I meet Rob for a drink. I’ve known him since university, when we both read the same books and watched the same films and mistook that for a life. He works for a housing charity now and attends council meetings, tenants’ meetings, food-bank meetings in rooms where people try to stop something worse happening.
He asks directly about work and the inheritance. I tell him a little.
So do something, he says, now you’ve got time. Going to church doesn’t change anything.
I don’t know about that, I say.
He says they need drivers on Tuesdays. Someone to take food boxes out to people who can’t get to the centre. Nothing dramatic. Mostly tins, nappies, toilet roll.
I don’t know if I’m the right kind of person for that, I say.
He looks at me. What kind of person do you have to be to carry a box?
I’d feel like I was acting, I say.
You are acting, he says, everyone is. We do it anyway. It’s not like anyone’s marking us.
Notes from a Room 