Calling Time

Through the glass ceiling of the crumbling accident and emergency department, the light faded from a grubby grey to a near pitch black. The cold, fluorescent tube lights flickered on, signalling the start of a long evening ahead. The walls were as grey as the clouds had been and the floor had become even colder and somehow harder after it was announced the heating had failed. It smelt like a hospital should smell; that sort of abnormal stench of disinfectant, masking the odour of illness and decay.

In the far corner stood a grandfather clock, its mahogany casing battered and bruised by time and the odd careless cleaner. It choked out every second as its old rusting hands struggled towards the end of each hour until it cried out the six o’clock toll.

Ray and Suzanna were sitting on two ripped green waiting room chairs at the side of the room hunched up with their chins in their hands. The pair hadn’t spoken for eighteen minutes and forty two seconds (according to Ray’s watch) before Suzanna broke the silence.

“It must be about three hours by now,” she said.

“Two hours and sixteen minutes,” he replied, caressing his watch. Neither looked at the other for fear of having to engage in deeper conversation. Now wasn’t the time to bring up the events of the last few months.

“I hope she doesn’t stay overnight,” Ray mumbled disdainfully. “It will be such a bother.”

“It’ll be fine,” Suzanna sighed.

“It’s easier for you to be non-chalant about it...” he was afraid he’d raised his voice too much. He murmured, “She’s not your mother.”

“I’m not being non-chalant, I’m just trying to be reassuring.”

“Well, OK, thank you.” He paused. “And about the other night- I suppose I overreacted a little.”

“It’s not you, Ray, it’s me,” she sighed, as Ray chuckled.

“Have you been watching Doctors again?” he joked.

“Every day, Ray. You know we do. Then it’s Escape to the Country. Sometimes we flick to Alan Titchmarsh. Only sometimes, though.” Her voice faded into the noise of another bed being rushed in by screaming attendants. Ray looked up and caught her eye. He noticed her greying hair, and remembered how old they were. “So I went and drank a little more than usual,” she said.

“You seem to drink...” he hesitated, before noticing the hip flask poking out of her handbag.
“You seem to be drinking a lot these days.”

“I was only trying to have a bit of fun, Ray. It’s... it’s tedious, feeding her and washing her clothes all the time.”

The attendants of the next trolley to arrive were in such a rush that anyone else walking through the entrance hall had to dodge out of the way. If they hadn’t, Ray observed, they would have ended up as casualties themselves. The noise lulled, and the painful ticks of the clock seemed louder.

“Perhaps you should move out,” he said.

“Ray, I... really?”

“It’s not as though she should be your responsibility. And it’s as though she treated you well when we were kids.”

“She never did like me being a Daddy’s girl,” she mumbled, looking again at the floor.

“It was difficult for all of us when he died. She’d only lived with you for three months, and all of a sudden she had to be your mother.”

“She didn’t treat you well either, Ray.”

They looked at each other again. This time, Ray noticed how her tears trickled over the web of lines on her face, and felt the same on his own tired skin. Webs just like the ones the spiders had built hanging from woodworm ridden beams of the attic in the Yeoman’s cottage, Ray’s family home, passed down through countless generations. Many times in his childhood he would sit on the dusty old footstool in the corner, among the empty wine crates, as one of his daily punishments for trivial crimes. He observed that whatever shape the cobwebs were, they were always built in a sort of spiral shape, around a centre, where the spider would often rest. He wondered whether the spider was content, having built this intricate silky structure only to sit there, in the middle, alone. Only once did he see more than one spider on a web- they had lots of little spiders as well. But still they just sat there. Waiting, perhaps, but there were no flies to be caught in this airless space.

He didn’t like the cobwebs- they would get tangled in his hair that should have been cut months ago. His mother said that the Barber was too expensive, and too far away anyway (it was only a couple of miles away, two doors down from his mother’s favourite wine shop). In fact, they never really went out much at all; according to the local authorities Ray was tutored at home by his mother. He was her only child- a mistake, or rather an unwanted after effect of a distressing evening with some of her fathers’ new clients. He was a failing businessman, desperate for new contracts. He had threatened it, but she never believed he really would.

She married aged 29, not long after Ray’s fourteenth birthday and her father’s death. She knew he would succumb to suicide eventually- there was no money left, after all. The pairing was convenient- she had known him and his daughter as her next door neighbour for most of her life. His wife had died young. Ray was punished a little less in the three months before his stepfather’s death but after he had gone his mother returned to her old ways. At least he had someone to compare bruises with.

It was 11.42 pm when the doctor arrived to break the news to them. Ray’s mother’s had been in a bad way for months. There had been some respite, a lull in her pain, over the last few weeks but tonight her health had deteriorated. It was unlikely, the doctor said, that she would ever return home. Ray and Suzanna embraced each other. Ray asked the doctor what had happened.

“We’re unsure,” he said. “We think she’s had an overdose, and that’s what’s caused this.” The pair looked at each other.

“How could that have happened?” they said to each other, almost in unison.