Hut7

Poor wee Maggie McCann was dying. I suppose I should have felt sorry for her. But she just used to rock herself non stop 24 hours a day and scream intermittent parrot chatter, at full volume half that time, so that you had to turn up the radio, the only thing that made Ailsa Ward life bearable.

Maggie McCann shouldn’t even have been in our ward. She had to get fed cut morsels spoonful by spoonful, which sat in the folds and bulges of her fat rosy cheeks ready to rot her remaining two front teeth and spill out onto her man size-baby bib. And she was doubly incontinent. She had to get checked and her big fat nappy arse changed and washed out in the sluice room every few hours. So she was really a pain in the arse. She was severely subnormal. They should have put her in with the geriatrics up the hill. They had room for her.

Wullie the Pole spent a lot of ward time in Maggie McCann’s room. She’d been moved to a single. It was probably the first time she had a single room since she’d been delivered and brought to Glendevon Hospital twenty three years ago. Maggie McCann had shrunk down into the single bed, like a yellow balloon, all her noise and wind gone, so that only her two arms were left sticking out of overly clean nightdress, like two pipe cleaners. There was a silver stand, that Wullie the Pole was always fiddling with and adjusting so that gravity pushed plasma and Maggie McCann’s medication, faster or slower, through her wasted arms. It was quieter there, like an aquarium, with the blinds half pulled down and the noise of the ward muted through the closed door.

I finally asked Wullie the Pole if it was cancer.

He just nodded.

I was flexing my new found medical knowledge and asked what type.

He just shrugged.

I saw for the first time how quick and nimble Wullie the Pole was at locating and putting a needle and shunt into Maggie McCann’s wasted arms as one vein shut down after another. Somehow, he seemed more open and communicative in that room. I learned, almost by osmosis, that he had trained to be a Doctor of Medicine at Cracow University before the war. I think he called it some kind of school, but I wasn’t really sure. He might have said more, but I’d asked him why he didn’t become a doctor when he came here.

He’d looked up at me, blew through his nose what could almost have been taken for a laugh, and went back to adjusting Maggie McCann’s medication levels.

For some reason, I didn’t understand, Wullie the Pole became expansive.
‘It doesn’t really matter what kind of cancer it is; there is no real cure. You can maybe buy a bit of time. But what does that mean to the likes of her? And if those fools make a diagnosis they’ve got to treat her, which would mean moving her from here to Gartnavel. And they don’t want to use up their precious resources on the likes of her. Why should they? There’s no one willing to play out the drama of making the oncologist feel important, ready to laugh or cry at his bidding, no one to phone, or write letters demanding explanations. There’s only the likes of us.’

Willie the Pole went back to fiddling with the stand as I slinked out of the room.

Wullie the Pole showed me how to lay out Maggie McCann. Her parents were coming to see her. It was all about symmetry, hospital corners and sharp edges on the sheets, so that only her head poked out. I don’t know where he got the heavy slab of a bible, or lectern, on which he put it. I peeked to see what passage he’d left it open at. I expected it to be that one, I couldn’t remember how it went, but it was something like ‘though I walk through the valley of death…’ But it wasn’t. It was opened at 1 Cornithians 13:4.8, with the passage underlined in blue ink that took me right back to Sunday school with Miss Carter:

Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.’

I almost felt like crying at the beauty of it. But Wullie the Pole was ushering me out of the room.

‘We have to prepare,’ Wullie the Pole, said gnomically.

Everybody that was in the ward that could work was put to work. Those that couldn’t were bundled next door to Beattie Ward. Daffodils appeared, in vases, as if they had grown there overnight. But they were drowned by the smell of a Domestos disinfectant tide, which engulfed the ward. Even the preparations for an Area Health Manager’s visit would have taken second place to the preparation of the visit of Maggie McCann’s parents.

I no longer wore the brown dust jacket that Wullie the Pole wore, but when he handed it to me I put it back on.

‘We have to make them believe,’ said Wullie the Pole, ‘that when they gave up their little girl, all those years ago, that it was the right decision, the only decision.’

I nodded. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

The ward bell went. I waited for Wullie the Pole to go and answer it. It rung again. Wullie the Pole looked at me and nodded as if I’d past muster. He handed me the keys.

Maggie Mc Cann’s mum and dad waited patiently for me to open the door to Ailsa ward. They walked cautiously and slowly behind me as I took them to the office. Wullie was sitting behind his desk, but he stood up smartly, his heels clicking together. I left them there. I dashed to the toilet and washed my face in cold water. Maggie McCann’s mum looked nice, just like mine.