The Nurse and The Patient

Nurse Anna stood by the open window of The West London Hotel’s penthouse suite, smoking a cigarette. Seven floors below, the rush hour traffic was at a standstill. It was early evening, and the hotel was busy that night, as it always was. But not on the seventh floor, which had been cleared of all other guests. Security guards outside the penthouse slouched on sofas in the foyer, reading magazines, one eye on the movements of the pretty nurse assigned to the room’s sole occupant.

The wail of a distant police siren cut through Anna’s thoughts. She inhaled deeply, and considered the very special patient committed to her care that evening.

The patient, an old woman, had once been a significant figure in the politics of the country. She’d been taken ill a few weeks ago, but rather than attend a nursing home or private hospital, the old woman had decided to convalesce in the wealth and luxury of one of the best hotels in London, an option not available to the majority of Britons approaching the end of their lives.

Anna wished her own parents could have enjoyed the rude good health and long life that God had granted the old woman.

Thirty years ago, Anna’s mother had been a singer, a beautiful and popular entertainer well known in the clubs around Yorkshire. Her father had been a miner at the local Orgreave colliery. Anna’s parents loved each other, and their daughter, very much.

Anna had been three years old at the time, but the images of those shell shocked days of strikes and protest were burnt forever into her thoughts. She remembered the baton charges of the police against the protestors. She’d watched as her father had been singled out from the other demonstrators and beaten so badly he’d been hospitalised for months. It changed him.

Soon afterwards, the pits closed, and her father lost his job, along with thousands of others. Anna’s once happy household disintegrated. She remembered the arguments and recriminations, the long silences, the tears. Her father had walked out a few months later, breaking all contact with his family.

Anna’s mother never sang again.

Years later, Anna heard of her father’s death. His body had been discovered in a derelict house in Leeds, empty bottles of cheap spirits surrounding the corpse. They said he’d probably been there a few weeks, months, maybe.

The image of his decaying body dissolved into the view of the stalled traffic below the window. Anna flicked the cigarette into the night, watched it drift slowly down until it disappeared from sight, then turned and made her way to the bedroom where the old woman was sleeping.

She checked the old woman's pulse, and found none.

Reflection

This was the spot. Brian was sure of it. The bulldozers had already taken most of the old familiar reference points; the Palace Cinema, first victim of the wrecking ball; the Railway Tavern, on the corner of Station Road and Manchester Road; the UCP Tripe shop next door. All gone. It would have been impossible for Brian to find the spot but for the partly demolished Co-Op Laundry building, still standing at the centre of the demolition site.

 

For the next few days, at least.

 

The ground was soaked and muddy, grey sky puddles reflecting the twisted lattice girders of the shattered old laundry. Brian loosened his collar. That morning’s flash thunderstorm had left the air hot, still and oppressive. The storm had moved south, probably halfway through Cheshire by now, soaking the stuck up residents of Wilmslow and Alderley Edge.

 

‘The rain it raineth every day,’ hummed Brian, ‘Upon the Just and Unjust fellow. But more upon the Just because, the Unjust hath the Just’s umbrella.’ He’d always liked that little poem; the vindication of crime with a little humour. He turned and paced out fifty yards from the front entrance of the shattered laundry to where he thought the small cobbled yard at the back of his first home would have been.

 

Wilmslow was where Joyce’s mum and dad had lived. Naturally, when Brian and Joyce were courting, he’d never dreamt of taking her to the Railway Tavern, or the Bricklayer’s Arms down the road, or even the Midland Hotel on Burnage Lane. Beer might have been one shilling and eleven pence a pint in those pubs back then, but those pubs weren’t for the likes of Joyce.

 

No; for Joyce, it was chicken in the basket at the Berni Inn, Didsbury. Or scampi and chips in the Dog and Partridge next door. Beer was three times the price in those places, “Establishments,” as Joyce’s dad used to call them. But needs must, his own dad used to say.

 

When The Devil Drives, thought Brian.

 

It hadn’t taken long after their marriage for Brian to realise his mistake. You can’t marry outside your class, his dad said. If only he’d dispensed his sage, nodding, pipe smoking, after the fact, stable-door-locked-too-late-the-horse-has-bloody-well-bolted advice a bit sooner!

 

The arguments. The neediness of material possession. The cramped little terraced house behind the laundry that they’d rented for twenty years, waiting, scrimping, saving for the deposit on a semi-detached house fit for Joyce, from Wilmslow, Cheshire.

 

Brian still recalled their arguments, sometimes violent, the hatred always simmering just below the surface; a cruel retort, a door slammed, the silent replay of how he could have won the day with a smart response always delivered too late, always delivered to an empty kitchen or parlour.

 

And then she was gone.

 

Brian put his hands in his pockets and looked down at the puddle. Just another old fool reminiscing over lost times and happy days. The pool of water obscured most of the ground, but he thought he could make out the foundations of the walls surrounding the yard.

 

He should have done this months ago, when he’d first heard the area was being redeveloped.

 

Never mind, he thought, this particular stable door’s still open at least. He’d come back after dark with a pick and shovel and get Joyce. He placed a brick, upright in the centre of the puddle to mark the spot, and walked away.