The check-up

Fiction, about two adults over 18 playing at professions. She had expected to feel exposed. What she had not expected was to feel filed.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

I run a team of twenty-six people. I want that on the record before anything else, because it explains the whole thing.

Twenty-six people, four of whom are currently a problem, and a budget that has been cut twice since March. My phone goes at six forty every morning and it is almost never good news. I make decisions all day. Small ones mostly, but they are relentless, and they are all mine, and everybody in that building believes that I know what I am doing.

So when Adam asked what I actually wanted out of this, after weeks of the conversation going in circles, what came out of my mouth surprised both of us.

I said: I want somebody to fill in a form about me.

He got it immediately, which is one of the reasons I am still there. He did not make a joke and he did not ask what that was supposed to mean. He said, "Right," in the way he says right when he is already three steps into planning something, and then he said, "Can you give me a fortnight."

We spent an evening on the rules first, at his kitchen table, both of us with tea, which is not how any of this looks in anybody's imagination. What was on the table and what was not. What he was allowed to say. The word I would use.

And one line I was very clear about, which he wrote down in his own handwriting and read back to me: nothing about my body, nothing touched that was not agreed, and no version of this that involved being examined. He said that was fine. He said it was better, because the interesting part was the paperwork anyway.

That turned out to be true in a way neither of us predicted.

He made me wait in the hall.

That was the first thing, and it worked before anything had happened at all. I stood in the hall of a house I have a key to, on a Tuesday evening, with my coat still on, because he had said to wait there and he would call me through. Eight minutes. I checked. I had nothing to do with my hands and nowhere to put my attention and I could hear him moving about in the front room, unhurried, doing something with paper.

When he opened the door he did not say my first name. He said, "Come in, please. Take a seat."

He had moved the small table so it sat between two chairs, and on it was a clipboard with an actual printed form on it, and a pen, and a blood pressure monitor from Boots that I know for a fact he bought when his dad was ill. He sat down. He did not look at me. He wrote the date at the top of the form.

"Full name."

I told him. He wrote it down. He asked my date of birth and wrote that down too, and something in my chest went very quiet.

That quiet is the reason I have asked him to do it again twice.

He asked me forty questions off that form. How much sleep. How many units a week. What time I go to bed and what time I actually go to sleep, which are different questions and he asked both. Whether I eat lunch. Whether I have taken any leave this year. How many days I have worked past seven in the last month. Whether there is anybody at work I can say a true thing to.

None of it was cruel. That is the part I cannot explain properly to anybody who has not felt it. It was a flat professional voice asking a series of ordinary questions and writing my answers in a box, and by about question twelve I could hear myself telling the truth in a way I do not tell my sister.

At one point I said something defensive, some version of well everybody is tired, and he did not argue and he did not soothe me. He just wrote it down. He wrote down my excuse. I have never in my life been so effectively shut up by somebody writing something on a clipboard.

Then he put the cuff on my arm, which was the only time he touched me in the whole first hour, and he did it the way a nurse does, which is to say impersonally and with his mind on the machine rather than on me. He read the numbers out loud. He wrote those down too.

Then he said, "Stand over there, please, and wait. I need to go through this."

So I stood by the bookcase in my own boyfriend's front room like a woman waiting to be seen, and he read four pages of my own answers, in silence, for what he told me afterwards was six minutes and what I would have sworn was twenty.

Nothing happened. That is what I would want somebody to understand about this if they were thinking of trying it. Nothing was happening. A man was reading and a woman was standing up, and it was the most complete relief I have had in about four years.

Because I was not in charge of it. There was no next thing for me to decide. The outcome was already determined by what was written on those pages and my opinion about it was not being sought. Somebody else had the file, and the file was me, and for six minutes I was a case rather than a person who has to hold it all together.

I did not know that was available. I had spent two years assuming what I wanted was to be hurt, and it turns out that what I mostly wanted was to be assessed by somebody competent and told the result.

He gave me the result standing up, reading from the form, in the same voice he had used for the questions.

Sleep, inadequate. Alcohol, higher than I had told my GP. Leave taken this year, two days. Boundaries at work, none identified. Then he said the sentence I have thought about more than any other part of the evening, which was: "You are not looking after the person I am responsible for."

I cried at that, standing by the bookcase, before anything at all had happened, and he let me and did not come over.

The rest of it took about twelve minutes. What happened in them is ours. He stayed in the voice throughout. It was cold and it was procedural and it was exactly what I had asked for. What I remember is not the hairbrush. It is him saying the number out loud at the start, and then that it would be recorded.

Afterwards he came out of it in one move, the way you take off a coat, and put the kettle on and turned into a man in a jumper who was slightly worried he had got the tone wrong.

He had not. I told him so about six times. Then I made him promise something, while I was still shaky and being honest, and I have kept him to it: the form goes in the drawer, we do it every eight weeks, and he reads the last one out before he starts the new one. So there is a record. So I have to look at whether anything moved.

Two of the boxes are better than they were in March. One is worse. He read that out in the same flat voice as everything else, and I stood there with my hands at my sides and felt like a new starter on her first morning.

Twenty-six people. Four of whom are currently a problem. And a man with a clipboard who is the only person in my life who checks.