The dark-haired nurse of yesterday takes his temperature, pulse and pressure. She inevitably asks if his memory has returned, pulls a sympathetic face when he tells her not. He resumes his reading of the newspaper.
A white-coated woman with a large chest brings a red chair attached to some scales into the ward. She has ginger hair and a deep mocking voice.
The dark-haired nurse asks him to leave the bed to be weighed and measured. The other day nurses, he realises, are avoiding him. His lack of a name confuses them, upsets their cultivated cheeriness.
The dark-haired nurse holds onto his arm as he crosses to the weighing chair. He leans slightly towards her, feels his feet spreading out upon the cold floor, tests the weight of his body on his legs, notes the movement of his vertebrae as he straightens to be measured, ponders over the placement of his limbs as he lowers himself into the weighing chair... He cannot breathe, cannot swallow, looks down in tilting surprise at the sweat prickling from the backs of his hands. The nurse and the white-coated woman tell him to let go of the chair, and they help him back to bed. The white-coated woman is red and puffing.
Movement has freed his airways. He signifies that he is no longer dependent on their support. They make him lie down. He asks the worried white-coated woman if he might have a copy of his precise statistics — to give to the detective who is trying to find out who he is. The woman writes them on the back of a form. The dark-haired nurse takes his temperature, pulse and pressure.
"Wonder what that was all about?" she lays her cool fingers lightly upon his forehead.
He studies his statistics, watches the white-coated woman push the weighing chair along to the patient who arrived after him yesterday. The patient looks ill, has wrinkled skin the same colour as his teeth, his thin limbs dithering. Under the bedclothes the man flexes his leg muscles, feels their firmness, decides that — compared to the other patients, and despite his momentary faintness — there can be little wrong with him.
He next has to lay aside his newspaper when two nurses come to make his bed. They help him into the red chair beside Mr MacMaster.
"Try doing the quizword," Mr MacMaster tells him, "Be a good test. See if you can remember other things."
Mr MacMaster shows him where the quizword is in the paper. Because of his close scrutiny of every news item he had not yet reached that page.
When the two nurses — unnecessarily, he thinks — help him back into bed, he frowns pensively over the quizword.
When next he has his temperature, pulse and pressure taken, he has only managed to solve those clues which asked him to make a word using a letter, or letters, from four other words. Borrowing a blue biro from Mr MacMaster, he prints, with effort, those solutions
in the squares. He knows the answers to no other clues, abandons the quizword to read the rest of the paper.
He is trying to make sense of the mathematics on the sports page when another white-coated woman parks her trolley beside his bed. This women is skinny with frizzy hair and freckles. On the trolley are bottles and syringes in plastic bags. Obligingly, glad to know what is expected of him, he rolls up his pyjama sleeve, allows the woman to take a blood sample.
Watching her fill out the inevitable form he realises that this day no-one is asking him his name. He hears the woman greet the other new patient by name and, discomfited by the idea of people being kind to him, he returns to puzzling over the day's racing programme.
He is about to start on the front page of The Guardian when a small man in a baggy white suit stops at the end of his bed. He has difficulty putting the brake on a wheelchair.
"X-ray for you old son," he comes around the bed, "Need a hand?"
Unassisted the man climbs out of the bed and walks to the wheelchair. The porter arranges a coffee-coloured cellular blanket around his legs, another blanket around his shoulders. Then, letting off the brake, the small porter begins pushing the wheelchair out of the ward. The dark-haired nurse, in passing, smiles down on him.
They pass the nurses' rooms — a polished desk and black phone in one room, in others large chrome machines, metal cabinets, a steel sink and taps, a tray of upside down white cups...
They enter a long waxed corridor. The porter grunts.
"I don’t think," the man looks up and around at the porter, "there's any need for you to push me. I'm sure I'm quite strong enough to walk."
"Listen John," the porter says, "if nurse says you gotta go in a wheelchair in a wheelchair you gotta go. Right?"
The porter's unsmiling demeanour intimidates him. Wishing he had a more sympathetic companion for this excursion into new territory, he looks into the double doors they pass on either side of the corridor. The wards within are replicas of his own. Women in frilly nighties in one ward, children with bandaged limbs in another.
The wheelchair stops between two sets of grey lift doors. The porter presses a white button. Opposite the lift doors are blue plastic seats, a trough of potted plants and two cylindrical ashtrays. Fixed to the wall is a tall list of ward numbers, arrows beside them. A windowsill is too high to be seen over from the wheelchair: again he beholds a blue sky with today some comma-like wisps of clouds.
The porter jabs impatiently at the lift button.
"Why did you call me John?" the man asks him, "Do you know me?"
"Nah!" the porter laughs. His teeth are yellow and crooked. "Call everyone John. Dunno why. I come from London. Call everyone John down there." He jabs at the button, "Only been here a month."
The wheelchair is pushed into the lift between two white-coated doctors and a young blushing nurse. They all leave at the next floor down; one of the doctors laughing as they round a corner.
The sign outside the lift says the groundfloor. The porter, heaving at the handles of the wheelchair, follows arrowed signs to the X-ray department. Other signs, of initials and abbreviations, point into doors or further on.
The man is aware of the porter labouring behind the wheelchair, occasionally feels his hot moist breath on the back of his neck. They pass a blood bank and a steamy clanging canteen.
On entering the double doors of the X-ray department the porter parks him behind two other wheelchairs. In one is a bald old woman, in the other a long-haired youth with his left leg in plaster.
"You wait here John," the porter says, "They’ll see to you. I'll be back for you later."
On a long settee sit three people in civilian clothes — two youths with walking sticks and a thin woman in fawn skirt and jacket. The two women who appear to be in charge are also in everyday clothes Both are wearing dark blue skirts, one a pale blue cardigan, the other a white blouse. They come and go carrying large cardboard files. The man realises that he is made nervous by civilian clothes: because he doesn't immediately know the wearer's function?
The two wheelchairs before his are pushed through thick doors. The bald woman is dribbling. A few minutes after the doors closed a red light comes on above the doors. A notice says that it is dangerous to enter when the red light is showing. A telephone rings in an office beyond the long settee. All listen to a woman angrily explaining why something wasn't done.
When the youth in plaster and the dribbling woman are wheeled out, their wheelchairs are parked facing the double doors. Large cardboard files are slotted into the backs of the wheelchairs.
One of the walking-stick youths from the settee is escorted into the nearest X-ray room by the woman in the blue cardigan. The woman in the white blouse wheels the man past the thick door. He recognises none of the equipment.
"Can you stand?" the woman stamps on the wheelchair's brake.
"Yes." Trying to appear competent the man divests himself of the two blankets.
The woman leads him over to a metal stand.
"I want you to rest your chin on here," she adjusts a cushioned pad, brings it up to his chin, pushes a metal plate against the back or his head, asks him if it is comfortable, "In a minute I'll ask you to take a deep breath and keep perfectly still." She crosses the tiled room, goes behind a screen.
"Ever had your X-ray taken before?" she asks as she brings the equipment into alignment. She too knows that he has lost his memory.
"Not that I can recall," he says.
"Deep breath now," she tells him. A machine buzzes.
The woman emerges from behind the grey screen to turn his head first to one side, then to the other. Close to she gives off a scent sweetly sour and not unpleasant. She X-rays his chest next from the front, then from the back.
When he is again sat in the wheelchair he hears her shuffling what sounds like metal plates. He thinks of white sliced apples. She slots one of the large cardboard files into the back of his wheelchair, tucks the two light blankets around him and pushes him into the waiting room.
The youth and the bald woman have gone. He recognises yesterday's pale admission to his ward gripping onto the arms of his wheelchair.
"All done John?" the porter emerges from behind the office door, "Back we go."
In the groundfloor corridors are large women with shiny blue aprons, other wheelchairs, a stretcher with a transparent bag suspended above it, walking patients in wraparound dressing gowns.
This time they have the lift to themselves.
"Sister said," the small porter stands to one side to look down at him, "you lost your memory. That right?"
"That’s right." He doesn't like this porter: he talks too close to his face.
"Can't remember nothing?"
"I'm not sure.." The porter's salacious leer is making him nervous.
"Knew this bloke," the lift doors slide apart, "said he drank to forget. If he could've seen you now, he'd have had to come up with somethin' else.."
His bed has been made in his absence. Unassisted he climbs back in, picks up The Guardian from his bedside locker. He is on page two when the dark-haired nurse comes to take his temperature, pulse and blood pressure.
Voice Off. Chance is the one universal law which cannot be formulated.
Wednesday, 21 November 2007
Wednesday, 14 November 2007
Seven
Detective Constable Derek Hawkins sits at a desk and watches the clock. No call has come from the hospital. He has already gone an hour over his shift. The day shift has come and gone. Time enough now for the rest of the population to have got out of their beds.
He reaches for the phone and dials the first London number.
"Mrs Bofill? Sorry to trouble you so early. Detective Constable Hawkins of the Northampton Constabulary here. You reported your husband missing?"
"Four years ago," the women flatly says. She has a discernible London accent.
"I have his description before me. It fits a man we have who says he’s lost his memory. It’s probably not your husband. Could you add anything to your earlier description of your husband?"
The woman, hesitantly, having to stretch her memory back over four years, repeats the description already on record.
"I was hoping for something not on his file. An unusual mole... a small scar maybe? Something that would help us to either definitely identify him as your husband; or that would enable us to eliminate your husband altogether from our enquiries."
"What's he done?"
"Nothing, so far as we are aware. Just lost his memory."
"He had freckles on his chest," the woman says, "Not on his face, just on his chest."
DC Hawkins writes.
"Anything else? Did he have an accent, speech impediment, wear glasses occasionally, false teeth?"
"He wore glasses for reading."
"Did he smoke?"
"Yes. Not much though."
"So he could have easily given up?"
"He used to."
"That’s it? Nothing else?"
"It is four years ago."
"I understand. Now I’m afraid I won't be able to let you know one way or another until late this evening. We have several more lines of enquiry to pursue. But, if by this evening we can’t decide who he is, would you be prepared to come to Northampton to identify him?"
The woman is silent. He can hear traffic passing beyond her windows. Four years is time enough to have built several more lives. What does she owe a man who walked out on her four years ago? Who she could legally have divorced after two years?
"Yes," she says.
"Thank you."
Replacing the phone he reaches for the next sheet of paper, dials.
"Mrs Bekel?" Mrs Bekel has an eight year old daughter. Three years of her growing up the absent father has missed. Yet still Mrs Bekel wants to find him. To ask why? If DC Hawkins was to walk out on his wife, would she be distraught? Would she continue to seek him year after year? Were he to die would she grieve? Yes, she would grieve. But only according to convention; and he wants something beyond convention. These deserted women are beyond convention.
Of the five others he calls the Bolton woman has moved, has left no forwarding address. Her missing husband is one whose blood-group is not included in the description. Two of the others, along with Mrs Bekel's, have verifiable scars; and the Welsh woman’s seven year missing man has a pronounced Welsh accent.
Voice Off. Non-thought in humans is caused by their innate idleness. Thought for some human beings must always precede action — to think of something is to imagine doing it — and action inspires change, and change will lead to the unknown. The known, for human beings, no matter how miserable their lives, is always preferable to the unknown.
At 04:46 the scope completes its traverse of the line. At 05:11 Barry runs off a copy of the night's observations. At 05:26 he makes his last entry in the log and leaves the brick tower, staggers under the stacks of printout across the institution lawns to his office. There he makes his first cup of coffee since 11:15 the previous evening and he begins to study the printout. By 07:30 he is once more full of doubts. (The new is disconcerting, especially in a science as ancient as astronomy.) He craves further confirmation. No point, though, in calling Las Palmas: be only technicians there working on the scope, and none of then will have been looking at the sky.
At 07:38 Berry phones Brian Waters at Palomar. Barry Tappell and Brian Waters were undergraduates together. Brian Waters was lured by vast amounts of dollars and warm winters to join a Californian space zoo. Though, not being of that high an intellectual calibre, Brian Waters was relegated to Palomar, which pleased the convalescent Barry when he heard. Palomar, however, still has facilities above and beyond Herstmonceux.
