Jake (later years)
35→55, Middlesbrough
Jake at 35 — Fifteen Years After the Army Youth Programme
I’m a site manager for Utilico now.
I know. The lad who couldn’t name a tool beyond a hammer is managing a crew of forty on a water treatment facility upgrade in Teesside. Sergeant Williams would do that thing where he pretends he’s not smiling but his moustache twitches. He died three years ago — heart attack, the bastard, couldn’t even let someone else go first. I spoke at his funeral. I said: “He told me on day one that he didn’t care where I’d been. He was right. He only cared about where I was going. I’m here.” The moustache would have twitched.
The five lads I sent to the programme — three signed up, remember? Kieran was the terrified one. Kieran is now a senior drainage engineer running his own team on the coastal resilience programme. He’s got a kid. Named her Bev, after the nurse at the CHRC who kept us both alive. Bev retired last year. Kieran took the kid to meet her. Bev cried. We all cried. We’re engineers; we cry about infrastructure and nurses.
The other two who signed up — one’s in Transitco maintenance, one’s in the nuclear decommissioning programme. They both own homes. Homes for Life tenancies, then saved enough to buy. Zero student debt because the training was free. The system worked for them the way it worked for me: door opens, person walks through, life changes.
The two who didn’t sign up? One of them — Danny — he went a different way. Didn’t make it. Overdose, 2034. He never went to the CHRC. He knew it was there. He just couldn’t walk through the door. The door was open. He couldn’t walk through it. I think about Danny more than I should. The system saved me and Kieran and the others but it didn’t save Danny, and the maths of that — the fact that you can build every door and open every door and someone still doesn’t walk through — that’s the thing the dashboard can’t show. The invisible losses. The people the numbers never counted because they never entered the system that would have counted them.
The CHRC nurse — different one, not Bev, a younger woman called Ade — she told me once that the programme’s 61% reduction in street drug deaths means 39% didn’t reduce. “We celebrate the sixty-one,” she said. “We carry the thirty-nine.” Danny’s in the thirty-nine. I carry him.
Jake at 45
I’m an operations director for Utilico North. Forty people became four hundred. I run the water and energy infrastructure for everything above Birmingham.
Mum died last year. She was seventy-two. Not old enough. Never old enough. She died in the flat she’d lived in for thirty years — Homes for Life tenure, the same flat she moved into when the NRSA changed the law. The landlord — long since replaced by Utilico’s housing arm — had maintained it properly for three decades because the dashboard showed the repair response times and the right-to-repair deductions would have cost more than just fixing things.
The funeral was £1,900 — dignified, proper, the baseline that Anderson’s reforms guaranteed. I paid for it from savings. I have savings. The sentence “I have savings” would have been science fiction when I was eighteen. I have savings and a pension and a home and a career and a drunk giraffe welding sculpture in the garden that Dave and I made twenty years ago at free college. Dave sends a Christmas card every year. His daughter Sophie works on the tidal programme. She was right — the sea does power the country now.
I submitted a Dashboard Direct question the week Mum died. Not about policy. About something personal:
“My mum was a cleaner. She cleaned offices and served school dinners and cared for my nan without being paid for it. When the carer’s allowance went up, she cried because someone finally acknowledged what she did. She dropped one of her cleaning jobs and she was still tired all the time but she was less tired. She died last week. She was the reason I survived long enough to reach the Army Youth Programme. She was the reason I’m here. Can you make sure the carer pay keeps up with inflation? Because there’s another mum out there right now, cleaning offices and caring for her mother and holding it all together with nothing, and she needs what my mum got. She needs someone to say: we see you.”
The PM answered it. Not with policy. With four words:
“We see her. Always.”
I printed it. It’s on the fridge next to a photo of Mum and a faded letter from the Army Youth Programme confirming my start date. The two pieces of paper that changed my life: one that said “you start in March” and one that said “we see her.”
Jake at 55
I retired early. Utilico pension, thirty years of service, enough to live on. Not rich. Comfortable. The word comfortable would have made eighteen-year-old Jake laugh so hard he’d have choked on his off-brand energy drink.
I volunteer now. Two days a week at the CHRC in Middlesbrough — not as a nurse, as a peer support worker. I sit in the waiting room and I talk to the people who come in. Not about drugs or treatment or recovery. About whatever they want to talk about. Football. Dogs. The weather. The Transitco bus that’s always two minutes late on the Acklam route (some things never change; I’ve submitted three Dashboard Direct questions about it).
Sometimes they ask me how I ended up volunteering. I tell them: I used to sit where you’re sitting. Different chair, same room, same feeling. Bev looked after me. Now I’m here because someone should be, and I’ve got the time, and I know what it’s like to walk through a door you’re not sure you should walk through.
Sometimes they don’t come back. That’s Danny’s lesson. You can’t save everyone. The door is open but you can’t carry people through it. You can only be there when they’re ready.
Sometimes they do come back. And sometimes, a year or two later, they’re sitting in a free college classroom learning to weld, and their sculpture looks like a drunk giraffe, and they’re proud of it anyway.
The drunk giraffe is still in the garden. It’s rusted now. Looks better rusted, honestly. Dave would agree. Dave died last year — fell off a ladder fixing a boiler at seventy-two. A plumber to the last. His daughter Sophie gave the eulogy. She talked about Friday walks and drunk giraffes and the road outside their house that the Army fixed and never needed fixing again. She said: “Dad loved that road. He said it was the smoothest road in West Yorkshire. He drove it every day for thirty years.”
I’m 55. I’m sat in a clinic talking to strangers about football and weather. I’ve got a rusted sculpture and a faded letter and a pension and a life that shouldn’t have happened but did because a bus showed up, a nurse said “what do you need, love,” a sergeant said “I don’t care where you’ve been,” and a man in a chair said “the system should treat you like a human.”