There is something unseemly about the place itself. The nurses, talking amongst themselves, call it “gerry”—“I’m on gerry tonight,” they say, sometimes right in front of him. He doesn’t blame them, even though it’s disrespectful—he knows his face is falling in on itself, his eyes dim, his mouth slack. How are they to know that there is sentience in all this drooping flesh? He has tried telling them about the dream of Gerontius, but they don’t have time to listen to his old man’s mumble, his old-fashioned insistence on complete sentences, just briskly assume he’s mispronouncing “geriatric” and assure him, Yes, that’s where you are, Mr Low. The gerry ward.
Before coming here, he used to enjoy this part of the day—the faint chill of the air, the light mist over the field downstairs. He would make himself a cup of tea in the dim false dawn and sit at his kitchen table, listening to the neighbours beginning to wake up. The hospital is different. There is already a tinny feeling of readiness as the night shift hands over, as tureens of Quaker oats are filled and loaded onto trolleys. He tries to sit up, but that makes his sheets rustle unnaturally loudly. Only the higher-class wards are carpeted. This room has noisy tiled floors and a ceiling fan.
Not that he’s particularly eager for the day to start. After breakfast, the nurses come round with medication, and at some point in the morning he will have a sponge bath. Afternoons grind by, once the lunch trays have been cleared away and he has nothing to do. There’s a television in one corner of the room but he worries about looking in its direction, alarmed at the great chunks of time that slip away in chat shows and cookery programmes. He wonders if his face in repose takes on the same deadened look he sees in the others as they gape at the machine. He wishes he could read instead, but it’s too much effort to hold a book upright, to concentrate.
His daughter invariably arrives with the first wave of visitors at five on the dot. She has to leave work early to ensure this, and is always sure to let him know if this has meant walking out of an important meeting or letting a deadline lapse. He wants to say, You didn’t have to—but what if she takes him at his word and stops coming?
Janet is a schoolteacher—at least she was, until her talent for bureaucracy was spotted by someone high up in the Ministry. She still looks like one, with her stiff cardigans and martinet’s glasses, her hair tightly permed. Jason is faintly stunned every time he remembers his daughter is less than a decade from retirement. It seems wrong that she should be old.