“He’s gone home,” says the waitress, looking at him thoughtfully.
There is no record of how their conversation ends.
THE PATIENT
WITH NO MEMORY OF ANYTHING PREVIOUS he found himself sitting up in a hospital bed wearing a hospital nightgown while a young woman checked his pulse, temperature, tested his reflexes then asked, “How do you feel now?”
“Perfectly all right,” he said because that was exactly how he felt. She made notes on a clipboard while he wondered if she was a doctor, a highly-trained nurse or something between the two. His main experience of hospitals had been half a century earlier, when everyone’s rank in a hospital was shown in the clothing. Doctors had white coats, usually open to show suits worn by most professional people then. Ward matrons and the nurses they commanded wore crisp linen aprons over blue dresses, with the matrons’ superiority asserted by a linen head-dress rather like the wig of a sphinx. He thought about changes that had altered most things he once took for granted until a young man in a green t-shirt and trousers came and began checking his pulse, temperature etc. The patient said, “This has been done already.”
“Yes,” said the man, “but we like to make sure.”
The patient thought about asking what was wrong with him, and how he had come there, but felt that admission of ignorance would demean him. Instead he asked (for the thought had suddenly occurred) “Where is my wife?” “She’s staying overnight in a hotel. We’ll probably let you out tomorrow, but had better keep you here till then in case complications develop.”
The man went away and the patient took stock of his situation.
His clothes, neatly folded, were on a chair beside the bed with his shoes on the floor beneath. A window behind showed total darkness outside so the hour was very late or very early in the morning. He was in a square ward with a bed in each corner. The bed facing him was empty. The other two beds, on each side of the ward’s entrance, had curtains pulled round them with two or three people inside talking in low voices. This was certainly an Accident and Emergency ward, but what had been the accident and where was the hospital? There was no ache in any part of his body and no stiffness in any joint, but on top of his skull where hardly any hair now grew he felt a mound like half a hard-boiled egg without the shell, sore when pressed, and with what seemed a gritty groove across it. How had that happened? Margaret and he had gone to a conference at Edinburgh University. His speech had received the usual friendly applause, and in a staff room afterwards they had stood eating wee sandwiches and sausage rolls and from cardboard plates, gossiping and sipping wine. Or was it whisky? Or both? Both were possible. Had this led to him falling down? But he had no hangover. He really did feel perfectly well and (he suddenly noticed) hungry.
After a while he got out of bed and went between the curtained beds to the entrance. Here he met the young man in green clothes coming in with a piece of medical equipment and asked him, “Can I have something to eat?” “Certainly. Soon. Soon.” said the man, going behind the curtains around a bed. The patient went back, lay down and after a while decided that the Emergency staff had more important things to do than feed him, so he would go out and buy a supper from the nearest fish and chip shop. Without removing the hospital nightshirt he tucked it into his trousers, put jersey and jacket on top, strapped on his sandals and went out into the corridor. Following EXIT signs with pointing arrows he passed through several corridors without passing anyone who noticed him, then arrived at a big doorway and went through. There was no street outside, only an acre of tarmac with a few parked cars and on the far side the black silhouettes of treetops against the slightly less black night sky. Then he remembered that Edinburgh City Hospital was no longer beside the University with nearby shops and pubs. This modern hospital was obviously miles from a fish and chip shop. With a sigh he went back inside. Seeing some seated men who seemed to be ambulance drivers he asked if there was a place where food could be got.
“You’ll find a vending machine through there,” said one of them, pointing. He found a big waiting room with nobody but himself there, and beside an empty reception desk a big glass-fronted cupboard containing many shelves. On the upper shelves packets of differently flavoured potato crisps were displayed, on the lower shelves those sweets that Americans call candy bars. Each was identified by a number and a letter of the alphabet beneath it on the shelf. A bar of chocolate interested him but could only be acquired by pressing buttons on a small switchboard at the side and putting money into a slot. He had not used a slot machine for years so had not realized they had become as bafflingly intricate as modern telephones, wireless sets and the latest models of probably everything else. He went back to the Emergency ward, again without anybody appearing to notice.
On the locker by the bed was a sandwich in a plastic wrapper and a cup of tea that was still warm enough to drink. Whoever left it there had perhaps assumed he was in the ward’s lavatory. It was a cheese and tomato sandwich. He ate it and drank the tea with great pleasure while sitting on the bed, then removed his sandals, stood up to undress, then saw that what had been the empty bed opposite had now a woman in it who was much younger than he. She was watching him with an absence of expression that somehow made him feel apologetic. Before pulling the curtains around his own bed he told her, “I’m doing this because I’m going to get undressed.” She said, “Don’t worry — I won’t jump on you.”
He pulled the curtains round his bed, undressed, got in and slept.
And awoke to a new day because there was a bright sky outside the window. He got up and dressed. The bed opposite was empty again. The two beds beside the entrance were now uncurtained. One was empty, the other contained a body he did not look at closely because of the low distressing sounds it made and the many tubes running into it. A clock on the wall showed the time was 8.20 a.m. National Health Hospitals had certainly changed a lot. Until the 1970s or perhaps later he remembered all patients being wakened soon after 7 a.m. by nurses serving breakfast. Then he heard a familiar voice from the corridor saying a sentence ending with the words, “… my husband.”
He stood up and went to her saying, “Here I am.”
“So he’s all right? I can take him home?” she asked the man in green who was obviously still on duty.
“Yes, take him home. If any of the symptoms described on this sheet occur, send for your GP at once, but if he takes things easy for a few weeks and avoids booze for a fortnight, I think he’ll be fine.”
As they walked hand-in-hand to the exit he asked, “What happened? How did I get here?”
“We were going down some steep steps into the Old Quadrangle. I needed help and got it. You thought you didn’t, and tripped, and would have fallen on your face had you not twisted sideways and banged your head instead. I thought you were dead — it was a nightmare. The ambulance came quite quick and the doctors here said it was a simple case of concussion, and I needn’t worry, but how did I know they weren’t saying that just to calm me? We are not going back to Glasgow by train. We’re going by taxi the whole way, no matter what it costs.” And they did.
BILLY SEMPLE
LEANING HEAVILY ON A STICK and walking with great difficulty, a man came into the pub where I usually drank a few years ago. The pub has since been gentrified out of existence. I did not think the man leaning on the stick was drunk, but the barman refused to serve him. The man said, “I’m Billy Semple, I used to play for Rangers.