Huts5

I knew that Norean Kileen went out to work every day at about 8.50am. That kept me going. She was the first good thing that I looked for in the ward, every new day. But, inevitably, the first thing I saw, was old Wullie the Pole, the charge nurse. There was changeover between dayshift and nightshift staff at 7.30am, but that was little more than a chance to smoke a fag and drink a fresh cup of tea. Sometimes there would be a file out, sitting nice and clean, in the middle of the desk, bright as sunshine in a new yellow paper folder. It was a new admission. We’d get admissions from local authorities, hospital paediatricians and general practitioners. Despite all the promises from those higher up, of a single room policy, in the shiny new collective wings, called The Huts, most patients were still warehoused two to a single room. We couldn’t squeeze another single bed in. Glendevon Hospital just kept on growing bigger and bigger, like a bloated body, all the way back up the hill, in the old bit of Glendevon Hospital, with their 50 beds to a single ward. Maybe they could squeeze in another patient there. That wasn’t our concern. Wullie the Pole fumed and muttered about inefficiency. He wondered why they kept sending us these files. He also hinted, but never said outright, which wasn’t like him, that changeover was a waste of time. It always ended with the last fag and the two night shift workers, Jenny and Terry, yawning, open mouthed ‘ah wells’, as if they were twins that had rehearsed more than sleep in the ward’s leather armchairs. The last act was me, jangling through the set, finding the right key, and opening the fire door so that they could leave early.

I tried not to be too obvious. I watched Norean Kileen as she walked down the corridor, into the anteroom that separated the two wards and out into daylight. Then I dashed through to the kitchen area and, if I craned my neck, I could see her through the kitchen window, walking her shoulder back, carefree walk, up the hill. There was a hairdresser’s shop, spread out in three different hospital buildings, just off the top of the hill, in the old section. To give it the official title it was called Glendevon Hospital Hairdresser Service. But nobody in the village called it that. If it was referred to at all, it was called the mad barbers, which was shortened to the mad barb. I couldn’t really remember anything much about it, good or bad, it was just one of those things that I did, or was done to me. I used to go for a mad barb when I was still at school, for a short back and sides.

Norean Kileen had started in the mad barb at the same time as I’d started working in Ailsa Ward. We were both the same age, just short of our sixteenth birthday. I liked to thing of these things as some kind of sign. There was a rumour that the mad barb was shutting because it wasn’t commercially viable. I was thinking ahead, wondering how it would affect us. But, of course, there was no us. She wasn’t even pretty, or beautiful, she was a level beyond that, a level beyond even the glossy pages of fashion magazines. I’d lied that I’d kissed a girl a few times. Maybe even suggested that I’d did a bit more. That was about it. She was certainly beyond any fairy tale thoughts of there ever being any us.

Willie the Pole, momentarily, was even caught off guard by Norean Killeen. When he spoke, at all, it was usually about something concrete: a patient, a file, a bit of food, a cup of tea, shut the fuck up. He’d remarked, in a general aside, that even that stupid bastard Doctor Fleming, harrumphed and hurrahed, the same kind of nonsense every week, but fluttered around Norean Killeen as if she was some kind of exotic butterfly. I wasn’t sure how that was possible, having seen Dr Fleming up close, but was even more perplexed that old Wullie the Pole should say such a thing.

Wullie the Pole’s hatred and contempt for Dr Fleming, at our biweekly-weekly meeting, was so intense it could almost be picked up and put on the coffee table, for Dr Fleming to misplace and talk about somebody else entirely and mix up both files and put them in a Kellog’s Cornflakes Box. Wullie the Pole’s remark sounded something remarkably close to affirmation of Dr Fleming’s judgment, or indeed any other doctor that found there way to the bottom of the medical hierarchy, but in a position still above Wullie the Pole at Glendevon Hospital.

