Conversations spun.

Now hello. Who do we have here? Are you on any medication? Have you anyone at home? Do you drink? How much on average? Ah now. Come now. A week? Liver enzymes. Sharp scratch. Deep breath. Have you slippers? A bag? Perhaps you’d like a glass of water? Oh, we are so sorry, we’ve no plastic glasses. Or water. No, no jugs either no, sorry. You can buy water bottles in the Hospital shop. No, sorry, no one has time to bring you there. It’s only on the Ground Floor. Oh, yes, you’re all lines. Well, maybe later.

‘Morning,’ said Michal Piwaski, as he walked briskly onto the Ward, cracking his pale knuckles into a thin fist. He checked his watch. Margaret Rose Sherlock was perched in the bed opposite me.

‘Morning,’ she replied to Michal and threw an eye over the cover of HELLO! magazine.

Michal Piwaski passed out my bed and busied himself fussing about Shane-no-one-caught-a-surname, my neighbour.

‘Hullo,’ Patrick Hegarty said.

‘Morning, Mr Hegs,’ Michal Piwaski replied, while tucking Shane’s chin on top of his collarbone, using one bone off the other as leverage. Unfortunately this left Shane’s narrow mouth wide open like a delicate orchid. Michal then busied himself with wiping Shane’s gaunt face vigorously with a blue washcloth.

‘Ah now, well, Good Morning, you see, isn’t it early you’re all up and about?’ Jane Lohan said excitedly, to no one in particular, and stood out of bed, grabbing on to the window frame. A breeze billowed outside, and Jane Lohan begun a half-pirouette with her arse cocked upwards.

Claire Hegarty, the attentive daughter of Patrick ‘Hegs’ Hegarty, sat directly opposite Shane, on an elaborate leather visitor’s chair, and yawned silently while scanning the middle pages of the Irish Independent. She read out yesterday’s parliamentary proceedings in Dáil Eireann to her father who began shaking his head while making disapproving noises. He was an awkward rotund sort of man-boy, balding, particularly hard to age and with a most peculiar sheen to his face.

At first it had been difficult to be so close to other humans, the unreserved way of us, for the engineering of the human body is not, sadly, inclined to modesty during illness, contrary to my own best efforts. The rationale for not being given a private room, despite paying private health insurance, had been given to Alex upon my check-in, in many loud acronyms. Private rooms are only for the most seriously infectious, MRSA, GBA, GBH, HIV, Clap, Strep, A B C D, Z-eka Virus, ADD, EBD, DTs, ALP.

Margaret Rose Sherlock put down HELLO! and picked up her ebony rosary beads, glancing her good eye over Shane as she muttered some prayers, ending loudly with The Agony in the Garden.

Then she closed down her good eye to match the bad one.

Shane’s Wi-Fi Connect?

Nice one. G’man Shane. April Fool’s Day Headlines.

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