Whenever Barry pictures Brian Waters he sees a lumpy dullard. Even his phone manner is stolidly slow; and, when finally Barry does succeed in identifying himself, Brian Waters displays not even polite pleasure.
"Yes?" It is late evening at Palomar.
"'I'm at Herstmonceux, and we've got a slight problem. Are you going to be looking anywhere in the direction of Lyrae tonight?"
"Not so far as I’m aware. No... I think I can tell you..." He would be security-minded, Barry thinks. "Yes... We've been concentrating on Sagittarius lately." Centre of the galaxy: needles and haystacks.
"I see. Well... I’m seeking confirmation of what I believe to be a new phenomena. Could you have a look to the East tonight? Let me know what you find there?"
"I'm not sure..." Brian Waters begins his slow cogitations, "It would take a much higher priority to interrupt our present scheduling."
"Nothing so official. Just a personal observation. Binoculars'll do. If you wouldn't mind?"
"If you could tell us what we’re supposed to be looking for?"
"I’d rather not. Don't want to prejudice your observations. If you could just look to the East..."
Returning the phone to its nest of buttons he snarls at it; then he sits back and tells himself to think. Sitting forward he pulls out a desk drawer, finds a phone pad and dials an Australian number. After two attempts he gets through to New South Wales, asks for Steve Church. While waiting he decides that it is lucky the Herstmonceux switchboard hasn't come on to query all these international calls.
"Yea?" a distinctly irate voice snaps in his ear.
"I don't know if you remember me, Barry Tappell? We met at that seminar in Paris last year." And, a pair of angry kindred spirits, they got paralytic together.
"You in Australia?"
"No. England."
"What can I do for you?"
"I was wondering if you were looking anywhere in the region of Pegasus last night. It's now about six in the afternoon there? Isn't it?"
"The answer to both questions is yes. Why d’you ask?"
"Did you notice anything peculiar?"
"Peculiar's putting it mildly. I’ve been up all bloody day trying to sort it out."
"Was it," Barry takes a deep breath, "because of a North-South line?"
"Yea. About 2 hours before dawn. Right across Scheat. Which spelt differently about sums up my mood. Why did... You mean to say you had it there too?"
"Through Vega at first."
"Shit! First of all I thought it was optics. Been checking all our bloody mirrors. Though I didn’t see how it could be. I was just about to put it down to a freak heat distortion."
"I got it logged at 11:05 GMT."
"So I've got the Tappell bloody line to thank for today."
Barry grins,
"Looks like." The Tappell Line.
"Any idea what's causing it?" Steve Church asks.
"Tentatively," Barry smirks, "I'll let you know."
Sitting back, Barry drums his feet on the floor, gives a whoop of delight. The Tappell Line.
Voice Off. Despite the emphasis placed by various human societies upon individuality, humanity’s is a collective intelligence: a thing is perceived as real only if it is a shared perception.
He reaches for the phone and dials the first London number.
"Mrs Bofill? Sorry to trouble you so early. Detective Constable Hawkins of the Northampton Constabulary here. You reported your husband missing?"
"Four years ago," the women flatly says. She has a discernible London accent.
"I have his description before me. It fits a man we have who says he’s lost his memory. It’s probably not your husband. Could you add anything to your earlier description of your husband?"
The woman, hesitantly, having to stretch her memory back over four years, repeats the description already on record.
"I was hoping for something not on his file. An unusual mole... a small scar maybe? Something that would help us to either definitely identify him as your husband; or that would enable us to eliminate your husband altogether from our enquiries."
"What's he done?"
"Nothing, so far as we are aware. Just lost his memory."
"He had freckles on his chest," the woman says, "Not on his face, just on his chest."
DC Hawkins writes.
"Anything else? Did he have an accent, speech impediment, wear glasses occasionally, false teeth?"
"He wore glasses for reading."
"Did he smoke?"
"Yes. Not much though."
"So he could have easily given up?"
"He used to."
"That’s it? Nothing else?"
"It is four years ago."
"I understand. Now I’m afraid I won't be able to let you know one way or another until late this evening. We have several more lines of enquiry to pursue. But, if by this evening we can’t decide who he is, would you be prepared to come to Northampton to identify him?"
The woman is silent. He can hear traffic passing beyond her windows. Four years is time enough to have built several more lives. What does she owe a man who walked out on her four years ago? Who she could legally have divorced after two years?
"Yes," she says.
"Thank you."
Replacing the phone he reaches for the next sheet of paper, dials.
"Mrs Bekel?" Mrs Bekel has an eight year old daughter. Three years of her growing up the absent father has missed. Yet still Mrs Bekel wants to find him. To ask why? If DC Hawkins was to walk out on his wife, would she be distraught? Would she continue to seek him year after year? Were he to die would she grieve? Yes, she would grieve. But only according to convention; and he wants something beyond convention. These deserted women are beyond convention.
Of the five others he calls the Bolton woman has moved, has left no forwarding address. Her missing husband is one whose blood-group is not included in the description. Two of the others, along with Mrs Bekel's, have verifiable scars; and the Welsh woman’s seven year missing man has a pronounced Welsh accent.
Voice Off. Non-thought in humans is caused by their innate idleness. Thought for some human beings must always precede action — to think of something is to imagine doing it — and action inspires change, and change will lead to the unknown. The known, for human beings, no matter how miserable their lives, is always preferable to the unknown.
At 04:46 the scope completes its traverse of the line. At 05:11 Barry runs off a copy of the night's observations. At 05:26 he makes his last entry in the log and leaves the brick tower, staggers under the stacks of printout across the institution lawns to his office. There he makes his first cup of coffee since 11:15 the previous evening and he begins to study the printout. By 07:30 he is once more full of doubts. (The new is disconcerting, especially in a science as ancient as astronomy.) He craves further confirmation. No point, though, in calling Las Palmas: be only technicians there working on the scope, and none of then will have been looking at the sky.
At 07:38 Berry phones Brian Waters at Palomar. Barry Tappell and Brian Waters were undergraduates together. Brian Waters was lured by vast amounts of dollars and warm winters to join a Californian space zoo. Though, not being of that high an intellectual calibre, Brian Waters was relegated to Palomar, which pleased the convalescent Barry when he heard. Palomar, however, still has facilities above and beyond Herstmonceux.
Whenever Barry pictures Brian Waters he sees a lumpy dullard. Even his phone manner is stolidly slow; and, when finally Barry does succeed in identifying himself, Brian Waters displays not even polite pleasure.
"Yes?" It is late evening at Palomar.
"'I'm at Herstmonceux, and we've got a slight problem. Are you going to be looking anywhere in the direction of Lyrae tonight?"
"Not so far as I’m aware. No... I think I can tell you..." He would be security-minded, Barry thinks. "Yes... We've been concentrating on Sagittarius lately." Centre of the galaxy: needles and haystacks.
"I see. Well... I’m seeking confirmation of what I believe to be a new phenomena. Could you have a look to the East tonight? Let me know what you find there?"
"I'm not sure..." Brian Waters begins his slow cogitations, "It would take a much higher priority to interrupt our present scheduling."
"Nothing so official. Just a personal observation. Binoculars'll do. If you wouldn't mind?"
"If you could tell us what we’re supposed to be looking for?"
"I’d rather not. Don't want to prejudice your observations. If you could just look to the East..."
Returning the phone to its nest of buttons he snarls at it; then he sits back and tells himself to think. Sitting forward he pulls out a desk drawer, finds a phone pad and dials an Australian number. After two attempts he gets through to New South Wales, asks for Steve Church. While waiting he decides that it is lucky the Herstmonceux switchboard hasn't come on to query all these international calls.
"Yea?" a distinctly irate voice snaps in his ear.
"I don't know if you remember me, Barry Tappell? We met at that seminar in Paris last year." And, a pair of angry kindred spirits, they got paralytic together.
"You in Australia?"
"No. England."
"What can I do for you?"
"I was wondering if you were looking anywhere in the region of Pegasus last night. It's now about six in the afternoon there? Isn't it?"
"The answer to both questions is yes. Why d’you ask?"
"Did you notice anything peculiar?"
"Peculiar's putting it mildly. I’ve been up all bloody day trying to sort it out."
"Was it," Barry takes a deep breath, "because of a North-South line?"
"Yea. About 2 hours before dawn. Right across Scheat. Which spelt differently about sums up my mood. Why did... You mean to say you had it there too?"
"Through Vega at first."
"Shit! First of all I thought it was optics. Been checking all our bloody mirrors. Though I didn’t see how it could be. I was just about to put it down to a freak heat distortion."
"I got it logged at 11:05 GMT."
"So I've got the Tappell bloody line to thank for today."
Barry grins,
"Looks like." The Tappell Line.
"Any idea what's causing it?" Steve Church asks.
"Tentatively," Barry smirks, "I'll let you know."
Sitting back, Barry drums his feet on the floor, gives a whoop of delight. The Tappell Line.
Voice Off. Despite the emphasis placed by various human societies upon individuality, humanity’s is a collective intelligence: a thing is perceived as real only if it is a shared perception.
Tuesday, 6 November 2007
Six
Voice Off. Human society so orders itself according to the lowest common denominator or to the greatest good. The powerful in that society decide what is the greatest good.
He awakes curled on his side. A brown fibreglass chair is between his bed and the Asian's. He has recognised the ward. How do I know the chair is fibreglass, he asks himself, looks inside his mind. He has no memory or anything before yesterday. Sighing he straightens his body, pushes his head further up the pillow.
The nurses are chattering in their quarters. He hears the clink of the white cups. A dim grey light glows through the green and white flower-patterned curtains. A small tufty-haired old man is nervously collecting his towel and toilet bag. The old man's own haste appears to be confusing him. He has to lay down his toilet bag and towel to put on his dressing gown. He cannot then find his slippers, goes jerkily onto his hands and knees to look under the bed. Then, having got them on, the old man drops his toilet bag, breaking something glass within. Clutching his toilet bag and towel to his stomach the old man makes jaw wobbling for the bathroom.
The thought of water running brings to mind the man's own bladder. Reaching an arm out from under the bedclothes he takes the flask, removes the wad of paper from its neck and slides it down the bed.
Having returned the hot flask to the bedside locker he looks to the two beds on either side of him. The Scotsman and the Asian still sleep. Across the ward the feeble patient, who yesterday smiled at him, raises a thin white hand in salutation. The two night nurses come bursting into the ward pulling curtains apart and letting the thin blue light of day into the long ward. Some patients grunt angrily at this sudden disruption of their dreams, and they dig back into sleep. Others weakly stir and are helped to sit up by the two nurses.
The waking of men precedes the two chirruping nurses down the ward. Patients grab towels and dressing gowns and make for the bathroom. Despite their urgency none of the patients moves quickly. Some walk on stealthy tiptoe, cagey of arousing the slumbering pain within; others try to deceive their pain with flatfooted slothfulness; while the convalescent move with unbelieving caution, unable yet to credit the complete absence of pain.
The nurses pause to minister to those fully awake and confined to bed. The man watches this activity and examines himself. He is calmer than yesterday, cooler. The heartbeat is no longer hammering away at him. Maybe because he now has a past, if only of half a day? Did he dream last night? No, he was awake, then asleep, then awake again. All was here. Now he feels rested, refreshed.
The blonde nurse reaches him, opens the window curtains between his and the Asian’s bed. The large mound of the Asian, after a mumble acknowledging that it is day, presses itself back into sleep.
"Sleep well?" the nurse asks the man.
'Thank you," he struggles up the bed. She pulls pillows off a chair, piles them behind him.
"Sleep of the exhausted by the look of it." The other nurse has joined them, helps the blonde nurse to straighten the bed around him.
"Be back in a minute to take your temperature," she trots off with his flask of yellow urine.
