The Doctor Will See You Now

Call her Blondie, she says, though she looks nothing like that Debbie Harry from Blondie, she admits. This Blondie was found prone and overdosed in that narrow lane off Thomas St where everyone knows they go to shoot up – everyone bar the cops, who are still scratching their heads. Angry, this Blondie is, to have her life fetch up here in a ward full of zombies when she could be injecting with close acquaintances – close acquaintances, she calls them. Sorry, she says, to be fair, to a crutch she's banged into.

Siobhan wakes at last into the tropical heat of Ward B. Grade A, she says. Or, possibly, Grey Day. She drank vodka earlier, her pals had stopped off at the off-licence, Siobhan poured from brown bag to brown bag, hello vodka meet mixer, then her pals left. When her daughter called, later, she must've smelled and not for the first time a life left too long on the hob with children waiting hungry, and she made her report to the nurse's station. Siobhan wept as she lied about her drinking to the ward sister, and those who heard her knew she lied. I'm checking myself out, Siobhan roared, as she sought the single crutch Blondie had knocked over and apologised to. The ward sister, unimpressed, countered with Burst Stitches; Personal Liability. Siobhan, still teary, stayed, even though it’s the long weekend and she knows her friends are drinking in The Nearby Tavern. What kind of a daughter does that, she asks the stern woman in the corner who never speaks. The stern woman in the corner never speaks. So Siobhan turns to Maureen. Is that what I reared her for?

Yes, Maureen replies, although she doesn't hear the question. For Maureen in the opposite bed is ninety years of age and deaf all her life. But Yes, she replies, once addressed eye-to-eye, because she's a fifty per cent chance of being right in the long run, and better to be agreeable than not, as her own mother always advised. The woman in the next cubicle to Maureen's is agreeably polite too, due to the fact of possibly having passed in the night. The nurses will admit that her pulse is virtually unfindable, and that she doesn't respond as expected to knock knock jokes. But this woman will never be dead, they insist, until the doctor in charge of Ward B comes around and pronounces. The small print in the contract means the emergency doctor – if available – cannot pass definitive judgement on these patients who are not his patients. And where – this emergency doctor asks – is the emergency? Dying, yes, is an emergency. But not death. Death is the opposite of an emergency.

Friends and relations turn up to join the habituées of Ward B. They've sneaked off work for an hour, or taken a half-day, they've called round too early or too late in order to intercede on their friend's or neighbour's or loved one's behalf, who drugged or weary or deaf or dead may not catch the finer points of a prognosis, should a doctor show. Everyone, patient and visitor alike, pities the stern woman who never speaks, who also never has a visitor. Whereas the possibly dead woman often does, a hooded chap in a cloak who rests his scythe against the wall and thrums a gloved hand against a locker. This is the Grim Reaper, her son it turns out, a neat line in cosplay and quite some distance along the spectrum. Wants – understandably – his Mam’s diagnosis. While Siobhan, the thirst again on her, is mad keen to yield her bed to a trolley-dweller floors below in A&E. Is this possible? Only the doctors know, and they're not saying due to the clause in their Hippocratic oath which states that they’re not obliged to show in hospital wards over Bank Holiday weekends. Once the visitors leave, everyone is maudlin then effervescent. Let's go for it, Blondie decides.

All for one, one for all, so they take the possibly dead woman with them, lying in her bed in the same foetal crouch she favoured in her pre-natal days. Down the shadowed corridors of night they steal, the stern woman who never speaks, Maureen pushing her walker, Blondie and Siobhan wheeling the possibly dead woman to her next adventure, while a faraway radio plays Elmer Bernstein's score for The Great Escape. They make it to the lift and the doors open and in the gloom of the lift's mirrored interior all they see are the shadows of their former selves. And behind their shadows they see the shadows of night nurses and orderlies hurrying after. They're returned to the reality of Ward B to resume their positions. On they endure, over the infinite hours of hospital time. Waking, yawning, sleeping, endlessly brushing each other's tangled hair, with occasionally a plate of cholesterol delivered erroneously for lunch despite the healthy option ticked.

Tuesday morning. The long weekend's over. Bustle and laughter from without, followed by a trumpet fanfare and a blast of the Hallelujah Chorus. The doctor and juniors enter stage left, beaming equally. They stop first by the bed of the stern woman who never speaks. She never speaks, Blondie shrieks. The stern woman who never speaks opens her book – An Introduction to Elementary Logic by Wilfrid Hodges – and reads aloud to the visiting entourage the following passage from a section on Declarative Sentences: "Were you angry with Sally? Her train was decorated with gorgeous silver lace. The government is hastening the collapse of the economy. I could never thrive by swaggering." Silence. The Grim Reaper rises and, scythe held tight in the crook of an arm, gives a standing ovation for his Mam who at last can have her biopsy (or, possibly, her autopsy), and for the stern woman who never speaks who has finally found her voice, and who even now, clearing her throat impressively, is preparing to sing falsetto.