Voice off. Human beings possess no intrinsic self-criticism. Only through other human beings does an individual human being know of itself.
The old man opposite is still sat in the padded red chair, a washed out green blanket folded over his knees.
The man holds the old man’s gaze a disinterested moment, then lets his sight and mind drift elsewhere.
The ceiling of the long ward has been lowered, slopes up to the tops of the high windows. The two ranks of supine beds do not keep pace with the tall windows: less windows than beds. The lower panes of the windows are of frosted glass. Through the upper panes is a view only of small rounded white clouds in a blue sky.
Behind each bed is an assortment of wires and tubes. Beside a few of the beds are upright iron cylinders. Across each bed is a narrow cantilevered table. Between each bed, apart from the folded back curtains, is a locker and a chair. Some of the locker tops are crammed with bottles of different coloured drinks, upright angled cards, bowls of fruit, boxes of tissues, vases of flowers, books, magazines and papers. A few patients have spread their occupancy to adjoining windowsills; others keep tidily to themselves. Yet other lockers, like his, have only a transparent jug and a beaker of water.
The dark green floor of the ward gleams with semicircular smears of polish. At the far end of the ward is a large table and two stacks of brown plastic chairs. Taped to the square pillars in the centre of the ward are hand-printed notices telling visitors that not more than two chairs are allowed beside each bed.
At this end of the ward, on either side of the unseen entrance, wooden partitions enclose small rooms. His bed is one bed away from a glass-walled isolation room. Vacant.
Half way down the ward is a gap between the beds where, on either side are double doors. Patients have been shuffling in and out of those doors. From the opening doors on the opposite side he hears the blare of a television, shuttered by the bumping door. A patient emerges from the open doors this side with damp hair and a white towel over his arm.
Groups of people, in variously coloured street clothes, sit around two of the distant beds. Strained laughter comes from one group, respectful murmurs from the other. The two patients, sitting up in bed, are being politely attentive.
A few of the beds are empty, some temporarily vacated, others smooth and untenanted. Two patients lay asleep. Most are sitting up in bed or are curled on their sides reading. One patient is sat beside another’s bed watching, with him, a small white television.
A sparse-haired man, three beds down on the opposite side, smiles and lifts a white hand in a flaccid wave. The man returns the smile, feels muscles move over his face.
He examines the other patients. None are young. All have an unhealthy pallor, even the fat black man further down the ward and the overweight Asian in the bed beside him. All look grey, their abundant flesh dragged down, as if their excess fat has given up the fight against gravity and they have collapsed inside themselves. Surreptitiously he feels around his own body. Flesh to spare, but not fat.
Nor is it just their being fat. A black nurse chiding a patient is small and round and plump. But there is a solidity, a sheen, a vitality in her flesh, a brightness to her eyes that these drooping men don't own. A lustre even to her hair. She is wearing a grey and white striped uniform.
Names are clipped to the bedrails. The printed names — Assan and Burton — are the doctors’. The patients' names are all hand-written. He turns in his bed. ‘Assan’ only is attached to the bedrail above his head.
He turns back to the ward. Some of what he has seen is new to him; much, though, is familiar. Has he been in hospital before? The unaccountably familiar disconcerts as much as the apparently new. Anxiety, like a prickling gaseous bubble, rotates within his gut.
A woman in a blue overall has been slowly pushing a tea trolley around the ward. At each bed she has glanced to the charts at the bottom of the bed before asking the patient what he wants.
Curtains have been drawn around one bed. Two nurses and the doctor move behind that curtain, exchange crisp remarks. The nurses are not those who attended him. One nurse has a dark blue uniform trimmed with white lace. The telephone rings occasionally in the nurses' rooms near the entrance.
The woman with the trolley arrives at the Asian's bed. The overweight Asian takes his tea without milk or sugar. The Asian grunts his thanks.
"And how do you like your tea?" the woman stands by her trolley and smiles at the man, the newcomer. She didn't smile at the Asian. The men searches inside himself for a response. Sucking on a deep breath, he shrugs.
"Milk? Sugar?" She stands waiting. She has neatly curled hair.
"Try him milk without sugar," the dark nurse appears, "Don't want to start you in any bad habits." She smiles at the man and adjusts the bedside table. The cup of tea in its green saucer is placed before him.