"Home today Mr MacMaster?" the blonde nurse greets the Scotsman, "Sorry to be leaving us?"
"Not a bit," he grins, "My daughter's collecting me at twelve." The phone rings.
'Take care," the nurse hurries off.
"Morning," Mr MacMaster says to the man.
"Morning," the man responds.
While he is having his temperature, pulse and blood pressure taken, two cleaners in long blue coats come into the ward, plug in a suction cleaner and a circular floor polisher. The man has seen neither done before. He watches fascinated the pattern of glistening arcs the polisher makes. The cleaners answer with long faces the patients' greetings.
"Sleep seems to have done you good," the blonde nurse makes her crosses on his chart. "Any luck with the..?" she taps her temple.
"Just yesterday," he tells her.
"Be a cup of tea along in a minute," she leaves to take the temperature of the sullen Asian.
The walking patients are now emerging freshly shaven from the bathroom. One has white soap bubbles in his fluffy ears. Some have wet hair. On reaching their beds they either loop their towels through the rails on their bedside lockers, or they drape them over the bottom of their beds. Rearranging their few possessions some take up books, some sit on or beside their beds, some walk over to talk with other patients; and two take packets of cigarettes into the telly room.
A new nurse brings round the tea. The man is pleased to be able to tell her that he takes no sugar. His fear is not so great this day; he has a yesterday to build upon. The ritual of the tea gives him satisfaction and he dislikes the Asian for again grumbling about the quality of the tea.
A small bent man comes pushing a tent-sided trolley into the ward. The tent's sides are wooden racks into which are slotted newspapers and magazines. Newspapers are also stacked on the low flat base. Patients ask for certain of the papers: money rapidly changes hands. The man has no memory of this civilian transaction. The grubby newspaperman stops his squeaking trolley at the end of the bed, sees to the vacant old man opposite. Nervousness at this novelty rises within the man.
"Paper?" the newspaperman addresses him. He has a quick and furtive manner.
"I haven't any money," the man says, relieved to have so easily warded off this complication.
"That’s alright," Mr MacMaster says: he has just returned from the bathroom, "I’ll get it. What d'you want?"
The man looks fearfully at him,
"I don't know."
"Tell you what," Mr MacMaster takes a brown wallet from his locker, "I'll lend you a quid, you get a couple of papers, see which you like. How about the Mirror and the Guardian? Or d’you reckon..." But the impatient newspaperman has already taken the two papers off his trolley.
"Yea, that'll do," Mr MacMaster hands the coin to the newspaperman, who from a heavy pocket counts the change onto the newspapers on the bed. Mr MacMaster buys a Mirror for himself.
"Friend of mine," Mr MacMaster says, puffing around his words and getting into bed, "lost his memory once. Car crash. Didn't know his own wife when he came round. Been married twenty years. Had three teenage kids. But it all came back. Yours will too. Wait and see. When you get some money, pay that quid to the nurses. They got a fund here. You give it them."
"Thank you."
Mr MacMaster brusquely waves away the thanks, opens his paper.
The man pulls the smooth newspapers up the bed. Scooping up the change he examines the size, shape and colour of the coins. None are familiar. He unfolds the smaller of the two newspapers, reads its front page, studies the large photograph of a man said to be arriving at Heathrow yesterday.
"Ring any bells?" Mr MacMaster has been watching him.
"Vaguely," the man opens the paper, glances over the heavy print within, more big headlines, more photographs, "Nothing specific though."
"If you use words like specific," Mr MacMaster laughs," better try the Guardian. If that's no use, get the Sun and Telegraph tomorrow."
"Sun and Telegraph," the man soberly nods, returns to his reading. He reads every item, even the advertisements and the cartoon strips. All in the newspapers is new, and yet it is also familiar in that not one item surprises him. The hysterical headlines, the stories of hostages, of bombs, murders, crashes, famines... All is as before. Before? He becomes aware that the day nurses have arrived, lays aside the newspaper when his breakfast is placed in front of him. And that too is familiarly new. He samples and enjoys the cereal and the yellow fruit juice, but a wet yellow-grey lump called scrambled egg he discovers to be, in texture and taste, both unpalatable and indigestible.
Voice Off. The greater the unlikelihood of something happening the more significant will be its effect.
He awakes curled on his side. A brown fibreglass chair is between his bed and the Asian's. He has recognised the ward. How do I know the chair is fibreglass, he asks himself, looks inside his mind. He has no memory or anything before yesterday. Sighing he straightens his body, pushes his head further up the pillow.
The nurses are chattering in their quarters. He hears the clink of the white cups. A dim grey light glows through the green and white flower-patterned curtains. A small tufty-haired old man is nervously collecting his towel and toilet bag. The old man's own haste appears to be confusing him. He has to lay down his toilet bag and towel to put on his dressing gown. He cannot then find his slippers, goes jerkily onto his hands and knees to look under the bed. Then, having got them on, the old man drops his toilet bag, breaking something glass within. Clutching his toilet bag and towel to his stomach the old man makes jaw wobbling for the bathroom.
The thought of water running brings to mind the man's own bladder. Reaching an arm out from under the bedclothes he takes the flask, removes the wad of paper from its neck and slides it down the bed.
Having returned the hot flask to the bedside locker he looks to the two beds on either side of him. The Scotsman and the Asian still sleep. Across the ward the feeble patient, who yesterday smiled at him, raises a thin white hand in salutation. The two night nurses come bursting into the ward pulling curtains apart and letting the thin blue light of day into the long ward. Some patients grunt angrily at this sudden disruption of their dreams, and they dig back into sleep. Others weakly stir and are helped to sit up by the two nurses.
The waking of men precedes the two chirruping nurses down the ward. Patients grab towels and dressing gowns and make for the bathroom. Despite their urgency none of the patients moves quickly. Some walk on stealthy tiptoe, cagey of arousing the slumbering pain within; others try to deceive their pain with flatfooted slothfulness; while the convalescent move with unbelieving caution, unable yet to credit the complete absence of pain.
The nurses pause to minister to those fully awake and confined to bed. The man watches this activity and examines himself. He is calmer than yesterday, cooler. The heartbeat is no longer hammering away at him. Maybe because he now has a past, if only of half a day? Did he dream last night? No, he was awake, then asleep, then awake again. All was here. Now he feels rested, refreshed.
The blonde nurse reaches him, opens the window curtains between his and the Asian’s bed. The large mound of the Asian, after a mumble acknowledging that it is day, presses itself back into sleep.
"Sleep well?" the nurse asks the man.
'Thank you," he struggles up the bed. She pulls pillows off a chair, piles them behind him.
"Sleep of the exhausted by the look of it." The other nurse has joined them, helps the blonde nurse to straighten the bed around him.
"Be back in a minute to take your temperature," she trots off with his flask of yellow urine.
"Home today Mr MacMaster?" the blonde nurse greets the Scotsman, "Sorry to be leaving us?"
"Not a bit," he grins, "My daughter's collecting me at twelve." The phone rings.
'Take care," the nurse hurries off.
"Morning," Mr MacMaster says to the man.
"Morning," the man responds.
While he is having his temperature, pulse and blood pressure taken, two cleaners in long blue coats come into the ward, plug in a suction cleaner and a circular floor polisher. The man has seen neither done before. He watches fascinated the pattern of glistening arcs the polisher makes. The cleaners answer with long faces the patients' greetings.
"Sleep seems to have done you good," the blonde nurse makes her crosses on his chart. "Any luck with the..?" she taps her temple.
"Just yesterday," he tells her.
"Be a cup of tea along in a minute," she leaves to take the temperature of the sullen Asian.
The walking patients are now emerging freshly shaven from the bathroom. One has white soap bubbles in his fluffy ears. Some have wet hair. On reaching their beds they either loop their towels through the rails on their bedside lockers, or they drape them over the bottom of their beds. Rearranging their few possessions some take up books, some sit on or beside their beds, some walk over to talk with other patients; and two take packets of cigarettes into the telly room.
A new nurse brings round the tea. The man is pleased to be able to tell her that he takes no sugar. His fear is not so great this day; he has a yesterday to build upon. The ritual of the tea gives him satisfaction and he dislikes the Asian for again grumbling about the quality of the tea.
A small bent man comes pushing a tent-sided trolley into the ward. The tent's sides are wooden racks into which are slotted newspapers and magazines. Newspapers are also stacked on the low flat base. Patients ask for certain of the papers: money rapidly changes hands. The man has no memory of this civilian transaction. The grubby newspaperman stops his squeaking trolley at the end of the bed, sees to the vacant old man opposite. Nervousness at this novelty rises within the man.
"Paper?" the newspaperman addresses him. He has a quick and furtive manner.
"I haven't any money," the man says, relieved to have so easily warded off this complication.
"That’s alright," Mr MacMaster says: he has just returned from the bathroom, "I’ll get it. What d'you want?"
The man looks fearfully at him,
"I don't know."
"Tell you what," Mr MacMaster takes a brown wallet from his locker, "I'll lend you a quid, you get a couple of papers, see which you like. How about the Mirror and the Guardian? Or d’you reckon..." But the impatient newspaperman has already taken the two papers off his trolley.
"Yea, that'll do," Mr MacMaster hands the coin to the newspaperman, who from a heavy pocket counts the change onto the newspapers on the bed. Mr MacMaster buys a Mirror for himself.
"Friend of mine," Mr MacMaster says, puffing around his words and getting into bed, "lost his memory once. Car crash. Didn't know his own wife when he came round. Been married twenty years. Had three teenage kids. But it all came back. Yours will too. Wait and see. When you get some money, pay that quid to the nurses. They got a fund here. You give it them."
"Thank you."
Mr MacMaster brusquely waves away the thanks, opens his paper.
The man pulls the smooth newspapers up the bed. Scooping up the change he examines the size, shape and colour of the coins. None are familiar. He unfolds the smaller of the two newspapers, reads its front page, studies the large photograph of a man said to be arriving at Heathrow yesterday.
"Ring any bells?" Mr MacMaster has been watching him.
"Vaguely," the man opens the paper, glances over the heavy print within, more big headlines, more photographs, "Nothing specific though."
"If you use words like specific," Mr MacMaster laughs," better try the Guardian. If that's no use, get the Sun and Telegraph tomorrow."
"Sun and Telegraph," the man soberly nods, returns to his reading. He reads every item, even the advertisements and the cartoon strips. All in the newspapers is new, and yet it is also familiar in that not one item surprises him. The hysterical headlines, the stories of hostages, of bombs, murders, crashes, famines... All is as before. Before? He becomes aware that the day nurses have arrived, lays aside the newspaper when his breakfast is placed in front of him. And that too is familiarly new. He samples and enjoys the cereal and the yellow fruit juice, but a wet yellow-grey lump called scrambled egg he discovers to be, in texture and taste, both unpalatable and indigestible.
Voice Off. The greater the unlikelihood of something happening the more significant will be its effect.
Wednesday, 31 October 2007
Five
Voice Off. The more complex a human society, the more an individual wants to do right, the more divided will that individual's loyalties be.
DC Derek Hawkins sits before the terminal. He has faxed the prints, is awaiting a response from Central Records. It comes — Unknown.’
Records wants a name to attach to these new prints. ‘Unknown’, DC Hawkins tells them; and under 'Description' he types ‘Amnesiac, Ward 11, Bed 2, Northampton General. Giving his own rank and number as the reporting officer, he closes the enquiry.
Before calling up Missing Persons he glances back through his notes. Why didn't the uniforms interview the man? Hs calls up the day's log. 14:15 a call reporting a collapsed man in Harborough Road. Two mobile officers directed with ambulance to scene. 14:17 those two officers redirected to a crash and fire in Sheep Street. No further entries then until 15:48, when a call from Emergency said the man was being transferred to Ward 11, General. No action taken. The uniforms were busy. Two more pileups, a street fight, three burglaries, a shoplifter. 17:03 a call from Ward 11 telling of their amnesiac, referred to plainclothes. Had it not been for that one call, the uniforms would have picked up the case in the morning. Now it is his.
