Friday night shift

Friday, tenth floor. I went in at seven in the evening and was due out at seven in the morning. On paper that's twelve hours. In practice it's twelve hours plus however long it takes you to be fit to drive.

Marta had the same shift. Nurse, fifteen years in the building, fourteen more than me.

She wears a hair elastic on her left wrist. Not in her hair. On her wrist. When she's annoyed she pulls it and lets it go. She's been doing it since before I arrived and it has left a paler band on the skin, about a finger wide. I noticed in my second month. It took me another year to ask. She said it was a habit from giving up smoking, and that she gave up smoking in 2019.

At half eight the machine on the fourth floor ate two of my coins. She lent me a note, one of those soft ones that live in the pocket of a coat.

"Don't pay me back," she said. "I'd rather you owed me."

It was a good night. Good, in a hospital, means dull.

Bed 12: Mr Anísio, eighty-four, heart failure, nine days in. Every shift he asked me whether Palmeiras had played. Every time I said no. He'd say "right, fine then," and turn to face the wall.

Midnight. Prescriptions. A blood pressure that wouldn't come up in one bed, a family crying in 7 over news that wasn't serious. Coffee from the kitchen, which is bad in a very particular way, of old vacuum flask.

Twenty to two. Marta sat in the chair beside mine at the station and looked at the central monitor without seeing it.

"How many hours do you sleep?" she asked.

"Depends on the week."

"This week."

"Depends on the day."

She laughed through her nose. Pulled the elastic. Let it go.

"Why do you take Fridays?" I asked. "You've been here long enough to pick your rota."

"Because on Fridays everyone disappears. It's me, one junior doctor and the phone."

"And that's good."

"I used to take Tuesdays. Tuesdays there are too many people. There's management. There are people asking you what you're doing while you're doing it."

She went on looking at the central monitor. Four traces rising and falling out of step with one another.

"And at home?" I asked.

"At home there's a seventeen-year-old who only answers by text and a dog nobody walks."

She said it in the same voice she uses for drug doses.

Twelve minutes past three.

The alarm in 12 went and she got there before me, and I got there before the rest of the floor, and after that came twelve minutes I can't lay out properly, because memory doesn't file that sort of thing in order. I know I knelt on the bed. I know she counted out loud and that her voice was the only steady thing in the room. I know she swapped in on compressions without anyone asking, exactly on time, and that her hand touched my ribs as she came past.

At 3:24 Mr Anísio came back.

He swore at us. He asked what all this was about. Then he asked whether Palmeiras had played.

Somebody laughed. I think it was me.

Then comes the part nobody films. Picking packaging up off the floor, the empty ampoule, an electrode pad stuck to the sheet. Marta changed the bedding with him still lying on it, rolling the old man from one side to the other the way only an experienced nurse can, without seeming to handle anybody at all.

I rang his daughter at half three. She lives out of town. She got there at twenty past six, still holding the bag from the chemist's.

At four in the morning the corridor of the tenth floor is the quietest thing in a large city.

I was against the cold wall outside 12 with the notes in my hand, trying to write the entry. The letters came out shaky. I stopped trying.

She came round with two coffees and saw my hand.

"Normal," she said.

"Yours isn't shaking."

She held her hand up. It was shaking.

We stayed there, both of us with our backs to the wall, watching the lift doors on the far side of the corridor. Neither of us spoke for about two minutes. That had never happened between us before, two minutes without speaking.

"On-call room," she said.

It wasn't a question and I didn't treat it as one.

The on-call room on the tenth has a single bed with a thin mattress, a steel locker and a lock that doesn't lock. We put the locker against the door. It took four seconds. I still count them.

She took her badge off before anything else and set it on top of the locker, carefully, face down.

She took off her coat and stood there in her top. I went to take off mine and she took it off for me, and her hurry had the same quality as her hurry in bed 12: nothing wasted, no extra movement, everything in the right place first time.

The elastic stayed on her wrist. I felt it against my back.

Nobody said anything beautiful. Nobody said much at all. The emergency light from the corridor came in under the door and that was the whole of the light, a yellow strip on the floor about the length of a ruler.

At some point her radio crackled in the coat on the ground. She reached it with her foot, pushed it under the bed, and didn't stop.

What I remember is the alcohol gel on her hands. It's the smell of the whole building, the smell of twelve hours of work, and in that three-metre room it became something else entirely without changing at all.

She bit her own wrist, over the elastic, to keep quiet. Then she gave up on keeping quiet.

The bed creaked. We gave up caring about that early on.

Twenty-three minutes. I know because when I came out the clock at the station said 4:41.

She left first. Tied her hair up in the lift, using the steel door as a mirror, and when the next floor called she answered in her ordinary voice.

At seven I handed over. Mr Anísio was sitting up, eating porridge, complaining about the porridge.

In the car park I sat fifteen minutes in the car without starting it. Not because of the on-call room. Because of 3:12.

The following Friday she came in at seven with two coffees from the bakery on the corner rather than the kitchen.

She put one down in front of me. Two sugars. Nobody had asked me how many.

"Bed 12 went home on Tuesday," she said.

"I know."

"He asked after you."

"He asked after Palmeiras."

"That as well."

And she went to work. Pulled the elastic once, halfway down the corridor, for no reason I was able to identify.