The corridor at night

In ten nights I learned that hospital by ear, and it happens to every person sitting with a relative, and nobody warns you.

Sitting with somebody is not work and it is not rest. You sit on a plastic chair and wait for a thing that has no time attached to it. And since the eyes have nothing to work on, because the room is dark and the corridor is always the same, what is left is listening.

My father came in on a Saturday with his speech slurred and his right arm dead. He was on the fourth floor for ten nights, bed B.

The first thing you learn is the infusion pump.

It beeps when the medication runs out, and it keeps beeping until somebody comes. It is not a serious alarm, it is a thin patient beep every three seconds, and the nurse knows it is not urgent and sometimes takes twelve minutes.

By the second night I could tell the pump in bed A from the pump in bed B by the interval.

Then comes the rest. The cough from room 408, which is an old smoker's and arrives in runs of four. The television in 411, left on all night because his daughter thinks the sound is company. The cleaning trolley, which comes past at ten past four with a buckled wheel.

And the goods lift, which does not shut first time. It tries, bangs, backs off and tries again. Two bangs with half a second between them, and I heard that about four hundred times.

The voices run to a timetable.

Seven at night and seven in the morning is the handover, which is the only moment the corridor speaks up. Ten minutes of people reading charts aloud in the voice of somebody already on their way out.

Between midnight and five nobody talks. Not even the relatives. That is not a written rule: it is that by two in the morning there is no subject left.

Genésio had been in the chair next to mine since the third night.

His wife, bed A in 406, three rooms along from my father. He had got to the hospital before me and he left after me.

For the first few nights the two of us shared nothing but logistics: which water fountain works, that the kitchen puts coffee out at half five, that the guard on entrance C lets you through with a food container and the one at the main door does not.

The conversation between relatives has an order to it that I learned there and have never forgotten.

First the diagnosis, which everybody recites the way you repeat something learned by heart at a counter. Then the doctor, whether he is good or whether he is in a hurry. Then the insurance, or the absence of it. Then the house, the work that has stopped, the brother who lives far away and rings to ask whether anything is needed knowing the answer will be no.

Only after all of that, a long way after, does the rest show up.

On the sixth night he told me, quietly, that his wife was not going to leave that building, and that the doctor had said so in three words on the Wednesday.

I did not answer. There is no answer and anyone who tries only makes it worse.

The pump in bed B beeped and I went in and switched it off and came back, and when I came back he was still sitting there the same way, and I sat down the same way.

About the body, which is the subject nobody associates with hospitals.

Ten nights in a plastic chair make you ache in a place that is not your spine and is not your leg. The whole body aches, dully, and that kind of tiredness takes down your embarrassment before it takes down anything else.

By the eighth night I was in the same top I had worn for two days and I did not care. He had four days of beard. Neither of us had anything left to look like for anybody.

It is a very particular state. You are not well, you are not available, you are not looking for anything. And at the same time, any skin that touches yours becomes the most informative thing on the floor.

We held hands on the ninth night, in the chairs, for about two hours, without mentioning it.

The stairwell between the fourth floor and the fifth is the only part of that building where you hear nothing.

The fifth had been closed for refurbishment since the year before, with the door shut and tape across it. The stairs between the two stood empty, on green emergency lighting, with an iron handrail painted so many times it was more paint than iron.

I went up there on the tenth night at about half one because I needed to cry without anybody.

He came up about ten minutes later, for the same reason.

What happened between twenty to two and twenty past stays out of this, and not out of modesty. It is that I spent ten nights listening to that floor, and that was the only half hour in which I heard nothing at all, and I have no way of telling with sound a thing that had none.

The step is terrazzo and it is cold. That I remember.

We went back down separately, about five minutes apart, and the goods lift banged twice while I was walking back to the chair.

My father went home the next morning, his speech coming back and his arm still bad. Discharged at twenty to eleven.

Genésio's wife died in November, at home, and I only know because I went looking.

We did not exchange numbers in the hospital. We exchanged them on the pavement, at the discharge, standing up, while I waited for my brother's car, and it was a forty-second conversation about nothing.

And it was there, on that pavement, at twenty to eleven in the morning, in daylight, that I looked at him.

Ten nights of corridor, on emergency lighting with the curtain shut, and I had learned his voice, his step, the way he breathed when he was about to say something and gave up on it. I did not know the colour of his eyes. I did not know he was a good deal shorter than me, or that he had a scar crossing his left eyebrow.