Faxing the polaroid he calls up Missing Persons, types in the man's statistics, including the man's blood group — 0 positive -which the ward sister gave him. He waits. Missing Persons tell him that they have nine possibles. He asks for printouts, crosses to the printer, scans each as it is printed, tears off the nine sheets.
Separating the sheets he studies each one, places it in the man's file. None are from Northampton. Two have records. He discards those. Of the remaining seven, two come from London, one from Birmingham, one from Swansea, one from a Yorkshire village, one from Bolton and one from Liverpool. Sighing he flips the file closed, reaches for another. He has work to do.
Voice Off. All life, all reproduction on the planet, from the simplest to the most complex of organisms, depends to a major extent upon chance. Yet, save where it applies to statistical probability, human intelligence has made no concerted attempt to understand the mechanics and consequences of chance.
This program is new. No-one else has reported a fault in it. That, though, does not mean that the program is faultless. Barry decides to employ its tried and trusted predecessor.
By the time he has found the old program two more printouts have shown the line to be deepening. He loses three printouts setting up the old program. At 00:24 the first printout from the old programme shows the line to be even deeper, obscuring Sheliak altogether. At which point Barry flings himself out of his chair and marches furiously back and forth across the cluttered room.
At 00:32 he leans on the printer staring at the darkening line. Hardware failure. Has to be. That's what comes from working in a near museum. And the on-call Engineer lives in Tunbridge Wells. He will shut down the computer when he arrives. By the time the computer is up again it will be daylight. Tomorrow night the scope is not his.
The line is also on the VDU. Possibly, hope reasons, the fault lies somewhere in the region of the program just prior to its being displayed on the VDU and printout. Possibly the images being stored on disc will be satisfactory and when the fault has been cured he can retrieve them from there.
He rubs his fingers nervously over his lips. The line has now deepened over both Sheliak and Vega. The multiple E, the binary and the Ring Nebula are also obscured, with the line now encroaching on Y Lyre.. What if, the thought further dismays him, the line isn't a computer fault but an optics failure? In that case he should call the scope engineers immediately, so that the failure can be quickly rectified and tomorrow night's viewing rescued.
If it is an optics failure, though, a hairline crack in a mirror or a lens, then the line would have remained central to the image and not be shifting from right to left in this manner.
Flicking over the printout he tears it off, lays it on the floor and crawls its length. The line has definitely widened out from Vega. On the last printout Vega's luminosity was just visible on the line's edge.
At the clatter of the printer Barry rushes over, tears off the new image. Vega is wholly visible again.
Taking up his calculator Berry estimates the drift of the line. At the line's present rate of drift, Sheliak will he fully visible again in 46 minutes. The night’s work is not wholly lost.
The following two printouts confirm his estimate. What then, he squats by the long ribbon of paper, is causing the fault? On the scope's present co-ordinates the line will be off his printout altogether by dawn. In which case he will have nothing to show the engineers but the printout; and to be able to cure a fault one has to be able to recreate that fault.
What, the thought takes shape as he examines the next few printouts, if the line is external? Is atmospheric? A freakish vapour trail maybe? A vapour trail would drift in the westerly air flow. It would also widen. But would a vapour trail cause that much refraction? Picking up a pair of binoculars from the console he trudges up to the scope.
Through the partly open roof the milky way spangles the night sky from East to West. He seeks out Lyrae. No line is visible to the naked eye. He looks at Lyrae through the binoculars. The line is visible.
As far as he can see through the binoculars, from the lilac glow of the Hastings streetlights to the orange haze of the Northern horizon, the line cuts like a cheesewire across the sky, bisecting the Cygnus and Pegasus constellations. And the line is beyond Lyrae now; and far far too high to be a vapour trail. Not of the atmosphere, nor of the solar system. To register on the reflector, at its focus, it has to be in the order of parsecs distant.
As he traces and retraces the line with the binoculars his anxiety and uncertainty, piece by piece, give way to the excitement and elation of discovery. Never before has he seen or heard of anything resembling this line.
Slamming back into the tower he scrambles down the steps, tears off the last three printouts. The line is now far to the left of Lyrae. He draws his lips back in indecision, drumrolls his fists gently on the printer's perspex cover. This is too good to miss. Sod the night's schedule: he'll record the line from horizon to horizon.
The time is now 02:27. Two hours viewing left. Ripping off the last sheet of printout he hurries over to the console. Cancelling the Sheliak program he feeds in the present co-ordinates of the line, calculates how many frames he'll need to record the whole of it, and he types in the declinations to give him an horizon to horizon scan.
He sets the program running, hears the scope grinding on its mountings above him as it takes up the new sighting. His whole being is atremble, yet calm, like the first confident look over an exam paper. The scope pauses, photographs. He listens to it move, pause, photograph. The printer rattles. The line is centre of the page.
Imagining the scope up there beginning its slow tilt out of the vertical, he thinks there’ll be hell to pay if this turns out to be a common phenomena. The thought makes him chuckle: he has acted, too late now for second thoughts.
The scope moves, pauses. He hears the roof opening wider. A whole good night wasted if it is a common phenomena. He squeezes up his face in concentration: he cannot recall mention of any such phenomena elsewhere.
If you’re going to make a fool of yourself, Barry tells himself, go the whole hog and log it. Sitting at the console he takes up his biro, opens the ledger. Flicking the biro between thumb and forefinger he composes his opening sentence. '11:05', he writes, 'a line discovered...' Discovered! The word dances like a luminous ping pong around inside of him. Quieting his agitation he gives the line’s co-ordinates, describes its Easterly drift up to its present position.
The scope, following its new instructions, is way out of the vertical. He checks the printout. The line is still there, obliterating Sadr in Cygnus. And the line is still maintaining its Easterly drift. When he moves the scope to the Northern sky he will have to allow for that drift. In the meantime some independent corroboration wouldn't go amiss. He might also gain some idea of its distance. But who? Las Palmas? Not much point if they're out of action. And better to go outside: he can make a fool of himself within the zoo later.
He smiles and picks up the phone, from memory taps out a Teignmouth number. Like electronic footsteps the connection bleeps into place.
On an old school desk, in the corner of a creosoted shed with a hinged roof in a Teignmouth garden, he hears the black phone give two double rings.
"Duncan? Barry here. Didn't think you'd miss a night like this."
Duncan Blythe is now 72, has been an amateur astronomer man and boy. He it was who passed his astral enthusiasms onto Barry. Many nights they spent together in that unhinged shed, long winter nights in mittens with thermos and sandwiches, to the detriment of his appetite and schoolwork the following day.
Barry outgrew that shed when he was fourteen. At nearly six foot then, six three now, he decided against amateurism and an interesting hobby in favour of a profession and hard work. Foregoing his universal nights he had bowed over earthly revision.
"Barry?" Duncan says without recognition. Barry realises that he hasn't see Duncan now for over ten years. Duncan doesn’t know about Barry's breakdown.
"Barry Tappell. I'm at Herstmonceux."
"Lucky you."
"I'm calling for corroboration. Didn't know who else to ring."
"Herstmonceux calling me for corroboration. I'm flattered."
"Can you have a look at Cygnus? Tell me what you see?"
Barry listens to the old man carefully laying down the phone and turning to his skeletal six inch reflector. All movements in that small shed have to be slow and deliberate. Barry hears a boy's voice. Laughter as Duncan laconically replies. Another young acolyte whose mother is also probably worried by his spending nights in a roofless shed with a peculiar old man.
The printer rattles. Barry listens to Duncan conferring with the acolyte.
"The Filamentary Nebula's gone," Duncan says into the phone, "Like the universe's been zipped up."
"That's it!" Barry laughs, "Exactly like a zip. Thanks Duncan. It was Lyrae when I spotted it. Any ideas?'
"Not a one."
Returning the phone, with a grateful and affectionate pat, to its cradle, Barry crosses to the printer. The frame has moved off Cygnus. A thought has Barry grabbing up the binoculars and charging up to the scope. The Filamentary Nebula is obscured.
The line is some distance then, is certainly no vapour trail if it is visible from both Hastings and Teignmouth. What, though, can it be?
Descending slowly back into the tower Barry loses himself in speculation. ‘Insufficient data’, he cautions himself, records the observations, and takes pleasure in entering Duncan Blythe’s name, and the precise details of his Teignmouth reflector, in the Herstmonceux log. As he is writing he hears the scope grinding back up to the perpendicular. Before it can start plotting the other half of the sky Barry checks the line on the last frame, moves the co-ordinates further East.
The scope begins its whirr, pause, photograph. Barry takes up his biro. Mid-sentence, he stops. If it is so high as to appear stationery from observation points 200 miles apart, and yet its rate of movement is such that, in five hours, it has moved from Lyrae to the other side of Cygnus, what then is its speed..?
He looks up at the star charts. Saturn is in Aquarius. He studies his printout, rips more off the printer, lays it on the floor. And there is Saturn, between Pegasus and Cygnus, and not obscured by the line. The line then is definitely outside the solar system. Grinning he returns to the console to record that observation in the official log.
DC Derek Hawkins sits before the terminal. He has faxed the prints, is awaiting a response from Central Records. It comes — Unknown.’
Records wants a name to attach to these new prints. ‘Unknown’, DC Hawkins tells them; and under 'Description' he types ‘Amnesiac, Ward 11, Bed 2, Northampton General. Giving his own rank and number as the reporting officer, he closes the enquiry.
Before calling up Missing Persons he glances back through his notes. Why didn't the uniforms interview the man? Hs calls up the day's log. 14:15 a call reporting a collapsed man in Harborough Road. Two mobile officers directed with ambulance to scene. 14:17 those two officers redirected to a crash and fire in Sheep Street. No further entries then until 15:48, when a call from Emergency said the man was being transferred to Ward 11, General. No action taken. The uniforms were busy. Two more pileups, a street fight, three burglaries, a shoplifter. 17:03 a call from Ward 11 telling of their amnesiac, referred to plainclothes. Had it not been for that one call, the uniforms would have picked up the case in the morning. Now it is his.
Faxing the polaroid he calls up Missing Persons, types in the man's statistics, including the man's blood group — 0 positive -which the ward sister gave him. He waits. Missing Persons tell him that they have nine possibles. He asks for printouts, crosses to the printer, scans each as it is printed, tears off the nine sheets.
Separating the sheets he studies each one, places it in the man's file. None are from Northampton. Two have records. He discards those. Of the remaining seven, two come from London, one from Birmingham, one from Swansea, one from a Yorkshire village, one from Bolton and one from Liverpool. Sighing he flips the file closed, reaches for another. He has work to do.
Voice Off. All life, all reproduction on the planet, from the simplest to the most complex of organisms, depends to a major extent upon chance. Yet, save where it applies to statistical probability, human intelligence has made no concerted attempt to understand the mechanics and consequences of chance.
This program is new. No-one else has reported a fault in it. That, though, does not mean that the program is faultless. Barry decides to employ its tried and trusted predecessor.
By the time he has found the old program two more printouts have shown the line to be deepening. He loses three printouts setting up the old program. At 00:24 the first printout from the old programme shows the line to be even deeper, obscuring Sheliak altogether. At which point Barry flings himself out of his chair and marches furiously back and forth across the cluttered room.
At 00:32 he leans on the printer staring at the darkening line. Hardware failure. Has to be. That's what comes from working in a near museum. And the on-call Engineer lives in Tunbridge Wells. He will shut down the computer when he arrives. By the time the computer is up again it will be daylight. Tomorrow night the scope is not his.
The line is also on the VDU. Possibly, hope reasons, the fault lies somewhere in the region of the program just prior to its being displayed on the VDU and printout. Possibly the images being stored on disc will be satisfactory and when the fault has been cured he can retrieve them from there.
