Betga had been in the Intensive Care Unit anteroom for almost an hour, alternately pacing and drinking cups of water from the water cooler adjacent to the hand sanitiser. And when he wasn’t doing this he was reading the bible. There was a large, mute television suspended from the ceiling, showing what was either a news magazine show devoted to the entertainment industry or else the network’s late news program. Betga couldn’t tell and hadn’t really paid the television much attention. Instead, he’d been hoping to impress the nurse with his apparent religiosity, studying the bible he’d brought along. But this was hard given she had barely looked at him for the previous forty-six minutes.
‘Are you a religious person?’ Betga suddenly asked Nurse Penberthy outside Malcolm Torrent’s room. She looked up as though startled anyone was there.
‘What?’
‘Are you a religious person?’
‘No, used to be . . . when I first started, but it’s not really possible to remain religious after you’ve worked here for years.’
‘Is it confronting mortality day after day, does it test your faith to breaking point?’
‘Sure, it’s that and all the rest of it.’
‘“All the rest of it”? The physical toll of the work?’
‘Yes, the daily reminder of suffering and mortality, the physical toll, the fact that you can come into this career so full of enthusiasm, so well educated and trained and be so poorly treated as a matter of course.’
‘By management?’
‘By management, they who periodically line us up against the wall for rounds of jobs cuts, wave after wave of job cuts, then make those who survive do the work of all the people they’ve just fired. Then there’s being treated like dirt by the doctors and by the family and friends of the patients who don’t make it and allow their grief to morph into anger. There’s not a nurse here who hasn’t been abused in some way, verbally and physically assaulted, some of them even sexually.’
‘Jesus! I’m so sorry to hear that,’ said Betga. ‘I really . . . am.’ He glanced up at the television screen, momentarily distracted.
‘Oh, look, it’s that actress, Helena Bagshaw,’ said Nurse Penberthy, ‘the one who was sexually assaulted. She’s got herself lawyered up. Good for you, honey!’ On the screen, standing beside the mute young actress, was her new lawyer, taking questions from the press, Mike Hamilton of Freely Savage Carter Blanche.
‘You know,’ began Betga, looking away from the screen, ‘all the nurses I’ve met tell me they love what they do. They speak of the tremendous job satisfaction they get from nursing. I can’t help but admire them. And,’ he added cheekily, ‘I’ve met a lot of nurses in my time.’
‘Why, are you chronically ill?’
The woman was not easily charmed. She was too exhausted, not just by the day, but by the sum of all the suffering it had been her task to try to mitigate and by the inappreciation with which that endeavour had so often been met.
‘No, I was just trying to be funny.’
‘Yeah, you’re funny, mister,’ she said, unimpressed.
‘Betga, A.A. Betga.’
‘Look, Mr Betga, I can’t let you in to see your friend till tomorrow, no matter how much you sympathise with the plight of working nurses.’
‘I empathise, it’s better than sympathy,’ said Betga.
‘And I’m not giving you my phone number so you can put your bible away.’
‘Nurse, that was the furthest thing from my mind.’
‘Mister, I’m too busy and too tired for your bullshit. You want to know how things really are for people around here? This will probably sound crazy to you but . . . more than half the nurses here, pretty much everyone employed in the hospital, certainly everyone below doctor, most of them are absolutely terrified of losing a job they absolutely hate. Does that sound crazy to you?’
‘No, that doesn’t sound crazy to me at all.’ He looked up at the television screen. Hamilton was still there, talking.
‘If I might speak frankly, with your experience and your postgraduate training as an ICU nurse, you could really earn a packet working directly, I mean privately, for the patient, one patient, a grateful patient, say, a high net worth patient. I’m talking really high net worth, high enough to build his own hospital. You could recruit colleagues to share the shifts, take a cut as a finder’s fee and, well, you could have a much improved life, should the circumstances arise. You just need to be on the lookout for the right opportunity. Granted, the kind of opportunity I’m talking about doesn’t come every day, but if ever one does come, you wouldn’t want to miss it, Nurse Penberthy. Would you?’
She looked at him and, for the first time, paused to consider what he’d said. Then, abruptly, she turned her attention back to what she was doing. ‘I need to check on my patient,’ she told him.
Betga wondered if he’d just played his last card. He’d gone all-in and was looking to fold.
It was late and he was tired. It was not a good time to be tired.
Just then Nurse Penberthy came out of Malcolm Torrent’s room newly animated. She closed the sliding door and started walking away from both the room and Betga at speed.
‘What’s wrong?’ Betga called to her.
‘You can’t go in. I need to get the ICU registrar.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s woken up.’