Will somebody go out?” I said.
“A decision on whether the report is accepted for investigation is made within twenty-four hours.”
“By who?”
“By a supervisor.”
“On the basis of what?”
“On the basis of what I’ve entered.”
I stood in a phone booth on Devon with a laundry marker on my wrist and understood that six months of two o’clock in the morning had just been converted into eleven lines of somebody else’s typing.
He told me the household would not be told who had made the report.
I said the household had four members of staff and a suspended nanny with a spreadsheet, and asked him how long he thought that would take.
He did not answer that, because there was no answer, and because he had two hundred calls behind me.
Then he said the only thing he said that was not on his screen.
“Miss Carter. If it happens again, call from the room. Not afterwards. From the room.”