Huts63

It was getting dark earlier at night, although not enough to hide my misery. Mum made me enough cheese sandwiches to feed the whole ward, a flock of pigeons, or both. But it wasn’t that which put a lump in my throat, it was the fact that she felt genuinely sorry for me, as if I’d suffered some kind of cosmic injustice, and I had, but she wouldn’t phone in sick for me.

Wullie the Pole, as usual, was doing a doubler. He came in early, went home late and had no life in between. I hoped he’d rot in his casket, with his double time money. But he seemed perky enough, ignoring us, sitting doing a crossword from the Evening Times at the handover meeting. I’d checked them before. He cheated and put all the answers in the right boxes, but used Polish words.

‘Right,’ said Wullie the Pole, mocking me by yawning, ‘most of the half wits are already in their rooms, in bed. Send the rest to bed when I’m away. I’ll be back in a bit earlier tomorrow to see if there are… problems.’

He pursed his lips, looking at Carol and me, as if such a thing was not to be considered and left his set of keys on the middle of the desk. Carol, picked them up to let him out, whilst I stretched out in Wullie the Pole’s chair, picking at my teeth and pondering what I was going to do next, apart from eating cheese sandwiches and watching TV. I couldn’t put any music on because people were sleeping, or doing something else in their rooms and I didn’t want to find out what. I looked out of the little bubble of light, in the office, into the half-light of the corridors and shivered.

I ransacked the office drawers and looked through the filing cabinets, but there was nothing to read, only a British National Formulary and a Collins Dictionary and I’d read both of them. I picked up Wullie the Pole’s crossword puzzle and tried to work out what he was saying about me in code. I was almost glad when Carol returned and coughed, as if I’d been doing something indecent.

‘You want a cuppa?’ she said, making no comment about me having my feet on the desk table.

‘Yeh, that would be nice,’ I replied, trying to sound cheerful and jumping up from the seat, ‘I’ll get it’.

Although I wasn’t sure what it was called at night, Michael, Wullie the Pole’s erstwhile batman, was sitting alone in the day room lounge. I also wasn’t sure with his nose up, almost pressed into the telly, if he was short sighted, or part of the series he was watching.

‘What did you do with the gun?’ someone shouted through the cascade of music on the programme, but Michael didn’t answer, only looked up at me expectantly, as if, like Wullie the Pole, I was going to ask him to do something.

‘You want tea?’ I said, glancing at the TV, but I didn’t need to bother. I knew from another crescendo it was nearly finished.

‘That would be nice,’ said Michael settling himself back into the lounge chair, with his hands folded over his lap, like a proper English gentleman.

‘What you watching?’

‘Dunno,’ he said as I walked towards the kitchen.

I took my time heating the pot, stirring the tea. By the time I’d gave Carol and Michael their tea I calculated I’d only another seven hours and twenty five minutes to go.

Carol was on the phone when I went into the office. She stopped talking and held the phone away from her face, like a baton. I placed her cup carefully in front of her, and skedaddled.

I handed Michael his tea; four sugars. I’d used one of the staff mugs. I didn’t say anything about it and he didn’t comment, just supped his tea. We sat in companionable silence watching Patrick Moore springing about like an extra from a Hammer House of Horror film. You’d need to be locked up to watch Sky at Night. It’d never last.

‘That’s that,’ said Michael smacking his lips at the Orion belt and finishing his tea. He got up to turn the telly off at the wall. ‘My old back,’ he said, rubbing it.

‘You want another cuppa?’ I asked. ‘Maybe a toasted cheese sandwich?’

‘No,’ he said shaking his head. ‘I’m tired.’

‘Ok,’ I said, as brightly as I could, watching him shuffle away in his slippers.

I picked up his cup and mine. I took my time washing them in the kitchen sink, until I could no longer put it off and tentatively trudged back to the office. It wasn’t that I was scared of Carol. It was just that she was a woman and I was stone cold sober.

Carol had finished with her phone call, but she didn’t look any happier. Maybe it was just her face.

‘What do we do now?’ I stood leaning on one of the office chairs, ready to spring into action.

Carol looked at me blankly, or as if she had other things on her mind. ‘Eh, eh, we need to check on the residents and…I don’t know, just go to sleep’.

‘Right,’ I said, glad to have a concrete task to do. ‘What do we do to check on the residents?’

Carol fussed with the phone on the desk. ‘It’s ok,’ she said, ‘I’ve already done it’.

I knew that was the kinda lie that you’d tell to visiting dignitaries, but I didn’t say anything. That just left the going to bed bit and my face started getting redder.

‘I’m just going to have a fag,’ I said, as if having three ashtrays in the office wasn’t enough for both of us and I had to go somewhere else.

‘Uh hu,’ she said, looking down at the doodles on the blotter, as if they held some secret message, but her face looked as red as mine felt.
Not long now I thought, wondering if I should smoke another fag, while I had the chance.

I was almost glad when Angela Tilby wandered up. ‘I can’t sleep,’ she said.

I popped my head round the office door.

‘Angela said she can’t sleep.’

Carol seemed to consider this. ‘Just tell her to get to her bed,’ she said.

‘You’ve to go to your bed,’ I said to Angela.

She wandered away as if that done the trick and it had in more ways than one. I felt more at ease with Carol. ‘What do we now?’ I asked with none of the embarrassment of earlier.

‘Lets get the beds made up,’ she said, standing up and smiling, as if we weren’t exactly old friends, but no longer total strangers.

I helped drag two of the bigger couches along the floor from the day room to outside the office.

