第6章 The Fever Queue

Orrick Bramwyk was the dispenser, which meant that he stood between the doctor's pen and the patient's mouth, and he had come to believe that most of what happened in a hospital happened in that gap, in the turning of an order into a dose, and that the turning was done by a man whom nobody counted among the staff. He had come to the Marrowden in 1911, from a chemical works in Brammoor where he had learned to weigh and mix and to keep his hands clean, and where a spill of acid had left the first two fingers of his left hand stiff and shining, so that he held his pen in a way that made people think he had been a scholar. He was forty-two that spring, unmarried, asthmatic, and exact. The dispensary was a small room off the yard with a hatch in the wall and a counter worn pale by the wrists of the poor, and in it there were shelves of bottles and jars and a set of brass scales and a stone mortar and a book of the pharmacopoeia that he knew the way a priest knows a prayer book. The doctors sent their orders down on slips, and the slips came to Bramwyk, and he made up what the slips asked for, and the queue came to the hatch, and the queue was the city. He knew the queue better than any doctor knew the wards, because the queue waited in the open and talked, and he learned the names of the streets and the seasons of the sickness from it, and he learned that a city was not one city but a hundred thousand small distances between a person and the nearest place that could help them. In the winter after the war the fever came. It came into Vessock from the docks and travelled up the canals and along the tram lines, and it killed the young, which was the thing about it that people could not get over, that it took the strong and let the old live. The infirmary filled in a week. The dispensary hatch opened at seven and by eight there was a line down the yard and out into the lane, and Bramwyk stood at the counter and made up the mixtures as fast as a man could make them up and still be sure of the measure, which was not fast at all, because a dose that is a hundred times too strong is not a cure but a poison, and the scales did not care how long the queue was. He kept a smaller book as well as the big one. The big book was the register of poisons, in which every grain of anything dangerous had to be entered and signed for, and the smaller was his own, a plain notebook in which he wrote what actually happened: that the tincture had been cut to a quarter; that this child's mixture had been made with the last of the syrup; that the man from Bellcairn Street who coughed so badly came for forty-one weeks and then stopped coming, and that Bramwyk did not know, then, whether to be glad or sorry. The register told the board what had been dispensed. The notebook told no one anything, and he kept it anyway, because he had learned young that a man should keep some record of a thing he has done that the record of it cannot be mistaken for. The thing the queue wanted most was a thing Bramwyk did not have. The doctors wrote for a tincture to ease the breathing, and the steward had two bottles of it and could get no more, because every chemist in the city was out and the wholesalers were out and the war had emptied the warehouses before the fever came. Bramwyk diluted what there was by half, and then by half again, and wrote on each bottle the strength, and the bottles kept going out into the city as though there were no shortage at all, because the difference between a dose and half a dose is not a thing a patient can feel in a winter when half the city is sick. A girl came to the hatch on the fourth day. She was seventeen and her name was Orabel and she lived in Brammoor, in the same street Bramwyk had lived in before he came to the infirmary, and she had walked from there with her mother on one side and the wall on the other, and she stood at the counter and could not speak for coughing. Her mother did the speaking. Bramwyk made up the mixture and gave it over and told the mother to bring her back the next day if the breathing was no better. The breathing was no better. The girl came back on the fifth day and the sixth, and on the seventh she did not come, because she had been taken into Ostmere Ward in the night, and on the ninth she died there with her mother in the corridor outside, because Ostmere was a fever ward and no one was let in. Bramwyk heard it from the queue, which told him everything, and he put the news where he put all the news the queue gave him, which was in the middle of the work, because the work did not stop for it. That night he did a thing he had never done in eight years. He was in the dispensary late, past ten, when a nurse came down from the corridor with a man in a chair who had been in the accident and was not going to live through the night, and the man was fighting for breath and the doctor had written for the tincture and there was none, or none that Bramwyk would admit to having, because the bottle in the cupboard was the last and was meant for the theatre list in the morning. Bramwyk looked at the slip and at the man and at the nurse, and he measured a dose from the theatre bottle and gave it, and the man's breathing eased, and the man died before dawn, which he would have done anyway, and the theatre list in the morning went without. The shortage did not pass unnoticed, and the steward counted bottles as he counted everything, and in the spring there was a small inquiry, and Bramwyk was asked whether he had dispensed the tincture without an order, and he said that he had, and gave no reason, because the reason was a man in a chair at ten at night and a nurse with tired eyes, and neither of those was a thing the board could put in a minute. The board wanted him dismissed. The steward, who was a frugal man and knew what a dispenser was worth, said that a man who could keep a dispensary through a fever was worth more than one who had never been asked to, and Bramwyk was reprimanded and kept on, and the reprimand went into his file the way a stone goes into a wall, and it stayed there. ---