By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
30) Hospital
Paul sits with his bum on the edge of the long padded green bench, his legs stuck out before him. His gauze-taped arm is held up across his chest.
Paul is in waiting mode, a level above sleep. A hospital blanket is hung squarely about his shoulders, pillows his neck.
When he arrived the ambulancemen took him straight through to the curtained cubicles. A plump apologetic doctor scissored open his bloodied shirtsleeve, made soothing jokes, said something about having to get a seamstress in, congratulated the ambulancemen on their butterflies, was about to start picking at Paul's shoulder when something happened.
Paul had made himself passive, inert, ready to submit to proddings. Instead the doctor quickly gave him an injection and a little nurse with dark rings under her eyes stuck some more gauze dressings over his cuts, told him to keep his arm above his chest, arranged the blanket over his shoulders, and led him out to the long waiting room, his cut sleeve swinging free.
A backlog of patients are now sitting on the two facing rows of long green benches. New arrivals, limping, are told there's been a pile-up on the motorway, they'll have a long wait, would they prefer to see their own GP? It is not an option that has been offered to Paul. He waits.
A florid man in shock sits grinning like a farmer with no trousers. A prim woman fusses about a bespectacled older man, fetching him cups of coffee and tutting at him. Paul watches her as she walks back and forth past him. He tries to imagine in her upright carriage the yearning to wrap her body around a man's and devour him with her loins.
Another man, further along, sits with a loose bandage on his wrist and with an idiot's features unscarred by expression, untroubled by thought. With him is a tearful fat woman in tight clothes. Her talk is all of mysticism and ley lines.
Ambulances queue outside. Their stretchers, on long chrome legs and small wheels, are pushed straight past the desk. In his mind's eye Paul sees people struggling all hot and bothered from their crunched cars like turtles from damaged shells, all of a sudden soft and vulnerable.
Walking patients feed change into the telephone at the end and tell people where they are, how very long they'll be. Julie knows where he is. He waits.
In a railed enclosure a toddler with a scraped face talks to a fat brown bear. The toddler's parents hover, self-accusing.
Here are people in shock, not seeing what's going on around them, watching the replay inside their heads, and contemplating the large effects of such little things — viruses, pills, blades, burst tyres....
Paul sees some patients trying to catch a nurse's eye, smiling like court sycophants at the chubby young doctors. Smarm is the word, like a grass in the witness box. M'lud doctor, I am guilty of letting myself be injured, guilty of being presently imperfect....
Nurses and doctors are people who can see into your bowel shames and beyond. Soldiers too. They know all the hard facts of life, injury and death. The rest of us are deluded with our perfect beings.
Listen schmucks, Paul says inside his head, there's no such thing as innocence, just people who haven't had it happen to them yet. You are fooling yourselves that it can't happen to you.
In the doctors' power, these people have forgotten that doctors and the like have their fears too. Wise in the ways of death and drugs they may be, but they are as terrified of mice and loneliness as the rest of us.
The creeps are making another mistake too — for the doctors and the nurses the illness is the interesting thing, not the person who has it. The rest of us here, watching, are the diagnosticians of the human condition.
The ambulancemen asked what connection the bruises on Paul's face had with his sliced-open arm and shoulder. No direct connection, Paul told them moving with the traffic, just the way it is these days. Their silence didn't believe him. Their turning away said that it was none of their business anyway.
"Why Taunton?" he asked them.
"Something up in Bridgie," the driver said, without turning around. Bridgwater being a place that has many crises, Paul did not ask for details. And now, sat here, he tells their disbelief that if you revert to the laws of the jungle in your economics then on the streets you create savages.
Two young girls, long thin legs crossed about each other, sit whey-faced together. One — Paul has heard it said — overdosed, and the other is shocked out of her make-up. So young and got her whole life in front of her and from what she can see from here that whole life aint worth a shit.
A gesticulating man is arguing low-voiced with the white-coated receptionist. He is swearing to the truth of what he is telling her. You have to believe what a man says of himself, Paul mindtells her. If you can't, then you can believe nothing of anyone; and all laws, all morals, all ideals mean nothing.
You have to believe. You have to trust.
The receptionist is becoming flustered, is looking for help. Where's the old-fashioned goodness that knew right from wrong and tolerated wickedness and weakness in all but oneself? Uncertainty now.
The prim woman is on the phone, complaining of the time they've had to wait. She is smartly dressed. Listen you tight cow, Paul tells her, this is where most of the charity goes. All those fun runs that hold up the traffic, all those boozy dart marathons and silly trolley pushes — they're to keep this hospital going, to buy bits and pieces necessary to somebody's life. So wait a bit, and keep your trap as firmly shut as your legs.
He smiles inside his face.
Two besuited drunks are talking loudly near the phone. Bullshit terms, "I said I wasn't having any of that..." "Listen pal, I said..." So do bullshitters always provoke antagonism towards themselves. "If they thought I was going to stand there and..." This injured drunk is talking himself into new opinions, new hatreds, new angers, new injuries.
They are being looked at by two bodybuilders. Both are in shorts and stretched tee-shirts, slabs of hard flesh above a mosaic of stomach muscles. One has strapping on his thick leg. They impassively stare.
No more stretchers have arrived. Paul rolls his head to look behind him. The ambulances have all gone. On the glazed bowl of the orange sky are black wispy plane trails like pencil scratches.
A fat nurse with a hard face is calling Paul. He starts to stand. The blanket slips. He rearranges it with his good hand. The nurse holds his elbow. Paul smiles at her. They are back inside a curtained cubicle.
"Possibly a little heavy on the pethidine...?" the nurse looks significantly at the doctor. All three look up at some shouting in the waiting room.
"A lot of angry people out there," the doctor says.
"You're telling me?" Paul says
True Stories
In 1988 Colin Coleman, of Heathcombe Road, Bridgwater, sent tapes to Shell, Esso and BP headquarters. On the tapes he said that devices had been fixed to petrol storage tanks and would be detonated within 30 days unless each of the companies paid £100,000 into a Giro bank account.
Realising that they had all been sent the same threat the three oil companies didn't take the tapes seriously.
When opening the Giro account 34 year old Colin Coleman had used the name John Perkins. John Perkins had once been a neighbour of Colin Coleman. The police arrested Colin Coleman after he collected a letter from Bridgwater Red Cross addressed to John Perkins. Colin Coleman told the police, "For me it was exciting. I don't do anything anymore. Life's boring. Even though I've got a wife and three kids. For me, this was different."
On the night of Saturday 20th May 1989 a thief entered the house of Michael Vickery in Taunton Road, Bridgwater, and stole £100 in cash.
In September 1989 Mrs Doreen Jones, of Heather Close, Bridgwater, was hit by a car while walking in Mary Street. The car driver, Mrs Theresa Merritt, of West View, Othery, was unhurt. Mrs Doreen Jones's breastbone was fractured.
In May 1990 Nicholas Deadman, of Edward street, Bridgwater, got fed up waiting to be served in a St John Street pizza parlour and he shouted and swore at the staff. 26 year old Nicholas Deadman left the parlour once, then returned, still shouting and swearing at the staff. Not realising that it was a police officer who was arresting him, Nicholas Deadman turned to the officer and said, "Who the fuck are you? God?"
