Netwrck
Fiction.
Shift Starts at Ten
The ward went quiet at ten. The visitors left in a trickle, carrying their coats and their plastic bags and the strange cheerfulness of people who had done what they came to do. The nurses gathered at the station and handed over the day in lowered voices. The lights came down, one bank at a time, until the corridor was lit only by the little green glow above each door and the slow blue moon of the television in the day room, which no one watched anymore.
Then Vera pushed her trolley in from the lift, and the quiet floor got quieter still.
She worked nights because she had always worked nights, since she was twenty-two and a cleaner at the bus depot with a husband who slept days and a child who slept never. Nights were the hours that belonged to her. She emptied the bins and mopped the tiles and changed the paper towels, and she knew, better than anyone in the building, who was awake and who was not.
The man in room 14 was awake. He was always awake. The nurses had given up on him by midnight, because he did not want the sleeping tablet, and because the light was too bright, and because the door wanted to be ajar in one particular way. Vera came past and he said what he said every night.
"You are the only one who works."
"The nurses work," Vera said.
"They talk. You work."
She pushed the mop around his doorframe, and the floor came up clean and grey, and she did not correct him, because it was true that there was a difference, and it was not a thing he would have understood if she explained it.
The Apron
His name was Geraint, and he had been a teacher. Vera had not known this until the third week, when she had come in with a clean apron and he had looked at the stitching, the way she did it, double-stitched because a single row popped in the hospital wash.
"My mother used to do that," he said.
"Did she."
"She was a cleaner. She did the office block in Macneill."
Vera had gone on mopping. "What did she teach you?"
"Nothing I was ready to learn."
That was how they started, if that is the word for talking to a man at one in the morning through a half-open door while you ran a mop over tiles. He had taught for forty years. He had a voice that carried, even now, even sick, and he used it on her the way she supposed he had used it on classrooms of children, which was to ask a question and to wait.
"What does a man do," he said one night, "when he has learned everything he knows and it turns out he has taught it wrong?"
"Stop teaching," Vera said.
"I have."
"Then stop worrying."
He laughed, one note, and then the rattling came and he had to wait for the night nurse to turn the little tap by his bed. Vera stood in the corridor with the trolley and did not move. The instrument panel over his bed counted and blinked.
When it settled, he said, "You are good at the quiet."
"I have had practice."
"Was your husband quiet?"
"No."
"And you got used to it."
"I got used to the noise. Then I had to get used to the quiet. I am unused to both."
It was more than she had said to anyone in years, and she said it to a dying man in a green-lit room with a mop in her hand, and it felt, strangely, like finishing something.
Room 20
There was one night she did not go past room 14. It was the night room 20 had its turn to be quiet in a different way, and the family stood in the corridor in a huddle that did not speak, and Vera took the trolley around the long way and emptied the kitchen and came back with the machine and the family had gone, and the ward was still.
She was at the sluice when Geraint found her, which was the only time he had ever left his room. He came down the corridor in his hospital gown with the drip stand, the wheels clicking, slow as a man walking through water.
"You did not come past," he said.
"There was a death."
"Yes."
"I do not push the trolley past a death."
He looked at her. "Why not?"
"Because it is not my work. It is their work. I will be back tomorrow and it will be a room again."
He considered this for a while. Then he said, "That is the kindest thing I have heard in this place."
She pushed past him with the machine and he let her. The drips stand clicked behind her. At the far end of the corridor she thought: he will do it wrong, that, he will think I am being kind, but I am not, I am only being careful, and careful is what I am paid for. She was wrong, and she did not know it then, and she would not find out until the summer, which is when the hospital sent her a letter from a man's solicitor, and she sat in the break room with her tea going cold and read it twice and understood that some people see the thing you have been trying to hide your whole life, which is that you are good, and they see it because they stopped expecting anything and you never once asked for anything, and that is the only way it can be seen.
The Last Night
On his last night, Geraint had her turn the light on, the big one, the one the nurses had told him was too bright. Vera turned it on. It filled the small room and the green glow went quiet, and he lay there and looked at the ceiling, and she stood in the doorway with her trolley and let him have his light.
"You are still there," he said.
"Yes."
"You have mop water in your bucket."
"It is soap, not mop water."
"Then it is not mop water. You can tell. You are the kind of person who can tell."
She did not answer. She stood and watched him go to sleep in the bright light, the first time he had slept, as far as she knew, in the six weeks she had known him. The panel counted and blinked and settled.
Vera turned the light off, and the green glow came back, and she pushed the trolley on down the corridor and did not stop again at room 14, because there was nobody in it who needed to be told that the floor was clean.
She got them all, in the end. That was the thing about the night shift. You got them all, one at a time, and you kept the floors clean, and you kept your own counsel, and you went home in the morning and slept, and the hospital filled and emptied and the days folded over each other like a mop stroke, and the whole of it was not nothing. It was not nothing at all.
