Huts44

Wullie the Pole’s square Slavonic face looked older when he frowned. He also seemed to have shrunk and looked smaller, looking over the top of his specs at me, and back, down at his paperwork. ‘You’re a fool boy, falling in love with the pretty picture of a face that any girl presents to the world,’ he said, in a measured tone, then his big false teeth flashing, in a fair imitation of a horse’s smile, ‘at least she had enough sense to leave here’.

I don’t know how he knew, but he did. I’d some kind of rictal disorder and couldn’t help contorting my face into a big cheesy grin. And that was not my only answer to Wullie the Pole. Like the St. Frances of Assisi of Ailsa ward, I twittered and chattered and helped the dumb speak. I’d so many new best friends, that I even shocked myself and remembered some of their names. It was good, being one of the good, that had, actually, saved somebody. Well, two people, if I counted Norean.

But with every day that passed without a letter from Mary, or even Norean, my jaw slackened, and could no longer fully frame itself into a facsimile of the briefest smile. As the smiling and non-smiling self fought for control of my body, Wullie the Pole gave up with the subtleties of argument and whacked me broadside on the back of the head with his hand. But it was no gentle cuff, it was like getting hit by sand iron. I’d never really seen Wullie the Pole mad. He told me ‘to get a grip and get some work, or he’d boot my arse’. The smiling self wanted to get involved in some enlightened dialogue, tell him it was: do some work, not ‘get some work’, although in a way, his version was nearer the truth, there was little or nothing to do, and work did need to be sought 'got'. The more cynical self wanted to tell him to goin’ fuck himself and stick his crap job up his arse, but knew that such cushy jobs were not easy to come by and Wullie the Pole might well boot my, regardless of whether I was happy or sad.

And what made my lips stick together and my teeth grind, so that I had to breathe through my nose, or I’d throw up, was I had to work the whole weekend. So if Friday was the end of the week, then Thursday was a bit like Friday. Wednesday was a bit like Tuesday. Monday, obviously, stood itself. There could be no other day like it. But working Saturday and Sunday threw this entire carefully calibrated orrery system out. It was like a wave ripping your trusty Clark’s shoe compass out of your hand, in a snowstorm, and whispering magnetic North is now in the South, before knocking you out, and swamping you. It was all about just surviving. There was just no getting around it. You’d need to start again, trekking backwards, howling grief stricken like a lost wolf, in the summer sun, before you could take one step forward.

Wullie the Pole’s dust jacket was still sitting on the peg when he’d finished work the night before. Saturday was time and a half for him. And Sunday double time. I didn’t doubt he’d be in at work I just hoped he wouldn’t leave me with a full ward to run when the two nightshift staff, Terry and June, left. The only redeeming feature was many of the patients were allowed to have a long lie on weekends. They were no longer pulled out of bed, washed and shaved, in order to eat the same breakfast they ate on weekdays, only it was colder, with less choice, because the catering staff usually were undermanned at weekends, because of staff sickness. Wullie the Pole even allowed some leeway with giving out medication to the patients at weekends.

I stood behind the counter serving, mostly cereal breakfasts, to patients that dawdled up. Some like Brian Thompson might try and ram raid the kitchen, with their bulk, when Wullie the Pole wasn’t there, and stuff more than he could eat into his mouth, and hide the rest. But I was used to that, and had a tea towel folded over my arm, like a waiter, to use as a home made handle, for the heated metal spatula on the hot plate, to whack him with.

The trolley with Meds was set up within arms reach. I was stretched on two fronts. But I hadn’t much thought about it. I was tapping out some oral medication into James Burn’s waiting hand, but he had pseudo Parkinson’s shakes, so it was like trying to hit a moving target.

‘I’ll get that boy,’ Wullie the Pole said quietly, but I’d jumped. I hadn’t heard him come in. I’d the keys.

Other patients came up to the kitchen counter in dribs and drabs, but I was already thinking ahead to the long leisure time of the staff breakfast and automatically serving the ‘hot’ plate we’d been given into the clipped metal containers, to be picked up at the back door, and from there to lunch, as pig swill, on Dempsey’s farm. Wullie the Pole finally nodded to me and, like a bar man, who’d gave his punters every chance, I pulled the metal shutters down with a flourish, pegging them in, left and right, so that patients couldn’t lift them back up and gave myself space and somewhere safe to hide and have a deserved fag. There were a few desultory bangs on the shutters, just some patients wanting some breakfast, but they’d need to fight the pigs for it.

