Hospital Babylon

by Imogen Edwards-Jones

  ‘Will! Will!’ says one of the nurses, pulling the sheets more tightly over him. ‘You must calm down.’

  ‘Leave me alone!’ he shouts. ‘Leave me alone,’ he sobs. ‘Leave me alone,’ he whispers through his mask.

  I back off. The boy is waiting to go up to X-ray himself; the last thing he needs is an audience for his grief.

  I walk past the three corpses covered in sheets, waiting for their paperwork to be sorted and for Eric to come up and collect them. The first body is Angus, the driver of the car. His notes are clipped to a board at the bottom of his bed. I look a bit more closely at his chart; someone has written TTJ right at the very end: ‘Transfer to Jesus’. It must be one of the juniors. I feel a surge of indignation course through my body. What student doctor dickhead wrote that? Maybe I’m tired and emotional, and call me old-fashioned, but I don’t find three youngsters dying in a car crash a particularly rich vein to mine for comedy.

  I am on the verge of shouting at a few people when Alex arrives fresh from stitching his Lithuanian back together.

  ‘What’s happened? I got your page. Jesus …’ he says, looking around the place. ‘It looks like a car crash in here.’

  ‘It was, it is,’ I say. ‘Three dead, one of them DOA.’ I rub my face.

  ‘I’m sorry, mate,’ he says. ‘The nurses don’t pass on the pages when you’re in theatre. Any survivors?’

  ‘A young man, cubicle four, Will,’ I say. ‘Late teens, broken arm, dislocated shoulder, potentially fractured pelvis, and I’m sure there are a few more things going on. He’s about to go up for X-ray. He also needs half the road scrubbed out of his chest.’

  ‘God.’ He sniffs, looking over at the three dead boys lined up in a row. ‘It looks bad.’

  ‘It was,’ I nod.

  ‘You should take a minute,’ he says. ‘Go outside. Have a cigarette.’

  ‘I might actually go home,’ I say. ‘You’ve got the new lot in an hour or so.’

  ‘I know,’ he says, raising his eyebrows. ‘That’s something to look forward to.’

  Now that Alex has mentioned it, I realize I am desperate for a cigarette and some solitude, so I go outside and light up. The sun is just up; the sky is a pale blue and the clouds are pink with a hint of purple. It looks like it might be a nice day. I pull out a cigarette and realize I must have left my lighter somewhere. I look around the car park and see a bald-headed bloke parking his car. I wait for him to get out of the car before going over.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say, ‘do you have a light?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ he says, looking a little puzzled.

  ‘A light?’ I say, waving my cigarette by way of a serving suggestion. I know it’s early in the morning.

  ‘Oh, right,’ he says, tapping down his pockets. He then holds his head in his hands.

  ‘Are you OK, sir?’ I ask.

  ‘I’ve got one in the car,’ he says.

  He turns around and I immediately perform a double-take. As the man bends down to look in the passenger-seat glovebox he gives me a perfect view of a huge hole in the back of his head. I lean forward to take a closer look. Not only has a large part of his scalp disappeared, so has the skull. I can see right the way through to his brain.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to be rude, but you appear to have a hole in your head.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he says, ‘that. That’s why I’m here. I’m feeling a little dizzy.’

  6–7 a.m.

  I’m not sure how long I would go around with a hole so deep and gaping in my head that you can practically see the inner workings of my brain, but this old boy, Martin, has been quietly going about his business with his brain open to the elements for a whole goddamn year!

  ‘Doesn’t it hurt?’ I ask, as I escort him towards A&E.

  He shakes his head. Apparently not.

  ‘How did it happen?’

  He explains that he had a small patch of skin cancer on his scalp and his wife, being a homeopathic sort of a woman, had decided that doctors were shit and what he needed was some sort of red wort tincture, which is from some North American weed. She has been applying the stuff every day to the patch on his head. The only thing is, skin cancer can be quite sensitive to what you put on it, and this stuff seems to have inflamed the cancer instead of calming it down. In fact, the thing has been so goddamn inflamed it has managed to bore a hole right into his head. The hole is actually big enough for me to put my fist in. No wonder the bloke feels a bit dizzy. There’s trepanning to let a little bit of fresh air into the brain to help with the blue-sky thinking, and then there’s creating your own sunshine roof.

