Danny ‘Moonshine’ was nineteen once / a short story

Daniel Bradley was a porter in a city centre hospital for a year before he was sacked. He never challenged his dismissal. 

Bradley was part of a pool of porters who navigated the corridors of the ICU and Coronary care wards, ferrying patients to the various X-Ray, Echo and Respiratory departments. Each porter had a pager. They operated in shifts; six am to three pm, seven days a week. He came to work on a 50cc scooter, a round trip from his parents house of sixty minutes, depending on the traffic. Bradley had volunteered to do this job to get away from his ‘fight or flee’ homelife. To get away from his father, to get away from his mother. They had him late at life and almost from day one, seemed to regret it. They were old and becoming dependent. Bradley was struggling with their decline. In the hospital he felt useful, not useless as his father, Peadar would roar. His mother; just Mam, never spoke up. Just sat in the chair by the year-round turf fire nodding.

Bradley had a nick-name - all the porters had nick-names, his was ‘Smiley Burnett’, he wasn’t sure where it came from or who coined it, but he rarely smiled, if ever. Most of the pool were middle-aged men, former casualties from the wards. Most were cheery and made enormous efforts to make the scared men (they were mostly men; sixty-something wreckage) feel at ease as they slalomed the wheelchairs around nurses and medical teams gliding them to their appointments. Except for Willow. Willow was a young woman, a little older than Bradley; twenty-two or twenty-four, with a personality like a ray of sunshine. She was the only female in the pool. She had a boxy shape and a tattoo of a dragon on her wrist. 

He hated tattoos on a woman - mutilation he called it.

    “Very GOT,” said Bradley

    “I’m sorry?” said Willow looking up from her pager.

Bradley was blocking her.

    “Game of thrones,” said Bradley.

Willow smiled,

    “I just love dragons,”

    “My name is Danny,”

    “Willow. I have to go,”

    “Willow? For real? Jesus, were your parents hippies?”

    “Teachers… may I….?”

    “Sure..”

He moved. But Willow still had to pass. 

With a sigh.

Bradley’s pager beeped. He navigated his way to the bed. Christ, this one’s a gonner, he thought. The patient was so old, so ill, it was hard to tell if it was a man or a woman. The skin was waxy, almost sere, the oxygen tube strapped to the nostrils, struggling to remain in place. The eyes opened; they were clear and grey.

“X-Ray, Danny,” said Posey. Posey was a Filipino nurse. Bradley hated her. 

Bradley couldn’t understand why the hospital was full of them.

They eased the patient, a man, into the wheelchair. A tall thin man. Skeletal and on his way to ga-ga land. Posey produced a blanket seemingly out of thin air and placed it tenderly on the old man’s knees. She deftly removed the telemetry anchoring him to the bed and smiled a sunny smile.

Bradley wanted to punch her.

The man had no density, the wheelchair seemed empty. Bradley wheeled in silence. His ankle was paining him, the damp weather not helping. 

He had had a promising career, almost being called up to the International under- 17s. Football, not Gaelic. But a drunk driver,a hit-and-run had ended that; clipping Danny on his bicycle on Christmas week three years ago as Danny was leaving the train station. 

Left him lying in a ditch screaming. 

It was in this very hospital they had rebuilt it. But the damage was already done. The overworked and over-stretched staff had made him low-priority. He never forgot .

He wasn’t a forgiving type either. 

Career over. Dream over. Tossed aside as there were ten others like him. The gap was filled and Bradley was forgotten. A few columns in the local paper were in his scrap book. 

Bradley had nothing to live for.

He felt let down by God.

He wanted to tell Willow all about it, so he began to frame the tale in his head. 

As luck would have it, he found himself in the crowded X-Ray corridor with Willow. Her charge was a chatty old woman. Her hair, as light as cotton wool. Willow was chatting, assuring the nervous woman and bantering with Sean, the head porter. The craic was ninety as they would say. A very Irish corridor of laughter and jokes.

Bradley cleared his throat. He repeated it. Willow didn’t respond. Bradley nudged the wheelchair closer, aiming for her ankles. He suddenly wanted to hurt her. Inflict pain for not being aware of his own.

It was then that all hell broke loose. Slowly, then with increasing momentum, the tall thin man that Bradley was ushering, unfolded and fell out of the chair in a heap. His pull-up began to stain with piss. The gown opened and the man cried out on the cold, cold floor.

    “Oh, sweet Jesus-fucking-christ,” said Bradley as Sean and Willow set about recovering the wailing man.

He stood paralysed clinging to the wheelchair as if it was a life-preserver.