It Won't Hurt a Bit (23 page)

I peered down on a glass slide and could see little other than a wriggly comma.

‘What’s that?’

‘A sperm!’ They sounded like a pantomime act.

I peered again but it had disappeared.

‘It’s gone.’

‘Well it must be somewhere,’ the doctor replied looking round the room.

Between worrying about the lost sperm and getting a dawning awareness of the importance of football, the days drifted past. Even if typhoid raged, with any patient found collapsed taken to Casualty, immediately presumed to have the disease, then carted off to the City Hospital – the designated hospital for treatment – I saw none of it and heard even less whilst Aberdonians, trusting their medical services, just went calmly about their business.

The class’s feeling of importance dwindled too when we realised we were only covering wards to allow more experienced staff members to work in the typhoid wards. My work seemed especially limited but at last the great day came when I was allowed to take off venous blood.

Mrs Low had given the impression this was akin to brain surgery. She said that we could mistakenly inject air into the patients’ systems and floor them – surely a contradiction in terms. I’d been anxious about doing it, even though neither patient nor technician considered it important enough to take their attention from the seemingly eternal fascinations of the Dons and their fortunes. I located a vein, closed my eyes then pressed on the needle of my hypodermic.

As the blood welled satisfactorily into the syringe, it was acknowledged that this was my first time.

‘Same with me,’ said the patient, grabbing back his arm, ‘and yes, I’ll tell the wife she’ll need to come in as well.’

I watched the spivvy, swaggering, macho figure leave, adjusting his storyline and righting his brilliantined coif in some window glass, discreetly darkened but surely not designed for that purpose.

‘What do you think he’ll tell her?’ I asked.

‘Oh, the usual yarn about toilet seats, though the more imaginative can blame bicycles. We have been known to put in bicyclitis as a diagnosis if people can’t accept the official line. Still, we should be glad he’s told her. She wouldn’t know otherwise – not until it’s too late and nothing can be done. Venereal disease is not a pretty sight.’

There followed much sighing and rustling of newspapers. A knuckle was thoughtfully chewed.

A small young woman appeared next day, as bedraggled and dowdy as a wet sparrow. She crept into a far corner, neat, cross-ankled and anxiously clutching a red plastic purse like a talisman, bright against the darkness of her worry. She looked an unlikely partner to yesterday’s bold boyo but her concern for him was real.

‘My James’s right unlucky. He catches everything that’s going,’ she said, meekly surrendering her arm, ‘and I suppose I’ll have to have the examination as well?’

If only she had had some of the self-confidence of Bella Bliss, our most dedicated regular. If a howling gale had met her up an Aberdeen close, it would have been the first to change direction. She had the lines of a majestic ocean liner complete with multi-national flags, handy for helping with ambassadorial hospitality in this seaport city. Even her magnificently sculpted hairstyle had been nailed into submission, remaining constant despite the many ‘wee clinic checks in case I catch typhoid’ she insisted on having. She appeared at least once weekly, more if it was raining, and was never in any hurry to leave. I was reluctant to challenge such frequency, as was the staff, since Bella’s black, flashing eyes and mighty hands ruled out discussion.

‘Why do you think Bella comes here so often?’ I asked as a bang, crash and curse announced yet another appearance.

‘It’s a break from her street work, she likes the warmth, the attention, and of course she takes home the magazines. You know we always send you out for replacements after she’s been. We’d have thought you’d have noticed that – you read plenty of them.’ The doctor was condescending, then he folded his own intellectual paper and scratched his head in a perplexed way. ‘But truth to tell, she’s coming in just a bit too often – she’s killing off our other trade. They’re terrified of her. We’re going to have to tone her down a bit.’

Stung by his observation and my lack of it, I should have realised why in all weathers she wore a red coat so massive it must have been bought in a tent shop. It could probably hold a bookshop. The sparkly butterfly fastener could have come from a less mundane outlet, but the toning down of Bella Bliss defied imagination.

‘I’m just thinking of my clients and with this typhoid thingie you can’t be too careful,’ she explained as she made her usual entrance accompanied by jangling bracelets and high heels so staccato she could have been a flamenco dancer.

I fully realised then the role of chaperone as I caught Bella giving both technicians a measuring eye. She headed straight for an examination room and seemed surprised I was following.