  ‘How do you shower or have a bath?’ I ask, my body shivering at the thought of Badedas on the brain.

  ‘Oh,’ he says, looking at me like I’m asking the weirdest question. ‘I wear a showercap.’

  ‘Right,’ I say. ‘I suppose it does the trick.’

  I take Martin straight through and sit him down in a cubicle. Within five minutes all the doctors on call have come in just to have a look. Sanjay can’t believe it.

  ‘He’s been going around like that for a year?’ he checks.

  ‘It seems so,’ I say.

  ‘He looks in remarkably good condition. That’s a big plastics job if ever I saw one. They’re going to have to replace the skull and grow him some new skin.’

  ‘It’s going to take a while.’

  ‘I know a bloke who can fill almost anything,’ he says. ‘Nice chap. He loves a challenge. I’ll give him a call.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Men like him don’t need sleep,’ says Sanjay. ‘Sleep is for the weak, remember?’

  ‘And in the meantime?’

  ‘In the meantime …’ He pauses. ‘Fluids.’

  ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘How could I forget?’

  Martin is hooked up to an IV just to keep him busy. He’s been offered painkillers but he’s turned them down. So I leave him leafing through a six-week-old copy of Now magazine. Sanjay’s on the phone outside, calling round, trying to track down his superior plastics chap. I can hear the words ‘huge hole in his head’ and ‘yeah’ over and over.

  I walk back through the department. The three car-crash corpses have thankfully disappeared, but Will, the survivor, is still here. He must be waiting for his X-ray. I poke my head in through the curtains. His eyes are closed – the drugs have kicked in now. He looks a little more comfortable despite his smashed-up face and broken body. I am about to leave when he opens his eyes.

  ‘Oh, sorry to disturb you,’ I begin. ‘I was just checking you were OK. It shouldn’t be long now for the X-ray. I’ll go and see what’s holding them up.’

  I know he can hear but he doesn’t react. There is no flicker of recognition, no acknowledgement that I am trying to help. He just stares at me over his oxygen mask. The look in his glazed eyes makes my blood run a little cold. He blinks slowly, then looks away.

  ‘OK then,’ I add, ‘I’ll go and look.’

  Before I can get anywhere near the computer, a very large, very vocal woman comes screaming into A&E, accompanied by a panic-stricken man. ‘It’s coming, and it’s coming right now!’ she yells, stopping to grab hold of a trolley. She lets out a positively primordial roar that brings the whole department to a halt. Blood and water whoosh on to the floor.

  Alex drops his clipboard and comes running over. ‘Here, in here,’ he says, skidding slightly in the puddle on the plastic floor. ‘Let me help you.’ He grabs hold of the woman and tries to push her towards a cubicle and a bed.

  He’s a braver man than I.

  ‘You!’ bellows the woman, turning to look at him with her scarlet cheeks and bloodshot eyes. ‘Just fuck off!’

  ‘OK, fuck off, absolutely,’ says Alex, realizing his mistake. It is not terribly advisable to try to shift a woman during a full-blown contraction.

  The husband/partner just looks around in blind panic, trying to work out what to do, and where to go. His eyes lock on to mi
ne. Oh shit, I think, here we go.

  ‘Here,’ I say, moving towards a cubicle and pulling back the curtain, ‘this one’s free.’ I approach the pregnant woman with caution. Women in labour are so strong and determined, they have been known to fell a consultant with one swift well-placed punch. ‘In your own time,’ I say to her. ‘When you are ready.’

  The contraction subsides and she begins to list slowly in the direction of the cubicle. Alex stands there, feeling a little bit useless.

  ‘Um, I’ll phone Maternity,’ he says.

  ‘You do that!’ yells the woman, leaning so heavily on my shoulder I think my legs are going to buckle.

  ‘Here we are,’ I say, patting the bed.

  ‘Oh my God!’ shouts the woman, again.

  Her knuckles turn white as she grabs my shoulders. Her grip is hard and deep, her long red nails dig into my back. I want to join her as she screams out in pain. There’s another whoosh as more water and blood pour over the floor.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ she announces suddenly to me and the husband/partner, ‘I need to do a poo.’

