The waiting room

Sitting here, without my prescription shades, the inhabitants of the room are bright and busy blurs. Lazily, I squint at them while fingering the appointment card. I'd hate the waiting, queuing and any other activity that requires the creative avoidance of the passage of time but I'm so numbed by Waiting's noun chum ‘Boredom' that I barely muster the will to care. In defiance (born of a shining moment of self preservation) I find ways, oh such clever ways, to catch little lies of colour that can act as pall bearers to my afternoon.

I cast my gaze about to catch one.

One large woman in denim seems to be hunched, straining, as if the last vestiges of the contents of her bowels refuse to be dislodged. In fact, I imagine she is just texting someone.

‘Dull' I say to myself. ‘It's just a warm-up imagining' a more human and forgiving part of me replies.

Onwards.

An Asian man of indeterminate age scans what can only be a newspaper. There is a pinprick of shiny glimmer on his face. I guess it is a piercing. If so, then it's gold. If so, then he's a young man?

The mix of supposition and deduction detracts so I renew my strategy and I put on my shades and everything is a born again as a series of darkened but mundane revelations.

So, that is a boy kissing a girl…

So, that is a nurse and not an OAP in a deeply bland, beige dress…

And thus, in my emotive wanderings, I amend their sullen and bored vestiges with histories of my own design.

And thus, tedium is pinned and time flows quicker as my visioning pours forth.

The overweight, bearded man in a rugby shirt is called, er, Gavin. Gavin… Crackwood. His ginger wife sits beside him. They are both healthy 40 something's or they are 30 something's who have let themselves go. He is from Scotland but was born in one of Surrey's rougher estates. His wife does not undertand (but tolerates) his obsession with Rugby (even though she cheers with him). She sees this show of support for as fair play for her being allowed to bed her ball room dance partner (she stopped actual dancing about six weeks ago but he never asks to find that out). Currently, they are both reading papers over each other's shoulders. They laugh at an article about some asylum seekers who tried to smuggle themselves in a truck of milk. It turned out to be some kind of Harpic-esque industrial cleaner. They are all in intensive care; save for the one they identified as a woman from her pelvis. They return to their own papers. He turns to page three, skips it guiltily and settles on an interview with a Spice Girls tribute band. She finds a hidden recruitment section in her travel supplement. She finds herself more involved in her fantasies about her job as a high class PA or a senior exec than she does about days in Barbados or Miami.

Enough. Too resentful. I want poignant…

There sits an elderly woman. She is proud, dressed in a pink, silk blouse and a smart-ish and fading suit. She has a reasonable amount of make up on. She, like us, has been waiting here for Dr. Jestico for three hours (an appointment that will last five minutes). She smiles at the nurses and declines their offers for tea and sympathy. However, she does disappear to the café from time to time. Her husband, Jonathon Buckby, was a wealthy principle of a school in Brentwood, and a landowner too. Agatha was well respected then. A hard working volunteer and part time teacher (a full time mother and part time spouse). They had had two cars, then four, then a driver. They stayed every autumn at their chalet on the Isle of Skye. They would ramble and they would fish (what a very male pastime). They would cook fish that they caught on a fire that they made, stayed in tent they put up against the cold Scottish air they had chosen. Then, they would be driven home to their two servants, three dogs and four children.

They had had private care then. A private room, a doctor called Peter and a nurse called Gillian. Then, he'd died of three heart attacks and a stroke. After the news of his passing, it turned out that some people at the school he led had come forward. Jonathon had been ‘hurting' children. Many letters came through their post box, marked with the portcullis of the law, the scales of justice. They took everything. The press had come to the house and hounded her until she'd a heart attack of her very own. A stroke too. But, without resources, she was forced to live with her only daughter that still spoke to her.

She attended the out patients clinic at King George's hospital. Today's doctor was Dr. Jestico. She could not say it but she could spell it. She missed Jonathon when the doctor asked her to disrobe. And then he gave her a cervical and breast cancer check up. He had thick but soft fingers but she still cried very quietly. Then, after very carefully applying a new layer of make up, she waited with two, elderly, dark skinned women in full length white dresses for the bus. Then she slept. Four days later, she got her wish and joined Jonathon at the Manor Park crematorium.

Dr. Jestico forgot to de-register Agatha as a patient. So, when Gavin and his wife came to their appointment, Agatha's absence meant they could be seen early that Wednesday. Gavin liked that as Scotland was playing the French at Twickenham. He enjoyed watching the match when he got home, and then he hugged his wife when she came home, all aglow from her dance lesson.

By Sam Wardham

 

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