Glendevon Hospital had about 1200 patients under Dr Fleming’s care. People from the village also used Glendevon Hospital hairdresser service. I wasn’t sure how they could close it. Old woman, like my mum, said it did a good perm. But I just laughed at that. I’d never seen such a thing. It was getting the chop, was one of the more corny efforts at a joke in the village. But I didn’t think about it much. I left that kind of thing to people that knew what they were doing.

It was enough for me that Norean Killeen worked at the mad barb. I was trying to grow my hair longer, but was stymied by a cow’s lick that curved and killed stone dead any pretensions to style. But even I would have gone back to a short back and sides if Norean Killeen would have cut it for me.

Wullie the Pole gave me my first pay packet that Friday. He didn't present it to me just threw it casually into my lap at breakfast. I tried not to beam and smile. But the brown envelope in pound notes and shillings announced, to everyone, for me, that I was a worker and no longer a schoolboy. I counted it three times, put it in my pocket and brought it out to count again. I was rich. I needed to count it just once more to make sure.

I wasn’t sure how I ended up in the Village Tavern, The Horse and Barge. And I wasn’t sure how I ended up in my bed. I tried to work it out. My mum was shouting on me to get up. But I wasn’t getting up. I couldn’t.

I didn’t think that they would have served me. I went to school with Pat Loch. The owner Pat Loch senoir knew what age I was, but he just winked at me. It was a Friday Carnival atmosphere. Big Jukebox Music, belting out the sounds of freedom and the promise of more. I wanted to splash the cash. But nobody that worked in the Hospital, which was just about everybody, would let me buy a drink. It was my first week. Everyone I’d known all my life hugged and kissed me as if I was a newborn puppy. They bought me lager. Slipped it to me, because it didn’t do any harm. I didn’t like the taste. I’d rather have drunk Coke, but that was just plain stupid. Everybody thought I was funny. Hilarious. I was handed pint after pint, in a fug of fags, that I didn’t know if I was drinking them or…I didn’t know.

I thought I was funny. There was a girl. A girl like me. A student. She had a Brummie accent. But it was weird the way she talked about Glendevon Hospital. I eventually gathered she was from another planet. Not one that I recognized.

‘The patients were just so dead brilliant… it was an honour to serve them, to be with them.’

She whispered these things to me in a conspiratorial tone; to me that had known the hospital all my life; who now worked in the hospital. I was just going to tell her that. But I fell asleep with a pint still in my hand. When I woke up she was still talking, but it was a different lifetime. I could feel her knees beating out the music, squeezed in next to mine. I had to tell her something. I had to tell her something very urgently. But I didn’t

I don't know if there is such a thing as lank hair. But if there isn't her hair lacked an essential vitamin and, at first, the rest of her looked like shit too. But that wasn’t what I wanted to tell her. For one thing she had that skin condition so that her face looked a bit hard and potted. But sometimes it looked better than ok. It looked normal. She looked stunning in a skinny kind of way. I was going to tell her something, but I never.

I barfed on her back, but I didn’t mean to. She was nice about it. I don’t know what she said. I think I was in love with her. She asked me if I was going to be all right. Course I was. All I had to do was sit down, even though I was already sitting down.

Mum banged on the wall in the next bedroom almost shaking me out of my bed, but I clung on. She said two things. Neither of them was good. One of them was. 'get up out of my bed'. The other was, 'go to work'.

‘But mum I pleaded. It’s Saturday.’

The banging echoed in my head. Saturday was the same as any other work day now.

I’d read Norean Bernadette Killeen’s files over and over. I could almost repeat them word for word. There were one or two references that I learned to avoid. I could feel my cock, sneaking up into an erection, pulsating like a twitch, pushing against the blackness of my work trouser leg, so that I didn’t feel that I could leave the office, and I didn’t feel I could stay, with my face blooming and blossoming into a strident shade of red, sneaking a look at Wullie the Pole, sitting across from me to see if he noticed. I learned to edge her file out of the filing cabinet, pawing through the different sections, like a dirty mag, until I go to the bit I wanted, when Wullie the Pole wasn’t there.