Once on the Tuesday — he had the day — because the casters locked near the gymnasium and it took her something over twenty minutes to cross a building that he crossed in four.

He knew about the hand-rims.

Which is the part that I did not understand until much later and which turns out to be the whole of it.

The hand-rims are the metal hoops you actually push.

On a chair that age, with that many miles, the chrome goes, and underneath the chrome is pitting, and you cannot push a pitted rim without the heel of your hand taking the damage, and so you push with your palms flat against the tyre instead, which is worse.

He knew she had been in the nurse’s office on the ninth of October with blisters on both hands, because he had been sent to the nurse’s office that same morning with a nosebleed and she had been sitting there when he came in.