  ‘Oh my God, man,’ says the husband/partner.

  ‘Don’t push,’ I say. ‘Hold on.’

  ‘Nooooooo!’ she yells. ‘It’s coming!’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ declares the husband/partner.

  ‘Don’t push!’ I shout, getting down on my knees and putting my head up her huge floating skirt.

  ‘I have got to poo!’ she screams.

  ‘Man, get your head out of there!’ yells the husband/partner.

  ‘Oh shiiiiiiit!’ the woman wails, almost squatting on top of my head.

  ‘OK, I can see the baby,’ I say. ‘Push!’

  ‘The baby?’ asks the husband/partner.

  ‘Yes!’ shouts the woman. ‘What the fuck do you think I’m doing here?’

  The husband/partner’s reply is, fortunately for him, interrupted by the arrival of a midwife.

  ‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ she asks me, her short arms crossed over her large chest. It’s like she’s telling off a three-year-old. ‘Get yourself out from under there, will you? Are you all right, love?’ This question she directs to the woman. ‘Why don’t you sit yourself up here and let’s have a look at you. Oh my goodness, I can see Baby’s head. You’ve done so well, just a few more pushes and Baby’s out. My name’s Monica. And you are?’

  ‘Lorraine!’

  ‘OK then, Lorraine, just do exactly what I tell you to do and you and Baby will be fine. When I say push, you push, and when I say stop, you stop. OK?’

  ‘OK!’

  Monica sits on the bed then looks at me and the husband/partner in a manner that implies a certain amount of irritation at the fact that we are still here. We both read the look and retreat, at speed.

  While the two of us wait for Lorraine to bring a new life into the world, aided and abetted by the firm forearms of Monica, A&E prepares itself for a changeover. The backlog is cleared, Will is finally taken up for an X-ray, and the juniors are next door handing out sugary tea and sandwiches to the alkies, telling them in no uncertain terms that they don’t want to see their ugly mugs again. I go in to help them, and among the tramps, the down-on-their-lucks and the other pissed-and-fell-overs, I spot my businessman, the one who pissed himself. He’s sitting in the corner, rather forlornly eating a roll. Spending a night in stinking damp trousers curled up next to an incontinent granny can’t have done his hangover much good. The man’s mouth looks so miserably dry; he can barely get enough saliva together to get the doughball down his gullet. One thing’s for sure, and I’d be prepared to bet money on it: he won’t be back in here for a while. It’s a pity half the other drunks who spend their nights here don’t feel equally chastised.

  Over in the far corner, closest to the bin, I spot a woman lying horizontal on the red plastic chairs. She doesn’t appear to be moving. In her early twenties, wearing a pink-striped T-shirt, a short black skirt and cheap red heels, she is very obviously a prostitute. I look a little more closely and notice she is covered in track marks. Her arms and wrists are pricked pink and raw. I check her pulse. She’s still breathing, so I haul her up to a sitting position. She mumbles something before slumping forward. She’s high as a kite, whacked out on heroin. Beside her is a small black leather handbag, which is lying open. I pick it up and look inside. Maybe someone knows who she is? Maybe someone should come and get her? What is she doing here in the first place? The contents of her bag are covered in a brown dusting of heroin. It’s everywhere, all over the condoms, her keys, her empty purse, the photo of what I presume is her daughter and a small box of Kellogg’s Coco Pops. It is all too pathetic.

  I look at her, passed out on the chair, her long dark hair stuck to the side of her face, her dark brown lipstick smeared, one of her hoop earrings missing, and I think, what should I do? She’s alive, she’s not about to die. I could phone Social Services, get them involved. Or I could just walk away. It is the end of my shift. The end of my time here. I have been on the go for twenty-four hours. And they’d only make me stay another two hours while we filled out some more forms, signed a few things, and she’d be back out on the streets by the end of the day. So I walk across to the tea trolley, make a cup of very hot, very sweet tea, and put it at her feet. I can only hope she wakes up before it gets cold.

  Back in A&E, I bump into Monica, who is dumping her white plastic apron in the bin.

