In hospitals, it seems, you get to know people without having to speak to them. Just listening is enough. The hard part is avoiding hearing them.
“Nurse!”
Ten second pause.
“Nurse!”
Ten second pause.
“Nurse!”
This is how Laurence got to know Terry. Laurence was only in overnight. He’d had his catheter removed and was desperate to be discharged. Terry, he had worked out, had been in for several days. Laurence was surprised Terry was still alive – not because of any medical condition but because none of the staff had murdered him.
“Nurse!”
Ten second pause.
“Nurse!”
Around lunchtime, Terry had some visitors. That was good, because it meant Terry turned down the blaring telly chef chit-chat about paella and the recycled football match commentary clips that had been keeping him so cheerful.
His visitors were his sister, in from the outer east, and a younger woman who appeared to be her daughter. They gathered round and had a good old talk, mostly about Terry’s constipation.
“Nurse!”
Ten second pause.
“Nurse!”
Another visitor arrived. To Laurence’s surprise, he wasn’t another Essex Man but a naturalised Liverpudlian. How long was it since he’d moved to London?
“Twenty, years, Tel. The judge didn’t like me, so he gave me a long sentence.”
A ward sister arrived, a young black woman. Terry, as you might have guessed, was white. Laurence closed his eyes. Terry had already bellowed across the ward, several times, “Is anyone here English?” until Laurence, having nervily appraised the risk of an affirmative reply leading to a longer and potentially fraught interaction, had shut him up with a pointedly bored “yes”.
The ward sister, though, had Terry’s measure. She was kindly, she was poised. She chatted to Terry’s visitors and smiled. She assured Terry that relief was on its way. Later, Terry’s sister remarked on how nice she was. Laurence’s social tension eased.
In fact, the staff in general seemed to have worked out how to deal with him: at one point in the afternoon, another black woman, a nurse, her manner fondly scolding, her accent African, said, for everyone to hear, “Why is it, Terry, that every time I see you, you are naked?”
Terry had already provided his fellow patients with an explanation – one that announced itself to Laurence’s nose shortly before Terry delivered it to his ears by means of a phone call he made not long after his visitors had left.
“Tell her the eagle has landed,” he instructed an intermediary. “She’ll know what I mean.”
Then, his sister was on the line.
“The moment you left, I exploded,” Terry told her, with an intimacy as wondering as it was gruff.
By that time, Laurence, who was a urine sample and a consultant’s sign-off away from freedom, was getting his plastic water jug refilled and pacing the ward with ostentatious vigour, pausing only to socialise with the brown man in the next bed, partly to be nice but also to demonstrate, for the avoidance of doubt, his cultural distance from Terry.
He left two hours later.
“Nurse!” Terry was saying. “Nurse!”
John Vane is a pen name used by Dave Hill, editor and publisher of On London. Buy his London novel Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times here or here. Follow on Bluesky.