‘I think you’re only due a blood test, Bella,’ I said, hiding behind her medical notes.

‘Miss Bliss to you,’ she returned, stepping out of her fishnets and continuing to undress. Big knickers crashed to the floor. ‘Now just you run along like a good little nursie and tell the boys I’m ready.’

I didn’t fancy arguing with an Amazon and neither apparently did the boys, for they were showing all the signs of a pack on a planning mission and far too busy to attend their sole patient.

After some discussion, the doctor was transformed from a friendly dog into a wise but impersonal clinician whilst the kindly technicians became Rottweilers.

Dr Dog stood outside the examination room and spoke in a voice loud enough to be heard in Casualty: ‘Nurse Macpherson, on no account are you to leave this patient’s side. We’ll also get a staff nurse from another clinic, and we’ll attend to you in just a moment, Miss Bliss.’

Silence fell as he shut himself away to make a private phone call. The guard dogs planted themselves outside his office, ears cocked and grim of countenance.

‘What’s keeping the boys?’ said Bella at last, her sighs and gusts of irritation beginning to reach gale force. ‘See – if I’ve to wait any longer, I’ll start looking for them myself.’ Her hands curled into steel balls.

Incarcerated with her I began to panic. I was trapped with an impatient woman who took up so much room it was getting sweaty. The outside silence grew louder. I mopped my brow.

‘There better be somebody here in the next five seconds,’ Bella growled, ‘or –’

I was planning an exit strategy when the staff nurse appeared at the door, so large, she blocked it.

‘Miss Bliss?’ She approached, running a practised eye over our patient, who was already regarding the big feet, bigger hands and suggestion of a moustache with a suspicion that made her reach for a blanket to cover her shoulders, her sledgehammer hand protecting the seafaring tattoos.

‘Right, Miss Bliss, we’ll have you out of here in no time at all. The doctor here has been giving me training for examinations and it’ll just take a second. I don’t think we’ll need anybody else here other than the student nurse. She’ll need to learn too.’

Had she done an air kick and cracked her knuckles she couldn’t have been more threatening as, donning the biggest size of rubber gloves and picking up the clinic’s most treasured female investigative gynaecological/gardening kit, Nurse Powerful advanced.

‘Well maybe I’ll just not have anything. You can just go and find another guinea pig.’ Bella flew off the couch, flattening me against the wall whilst tussling to put her clothes back on. A fish scale, bright as a sequin, fell at her feet. ‘Ah’m off!’ Her coat flew behind her like a parachute but didn’t slow her. Perhaps being magazine-free helped to speed the process but certainly Bella could shift.

‘You’re killing trade but I’ll be back, see if I won’t!’ she yelled, shaking her fist at the kennel door. ‘And I’ll be taking my sailors with me.’

‘Good. That’s what you must do,’ growled the doctor, all but marking his territory.

Maisie and I were supposedly studying. In the face of ferociously good hygiene and practice, typhoid had packed up and left a city with a clean bill of health, immaculate public toilets and us back in Block. If we passed its exam we would graduate to purple belt, second-year status.

‘We can’t fail this. I couldn’t stand repeating another month of sitting in a lecture theatre hearing doctors droning on. Speak about being bored to death!’ Maisie slapped down her textbook, her hand searching in the digestive biscuit packet beside her. ‘At least the nursing tutors kept us awake. Who’d have thought there were others as good as Jonesie and Mrs Low and that learning to set a trolley for a lumber puncture would be such an inspiration?’

Flames danced in the fireplace. I was lost in a reverie wondering where the year had gone.

‘You’re thinking about eating that last biscuit.’

‘No, I’m not. I was just thinking how depressingly relevant the lecture on varicose veins was.’

‘Well, I suppose sitting down for a month will have given them a rest.’ Maisie made the ultimate sacrifice. ‘Come on, Jane, take the biscuit and just think of the ignominy of failure and Rosie in a purple belt.’

With incentives like that, we couldn’t, mustn’t, and didn’t, fail.

In triumph I rang home with the good news.

Mum sounded pleased. ‘We’ve been more worried about the typhoid business. The papers made it sound like the plague, but there’s you getting through it as well as passing another milestone. Good girl!’ Then unable to resist it, ‘We never had such good news when you were at school.’

