3

Ahmad Qabbani removed his jacket and hung it in the staff cupboard. The day was warm but, after three years in England, he knew better than to place any trust in the weather. He had learned the hard way that even the brightest start could be smothered and drenched in the time it took to unwrap his lunch, leaving him shivering and damp on his journey home.

He opened his locker and extracted his white apron, replacing it with the one he had carried home two nights before. His third and final apron had been delivered to Aisha, his wife, for washing only last night. He repeated this process every day to ensure he was always wearing a clean uniform. Not that he got really dirty, not often anyway, but you couldn’t see most germs and he had always had a spotless uniform in his previous life, before coming to England, so why should he change things now?

Aisha didn’t complain about the washing, she didn’t complain about anything at all. She accepted Ahmad’s apron each evening, or sometimes in the mornings when he worked nights, and there was always a clean replacement folded by the front door, together with a homemade meal for every day he went to work.

Maia, the other hospital cleaner, had worked through the night; not on this floor – they didn’t clean the private rooms during the night unless they received a special instruction – but they both had their lockers up here and their cleaning materials in the store room. She had left him a note on top of the bucket; she did that sometimes, scribbled on the back of a Tesco receipt. It read ‘Mr D room 6 very sick.’ And she had drawn a sad face with its tongue sticking out.

Ahmad grinned. Some days he and Maia worked at the same times and took breaks together. She was only twenty and from Romania, and had big dreams of marrying a doctor and living in a mansion overlooking the heath. Then she would have her own cleaner. He interpreted her note as a warning both to be prepared for whatever he may have to clean up in room 6, and also to enter quietly. Ahmad always did this anyway. He had learned the hard way that English patients really don’t like to be woken up when they have ‘just got off to sleep’ even if, in reality, they spend most of the day and night snoozing.

He checked his phone for messages. Only last week the school had called to say that Shaza, his daughter, was ill and he had had to return home almost as soon as he arrived, although it was still early – not time yet for school. He switched the phone to silent; he was not allowed to take calls on the ward.

Ahmad unpacked the pie Aisha had baked for his lunch and took a moment to savour the pungent aroma of zaatar before placing it in the staff fridge. The day she had visited the local shops and bought thyme and sumac and ground up her own zaatar, he had begun to hope she had turned a corner, that things might return to some semblance of how they used to be. But even though he had zaatar pie for his lunch, with olives and a pot of fatoush salad, little else of the joy of their former life had returned. How could it?

As he placed the apron over his head, he became aware of pounding footsteps in the corridor and raised voices speaking over each other. Ahmad peered out to see the cause of the commotion. Three nurses were standing outside Mrs Hennessy’s room talking in an animated way. One of them reached her hand out to touch the door handle and then withdrew it. Then a second nurse did the same. Ahmad watched them huddled together stepping forwards and back, stretching out and retracting their arms, rather like a bizarre form of dance. Maia would have thought it funny. She would have copied them, turning it into a loud, raucous Eastern European version of the hokey-cokey.

Ahmad considered offering to help but decided against it. Sometimes the nurses were friendly but not all of them and not always. He would wait to be asked.

He collected his bucket, mop and trolley from the cupboard and checked that all his cleaning materials were intact. But then heavier steps thundered past him and he heard a deep voice he recognised as Dr Mahmood, one of the senior consultants, delivering orders. Ahmad had little direct interaction with Dr Mahmood, although he frequently saw him on the wards and corridors. On the first occasion they had come across each other, he had nodded politely. On the second, Ahmad had tried to make eye contact, had tentatively craved recognition or kinship, from this English-adopted countryman of his.

But Dr Mahmood had merely reflected Ahmad’s bow of their first encounter and averted his eyes, and Ahmad had chewed his lower lip and chastised himself for his impertinence. After that, when he saw Dr Mahmood heading in his direction he stepped back and busied himself with something else. It was better that way.