Huts9

‘Just leave your list of patient’s names on my desk before you go and then go for your tea break.’

James Munn was already sitting down at the main front desk in what could loosely be called an auditorium. There was an uneasy silence, then a burst of nervous post exam chatter. Everybody was standing up, sorting through their stuff, deciding what to take and what to leave, as if we were going on a safari and not just a short stroll down through blue bell woods.

It wasn’t as simple as it should have been. What little catering facilities there had been in the hospital had closed with the old buildings. Nothing had been yet built to replace them. There was no café in the village, only the Village pub, ‘The Horse and Barge’ and their idea of food was cheese and onion or salt in vinegar crisps. There seemed little point in taking a tea break when there wasn’t any, but at least it gave us a chance to go outside and have a fag. I knew I should have brought something, but it just didn’t seem cool to bring out a set of cheese sandwiches made by my mum. It was a bit like admitting you liked Watch with Mother when you were a kid at school.

People were getting up starting to go into the aisles, but James Munn put a halt to that.

‘Before you go,’ he said, smiling at no one in particular, but rather at himself, ‘please write down on a separate piece of paper the names of the people in this class. You can start with mine: James Munn.’

We’d introduced ourselves when we’d first come into the auditorium, but I already knew most of the other student mental handicap nurses from our local high school and I knew the Brummie girl from the pub. Her name was Gillian Ambrose. I wrote that down. I scribbled down another 16 or 17 names without even thinking about it. Most of the others were in the same position. Some of the other students, still with their jackets on, were getting out of their seats, ready to hand in their papers. I quickly wrote down another couple of names. I didn’t want to waste time, especially since James Munn had put the notion of having a fag break in my mind, then suddenly took it away, so that my lungs had been seeded with nascent smoke and then left. Jilted. I was almost choking, gasping for one.

‘How long have we got sir?’ said Maureen Hargreaves, chewing on her pen furiously. She’d always been that way at school, brushing the bang of blonde nervously away from her head.

James Munn smiled at being called sir.

‘Just as long as it takes,’ he said imperiously,

‘And how long do we get for lunch sir?' said Maureen.

‘I don’t know,’ said James Munn, stretching his back in into the chair so that it seemed like part of him, but he did know, ‘about two hours’.

I got a lift from that and looking at everyone else they did too. I could almost lip read what Rab Morrison was saying to Snodgrass.

‘Two hours!’

James Munn didn’t look up when I left the two sheets of paper on his desk. He hadn’t asked us, so I took the precaution of not signing it. I’d already prepared myself to look suitably abashed at my stupid mistake if he looked up from the desk. But he was too busy scanning the papers that had already been handed in. He was making annotations on another piece of paper. I wasn’t sure what he was doing, but I almost tip toed by his desk, hoping that he wouldn’t notice me.

I took a deep breath of fresh air when I got outside and lit up a fag immediately. The sun was shining and all was right with the world. Maureen Hargreaves came out of the swing doors at my back. I’d always liked her. She was pretty in an unpretty sort of way. I mean, she wasn’t good looking, but she wasn’t ugly. She wasn’t fat and she wasn’t thin. There was something babyish about her. Her head seemed slightly too big for her body, which was just like a piece of string attached at the neck, neither male nor female, but a straight line. But she had those big trusting eyes that caught you unaware so that you couldn’t look away.

I’d gained a new adult confidence from smoking so instead of avoiding her, and her avoiding me, as we did at school, I said to her with as much confidence as I could muster:

‘How’d it go?’ and I said her name, to make it authentically, adult…’How’d it go Maureen?’

‘Fine,’ she said stepping past me neatly and quickly, blushing uncontrollably, almost contaminating me with her rising redness and starting me off as well.

I took another drag of my fag as she walked in quick efficient steps down the short cut through blue bell woods. She stayed right beside Glendevon Hospital. I thought, maybe I could do the same, go home for lunch?