  ‘A boy!’ she says, looking a little short of breath. ‘She sure as hell did make a noise.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ I say. ‘The dad must be thrilled.’

  ‘That’s two sons in one week for him,’ she says. ‘He was with another woman giving birth in here at the weekend.’

  ‘Which one is his wife?’

  ‘Maybe neither of them,’ she says, with a smile.

  The next time I look at the clock it’s ten minutes to seven, not long now before all the doctors arrive box-fresh from medical school. As each of the juniors, like Aiden, who have spent the last six months or so cutting their teeth in A&E walk up to say goodbye to Sandra, I can see the panic begin to rise in her eyes. The idea of turning up tomorrow to a department entirely staffed by new recruits is clearly beginning to freak her out. She’s smiling and nodding her goodbyes while nervously sorting through things, making neat piles of sterilized swab kits and moving the piles of cardboard bedpans to one side.

  ‘Excited about today?’ I ask, preparing to say goodbye myself.

  ‘Nothing I like better than a whole load of arrogant incompetents who can’t even find a vein,’ she says.

  ‘I know, but we all need to learn some time,’ I say, wondering how open the arms of the consultants in Acute Medicine will be in St Patrick’s down the road.

  ‘Yes, of course we have to learn,’ she agrees. ‘Just maybe not all at once.’

  ‘There is that.’

  ‘Worst day to be ill in the whole year.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s that lot out there I feel sorry for,’ she adds, pointing her bony finger at the waiting room.

  ‘Well, bye then,’ I say, shaking her leathery hand. ‘See you soon.’

  I look around for one last time. I’m going to miss this place. The people. The stories. The unexpected.

  ‘Oh, I’m glad I caught you!’ says a nurse running towards me. I recognize her. ‘Thank you for helping us out earlier with the woman.’ She nods towards the toilets that are still closed for cleaning. ‘We all just wanted to give you these. To say thank you.’ She hands me a large box of Terry’s All Gold.

  I look at them. They are dented in one corner. Then I look across at the office where I last saw the A&E box. It’s no longer there.

  ‘Are you pinching the staff chocolates?’ asks Sandra, coming over to investigate.

  ‘No,’ says the nurse. ‘They’re a present from Hepworth Ward.’

  ‘Really?’ says Sandra, leaning in. ‘Those were our chocolates yesterday.’

  �
�They were?’ asks the nurse.

  ‘I’m all for regifting,’ says Sandra, ‘but perhaps not back to the same place?’

  The nurse looks mortified. Two pink patches appear on her cheeks.

  ‘The thought was there,’ I say, smiling at her before handing the box back to Sandra. ‘These chocolates have been here since 1986. I don’t think they should ever leave.’

  Sandra possessively puts the box back in the office and I take one last look at the place.

  ‘Have you signed out of the computer?’ asks Sandra, coming back out of the office.

  ‘Oh, right,’ I say.

  ‘And leave your password,’ she adds.

  I am soon poised over the computer, thinking I might leave the new boys a note saying ‘Don’t take any shit from Sandra, be nice to Stacy, and Margaret is a bit of a goer.’ I could also advise them not to get involved with the drunks or the junkies, and let the abuse and the swearing wash off their duck’s backs. I want to tell them to listen to the patients – to what they don’t say as much as what they do. And don’t, if they know what’s good for them, ever admit anyone with back pain. The consultants won’t thank you, the hospital won’t thank you, and you’ll never get rid of the bastard. But I don’t. Instead I pick up a pen and find a piece of paper. I am ready. I am off. Oh, what the hell is my password?

  About the Author

  Imogen Edwards-Jones is the bestselling author of Hotel Babylon, Air Babylon, Fashion Babylon, Beach Babylon, Pop Babylon and Wedding Babylon, as well as novels such as My Canapé Hell and Shagpile. She lives in west London with her husband and their two young children.

  By the same author

  The Taming of Eagles

  My Canapé Hell

  Shagpile

  The Wendy House

  Hotel Babylon

  Tuscany for Beginners

  Air Babylon

  The Stork Club

  Fashion Babylon

  Beach Babylon

  Pop Babylon

  Wedding Babylon