Huts6

I never thought I’d miss my old school Glendevon High, then again I wasn’t used to thinking much about anything when I was there. Monday was Monday. I no longer took in the grandeur of the battlements of the old hospital, or wondered why they needed turrets, or curlicue stone claws to hold up the wrought iron gutters, as if they were expecting a rampaging army, with art critics and architects in the vanguard and decided at the last minute to confound them and build Glendevon Hospital for the Mentally Handicapped instead. I’d seen it all and done it all and I’d only been there a week. Everything was the same apart from me.

Terry the nightshift worker fumbled with the keys, in the way he usually did, as he let me in. I thought about having a fag outside the ward. I’d ten minutes to kill before I started at 7am, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. He walked ahead of me, the ward keys jangling on his leather belt like some kind of muted bell, clanging dissonant chords, metering out time, a step at a time. But instead of going into the office for our handover meeting he went into the staff toilet. He’d a newspaper firmly wedged into his back pocket of his denims. I no longer registered the smell of ammonia, pish, with the harsh underscore of shite, which lingered in the air and seemed to lie on every surface and not just in the toilets. The pain and shock of such smells had been beaten out of my head and the olfactory tract had been reduced to all but a few damp nervous sniffles. The cacophony of noises that accommodated the most basic tasks for some of the residents was muted now, little more than background music that nobody listened to, and nobody liked, especially me.

Wullie the Pole was sitting in the office, in the way that he normally did, with his chair positioned at the door so that he could look along the corridor and catch everything that was going on in the office at the same time. Jenny was in the seat beside the bookshelves, her knees tapping nervously up and down in the way that they normally did when she was separated from Terry. I usually had to stand, because the chair across form her was Terry’s chair, but this time it wasn’t someone else was sitting in it. My first thought was that it was a patient. But I knew that patients weren’t allowed into the office, with the exception of Michael and he was like part of the staff. But, in milliseconds, I’d figured out who it was and why he was here. There were no secrets in Glendevon Hospital.

I already knew enough to know that I disliked him. I didn’t dislike him because he was black. We’d seen many black people on the TV in the entertainment industry. I didn’t dislike him because he was bald and wore what looked like a stupid red and white polka dot tie, with a tweed suit and shiny black shoes that would have shamed my grandfather.

I disliked him on principle, in the same way that Protestants disliked Catholics and in the same way joined together to dislike the English. He was up here, for no good reason, taking our jobs. He was the new head of recruitment and training of students at Glendevon Hospital. The old head Barry Ferguson had been shunted sideways and everybody in the village knew what a great block Barry was.

The new head of recruitment and training positively sprung out of his chair when he caught my eye through the window. I was shaking his hand before I was even in the office. There were no half filled cups of coffee and tea, or half smoked fags lying about in ashtrays, the office looked like a show office. The new head of training and recruitment was positively beaming when he introduced himself.

‘I’m James Munn,’ he said, his hand still gripping mine, in a way that would usually suggested some kind of familiarity, or uncertainty, of who I was. It was difficult to place his accent.

I mumbled an introduction, telling him what he already knew, but he was ahead of me talking about himself.

‘A bit about myself,’ James Munn said to the nodding head that was me, ‘well I got a double first a Cambridge studying mainly the works of Plato, Seneca, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Schopenhaeur and em, of course, Marx. You have heard of Cambridge?’

Terry stood in the passage outside, just up the corridor. I could see him, but he was out of James Munn’s vision line. Terry was simulating putting his two fingers down his throat and making wanking motions in a way that made me feel older and him younger.

‘em,’ I said, as if I was listening to James Munn, ‘Cambridge. Yes. It’s near Oxford’.
James Munn was momentarily nonplussed by this but continued right on.

‘That’s when I met with the Behaviourist and thought…’

But I didn’t get to hear what he thought. Terry, in plain sight now, outside the office window was repeatedly pointing to his watch, signalling that it was time to go. Jenny in her dash to the door almost knocked me over.

‘eh, I need to let them out’ I said to James Munn. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Wullie the Pole watching us. James Munn still had an audience.

I wasn’t sure if it was monologue or dialogue, James Munn was talking I only heard the end of what he said when I got into the office.
‘…and what exactly did you do when you were in Poland Mr Borusc?’

I wasn’t sure, at first, that Wullie the Pole was going to reply. He seemed to be looking into the distance, as if he was selecting the right words, English words, that would reflect that time and place. The chair scrapped as Wullie the Pole got up. Wullie the Pole looked at me. Then he looked at the seated James Munn.

‘When I was in Poland,’ he said, moving towards the office door, ‘I minded my own business’.