The door banged behind me and I smelled her Petula oil. It was the kind of things that hippies used as a perfume. It was the kind of thing that the Brummie girl, Gillian Ambrose wore. I didn’t want to think too much about it, because hippies were kind of, associated with the sex thing and I was a Catholic and didn’t believe in it, apart from when I was wanking myself silly thinking about it. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she was wearing a caftan. I was trying to be casual and not turn round, but my face went redder than Maureen Hargreaves. I was hoping that Gillian would walk straight by me, not notice me, like some kind of Frances of Assisi statue with birds sitting shitting on my head. But she put her arm through mine as if it was the most natural thing in the world and I took one step, then another and we walked together down the shortcut of blue bell woods, arm in arm, like some married couple.

I gained enough confidence to even sneak a look at her tits, but she didn’t have any, just a blouse kind of thing, those hippies wore, but that was promising enough.

‘Where are we going for lunch?’ got mixed up with me saying ‘I’m sorry for the other night,’ so that we both laughed. She had the most amazing eyelashes and brown eyes, warm and welcoming, like a dairy cows. Not to say that she was a cow, of course, but I sneaked another look at her non-existent tits, just in case.

I couldn’t think of anything to say. I almost spluttered out that she could come to my mum’s for lunch with me. Jesus. The next step and the one after that: girlfriend, lunch, marriage, council house, babies all suddenly looming up in front of me like a car crash, with my life lying strewn out behind me. I knew she was a hippie, but I wasn’t sure if she was even a Catholic.

‘We could go to the pub, ‘The Horse and Barge,’ I gave it its proper name in case she didn’t know where it was, or what I was talking about, even though she had already been in it.

She smiled at that. She had on that kind of lip gloss- lipstick thing. It was nice, but it tended to highlight her pock marked skin. I felt a bit like a vet, as if at any moment I was liable to pry her mouth open and look at her teeth and count them and nod wisely.

‘What do they serve?’ she said in her Brummie accent. I quite liked that, her accent, not her teeth. They were kinda green.

‘Nothing.’ I said.

She laughed. I didn’t mean to say that and make it sound smart or wise. That was just the way it came out.

‘Ok,’ she said, as if she was looking for clues, ‘we’ll take it.’ She pulled me in closer to her so that I almost stumbled.

I liked that the closeness, the nearness that I could almost taste, the being together, but not being together. I liked all of these things until Bundy Macintosh loomed up ahead of us like some kind of troll. I instinctively flinched and tried to pull away, to separate myself from Gillian Ambrose, but she seemed to cling on even tighter.

It was childish. Bundy Macintosh was not only the ward sister for the ward next to my ward, Ailsa ward, she was also my next door neighbour. Mum used to say Bundy had a good heart, because she was good with animals, but that wasn’t what worried me. She used to come in the back door into our kitchen and just splurge out what was bothering her. When I was younger Bundy treated me just like any of her other young animals and I picked up more than flea powder. Bunty used swear words like salt and pepper to spice up her conversation. I thought that her cat was called cunting cat and her dog was called bastarding fuck of a dog. I wasn’t really sure why I didn’t really want Bundy to see me with Gillian, maybe it was because she was a bit different and a bit older. Gillian must have been at least 20.

Bundy was a bit overweight, a big bit, so she leaned on my arm to get her breath back. I wondered what she was doing up in blue bell woods and I was going to ask her, but before I could she said:

‘What the fuck you doing up here?’

She meant me, not Gillian. It was as if Gillian was a imaginary friend and Bundy couldn’t see her. I felt my face flaming as if I’d done something I shouldn’t.

Gillian gripped my arm tightly almost pulling me over.

‘We’re going to the local pub,’ said Gillian, speaking for both of us in her Brummie accent, ‘to get something to eat, you’re welcome to join us.’

Bundy had got enough breath back just to snort through her nose. Both women looked at each other, but Bundy obviously didn’t think it was much of a challenge. Her next question was directed just at me.

‘You haven’t seen that pervy fucking bastard Archie Cairney up here have you?’

‘No,’ I said shaking my head vigorously and looking to Gillian for confirmation, even though she didn’t know who he was.

Bundy squinted into the sun and looked around her, down towards the Maple trees, as if Archie would suddenly appear there because she was looking in that direction.

