medicine
At eight forty-five in the evening, I stood at the hatch window of the medicine room, doling out little paper cups of pills to the loose queue of patients in the corridor. It was fifteen minutes from the end of my shift, my fourth twelve-hour shift in a row. I was jacked tired. Of course, Gerry noticed.
“No snoozing on the job nurse Nally. What if the right pill goes to the wrong man and the wrong pill goes to the right man? What then?”
His bony old man’s head, with his flashy dentures, and his scrappy shreds of black hair that were like the feathers that fringe a rook’s beak, poked around the shoulder of Mona, the depressed retired post office owner from county Louth. Mona limped off with her pill, and Gerry stood there in his full glory, in his fluorescent pink, skinny woman’s AC/DC tee shirt hugging his ribs above a pair of drainpipe jeans with a stripe of pretend diamonds on the outside of each leg. He wagged an officious finger at me.
“Now come on, give us those magic beans, as I call them, wha?” he said to me, “Did you make sure the one to put me to sleep is in it? That’s the only good one, as I always say to Hegga.”
“Don’t tell me she was in again today?” I asked him.
Now, I wasn’t keen on Hegga. She was a hard, jaundiced old woman with hair like kelp who’d routinely visit him late in the day when the other visitors had come and gone. She would glide into the ward like a silent ghoul and fly straight over to his bed or out to into the smoking cage with him. She always came late, probably because Bert, his brother-in-law and only other visitor, another parasite, came early. Bert… come to think of it, was Bert his brother-in-law at all? Bert was very like Hegga. Maybe he was Hegga’s brother?
“Hegga was in,” said Gerry, after sucking his meds up into lips like a vacuum nozzle, “and she still is. She’s down in me bed talking to me about some very important stuff, nurse Nally, about me rights, nurse Nally. A man who knows things go right to the top needs to know his rights, amn’t I right, nurse Nally?”
According to Gerry, there is a global spying conspiracy that goes all the way up from “your window-cleaners,” to your “presidents, prime ministers and captains of industry.” A standard enough thought in places like this, the ‘secret system.’ It was his main obsession. He’d tell us nurses that he was “learning new things about the secret system every day, oh yiz’d love to know what I know.” The trade off for his secret knowledge seemed to be that “spies are always on the lookout for me, spying on me with machines.” “To battle,” I saw him say to himself once before, as he sat on the stone bench in the smoking cage.
“As long as chatting is all you are doing down there Gerry…” I said.
I was only half joking. On a ward inspection the previous week, Moll, the other nurse, had pulled open the curtain around his bed, to find Hegga tugging him off, “and him wearing sunglasses,” a detail I had to laugh at. I shouldn’t have brought it up. He got all heightened, antsy, a bit all over the shop. He was so beside himself, that he was full of slithery repetitive movement, like a frightened disco dancer who can’t stop. It was repugnant. I wished I could leap away from him, out the door, but it was impossible to do that before Moll relieved me.
“Don’t come nosing in at me and Hegga,” he said, “We are having an important chat. A crucial chat. You see, with Hegga’s head for things, and my…”
He stopped, and he raised a hand to his mouth, giving me an eyeful of all his rings, Liberace knuckles, imitation stuff though. He had clearly let a cat out of a bag. What was Hegga up to? I had to find out.
“Come on, King Louis, and hurry the feck up, we’re growing beards here,” said the reedy auld voice of lanky Sam the English lecturer.
He was standing behind Gerry and he had become impatient, as had some of the others behind him, the ones who looked forward to the medicine. The patients split half and half, you see, between those who want the medicine and those who don’t want the medicine.
“Hold on one sec now, Sam. Wait…” I said to his glowering head, as he stepped up to the hatch.
As old Sam’s pill disappeared into his maw, Gerry took advantage by slipping away, back to his bed and Hegga. I decided I’d go nosing after them once I had finished with dispensing the tablets, for I’m a nosey nurse, as you have seen; Nosey Nurse Nally is what a few of them call me. I’d go down, suss out what the story was, then head home, for some heroic sleeping. Just me marinating in the leaba, until my next shift. When I had finished up and locked the hatch, I walked as lightly as I could across the ward to get near to his bed, which had its curtain pulled around it, as I expected it would, at the furthest end. He had asked for the specific bed three months into his stay which was thirteen months and counting. He’d have it for another week, when he’d be due a rotation on account of another patient’s request. He originally asked for it because the sink was at that end, and he used the sink a lot, to wash his y fronts with a bar of Imperial Leather soap. He didn’t trust the hospital laundry with them. “Me DNA is on them,” he explained to me once, and now he’s worked out the further problem that his DNA might be collected regardless, out of the hospital’s pipes — “that’s the system for ye, always one step ahead.” As I traversed the ward, I flung a quick look around at the other patients. A few were already asleep, and there was that relative quiet you’d sense after the medicine, but before the sleep talking, which can be a real frightener with them all talking out of their separate lonely hells at the one time. I stopped at the foot of the bed next to his. It contained the sleeping lump of a new patient, a big miserable youngish fella called Barry. He had arrived in the night before, lashing sweat like someone with a disease, holding his stomach, crying like a baby.
“No. Leave me alone,” he said, startling me, but it was only the sleep talk, thank God.
I sat on my hunkers and pretended to read his medical notes. It was the perfect spot to eavesdrop. Because the main hospital lights had been dimmed for the night, the lamp beside Gerry’s bed threw his and Hegga’s shadows on the curtain. It made them big, and somehow like spider shadows or insect shadows in how they moved as the pair of them talked.