"I'm going off in a minute. I just came to tell you that we've called the police and they're sending someone around to see you. No luck yet?"
"No."
"Don’t worry," she pats his arm, "Drink your tea."
Obediently, gratefully, he swallows a mouthful of tea. All he can taste is its hotness. The Asian, belching, makes a disparaging remark to him about the tea. Three nurses come walking into the ward, start picking up charts from the bottom of beds, saying hello to the patients.
"Home tomorrow?" a nurse in a white uniform asks the patient in the bed the other side of him.
"Tomorrow morning. Eleven o'clock," the patient makes a show of rubbing his hands together. He has grey hair swept back. The man wonders how he knows the patient has a Scottish accent, and yet he doesn’t know if he takes sugar in his own tea. Again the gaseous bubble rotates trembling within.
Both sets of visitors, with a clatter of street shoes, hurry up the centre of the ward and out. A nurse in a blue uniform, blue belt, with short blonde hair has unhooked the charts from the bottom of his bed.
"Says here we've got to keep an eye on you," she brings the charts around the other side of the bed, "Better start as we mean to go on."
Her manner is easy, relaxed. Taking a thermometer out of a cup fixed to the wall she flicks it. Glad to know what is expected of him, he opens his mouth, puckers his lips around the cold tube of the thermometer. Holding the watch pinned upside down to her tunic, she takes his wrist.
"Fresh in today?" she asks. He nods.
"And what have you been up to?"
"I don't know," he says around the thermometer, and feels himself grow hot.
The blonde nurse frowns, concentrates on her watch, glances up to the single name on the bedrail. He reads her reactions: now she has recognised him. Before he was just a patient, this day's intake: he imagines her only half-listening to the nurses as they chattering went off-duty.
Releasing his wrist she makes a note, removes and reads the thermometer.
"Blood pressure as well I'm afraid," she says as he thirstily reaches for his tea.
Removing the dark-spotted cottonwool from the crook of his arm, she pumps up the black strap, watches the mercury fall. A shiny blue and red dressing gown is draped over the end of a bed across from him. The inside red stitches of the dressing gown are like Arabic writing. How do I know, he asks himself, what Arabic writing looks like?
The nurse packs the tubing and strap away into its long box.
"I also require," she pauses significantly, "a urine sample."
With an apologetic smile she hands him a long-necked white plastic flask,
"Want the curtains drawn?"
"No thanks."
Urine is yellow and comes out the penis. The feeble patient who waved to him took a flask off another nurse. Like him the man slides the flask down under the bedclothes, fishes inside his pyjamas for his penis and places it in the downsloping neck of the cold flask. Telling him to put the flask on his bedside locker when he has finished, the nurse disappears up to the ward offices. To consult with others on him, he guesses. And he feels and hears his hot urine trickling into the flask. And he wonders that he knows what to do but cannot remember ever having done it before. Something so functional, so ordinary, so everyday... and yet he has no other days but this one.
Following the other patient’s example, he twists in bed to place the flask on the bedside locker, then pulls the narrow table with his tea on it back to him. The other nurses have worked their way down the ward, taking temperatures, bestowing headslanted smiles. The blonde nurse reappears, takes his urine sample, gives him a clean white flask.
"Remember anything yet?" she says. He smiles, his guess correct,
"No. If anything it seems to get worse. More confusing. Realising how much I don't know."
"Well... Take it easy," she squeezes his shoulder.
Lying back against his pillows he watches the influx of new nurses establish the order of their shift, notes the care with which they treat him, the precise omission of his name, the cheerful unconscious use of the other patients names; and he looks inside himself and he wonders where, whoever he was, he has gone.
He watches nurses bringing newly delivered flowers to patients, listens to nurses passing on phone messages from relatives, and with wonder he picks up his knife and fork when dinner is wheeled around, and he watches himself eat and he wonders that he cannot recall ever having eaten before yet he knows how to do it. He also knows, approximately, what the potatoes and the greens will taste like before they enter his mouth. The cubes of grained meat he leaves around the outside of the white plate. And twice more his temperature, blood pressure and pulse are taken; and he glimpses their uneven progress across his chart. That much he knows about himself.
