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.