Breakfast, served by Pea Head, was a glorious drawn out affair, with newspapers placed strategically at hand, a table for Wullie the Pole and a table for me, pushed and tied together with a white table cloth, best management china, milk and sugar and the glint of stainless steel. I was full to bursting, but not, just forcing another, last, it would be a shame to waste, hot X bun, in. I don’t know if it was the heat, but I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

Wullie the Pole ambled up to the office. I took a desultory stroll around the dayroom and, off along the corridors leading off them, as usual, nudging open the doors, with my foot, like a security guard, checking the patient’s rooms. It was a familiar sight. Many of the patients barricaded themselves in their bed, with blankets looped and tied over their heads, as if sleep had to be kept in, and would escape through any gaps in the sheets.

I nudged open the door of the patient’s toilet, the furthest away one from the office. We called this the ‘dirty toilet’, but it was a relative term, because all manners of primitive things could be found growing out from the toilet pan, ready to colonise the rest of the room. I don’t know if I cried out. My feet took me away, running for Wullie the Pole, as if he was my dad, so that I seemed to take nothing and everything in at the same time.

Only the Angel of death wouldn’t have surprized by the suddenness of it all. There was no longer a public or private self, or the need for one, just Archie Cairney caught off guard, hanging from the thin white cord of a light switch that didn’t look strong enough to hold him.

Wullie the Pole trailed after me, along the corridor, with farmer’s steps, slow and measured, that even death itself could not hurry.

I wanted to drag Wullie the Pole up, beside me, to the door entrance. ‘He’s not dead,’ I said excitedly. And it was true, his feet were trailing the ground and he seemed to be moving.

‘No,’ replied Wullie the Pole, coolly dissecting the moment, ‘that’s just gas and waste escaping.’ And he looked him up and down, before taking the first step into the patient’s toilet. He turned to me. ‘He’s dead. Quite dead.’ He nodded. I thought, for an instance, to confirm his diagnosis, he was going to reach out and puncture his body, like a balloon, with a finger and let the gas escape.

In that closed room, Archie Cairney’s hanging body, reached out and imprinted the way unsanitized death smelled on me. My eyes watered and I had to gulp and look away. ‘Shouldn’t we cut him down, or something?’ I grimaced, out of the side of my mouth.

‘Yes,’ said Wullie the Pole, ‘get a pair of scissors from the desk drawer and two pairs of surgical gloves from the Med room.’

The patients were milling in the corridors outside the toilet door, as if, like a ship hitting a wave too big for it, the ward had been tilted, and they were trying to look by me, and through me, to see what had happened to them and us.

‘What will we do with him?’ I asked Wullie the Pole, who was holding his body, while I cut the umbilical cord to Archie Cairney’s death.

‘We’ll just lie him in the bath,’ replied Wullie the Pole. But his actions were quicker than his words. He let the body of Archie Cairney fall into the bath, with a clung, like potatoes in a Hessian sack.

Wullie the Pole used the blade of the scissors to turn a screw on the toilet door and lock it from the outside.

‘What do we do now?’ I asked Wullie the Pole.

‘Nothing much,’ Wullie the Pole said, putting his feet up on his desk, ‘phone the police and phone Dr Fleming to let him know.’

But Wullie the Pole seemed in no particular hurry to do either. I was wondering if he wanted me to do it for him.

‘And one other thing,’ said Wullie the Pole, lighting a fag, ‘they’ll probably send out Bundy Macintosh’s brother as the police investigating officer. You’ve known him most of your life. Just tell him what you saw. It would probably be better if you didn’t mention that I was late. I wouldn’t want the management, that fool Dr Fleming, thinking I make a habit of coming in late at weekends.’ And he added, pinning me with his eyes, ‘you do own me a favour.’

‘Yeh,’ I said, lighting a fag myself, ‘I wouldn’t want to stick you in.’