He rubs his fingers nervously over his lips. The line has now deepened over both Sheliak and Vega. The multiple E, the binary and the Ring Nebula are also obscured, with the line now encroaching on Y Lyre.. What if, the thought further dismays him, the line isn't a computer fault but an optics failure? In that case he should call the scope engineers immediately, so that the failure can be quickly rectified and tomorrow night's viewing rescued.
If it is an optics failure, though, a hairline crack in a mirror or a lens, then the line would have remained central to the image and not be shifting from right to left in this manner.
Flicking over the printout he tears it off, lays it on the floor and crawls its length. The line has definitely widened out from Vega. On the last printout Vega's luminosity was just visible on the line's edge.
At the clatter of the printer Barry rushes over, tears off the new image. Vega is wholly visible again.
Taking up his calculator Berry estimates the drift of the line. At the line's present rate of drift, Sheliak will he fully visible again in 46 minutes. The night’s work is not wholly lost.
The following two printouts confirm his estimate. What then, he squats by the long ribbon of paper, is causing the fault? On the scope's present co-ordinates the line will be off his printout altogether by dawn. In which case he will have nothing to show the engineers but the printout; and to be able to cure a fault one has to be able to recreate that fault.
What, the thought takes shape as he examines the next few printouts, if the line is external? Is atmospheric? A freakish vapour trail maybe? A vapour trail would drift in the westerly air flow. It would also widen. But would a vapour trail cause that much refraction? Picking up a pair of binoculars from the console he trudges up to the scope.
Through the partly open roof the milky way spangles the night sky from East to West. He seeks out Lyrae. No line is visible to the naked eye. He looks at Lyrae through the binoculars. The line is visible.
As far as he can see through the binoculars, from the lilac glow of the Hastings streetlights to the orange haze of the Northern horizon, the line cuts like a cheesewire across the sky, bisecting the Cygnus and Pegasus constellations. And the line is beyond Lyrae now; and far far too high to be a vapour trail. Not of the atmosphere, nor of the solar system. To register on the reflector, at its focus, it has to be in the order of parsecs distant.
As he traces and retraces the line with the binoculars his anxiety and uncertainty, piece by piece, give way to the excitement and elation of discovery. Never before has he seen or heard of anything resembling this line.
Slamming back into the tower he scrambles down the steps, tears off the last three printouts. The line is now far to the left of Lyrae. He draws his lips back in indecision, drumrolls his fists gently on the printer's perspex cover. This is too good to miss. Sod the night's schedule: he'll record the line from horizon to horizon.
The time is now 02:27. Two hours viewing left. Ripping off the last sheet of printout he hurries over to the console. Cancelling the Sheliak program he feeds in the present co-ordinates of the line, calculates how many frames he'll need to record the whole of it, and he types in the declinations to give him an horizon to horizon scan.
He sets the program running, hears the scope grinding on its mountings above him as it takes up the new sighting. His whole being is atremble, yet calm, like the first confident look over an exam paper. The scope pauses, photographs. He listens to it move, pause, photograph. The printer rattles. The line is centre of the page.
Imagining the scope up there beginning its slow tilt out of the vertical, he thinks there’ll be hell to pay if this turns out to be a common phenomena. The thought makes him chuckle: he has acted, too late now for second thoughts.
The scope moves, pauses. He hears the roof opening wider. A whole good night wasted if it is a common phenomena. He squeezes up his face in concentration: he cannot recall mention of any such phenomena elsewhere.
If you’re going to make a fool of yourself, Barry tells himself, go the whole hog and log it. Sitting at the console he takes up his biro, opens the ledger. Flicking the biro between thumb and forefinger he composes his opening sentence. '11:05', he writes, 'a line discovered...' Discovered! The word dances like a luminous ping pong around inside of him. Quieting his agitation he gives the line’s co-ordinates, describes its Easterly drift up to its present position.
The scope, following its new instructions, is way out of the vertical. He checks the printout. The line is still there, obliterating Sadr in Cygnus. And the line is still maintaining its Easterly drift. When he moves the scope to the Northern sky he will have to allow for that drift. In the meantime some independent corroboration wouldn't go amiss. He might also gain some idea of its distance. But who? Las Palmas? Not much point if they're out of action. And better to go outside: he can make a fool of himself within the zoo later.
He smiles and picks up the phone, from memory taps out a Teignmouth number. Like electronic footsteps the connection bleeps into place.
On an old school desk, in the corner of a creosoted shed with a hinged roof in a Teignmouth garden, he hears the black phone give two double rings.
"Duncan? Barry here. Didn't think you'd miss a night like this."
Duncan Blythe is now 72, has been an amateur astronomer man and boy. He it was who passed his astral enthusiasms onto Barry. Many nights they spent together in that unhinged shed, long winter nights in mittens with thermos and sandwiches, to the detriment of his appetite and schoolwork the following day.
Barry outgrew that shed when he was fourteen. At nearly six foot then, six three now, he decided against amateurism and an interesting hobby in favour of a profession and hard work. Foregoing his universal nights he had bowed over earthly revision.
"Barry?" Duncan says without recognition. Barry realises that he hasn't see Duncan now for over ten years. Duncan doesn’t know about Barry's breakdown.
"Barry Tappell. I'm at Herstmonceux."
"Lucky you."
"I'm calling for corroboration. Didn't know who else to ring."
"Herstmonceux calling me for corroboration. I'm flattered."
"Can you have a look at Cygnus? Tell me what you see?"
Barry listens to the old man carefully laying down the phone and turning to his skeletal six inch reflector. All movements in that small shed have to be slow and deliberate. Barry hears a boy's voice. Laughter as Duncan laconically replies. Another young acolyte whose mother is also probably worried by his spending nights in a roofless shed with a peculiar old man.
The printer rattles. Barry listens to Duncan conferring with the acolyte.
"The Filamentary Nebula's gone," Duncan says into the phone, "Like the universe's been zipped up."
"That's it!" Barry laughs, "Exactly like a zip. Thanks Duncan. It was Lyrae when I spotted it. Any ideas?'
"Not a one."
Returning the phone, with a grateful and affectionate pat, to its cradle, Barry crosses to the printer. The frame has moved off Cygnus. A thought has Barry grabbing up the binoculars and charging up to the scope. The Filamentary Nebula is obscured.
The line is some distance then, is certainly no vapour trail if it is visible from both Hastings and Teignmouth. What, though, can it be?
Descending slowly back into the tower Barry loses himself in speculation. ‘Insufficient data’, he cautions himself, records the observations, and takes pleasure in entering Duncan Blythe’s name, and the precise details of his Teignmouth reflector, in the Herstmonceux log. As he is writing he hears the scope grinding back up to the perpendicular. Before it can start plotting the other half of the sky Barry checks the line on the last frame, moves the co-ordinates further East.
The scope begins its whirr, pause, photograph. Barry takes up his biro. Mid-sentence, he stops. If it is so high as to appear stationery from observation points 200 miles apart, and yet its rate of movement is such that, in five hours, it has moved from Lyrae to the other side of Cygnus, what then is its speed..?
He looks up at the star charts. Saturn is in Aquarius. He studies his printout, rips more off the printer, lays it on the floor. And there is Saturn, between Pegasus and Cygnus, and not obscured by the line. The line then is definitely outside the solar system. Grinning he returns to the console to record that observation in the official log.
Wednesday, 24 October 2007
Four
Voice Off. Certain human societies inculcate in their young a belief in innate human goodness. To police those same societies a belief in universal human culpability has also to be impressed upon their police officers. Such counter expectations create a fluctuating imbalance in both those individuals and those societies.
When the last of the visitors leave, with nothing else to attract his attention, the man once more looks inside himself, mulls over — in light of what he has learnt from the detective — his ignorance of himself. Northampton? Mid-thirties? Criminal?
The other patients exchange the news their visitors brought them, drink their coffee, or watch their small televisions. He listens to the television nearest him, remarks on its familiarity, its filling the airwaves with chatter and jingles. Will the radio be new?
Following the example of another patient he unhooks the headphones from the wall behind the bed. The moment he hears it — a DJ cheerily warbling — he knows that it is what he expected.
Two of the nurses push a wooden-sided drugs trolley around the ward. His buttocks have gone numb from sitting up in bed. He shifts onto his side. The blonde nurse tells him that no medication has been prescribed, but if he can't sleep to let her know and she will ask the duty doctor for something.
The drugs trolley completes its rounds. He pees in his flask. Some of the patients switch on their angled bedlamps to read, some settle to sleep. The nurses switch off the ward televisions, then the ward's ceiling lights. One low bulb remains on in the centre or the ward, above a table. Two patients are still in the television room. The blonde nurse sees him still sitting awkwardly up in bed, rearranges his pillows for him, helps him down the bed. She tells him that he'll probably awake in the morning remembering everything.
Looking up at the dim squared ceiling, the idea of becoming unconscious again frightens him. He listens to the single separate sounds of the ward, a bed creaking, a man's choked cough. Northampton? Every answer begs more questions, his ignorance of himself seeming to endlessly increase. Does he have a family? Disconcerting to think of a group of people he doesn't know intimately concerned for him. He tries to imagine, from what he has seen of the other patients' visitors, what his own family of different-sized strangers will look like. That they should know more about him than he does makes their situation unfair, unnatural, makes him afraid of meeting them.
A nurse's shoes stick and unstick from the polished floor as she passes the end of his bed. A whispered conversation: nurse soothing an anxious patient. He hears a bedside light click off further down the ward. He listens. He sleeps.
Voice Off. Identity depends on the type of human society to which one belongs. In a small structured tribal society identity depends only on whose son or daughter one happens to be, and to which sub-grouping of the tribe one's family belongs. In a loose largely unstructured society identity depends on other peculiarities such as one's given name, one’s income, one's possessions, one’s education, one's accent and one's aspirations within that society. In such a society one's status is mostly self-imagined, is influenced by the other people one has chosen to know and one’s remembered experience of that society. With so much more to remember, amnesia in such a society is far more traumatic.
The observatory is a brick tower. Surrounding the tower, beyond oblong lawns, are squat blocks of brick and glass offices. On the flat top of the tower is the telescope. The scope's protective coverings are hinged open making the tower look like a nestling stretching its stringy neck up out of a cubist nest, gaping beak open to the stars.
Within that tower, below the scope, are rooms full of arcane equipment. Barry Tappell curses that equipment.
Las Palmas being down — a recurrent fault there resulting in a 24 hour shutdown for a complete overhaul — he had a whole free night on the scope here to catch up on and fill in the gaps in his research. A perfect night for dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Even if a short summer's night. An anticyclone stationary over Northern France, no moon, the evening mist blown offshore by a light breeze... and technology has failed him.
And what primitive technology. Computer enhanced images from a 98 inch reflector. Prehistoric! Like mounting a radar on a horse and cart. So dependent on the day/night rotation of the planet Earth; and, of course, the English weather. He can't, though, blame the weather tonight.
His object of study is Sheliak, an eclipsing variable in the Lyre constellation. A constant does not excite the human curiosity. Variables are also more scientifically attractive in that they are amenable to qualification and quantification.
The eclipse is now in the sixth day of its 13 day cycle, its magnitude 5.71. All is an earthbound astronomer's dream. And technology has failed him.
Had Barry Tappell been unquestionably ordinary then Barry Tappell is convinced that he'd now be using satellite reflectors, be a 24 hour a day astronomer, be in the van of apace exploration. But oh no, mediocrity rules the day, no-one is allowed to act that differently. And all he did was to fall worshipfully in love. She fell worriedly pregnant. She didn't want the baby, nor him. He fell into despair.
He had believed in singleminded women like his mother, women prepared to subjugate themselves for another life, for the new life. He had believed in women who fiercely made their children their cause, who believed in themselves. The woman he loved negated her sex and aborted his seed.
Wanting to understand, and be loved again; wanting to do the right thing, and unable to find out what it was, he first questioned the worth of his own existence, then of all existence.
"What worth a human life?" he asked of shoppers passing by. Then he withdrew into a depression so deep that he lost two years of study. Such human fallibility consigned him to this second-rate zoo.