To celebrate I bought an apple-green velvet dress with a price tag so large I could have worn it instead, and some might have preferred it if I had. With the city banning public gatherings and the Palace Ballroom dances cancelled, medical parties were the only social outlets.

Unfortunately, I’d been asked at the clinic to take the occasional walk well away from it. ‘We’re frightened you might recognise the person coming in,’ the technicians had explained. Swapping curiosity about clients for distrust and remembering Matron’s morality lecture, I wasn’t keen on anybody in the medical profession getting close.

In a bid to cover suspicion with sophistication, I practised smoking in front of a long mirror.

‘You just look silly,’ said Maisie. ‘Have you seen yourself?’

Still, I persevered whilst the purple belt comforted. It meant I must know something and surely entitled me to lord it over any grey ones. However, my next move was to Casualty where lack of accommodation in Woolmanhill meant there weren’t any.

I began to worry about running the department. I was, after all, a very new purple belt, but as soon as I passed through that busy main door Mr Morgan, the charge nurse, put me straight.

He was bald with compensatory bushy outcrops covering his ears, a luxuriant moustache and an easy air of command over the exciting world that, in earlier days, I’d believed was everyday hospital life. With a nice line in music, he would sing in a pleasant tenor to divert the afflicted from the copious blood, vomit, broken bones, buckets and basins that were the everyday ingredients of this busy place. Ambulances, their blue lights flashing and horns blaring, were forever screeching to the main entrance, and always there was Mr Morgan or his staff who would restore calm from chaos, and knew when to despatch the most dire emergencies back into the ambulances and onward to Foresterhill.

Sometimes I’d get to be the accompanying nurse and felt guilty that flashing through red traffic lights at break-neck speed made my pulse race with excitement on a par with that of a patient in a serious condition.

Meanwhile, Mr Morgan would be in full voice. ‘A wandering minstrel I,’ he would warble, then, just as his patients were leaving, restored and smart in neat herring boned bandages, he’d despatch them with another refrain, ‘A thing of shreds and patches –’

‘Can I get a shot?’ I asked one day, as he was set to treat a patient’s sprained ankle.

‘I’d rather he did it.’ Uneasy in these surroundings and suspicious of my interest, the old man nodded at Mr Morgan, whilst his hand beat its own trembling rhythm.

‘I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor,’ sang the resident vocalist, ‘the lassie has to learn, otherwise, she’ll never learn.’ He handed over the bandage, still crooning, ‘and I polished up the handle.’

The patient looked doubtful. ‘I think it’s getting better.’ He struggled up, his face bright red with the exertion, then fell back in his chair, the air whistling in his lungs and making him gasp. ‘Well, ok then, but only if you don’t start that confounded racket again.’ Mr Morgan looked hurt and stroked his moustache as if to comfort it.

I advanced, crepe bandage in hand and wound, like carding wool, a yard of it round the purpling foot.

‘You’re trying to mummify me,’ grumbled the patient, ‘and how’m I going to get my sock on?’

‘I’ll flipe it for you. See?’ I turned the rancid article half inside out.

A gold tooth gleamed as the old man relaxed. ‘I hivna heard that word since ah wis a loon.’ He leant forward in a matey way. ‘Ye must be gey auld fashioned.’

‘Jist a country quine,’ I said, feeding the sock over his toes and stretching it so that it covered the bandaging. ‘Look! It’ll act as a compress too.’

‘Take a pair of sparkling eyes,’ burst out Mr Morgan, helping him to his feet and out the door.

I improved so much at bandaging that the arrival of the tubular bandage with its neat, bombproof way of application was a great blow. Maybe I could shine at reception skills.

‘That’s me off for my lunch break,’ Miss Lettuce and Yoghurt announced, coming from behind her glass screen where, in her secretarial capacity, she recorded everybody’s particulars. ‘Somebody will have to take my place.’

‘Let me,’ I said and put my cap aside. I had neither her figure nor face, but once ensconced I found it easy to find out the necessary details.

‘Married?’

‘Yes.’

‘Age and occupation please.’

‘Why do you need to know that?’

‘Just curious.’