‘Well, if you see that fucker, tell him that I’m looking for him and that I’m going to cut his wee cunty balls aff,’ Bundy said that emphatically with a lot of finger pointing and with arms like ham hocks I didn’t for a moment doubt she would.

I nodded politely, because for me it was the most natural thing in the world, but I wasn’t sure what Gillian would say or do.

‘We’ve got to go.’ I said to Bundy, almost in a proper English accent, pulling Gillian down the path with me. Gillian let go of my arm. I didn’t want Gillian to say anything bad about Bunty. She didn’t know her, not the way I did, not the way the people in the village knew her. We walked on silently, apart, but together. We had to climb over a gate to get out of what had once been an overgrowing field. It gave me a chance a look at Gillian’s legs. She wasn’t wearing tights and her shaved legs seemed just to go on and on. I tried not to stare.

I put one hand on the top of the gate and vaulted over the falling off bit of rail at the end of the gate. I landed squarely on two feet, but my specs bounced off my nose. Gillian picked them up and made a show of dusting them down and handing them to me. She smiled. Someone waved at me from the passing Corpy bus. I wasn’t sure who. I waved back. There was a bus stop across from the hospital, with a bus every hour on the hour, even though it was never used apart from first thing in the morning and last thing at night, with workers coming and going. We still had about an hour and forty-five minutes for lunch. We walked arm in arm, in the way that we had before we met Bunty. The Horse and Barge was just over the bridge.

Most of our classmates were already there. Barry Ferguson, our tutor was standing at the bar when we went in nursing a pint of heavy and a half of whisky. He also knew my mum and dad and I’d know him since I was small. He smiled at me and winked, because Gillian was standing behind me.

‘What you having?’ Barry asked me, but included Gillian.

‘Coke,’ said Gillian.

‘Eh, I’ll have the same,’ I said.

Barry held one finger up, even though the barmaid was standing right in front of him and had heard everything.

‘One Coke, for the lady, and what do you want?’ Barry asked me again.

I could see that other people in my class were drinking pints so I said
‘A pint of lager. Thanks’.

Barry just nodded.

I didn’t really know where to sit. Usually I’d have just went over to the pool table and put a coin down and hoped that I’d be able to win at least one game. But I couldn’t do that with Gillian beside me. She was practically sitting on my lap at the bar.

I took a deep swig of lager to calm myself and give myself space to think. I ordered Barry another whisky and myself another lager. I pointed at Gillian, like two fingers of a gun.

‘Coke?’ I said.

Gillian sidled up to me and slinked in beside me as if we were the only two people in a crowded bar. She whispered in my ear.
‘I’m going for a smoke. You want to come?’

I nodded my head and tried not to look too perplexed. Everybody in the Horse and Barge was smoking. If the bar staff had opened all the windows the fire brigade would probably have arrived and started hosing down the building. I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but I was quite sure that I was going outside with Gillian to find out.

There was an alcove at the back were the bar kept empty beer barrels and crates filled with empty bottles, an alcoholic’s graveyard. Gillian was standing there with a fag in her hand. The acrid fumes caught in my throat. I knew it was cannabis.

‘Want some?’ Gillian stretched out her hand covering the roach so that only the tip was visible.

I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. I didn’t want to seem disrespectful to her or her druggy lifestyle, so I added, ‘it’s just not my thing’.

‘Go on,’ she said moving closer to me, asking me with her whole body, daring me, and questioning me.

‘Nah,’ I said, ‘I’m not bothered.’

‘Just a little bit,’ she said, taking a deep drag, but not breathing it out, holding it in. Cat like, she padded in beside me, moving her lips close to mine. I knew what to do. I opened my mouth and sucked the smoke from her. I waited for some kind of drug-fuelled explosion, but nothing happened. I was ready when she did the same thing again. I became bolder with each drag pulling her in closer and closer, her lips on mine, rubbing up against her. Marijuana was crap. It didn’t do anything for me, but I didn’t care.

Barry Ferguson seemed to loom up out of the bar, like a distant memory. He looked at me and handed me a polo mint. There was no polo mint for Gillian.

‘Time we were getting back,’ he said.