Were Barry to go to even a second-rate American zoo he'd more than treble his wages. But, because he has had to do battle with establishments to prove his suitability to continue with his education, he is effectively barred from any brain drain.
What true scientist, though, has ever placed pecuniary reward high on their list of requirements; the facilities are ultimately what matter. And the Americans, just to rub salt in the career wound, have the facilities as well as the wages.
At times of frustration like these Barry feels as tainted by his youthful idealism as a failed revolutionary; and he is as angered that the establishment won't forgive or forget. The injustice irks him. One youthful aberration and he is marked as unstable for the rest of his tedious life...
For all his reflection and self-justification, the inescapable present is that he is stuck here in a castle in a steaming marsh, like a mad scientist in a gothic nightmare. Except that those marsh-bound and sinister scientists usually had machines that worked.
Barry's doesn't. This zoo's egotistical benefactor's pursuit of posterity is a penny-pinching affair.
The prestige projects which attract the bigger egos and the bigger money now all belong to the Mullard zoo and the Royal Observatory on Mount Ichea, Hawaii. As if Hawaii didn't already have the weather. Here in this Sussex bog Barry has to make do with obsolete leftovers, hand-me-downs, technological crumbs.
Every five minutes this night this particular technological crumb gives a facsimile printout. The first printout came at 10:30, clarified as the night deepened. At 11:25 he noticed a faint line to the right of Sheliak, down through Vega. The line went from top to bottom of the page, almost like an overlap, bringing Vega too close to Sheliak. Neither the printer's ribbon nor the paper feed was at fault.
Checking back he found that the line first appeared at 11:05, its distorting effect increasing with every five minute printout. He enters the fault in the log, loses two printouts clearing the computer, reloading the program and giving it his co-ordinates. At 11:36 the line is darker still. At 11:41 it has centred on Sheliak If it stays there the night's work is ruined.
When the last of the visitors leave, with nothing else to attract his attention, the man once more looks inside himself, mulls over — in light of what he has learnt from the detective — his ignorance of himself. Northampton? Mid-thirties? Criminal?
The other patients exchange the news their visitors brought them, drink their coffee, or watch their small televisions. He listens to the television nearest him, remarks on its familiarity, its filling the airwaves with chatter and jingles. Will the radio be new?
Following the example of another patient he unhooks the headphones from the wall behind the bed. The moment he hears it — a DJ cheerily warbling — he knows that it is what he expected.
Two of the nurses push a wooden-sided drugs trolley around the ward. His buttocks have gone numb from sitting up in bed. He shifts onto his side. The blonde nurse tells him that no medication has been prescribed, but if he can't sleep to let her know and she will ask the duty doctor for something.
The drugs trolley completes its rounds. He pees in his flask. Some of the patients switch on their angled bedlamps to read, some settle to sleep. The nurses switch off the ward televisions, then the ward's ceiling lights. One low bulb remains on in the centre or the ward, above a table. Two patients are still in the television room. The blonde nurse sees him still sitting awkwardly up in bed, rearranges his pillows for him, helps him down the bed. She tells him that he'll probably awake in the morning remembering everything.
Looking up at the dim squared ceiling, the idea of becoming unconscious again frightens him. He listens to the single separate sounds of the ward, a bed creaking, a man's choked cough. Northampton? Every answer begs more questions, his ignorance of himself seeming to endlessly increase. Does he have a family? Disconcerting to think of a group of people he doesn't know intimately concerned for him. He tries to imagine, from what he has seen of the other patients' visitors, what his own family of different-sized strangers will look like. That they should know more about him than he does makes their situation unfair, unnatural, makes him afraid of meeting them.
A nurse's shoes stick and unstick from the polished floor as she passes the end of his bed. A whispered conversation: nurse soothing an anxious patient. He hears a bedside light click off further down the ward. He listens. He sleeps.
Voice Off. Identity depends on the type of human society to which one belongs. In a small structured tribal society identity depends only on whose son or daughter one happens to be, and to which sub-grouping of the tribe one's family belongs. In a loose largely unstructured society identity depends on other peculiarities such as one's given name, one’s income, one's possessions, one’s education, one's accent and one's aspirations within that society. In such a society one's status is mostly self-imagined, is influenced by the other people one has chosen to know and one’s remembered experience of that society. With so much more to remember, amnesia in such a society is far more traumatic.
The observatory is a brick tower. Surrounding the tower, beyond oblong lawns, are squat blocks of brick and glass offices. On the flat top of the tower is the telescope. The scope's protective coverings are hinged open making the tower look like a nestling stretching its stringy neck up out of a cubist nest, gaping beak open to the stars.
Within that tower, below the scope, are rooms full of arcane equipment. Barry Tappell curses that equipment.
Las Palmas being down — a recurrent fault there resulting in a 24 hour shutdown for a complete overhaul — he had a whole free night on the scope here to catch up on and fill in the gaps in his research. A perfect night for dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Even if a short summer's night. An anticyclone stationary over Northern France, no moon, the evening mist blown offshore by a light breeze... and technology has failed him.
And what primitive technology. Computer enhanced images from a 98 inch reflector. Prehistoric! Like mounting a radar on a horse and cart. So dependent on the day/night rotation of the planet Earth; and, of course, the English weather. He can't, though, blame the weather tonight.
His object of study is Sheliak, an eclipsing variable in the Lyre constellation. A constant does not excite the human curiosity. Variables are also more scientifically attractive in that they are amenable to qualification and quantification.
The eclipse is now in the sixth day of its 13 day cycle, its magnitude 5.71. All is an earthbound astronomer's dream. And technology has failed him.
Had Barry Tappell been unquestionably ordinary then Barry Tappell is convinced that he'd now be using satellite reflectors, be a 24 hour a day astronomer, be in the van of apace exploration. But oh no, mediocrity rules the day, no-one is allowed to act that differently. And all he did was to fall worshipfully in love. She fell worriedly pregnant. She didn't want the baby, nor him. He fell into despair.
He had believed in singleminded women like his mother, women prepared to subjugate themselves for another life, for the new life. He had believed in women who fiercely made their children their cause, who believed in themselves. The woman he loved negated her sex and aborted his seed.
Wanting to understand, and be loved again; wanting to do the right thing, and unable to find out what it was, he first questioned the worth of his own existence, then of all existence.
"What worth a human life?" he asked of shoppers passing by. Then he withdrew into a depression so deep that he lost two years of study. Such human fallibility consigned him to this second-rate zoo.
Were Barry to go to even a second-rate American zoo he'd more than treble his wages. But, because he has had to do battle with establishments to prove his suitability to continue with his education, he is effectively barred from any brain drain.
What true scientist, though, has ever placed pecuniary reward high on their list of requirements; the facilities are ultimately what matter. And the Americans, just to rub salt in the career wound, have the facilities as well as the wages.
At times of frustration like these Barry feels as tainted by his youthful idealism as a failed revolutionary; and he is as angered that the establishment won't forgive or forget. The injustice irks him. One youthful aberration and he is marked as unstable for the rest of his tedious life...
For all his reflection and self-justification, the inescapable present is that he is stuck here in a castle in a steaming marsh, like a mad scientist in a gothic nightmare. Except that those marsh-bound and sinister scientists usually had machines that worked.
Barry's doesn't. This zoo's egotistical benefactor's pursuit of posterity is a penny-pinching affair.
The prestige projects which attract the bigger egos and the bigger money now all belong to the Mullard zoo and the Royal Observatory on Mount Ichea, Hawaii. As if Hawaii didn't already have the weather. Here in this Sussex bog Barry has to make do with obsolete leftovers, hand-me-downs, technological crumbs.
Every five minutes this night this particular technological crumb gives a facsimile printout. The first printout came at 10:30, clarified as the night deepened. At 11:25 he noticed a faint line to the right of Sheliak, down through Vega. The line went from top to bottom of the page, almost like an overlap, bringing Vega too close to Sheliak. Neither the printer's ribbon nor the paper feed was at fault.
Checking back he found that the line first appeared at 11:05, its distorting effect increasing with every five minute printout. He enters the fault in the log, loses two printouts clearing the computer, reloading the program and giving it his co-ordinates. At 11:36 the line is darker still. At 11:41 it has centred on Sheliak If it stays there the night's work is ruined.
Tuesday, 16 October 2007
Three
Voice Off. It hurts a human being to be born. It recovers. As toddlers human beings suffer bumps and illnesses. Most recover. So do most human beings, in their brief and painfilled lives, soon come to expect to be hurt and to expect to recover. They also, early in their lives, accept death's inevitability. Thus do most unwell human beings await cure or death with equal passivity.
Detective Constable Derek Hawkins has an aptitude for paperwork and court appearances. Nursing a swollen bladder in a cold parked car has never struck him as glamorous: he is happier by far sitting in the office or waiting on a court bench. Fortunately his superiors appreciate his inclinations and talents, and they like to have him in court — he has a stolid unflappable court persona. And, with him in court, his superiors can concentrate their other officers on what they regard as ‘real’ police work — the garnering of evidence Albeit that the presentation or that evidence in the courtroom is what leads to convictions.
For all of next week DC Hawkins has at least two court appearances per day. This week, the week of his obligatory nightshift, he has been looking forward to catching up on his outstanding paperwork. 'The suspect was seen to...' 'The suspect, when approached, admitted to...’
His superiors’ derisory attitude to the courtroom often amuses DC Hawkins, occasionally it dismays him. He was not unduly surprised, therefore, when, on coming on shift, his paperwork was dismissed as secondary; and dogsbody DC Hawkins was sent to investigate an alleged amnesiac.
Making his disgruntled way to the hospital DC Hawkins considers amnesia, loses himself in a daydream wherein he realises how pleasant it would be to escape his own past, to throw off his imprisoning identity and to start afresh. At twenty three he believes that already he's done everything, seen everything. Never again in his life will he know such intensity of experience: his lot now is dulling repetition, is paler variations of the same. Life for him, he believes, is effectively finished; mistakes been made, opportunities missed, his future decreed, nothing more for this identity to do in the next sixty years but to act out his self-formed fate.
His past, he knows, indelibly shapes his future. At school his friends used his solemn round face as a front for them, to persuade parents and teachers how safe and sensible was their every madcap escapade. Authority seemed reassured by his guileless features, always found, despite his protestations of culpability, extenuating circumstances for his part in any prank. And so it was that authority, in the embodiment of the police, chose him rather than he the police as a career.
How tempting, he thinks, to slip now out of this constraining identity, to greet life with debonair laughter. And, even before meeting him, he resents this man who claims to have done so, and in so doing has interrupted his paperwork.
He has trouble parking, is misdirected to the wrong wing, and when, finally, he introduces himself to a blonde ward sister, she is at her paperwork.
"Somebody here says they've lost their memory." Hers is a small afterthought of an office.
"Yes," she bridles at his overt scepticism.
"Where is he?"
"Go easy on him," she admonishes him as she squeezes around the desk, "He's very unstable at the moment."
"What... mentally?"
"No. Physically worried. As you'd be if you'd lost your memory. This way."
The bed is second along on the right. The man sitting up in that bed is in his mid-thirties.
"A visitor for you," the ward sister tells the man.
The man looks up startled. DC Hawkins watches the man seeking to recognise him, seeking to place him in his own life.
"Detective Constable Hawkins," he introduces himself, letting the man off the hook, says, "Thank you," to the sister who has fetched him a chair.
He pulls the chair closer to the man, putting as much distance as he can between himself and the family of Indians around the next bed. He lays his black briefcase on the bed, flicks the silver catches,
"I'm told you've lost your memory."
"Well..." the man visibly sweats, "Yes and no. I can remember lots of things. But not who I am. He smiles apologetically — ingratiatingly? — at DC Hawkins.
As he extracts a notebook from his briefcase DC Hawkins studies the man. A life's doubts and surprises are registered in the creases of the brow, a lifetime’s wrinkles around the grey eyes. No-one can simply forget what has formed him. His own 23 year old face is smooth, bland; even so he is his past. His mother and father, brothers... there is so much of it, even at twenty three, to forget, to casually mislay.