‘Why didn’t we just leave them and just fling some blankets over the top of them and kip down?’ I asked, after we’d already moved them.

‘If you look through that wee windy at the door you can see right into the dayroom,’ said Carol.

I knew the one she was talking about. You’d probably need to stand on a trestle to look through it and see into the day room, but I wasn’t arguing.

‘And what happens if somebody comes?’ I nodded towards the couches.

‘Oh. Nobody ever comes,’ said Carol emphatically.

That made me wonder even more why we’d bothered lugging two big leather couches 500 yards. Well. I’d lugged them. But she was pregnant.

‘Where do you get the blankets and stuff, do you get them off some of the empty beds?’

It was her turn to look at me as if I was daft. ‘No,’ she said, perfectly reasonably, ‘you get them from where the rest of the bedding is; the linen cupboard’.

The front door bell sounded even louder at night, echoing around the empty rooms, and hitting the two of us like a spotlight, highlighting our fears.

‘Who’s that?’ I said anxiously.

‘Dunno,’ she said.

The bell went again, even more insistently.

‘You’ve got the keys.’

But, Carol, my student supervisor, practically flung them at me. I cautiously walked towards the ward door. I held my hand up to acknowledge James Munn’s presence. I didn’t want him ringing the bell again.

‘Sorry about the delay,’ I said to James Munn when I let him in, we were making a few last minute checks.’

‘That’s ok,’ said James Munn squeezing by me.

I’d only opened the door a fraction. I don’t know. Maybe, I was hoping that he’d just go away. I followed at his back. A few patients were up, milling around the ward, with all the noise. Carol was away, rounding them up, making sure that they didn’t stay up.

James Munn didn’t comment on the two couches sitting like a wagon train encircling the office. He just squeezed past and settled himself into Wullie the Pole’s office chair, which was really my chair now.

‘Right,’ said James Munn, ‘this is your first time at night duty’.

I nodded.

‘What do you think you will learn?’ he said, waiting and peering at me, as if I knew the answer.

I felt the sweat running down my back and the heat of the 60-watt bulb felt like a summer sun. I was glad when Carol nudged her way past one of the office chairs.

‘One minute,’ said James Munn, holding up one finger.

‘I need the keys,’ said Carol, so quietly and shyly, that I smiled at her in apology, as I handed them to her.

No longer being the sole focus of attention had allowed me to think of something to say. ‘I think I’ll learn how Ailsa ward functions at night.’ I looked at James Munn to see if he wanted a bit more than that.

I knew it was ok when he started talking.

‘Yes. That’s interesting. And partly true. But functionality is never enough. We must try to impose order on function. As the philosopher Lipps famously argued, logic is nothing, if not the physics of thought. You know what I mean?’ said James Munn smiling at the hierarchical way that he had arranged words, his life, and my girlfriend.

‘Yes,’ I said, nodding hoping it was convincing enough to get him to shut up and go away.

‘It’s not so much what you do, or how you do it, but who you are. You are a role model,’ said James Munn emphatically. ‘Patients must learn from you. Just as you must learn from them. Does that make sense?’

‘Yes,’ I said nodding even more forcefully.

‘Good,’ said James Munn, convincing himself. ‘I’ll pop in later and see how you’re getting on.’

‘I’ll just get the keys,’ I said, springing up.

I looked in the day room, the kitchen and listened outside the toilets. ‘Carol,’ I whispered loudly.

One of the room doors opened and her head peeked out like a squirrel. ‘Is he away yet?’ she whispered.

‘The keys,’ I whispered back.

‘Shit,’ she said, pulling them out her apron pocket thingy, that all pregnant women wear, and handing them to me. ‘What’d you bring him here for?’ she asked, angrily, as if it was my fault and not some kind of natural disaster.

‘I didn’t bring him,’ I said. ‘He’s meant to work 9-4. Office hours. But he’s a weirdo’. I could tell that she didn’t believe me. Nobody could ever be that weird, turning up, practically in the middle of the night at eleven o’clock.

‘What’d he say?’ she asked, her mood lightening a little.

‘Nothing,’ I lied. I didn’t want to tell her that he’d said he’d pop back, and knowing James Munn, it’d probably be at 3am. She’d probably have more than kittens if I told her that.

James Munn kept talking. I kept nodding. That was the answer. If I agreed with everything he said he’d leave. I walked behind him to make sure he was really going and to let him out the ward. I’d changed my mind. I hated him more than Wullie the Pole.

Carol set the beds up with the bedding from the linen cupboard. The couches were pretty comfy. I didn’t want to think who had peed on them before she’d put the sheet on them. I should have been able to get to sleep. I hadn’t slept in about two days, but I just couldn’t, no matter which way I twisted or turned.

I woke with a start, with some wailing noise, and looked up to see Angela Tilby peering down at me like a ghoul.

‘Fuck off,’ I said, rather unprofessionally.

But she didn’t. She just stood wailing.

I sat bolt upright. ‘What’s the matter with her?’ I asked Carol angrily.

‘I don’t know,’ Carol said, sounding wide-awake, settling herself on her arms, as if for a long chat, assuming I was interested in any kind of explanation other than Angela magically disappearing. ‘I think it’s cause she likes you. She never does that when my Pete’s here.’

‘No. What’s that?’ she said, no longer happy with her happy go lucky Adventures of the Famous Five type answer. ‘Turn around Angela. That’s it. Good girl.’

Carol put her fingers against the wet patch of Angel’s nightdress and sniffed them. Then, as if her nose had deceived her, she put her fingers in her mouth.

I’d the dry boak, then the wet boak.

I was never working night shift again.