Visiting hour

Humour to break the ice of the frosty frosty hospital ward. But to be honest, it was pretty funny. I mean, surely there's a better name for the OAP ward than 'Harold Ward'. They might as well call it Last Chance Saloon, or better still something 'down with the kids'.... maybe 'Hollyoaks'?

And then you get up to the ward and there's this massive list of names, each of the patients in there. And they're all names you haven't seen since you last read a Dickens novel- 'Theodora', 'Gladys', 'Quentin'. So you giggle at that too. And at how they have OCD handwash every 10 metres, and at how there's two orderlies having a conversation about Ant and Dec's latest T.V show, and at how your shoes make a really embarrassing squeaky noise as you walk down the pristine corridors.

But it's not really funny. It's just something. Anything. An emotion, a noise in amongst the deathly silence and the faint but constant beep of machines that breath for the people who are too tired to do it themselves. Laughing and not crying at the desperation, the absurdity of it all.

Laughing to cover up anger, anger at how he slipped through the net, and now there is fuss and attention and help and care when it's too late, when there's nothing left to do except wait for yet another set of results saying where it's gone next. 'Where?' 'Everywhere.'

Down at the end of the corridor, a room suddenly appears around me. No doors, no curtains, nothing. 6 beds. One empty. ('Someone was there last week' my mother whispers to me.) 5 stick thin, tired men whose paper white skin stretches about gaunt and hollow cheekbones, pale lips flowing into an open mouth, each expression identical as they lay still, snoring slightly.

We stand by his bed, hovering awkwardly and unsure what to do with ourselves. Even asleep he looks deeply unhappy, his face set in a permanent frown after years of pessimism and pain. 'Francis?'. Eyes flutter open. Confusion. Then recognition. I have to move into his eyeline to be seen- he cannot turn his head. Today is a bad day. Half a minute of conversation. The briefest of goodbyes, a quick touch of hands. 'You're warm' he tells me. And then we leave. Back past the scores of handwash dispensers, back past the orderlies and the board of names. Back past the sign for 'Harold ward' and out into the fresh air that blows the smell of disinfectant out from under my nose.

My shoes squeak on the way out.