Huts50

When I was in Ailsa ward my sense of smell automatically switched off. But there was a worse than normal smell. It was an Ailsa ward equivalent of stronger than usual under arm body odour. A gallon of cheap disinfectant mopped on the floor and sprayed in the air, like aftershave, could not hide it. I used my big conk to good roving effect; the human equivalent of a patrolling Beagle dog and sniffed around the corridors, beds and bedding, in the back rooms in Ailsa ward.

The culprit was revealed. It was enough to make my eyes water, throat tighten, the watery gorge to rise up and desperately be gulped down again in a lump, when the sicky mix hit the back of my tongue. I should have thrown up, because it wouldn’t have made much difference. It was meatballs, squashed flat, like some kind of paste, beneath Eugen Weber’s mattress. I felt like just turning the mattress over and leaving it, for him, or someone else to eat.

But that wasn’t all we’d found. Wullie had a dog-eared copy of Playboy, with the pages stuck together, with more than tomato pasta. Wullie the Pole held it up, before my naked eyes, with two fingers, like a live fish. He finally let it wriggle free from his grasp, depositing it in the waiting net of the waste paper basket.

‘You recognize it idiot boy,’ Wullie the Pole said. He might not have said idiot, but something else in his foreign tongue, but I knew what he meant.

‘It looks like a Playboy magazine,’ I replied, my face and voice set like an altar boy at prayer, looking down at the waste paper basket, and quickly away, as if I’d never seen such a thing before.

Wullie the Pole took the magazine out of the basket and took a deep breath through his nose, as if the effort was too much for him. He carefully picked apart the centre pages and, without any further handiwork, let Carmen, the playful beach ball belle, staple herself to my innocent eyes.

‘You recognize it?’ Wullie the Pole, asked again, waving his finger about like a dart, as if he was deciding whether to land in on Carmen’s bouffant hair, pendulous breasts, and pert little bum. He lingered over her pouty pussy lips, which somehow still looked moist, the last of a girly picture, picnic spread, for his sad old eyes to feast upon.

‘No,’ I said flushed and aggrieved. It was Wullie the Pole I didn’t recognize, wondering what kind of pervert he was making me out to be.

Wullie the Pole must have been on the peach brandy. He started snorting through his nose, then letting out loud guffaws, as if I’d told him the funniest joke in the world and he was going to fall off his swivel chair. I was sure he was laughing at my beaming red face, as he kept pointing to the picture and laughing even more uproariously.

‘I thought I told you to fling them out,’ Wullie the Pole said.

‘I did,’ but as my face got redder and redder and I stifled the urge to run away like a little boy, I knew the lie was worse than the truth. I’d flung some of Archie Cairney’s magazines out. But some miraculously didn’t quite reach the bin. And some that got into the bin somehow jumped back out. And it wasn’t just me.

There were other people, some of them weren’t even patients, circling the bins, like seagulls around a trawler. It must have been some kind of sex sense. I don’t know how they knew, but they did. It was far easier rooting through the top of a bin for a porno mag, through the shitty nappies and upturned ashtrays, than it would ever be actually going into a newsagent in the City centre and looking a female shop assistant straight in the eye. Obviously, she’d think you were a brown paper bag pervert, because the proof would be sitting on the counter.

‘There’s some good stories in there,’ I stuttered out, as a part time alibi.

But Wullie the Pole caught me, flagrante delicto, snatching a look at Carmen’s tanned breasts spread all across the desk.

That didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t my fault. I wanted to cry in frustration. But my crimson face left no room for words.

Wullie the Pole sat back and laughed and laughed so hard that I thought he had the hiccups. He spluttered out ‘I’ll need to tell your parents, of course’. His hiccup laughter started again.

I stood rooted to the spot. The ward door bell rung. I half turned relieved to find a chance, any chance to get away.

But Wullie the Pole continued with his monologue. Before I'd reached the office door, he’d extended his laughing list, hooking one name on after another as they occurred to him. ‘I’ll need to tell…your mum and dad, you’re married now… to your left hand…James Munn the student supervisor. He’ll need to know. Barry Ferguson.’ The bell rang again, more insistently, but I stood waiting as he regained his laughing gas breath. I could almost see the cogs working beneath his receding hairline. ‘And Dr Fleming will need to know of course…’ ‘And Cannon Mallon,’ he added, so that I knew he was just making things up, but even as I went to unlock the ward door I really wasn’t sure. I could never tell with Wullie the Pole.

‘What took you so long?’ said Terry Davenport, the nightshift worker.

June stood holding onto to Terry’s arm as if some one was going to steal her co-worker away. She didn’t need to ask, because Terry spoke for her now, in more ways than one. Their baby bump looked as if it should be sitting outside the print dress on her lap. There must be some law against people like that coming to work. It wasn’t natural.

‘Sorry,’ I said to Terry, which meant I’d said sorry to the two of them and their baby, ‘we’ve been busy’.

Terry eyes knitted together in an expression I knew well, as if I was daft. Busy was the kind of things you said to bureaucrats like Dr Fleming. Busy wasn’t something you’d say to somebody that actually worked on the ward.

I shamefacedly marched ahead of them to the office, hoping and praying that Wullie the Pole had sobered up. But Carmen was still playing with her beach ball, plying her trade, spread out across the middle of his desk. I thought he’d have at least put it away with a pregnant woman in the room, but Wullie the Pole had no sense of shame.

I dragged my plastic chair right to the back of the room, behind Terry and June’s seats. My hands were shaking as we ritualistically lit up before the handover meeting commenced. I leaned down, looking at the white grout in the floor tiling, as if it was the most interesting thing in the world. My face had been set to red, but had went up a few notches, as Wullie the Pole eyed me over the top of his specs. At least the maniacal laughter had stopped.

‘What’s that?’ said Terry.

Terry didn’t sound embarrassed, in the way that I’d have been, just curious, in the same way that he would have been if it had been a Matchstick model car sitting in its box on Wullie the Poles desk.

I didn’t make any sound, just waited, as Wullie the Pole eyed me once more.

‘That’s nothing,’ said Wullie the Pole, smiling, almost like a normal old man. He looked at me curiously, ‘just something I found in one of the rooms’. He swept it up in his enormous paw and flung the magazine into the waste paper bin.

I let out a deep breath. I knew Wullie the Pole had been kidding me on. Terry Davenport didn’t say anything. An old married man like him knew better. If he did, I’d have mentioned I’d seen him skulking around the bins at the back of the ward. I wasn’t going to go down on that one alone.