On Bill’s side of the ward the doctors do their rounds twice daily to issue medications and advice, and not much changes until you are sent across the corridor for theatre. The light is low and claustrophobic there and the nurses hurry through a space punctuated by the slide of ventilators and infusion pumps, inhuman sounds. Bill knows this because sometimes he stops and listens when he makes his way to the shared toilets, imagining that he is moving through the holes left behind by these noises. It is a bit like swimming through the wreckage of a shipping disaster. The relief at finding yourself still there, able to swim, is tempered by the presence of things floating past, someone’s shoes they will never wear outside again, or books so waterlogged that the words bear no resemblance to the language you’ve known all your life. These things tell of another kind of sadness, something the entire ocean can’t dilute away. Bill moves through the debris and wonders how many things are falling down to the sea bed while he shuffles off for a crap.
         There is a nurse, one of the younger ones, whom he likes. Newly qualified, he supposes, because she can only do observations and basic IV work. She has a name that you don’t hear very often these days, but the morphine makes him forgetful and most of the time he can’t think what, other than it is a flower name, not one of the prettier ones. She is a pretty girl though, with pre-Raphaelite hair and skin that seems hard and bright, like she is made of diamond. He is not so far gone that he hasn’t realised this is merely a mirage of the drugs. Her cheeks are covered in a fine hair that makes him wonder about anorexia, but that could just be the drugs too, interfering with the ability of his retina to evenly process light and shade, as they also interfere with his ability to control his bladder and remember what day of the week it is. Although it has never been Bill’s thing he can see why some men like their girls to wear nurses’ uniforms, something about the knee length skirt and the little hats having the power to make the wearer both a person you would like to fuck and a person you wouldn’t mind cleaning shit off your backside, and he guesses too that some men are imagining a time far away in a chintzy bedroom where girls are dressing up together and kissing it better.

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