Chapter 13 The New Admission

Leon Odell came in on a Monday, forty-four years old, with a tumor in his brain that had taken his balance and his appetite and would, in a matter of weeks, take his speech, and in the meantime had left him sharp and tired and furiously observant. He was a man who had driven a delivery van for a living and had a memory for routes, and his sister Daphne brought him in and stayed the first two days and then had to go back to her job two towns over, and after that he was mostly alone, which Edie came to understand was not a failure of love but a failure of ordinary arithmetic. She met him on the day shift, because she was on days. That was the arrangement she had agreed to and was already breaking, sitting up half the night in a parked car and coming in gray and hollow for the morning report, and the day shift had begun to treat her with the particular warmth people use for a colleague who is clearly unwell. Leon did not like the day. He said so on the second afternoon, when Edie brought him his tray, and he said it without any of the politeness that the newly admitted usually keep for a week. "It's too bright in here," he said. "And there's too many people being cheerful at once. I can't hear myself think about what's happening to me." "What's happening to you," Edie said. "Exactly," he said, and almost smiled. He asked her, that first day, what she did when she was not on days, and she said she was a night nurse, usually, and the answer interested him, and he asked more, and by the end of an hour she had told him more about the difference between the night and the day in a hospice than she had told anyone in a decade, and he had listened the way a man listens who has all the time in the world and no intention of wasting it. Then on the third night he rang the bell at ten past three, and the night nurse on duty did not know to sit with him, and at half past three Edie, who was parked across the road with the window down, heard the side door click and saw the night nurse come out to the wall for air, which was a thing you did at Ferrier House because you were not allowed to smoke inside and it was a two-minute break and everyone took it. Edie went in through the side door. She told herself she was not on shift, and that a visitor could come and go, and that she was only checking on a man who had asked for her, and none of that was a lie, and all of it was a cover. Leon was awake and looking at the foot of the bed. "You just missed it," he said. Edie sat down in the chair. "Tell me what it looked like." "I'm going to tell you exactly, because it's the only thing I've got left that I can do exactly." He said it with a delivery driver's precision, item by item. "One, it came down the hall and I heard the boards by the kitchen, so it came through the kitchen end. Two, the light at the far end of the hall went soft a couple of seconds before. Three, it stands at the foot of the bed, left side, and it's tall, and it wears a coat like a wet slate roof, and the coat doesn't move, there's no draught, I watched. Four, there's a smell, and the smell is oranges and old coins, and the coins are the ones you find in a drawer you haven't opened since your gran died. Five, it has something in its hand, a board or a book, and it held it against its chest and then it lowered it, the way you do when you're reading off a list. Six, it looks at the door and asks the door a question. The question is *is this one ready.* And seven" — he paused, and for the first time his voice was not level — "seven, when it said it, it wasn't looking at me. It was looking at the door, and the door was open, and you were standing in it." Edie did not move. She looked at the door of the room, which was open, which it always was, and at the corridor beyond it, which was ordinary and lit and empty. "How long," she said. "Long enough to count me," Leon said. "It turned the board over. Then it looked at you, sort of, not the face, up above you, and it said the question again, and the light came back, and it was gone, and my headache went with it." He touched his temple, carefully, as if checking whether a thing was still there. "It's gone right now. The pressure. First time in a month. That's how I know I didn't dream it, because a dream can't take a headache." Edie sat with him until the night nurse came back in and the corridor filled with the small sounds of a shift resuming its ordinary work. Then she went out to the car and sat in the dark and put her hands on the wheel and looked at them, and on the back of her left hand, where she had written nothing, in handwriting that was not hers, small and upright and patient, in blue biro gone brown at the edges, were four words. *Nearly. One more. Almost.* She did not wash it off. She drove home with it on her hand and sat in her flat with the curtains closed and looked at it in the kitchen light until the light was morning, and it did not fade, and at seven she put on a cardigan and went back to the day shift with her sleeves down and gave the report in the flat voice, bed by bed, and if anyone noticed anything about her hands they did not say, because in a hospice there are a hundred reasons for a nurse to keep her sleeves down, and none of them are anybody's business. The mark on her hand faded over the next two days, the way biro does, and she did not wash it off and did not write over it, and on the third day it was gone and she found that she missed it, which frightened her more than the mark itself had. There was a logic to being signed, she understood now, a logic the day could never be told and the night did not need explained. In a house where the living were counted by the hour, in a chart, with a time beside every name, the only thing that was not written down was the clerk, and the clerk wanted, more than anything, the one thing every worker wants at the end of a long shift, which is to know that somebody has noticed she is there. She folded her sleeves and went back to the report and did the day's work, and if she said nothing to Leon's sister when Daphne came at the weekend, it was not because she had nothing to say. It was because there is no sentence in any chart that begins *your brother saw something true*, and a nurse knows better than to hand a frightened family a thing the day cannot help them carry. ---