"Before we go any further," he opens his notebook, "I warn you that should you, for whatever reason, not be telling the truth, and, as a consequence I have to go looking up all sorts of records, you will be charged with wasting police time. And if it turns out that you’ve known all along who you are, then you most certainly will be charged. Is that understood?"
"I'm sorry..." the man has a tremor in his voice, "I honestly don’t know who I am."
The man’s obvious agitation does not persuade DC Hawkins to the truth of what he is saying. The man may be trembling because he is simply frightened, and he may be frightened simply because he is not telling the truth.
"Now," DC Hawkins presses the button on his pen, "I’ve never actually had to deal with a case like this before. So let's begin by seeing what we do know. First a physical description. Starting at the top. Colour of hair," he stretches up to look at the man’s head, "Dark brown going grey. Eyes — grey/green. Face — squarish. Any scars?"
"I haven't seen any."
"Height?" The man shrugs. DC Hawkins runs his eye up the man’s bed length, "Five ten, eleven," he writes. "Weight?" He purses his lips, "Say eleven, eleven and a half stone." The man does not react: has he forgotten vanity too?
"Now your personal statistics. Date of birth?"
The man doesn't know. Nor his place of birth, nor the names of his parents, of his wife, nor of his children. Surely no man can forget his children, DC Hawkins thinks. Or do I think that simply because I don't want my parents to forget me? Maybe children, though, are the easiest of all to forget. He often has to remind himself that he too is now a father. That little pink bundle of smells, however, seems to have little to do with him. He makes fatherly noises; but it is a going through the motions. And easy enough to forget his wife, because he can't now grasp her existence. Why, he often asks himself, did he marry a woman who, as soon as she was married, thought of herself as a wife, whose sole raison d'être became the catering to his creature comforts? And she now thinks of herself as a wife and a mother, and she tries to reconcile the two. Yet, for all her busyness, there is a vacancy behind her self-imposed labels.
Before his marriage DC Hawkins had thought there was something elusive about his wife. He had married her to capture that elusiveness. Only, in domesticity, to realise that there was nothing there, that his imagination had endowed her with a mystery that she did not, does not, possess, nor aspire to. A vacancy is all there has ever been. And, here before him, is a man with a contracting density and no labels.
Who can he be?
You're the detective, he tells himself, detect.
"You carne in here what time today?"
"This afternoon. I don't know what time. The nurses wear their watches upside down. But I was taken to Emergency first." After all his negative answers the man is excessively pleased to be able to give information.
"What happened?"
"I... don't know," the man sinks back against the pillows, "The nurse, she's gone off now, said I collapsed in Harborough Road."
"Why did you collapse?"
"I don't know. I've got a bruise on my head."
"Do they know what's wrong with you?"
"They haven’t said."
DC Hawkins pauses,
"I'll see the doctor later. Now... I take it you weren’t wearing pyjamas when you collapsed?'
"My clothes are in there," the man eagerly points to the bedside locker.
Moving his briefcase to the end of the bed, DC Hawkins spreads the clothes out upon it. His search is more thorough than the nurse's. Not only does he turn out every pocket he also feels along the seams, knocks on the rubber heels of the shoes, examines the insteps for dirt. There is none.
Taking up his notepad, aware that he is being watched by the family of Indians, DC Hawkins lists each item of clothing, make, material and colour. He notes the shoe size.
"All very ordinary this. Nothing to help us here. Except what isn’t here. No money, no wallet, no keys. Not even a bus ticket. Think you could’ve been mugged?"
The man wonderingly touches the bruise on the back of his head.
"The doctor said I probably banged my head on the ground when I collapsed. Do you think I could’ve been mugged?"
"In Harborough Road? Unlikely. And we’ve got another puzzle here," he reaches over and picks up the blue quilted anorak, "Why this? It was a hot day today. What I saw of it. You’d have been boiling in this."
The man frowns. Eventually he limply lifts his hand, lets it fall. DC Hawkins folds and returns the clothes to the bedside locker. Profession? he fingers the shirt and trousers. Semiskilled. The clothes aren’t up to much, could do with a decent clean. Nor are they anywhere near sharp enough for a salesman. Hands aren’t callused.
"Can you drive?" he asks as he rises from the locker.
"I don’t know." Too neat and clean for a derelict. Probably a diffident office-wallah. Or self-effacing long term unemployed.
DC Hawkins sits back on the chair. The man takes sips of water. He’s right-handed. Pity. The water shakes in the scratched beaker. I know who I am, DC Hawkins thinks, I cannot escape who I am. Which must mean, my thinking it, that I must want to. And I envy him because he’s magicked away his past. Watching the water dance in the shivering beaker he thinks — and yes, freedom is frightening.
"You said you can remember some things. What?"
"Well... I can remember how to speak. I know what things are. The names for them. And some things I almost take for granted. Like being able to read... Other things I have to think about. Like using a knife and fork. You see, although I can remember how to use a knife and fork, I don’t remember ever having used them before."
DC Hawkins has been listening to his accent. No habitual affectations. Straightforward Southern Standard English.
"What were you doing in Harborough Road?"
"I don't know," the man shakes his head, "I don’t even know what it looks like. Sometimes I think it has trees in it. Sometimes I just see houses. One of the nurses said it has garages in it. But all I see is a road. It's a name, a word. Like if I think of dog, I just see all different breeds of dog. Not any one dog in particular."
"Why should you think or dog? Did you have a dog?"
"I don't know," he looks directly at DC Hawkins, "Why does no-one believe me?"
Because it's too bloody easy, DC Hawkins thinks, to cancel the past. He should be so lucky. Wipe out all the shames, run away from all the mistakes. His wife had thought his main virtue safety, and he’d been flattered, so he had married her; when the inside him had felt insulted, but being used to it he had bowed his head and donkeylike had done his duty. To negate all the chances missed. The old schoolfriend who had invited him into his electronics firm and he had been truly tempted, but the family voices of common sense had prevailed, a high risk venture, shit or bust; and here he is a detective constable in Northampton and his friend is a dollar billionaire in California. I hate myself. Envy and resent him. No wonder no-one wants to believe you.
"What do the doctors say?"
"I’ve only seen one. He said my memory'll come back of its own accord."
"When?"
"He didn't say. Just told me to relax."
DC Hawkins grimacing sighs,
"I've got to assume it won't. Dc you have any objections to giving me your fingerprints?"
"No," the man frowns, "Why should I?"
"I don't know. Don't know why anyone has come to that. But if you do have a criminal record, then with your prints I’ll be able to find out in a couple of hours who you are."
"That soon?"
The man gratefully accepts the least information. Maybe he is telling the truth.
"What if I haven’t?"
"It'll take longer. We’ll see. If your memory does come back it’ll all be academic anyway. If it doesn’t, and you don’t have a record, we’ve still got a few more strings to our bow. Then there’s your family. Though it will be 24 hours before they can officially register you as missing. If they’ve missed you already, and if you’re from Northampton, then we should know who you are almost straightaway. If you’re from somewhere else it will take longer of course. But all of that depends on your having a family who’ll register you as a missing person. No memories at all of a family?"
He looks a family man, as if he belongs to someone. A taken for granted household fixture. A drab wife buying drab clothes for him. Husband of... Father of... a man who no longer exists in his own right, who probably spends his weekends digging the garden and getting shouted at. He definitely has the anxious look of the family man about him. Or is he simply an anxious man? If his memory has gone he certainly has good cause to be anxious.
"No..." the man is shaking his head, "I see snapshots. Family groups. But none of the same family. Is this Northampton?"
"You didn't know that?"
"No."
"Where would you have expected to be?"
"I don’t know."
"Do you know where Northampton is?"
"I think so... Pictures of maps. About sixty miles north of London. Between Coventry and Oxford?"
"More or less. And exactly sixty miles from London. Think you come from London?"
"No idea."
"Then again you could know the distance from a signpost here. Remember any signposts?"
"Not specifically. Blue and white. No, all I can see is a vague map."
"So you were travelling, and probably on the motorway. They have white on blue signs. You do know this is Britain?"
"I suppose so. I hadn't thought about it. Northampton is in Britain. It follows."
"Not necessarily. There's a Northampton in Australia. Several in America."
"But this is Britain?"
"Yes."
DC Hawkins decides to believe that the man is telling the truth.
"Let's take these prints." He smiles as he pulls the card and ink pad from the briefcase, "Never know I might be arresting you tomorrow."
The man watches his prints being transferred from the ink pad to the card.
"Ever had this done before?" DC Hawkins asks.
'This is new," the man fervently declares.
Two more prints are taken.
"You’re a man or absences," DC Hawkins tells him, "Absence of indentations on your fingers — where a ring may have been. Absence of a sun tan line — where you might have worn a watch. Let's see if having your photograph taken stirs any memories."
Returning the ink pad and card to the briefcase DC Hawkins takes out a polaroid. He stands self-consciously at the foot of the bed, camera before his red face.
"Look straight at me." The man blinks in the flash. Other patients and visitors look to them, turn away.
DC Hawkins sits again beside the bed,
"I can't promise any quick results. In fact I can't promise any results at all. Over 7,000 people go missing every year. Within that same year 2,000 of them will turn up again. But the other 5,000..? Who knows? Maybe you're one of those who've never been heard of again... If you haven't heard from me by first thing tomorrow morning it'll mean you haven't got a record. So you can breathe a sigh of relief on that score. To be quite honest it'd probably be much easier for us to trace you if you were dead. Forensic could then take you to bits, find out where the pieces used to fit. But alive... what you tell us, what we think you tell us, what you appear to know... all of it can mislead us. For me, now, it'll mean my having to go through all the missing persons files, see if I can find a near enough fit. I'll also try to get the local paper interested. If, in the meantime, your memory does come back, can you get one of the nurses to let me know? Here's my number. Save me a lot of work."
"Yes. Certainly," the man takes the piece of paper, studies the numbers.
"Now let's have a look at this," DC Hawkins presses a button on the camera, removes the photograph, waves it dry, "That a good likeness?"
The man pales as he looks at the photograph of the man with red-centred eyes in the hospital bed. He bites on his lip,
"I don't know."
Detective Constable Derek Hawkins has an aptitude for paperwork and court appearances. Nursing a swollen bladder in a cold parked car has never struck him as glamorous: he is happier by far sitting in the office or waiting on a court bench. Fortunately his superiors appreciate his inclinations and talents, and they like to have him in court — he has a stolid unflappable court persona. And, with him in court, his superiors can concentrate their other officers on what they regard as ‘real’ police work — the garnering of evidence Albeit that the presentation or that evidence in the courtroom is what leads to convictions.
For all of next week DC Hawkins has at least two court appearances per day. This week, the week of his obligatory nightshift, he has been looking forward to catching up on his outstanding paperwork. 'The suspect was seen to...' 'The suspect, when approached, admitted to...’
His superiors’ derisory attitude to the courtroom often amuses DC Hawkins, occasionally it dismays him. He was not unduly surprised, therefore, when, on coming on shift, his paperwork was dismissed as secondary; and dogsbody DC Hawkins was sent to investigate an alleged amnesiac.
Making his disgruntled way to the hospital DC Hawkins considers amnesia, loses himself in a daydream wherein he realises how pleasant it would be to escape his own past, to throw off his imprisoning identity and to start afresh. At twenty three he believes that already he's done everything, seen everything. Never again in his life will he know such intensity of experience: his lot now is dulling repetition, is paler variations of the same. Life for him, he believes, is effectively finished; mistakes been made, opportunities missed, his future decreed, nothing more for this identity to do in the next sixty years but to act out his self-formed fate.
His past, he knows, indelibly shapes his future. At school his friends used his solemn round face as a front for them, to persuade parents and teachers how safe and sensible was their every madcap escapade. Authority seemed reassured by his guileless features, always found, despite his protestations of culpability, extenuating circumstances for his part in any prank. And so it was that authority, in the embodiment of the police, chose him rather than he the police as a career.