“Listen to me, you’ll take it, no listen, take it, take it, take it,” he said, and his skinny arm stuck out of his shadow to pass something to Hegga, who wouldn’t stop moving, pacing. The weird shape of her zig-zagged around the curtain the way a bug moves on cow-shite. She took what ever it was that he gave her, then whispered something to him, but I could not make it out. It sounded like a hiss.
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Gerry continued, “…when the Power Invest money comes in, I am going to buy a Delorean. You might know the car Hegga, the time traveller’s car from Back to the Future. There is only one man… so far, mind you, so far… one man in Dublin with a Delorean…”
I had heard this story before. According to Gerry, the Delorean belonged to his nemesis, the man who he was possibly swapped with at birth, who he would oftentimes say was “a powerful man, a rich man, and an influential man, you might call him the mirror opposite of me.”
Hegga seemed to hiss again.
“Who’s there?” she said.
I leapt out of my skin. I nearly went running. It was all I could do to remain rooted there, as her arm’s shadow jumped up Gerry’s curtain, pulling it open enough for her and Gerry to see me. I immediately looked at my feet. I just couldn’t look her in the face. To the sink instead, I said, “visiting hours are over, Hegga, you’ll have to go.”
Without saying a word, she got up and left, passing through the edge of my sight because I still refused to look directly at her. Her shape went sideways, like a fast crab in the dimness, towards the green light of the exit sign, and the door where a security guard would be waiting to wave her on her way. Why didn’t I confront her? I’m not sure. A force of some kind stopped me. I confronted Gerry instead.
“Here tell us, Gerry,” I said, pushing the curtain open and sitting down on the plastic visitor chair beside his bed, “what is ‘power invest’? Is Hegga taking advantage of ya?”
“Take that big fucken nose of yours out of my business, nurse Nally… You must think that you’re Big Brother’s little brother or something, but you’re only a cog. A cog.”
He was fuming, sitting there on top of his sheets with his bed tilted the way he liked it, so that he could “observe and report.” There was still a smell left by Hegga on the air. It was a wet outdoor smell, like rained-on cardboard. Under his skinny arms, I could see that sweat was soaking through the woman’s AC/DC top. It must have felt cold, he was shivering as well as everything else.
“I’m only looking out for you, Gerry,” I said.
“Hegga is not taking advantage of me,” he spat, and up he craned his old crow head until it was right up in my grill, “you are lucky, nurse Nally, that I don’t tell Hegga everything. Everything I really know about this place, about its secret system. Oh hoh, there’d be trouble then… because unlike you and me Hegga is powerful, very powerful…”
In my pocket, my mobile phone made its noise. Bloop bloop. My immediate superior, Doctor Bob, perhaps, or worse again, my landlord. Throughout my life, I’ve had a ghastly and strange amount of trouble with landlords.
Gerry nodded his head slyly towards me, and said, “is the person in charge checking up on you? Or is the person in charge of the person in char…,” and then, just like that, he stopped.
He had lost his chain of thought. In dispensing the prescriptions of Doctor Bob, Moll and I administered a lot of them a drug to stop florid thinking, and that was the main thing it did to their thoughts, snip at them before they completed. I suppose a psychiatrist would say it stopped them from getting out of hand, like cutting down weeds, or flowers. He then looked as if he were about to laugh or smile. The crow’s feet appeared either side of his eyes, and his mouth opened wide enough for me to see the four or five worn teeth that sat behind his dentures like yellow olives. His visage carried a green tint, light thrown from the distant exit sign. The peculiar way he considered me. Pity maybe it was. He said the weirdest fucken thing.
“It’s a hard and sorrowful old station for the likes of you, a nurse. But a pair of new shoes might be just the thing. A pair of new shoes might just make you happy.”
Before I could open my gob, he reached for the box of cigarettes he smoked. The same malodorous brand they all smoked. They smoked them because they were cheap and I hated the smell of them. Whenever I cleaned them up from around the smoking cage, I’d imagine that the tiny blue trademark sticker on their butts was made by mould, and that it had mould’s rotten unnatural auld taste. He tapped the fag box open and poked in it with his orange and brown fingers, until he found what he was looking for, rolled up next to a half-smoked fag, a fifty euro note.
“There you go,” he whispered to me, and so close and so soft was his voice that I could be sure that nobody else on the ward heard him as he crushed the note into the pocket of my nurse’s uniform, “There you go. I don’t need it. Go buy yourself a nice new pair of shoes.”
I looked over my shoulder. Everyone was in a world of their own. Nobody was watching. I took the old man’s money.
“Our secret, don’t tell Mammy,” he winked, and he picked up his sunglasses, which he wore over his eyes when he slept, and he put them on.
Our secret. I laughed, and I coughed. I was pretending already that nothing had happened between the two of us.
“Well, I’ll be on me way,” I babbled to him, “I’ll tell nurse Moll things are fine with you. You’ve a visit from Bert to look forward to in the morning. Cheerio Gerry.”
With my head held low, and my breaths coming hard, I took off in Hegga’s footsteps, towards the nurse’s station where I would finally clock off on the hospital’s computerized system. As I went, one of my hands groped madly at the fifty euro note in my pocket, balling it up, saturating it with sweat. I did not turn back all the same. I carried on through the corridor, and inside the pocket of my uniform, it was as if the note grew dense and heavy, and the heaviness grew cold and sucking. All the same, I did not turn back.