How tempting, he thinks, to slip now out of this constraining identity, to greet life with debonair laughter. And, even before meeting him, he resents this man who claims to have done so, and in so doing has interrupted his paperwork.
He has trouble parking, is misdirected to the wrong wing, and when, finally, he introduces himself to a blonde ward sister, she is at her paperwork.
"Somebody here says they've lost their memory." Hers is a small afterthought of an office.
"Yes," she bridles at his overt scepticism.
"Where is he?"
"Go easy on him," she admonishes him as she squeezes around the desk, "He's very unstable at the moment."
"What... mentally?"
"No. Physically worried. As you'd be if you'd lost your memory. This way."
The bed is second along on the right. The man sitting up in that bed is in his mid-thirties.
"A visitor for you," the ward sister tells the man.
The man looks up startled. DC Hawkins watches the man seeking to recognise him, seeking to place him in his own life.
"Detective Constable Hawkins," he introduces himself, letting the man off the hook, says, "Thank you," to the sister who has fetched him a chair.
He pulls the chair closer to the man, putting as much distance as he can between himself and the family of Indians around the next bed. He lays his black briefcase on the bed, flicks the silver catches,
"I'm told you've lost your memory."
"Well..." the man visibly sweats, "Yes and no. I can remember lots of things. But not who I am. He smiles apologetically — ingratiatingly? — at DC Hawkins.
As he extracts a notebook from his briefcase DC Hawkins studies the man. A life's doubts and surprises are registered in the creases of the brow, a lifetime’s wrinkles around the grey eyes. No-one can simply forget what has formed him. His own 23 year old face is smooth, bland; even so he is his past. His mother and father, brothers... there is so much of it, even at twenty three, to forget, to casually mislay.
"Before we go any further," he opens his notebook, "I warn you that should you, for whatever reason, not be telling the truth, and, as a consequence I have to go looking up all sorts of records, you will be charged with wasting police time. And if it turns out that you’ve known all along who you are, then you most certainly will be charged. Is that understood?"
"I'm sorry..." the man has a tremor in his voice, "I honestly don’t know who I am."
The man’s obvious agitation does not persuade DC Hawkins to the truth of what he is saying. The man may be trembling because he is simply frightened, and he may be frightened simply because he is not telling the truth.
"Now," DC Hawkins presses the button on his pen, "I’ve never actually had to deal with a case like this before. So let's begin by seeing what we do know. First a physical description. Starting at the top. Colour of hair," he stretches up to look at the man’s head, "Dark brown going grey. Eyes — grey/green. Face — squarish. Any scars?"
"I haven't seen any."
"Height?" The man shrugs. DC Hawkins runs his eye up the man’s bed length, "Five ten, eleven," he writes. "Weight?" He purses his lips, "Say eleven, eleven and a half stone." The man does not react: has he forgotten vanity too?
"Now your personal statistics. Date of birth?"
The man doesn't know. Nor his place of birth, nor the names of his parents, of his wife, nor of his children. Surely no man can forget his children, DC Hawkins thinks. Or do I think that simply because I don't want my parents to forget me? Maybe children, though, are the easiest of all to forget. He often has to remind himself that he too is now a father. That little pink bundle of smells, however, seems to have little to do with him. He makes fatherly noises; but it is a going through the motions. And easy enough to forget his wife, because he can't now grasp her existence. Why, he often asks himself, did he marry a woman who, as soon as she was married, thought of herself as a wife, whose sole raison d'être became the catering to his creature comforts? And she now thinks of herself as a wife and a mother, and she tries to reconcile the two. Yet, for all her busyness, there is a vacancy behind her self-imposed labels.
Before his marriage DC Hawkins had thought there was something elusive about his wife. He had married her to capture that elusiveness. Only, in domesticity, to realise that there was nothing there, that his imagination had endowed her with a mystery that she did not, does not, possess, nor aspire to. A vacancy is all there has ever been. And, here before him, is a man with a contracting density and no labels.
Who can he be?
You're the detective, he tells himself, detect.
"You carne in here what time today?"
"This afternoon. I don't know what time. The nurses wear their watches upside down. But I was taken to Emergency first." After all his negative answers the man is excessively pleased to be able to give information.
"What happened?"
"I... don't know," the man sinks back against the pillows, "The nurse, she's gone off now, said I collapsed in Harborough Road."
"Why did you collapse?"
"I don't know. I've got a bruise on my head."
"Do they know what's wrong with you?"
"They haven’t said."
DC Hawkins pauses,
"I'll see the doctor later. Now... I take it you weren’t wearing pyjamas when you collapsed?'
"My clothes are in there," the man eagerly points to the bedside locker.
Moving his briefcase to the end of the bed, DC Hawkins spreads the clothes out upon it. His search is more thorough than the nurse's. Not only does he turn out every pocket he also feels along the seams, knocks on the rubber heels of the shoes, examines the insteps for dirt. There is none.
Taking up his notepad, aware that he is being watched by the family of Indians, DC Hawkins lists each item of clothing, make, material and colour. He notes the shoe size.
"All very ordinary this. Nothing to help us here. Except what isn’t here. No money, no wallet, no keys. Not even a bus ticket. Think you could’ve been mugged?"
The man wonderingly touches the bruise on the back of his head.
"The doctor said I probably banged my head on the ground when I collapsed. Do you think I could’ve been mugged?"
"In Harborough Road? Unlikely. And we’ve got another puzzle here," he reaches over and picks up the blue quilted anorak, "Why this? It was a hot day today. What I saw of it. You’d have been boiling in this."
The man frowns. Eventually he limply lifts his hand, lets it fall. DC Hawkins folds and returns the clothes to the bedside locker. Profession? he fingers the shirt and trousers. Semiskilled. The clothes aren’t up to much, could do with a decent clean. Nor are they anywhere near sharp enough for a salesman. Hands aren’t callused.
"Can you drive?" he asks as he rises from the locker.
"I don’t know." Too neat and clean for a derelict. Probably a diffident office-wallah. Or self-effacing long term unemployed.
DC Hawkins sits back on the chair. The man takes sips of water. He’s right-handed. Pity. The water shakes in the scratched beaker. I know who I am, DC Hawkins thinks, I cannot escape who I am. Which must mean, my thinking it, that I must want to. And I envy him because he’s magicked away his past. Watching the water dance in the shivering beaker he thinks — and yes, freedom is frightening.
"You said you can remember some things. What?"
"Well... I can remember how to speak. I know what things are. The names for them. And some things I almost take for granted. Like being able to read... Other things I have to think about. Like using a knife and fork. You see, although I can remember how to use a knife and fork, I don’t remember ever having used them before."
DC Hawkins has been listening to his accent. No habitual affectations. Straightforward Southern Standard English.
"What were you doing in Harborough Road?"
"I don't know," the man shakes his head, "I don’t even know what it looks like. Sometimes I think it has trees in it. Sometimes I just see houses. One of the nurses said it has garages in it. But all I see is a road. It's a name, a word. Like if I think of dog, I just see all different breeds of dog. Not any one dog in particular."
"Why should you think or dog? Did you have a dog?"
"I don't know," he looks directly at DC Hawkins, "Why does no-one believe me?"
Because it's too bloody easy, DC Hawkins thinks, to cancel the past. He should be so lucky. Wipe out all the shames, run away from all the mistakes. His wife had thought his main virtue safety, and he’d been flattered, so he had married her; when the inside him had felt insulted, but being used to it he had bowed his head and donkeylike had done his duty. To negate all the chances missed. The old schoolfriend who had invited him into his electronics firm and he had been truly tempted, but the family voices of common sense had prevailed, a high risk venture, shit or bust; and here he is a detective constable in Northampton and his friend is a dollar billionaire in California. I hate myself. Envy and resent him. No wonder no-one wants to believe you.
"What do the doctors say?"
"I’ve only seen one. He said my memory'll come back of its own accord."
"When?"
"He didn't say. Just told me to relax."
DC Hawkins grimacing sighs,
"I've got to assume it won't. Dc you have any objections to giving me your fingerprints?"
"No," the man frowns, "Why should I?"
"I don't know. Don't know why anyone has come to that. But if you do have a criminal record, then with your prints I’ll be able to find out in a couple of hours who you are."
"That soon?"
The man gratefully accepts the least information. Maybe he is telling the truth.
"What if I haven’t?"
"It'll take longer. We’ll see. If your memory does come back it’ll all be academic anyway. If it doesn’t, and you don’t have a record, we’ve still got a few more strings to our bow. Then there’s your family. Though it will be 24 hours before they can officially register you as missing. If they’ve missed you already, and if you’re from Northampton, then we should know who you are almost straightaway. If you’re from somewhere else it will take longer of course. But all of that depends on your having a family who’ll register you as a missing person. No memories at all of a family?"
He looks a family man, as if he belongs to someone. A taken for granted household fixture. A drab wife buying drab clothes for him. Husband of... Father of... a man who no longer exists in his own right, who probably spends his weekends digging the garden and getting shouted at. He definitely has the anxious look of the family man about him. Or is he simply an anxious man? If his memory has gone he certainly has good cause to be anxious.
"No..." the man is shaking his head, "I see snapshots. Family groups. But none of the same family. Is this Northampton?"
"You didn't know that?"
"No."
"Where would you have expected to be?"
"I don’t know."
"Do you know where Northampton is?"
"I think so... Pictures of maps. About sixty miles north of London. Between Coventry and Oxford?"
"More or less. And exactly sixty miles from London. Think you come from London?"
"No idea."
"Then again you could know the distance from a signpost here. Remember any signposts?"
"Not specifically. Blue and white. No, all I can see is a vague map."
"So you were travelling, and probably on the motorway. They have white on blue signs. You do know this is Britain?"
"I suppose so. I hadn't thought about it. Northampton is in Britain. It follows."
"Not necessarily. There's a Northampton in Australia. Several in America."
"But this is Britain?"
"Yes."
DC Hawkins decides to believe that the man is telling the truth.
"Let's take these prints." He smiles as he pulls the card and ink pad from the briefcase, "Never know I might be arresting you tomorrow."
The man watches his prints being transferred from the ink pad to the card.
"Ever had this done before?" DC Hawkins asks.
'This is new," the man fervently declares.
Two more prints are taken.
"You’re a man or absences," DC Hawkins tells him, "Absence of indentations on your fingers — where a ring may have been. Absence of a sun tan line — where you might have worn a watch. Let's see if having your photograph taken stirs any memories."
Returning the ink pad and card to the briefcase DC Hawkins takes out a polaroid. He stands self-consciously at the foot of the bed, camera before his red face.
"Look straight at me." The man blinks in the flash. Other patients and visitors look to them, turn away.
DC Hawkins sits again beside the bed,
"I can't promise any quick results. In fact I can't promise any results at all. Over 7,000 people go missing every year. Within that same year 2,000 of them will turn up again. But the other 5,000..? Who knows? Maybe you're one of those who've never been heard of again... If you haven't heard from me by first thing tomorrow morning it'll mean you haven't got a record. So you can breathe a sigh of relief on that score. To be quite honest it'd probably be much easier for us to trace you if you were dead. Forensic could then take you to bits, find out where the pieces used to fit. But alive... what you tell us, what we think you tell us, what you appear to know... all of it can mislead us. For me, now, it'll mean my having to go through all the missing persons files, see if I can find a near enough fit. I'll also try to get the local paper interested. If, in the meantime, your memory does come back, can you get one of the nurses to let me know? Here's my number. Save me a lot of work."
"Yes. Certainly," the man takes the piece of paper, studies the numbers.
"Now let's have a look at this," DC Hawkins presses a button on the camera, removes the photograph, waves it dry, "That a good likeness?"
The man pales as he looks at the photograph of the man with red-centred eyes in the hospital bed. He bites on his lip,
"I don't know."
Tuesday, 9 October 2007
Two
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.
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.
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