‘Sharon,’ said Nurse Emily Fitt, patiently, ‘now, Sharon, if you don’t swallow this tube, you will die.’
‘Want to die,’ said Sharon. And then she called her lover’s name aloud, so that the sound bounced back from pale-green walls, up and down the casualty cubicles, softened by stacked cardboard boxes (labelled ‘Cardiac Infibulation’, or ‘Tracheotomy’, or ‘Paediatric Artery’ or whatever) but sharpened by racks of stainless steel, upon which were stacked instruments for the cutting and closing of human flesh.
‘Darren! Oh Darren, save me!’
‘Look,’ said Nurse Emily Fitt, who wore a badge claiming ‘a legend in her time’ on her tidy uniform, and whose face was neat and intelligent and composed – she was all of twenty-four – ‘Look Sharon, just swallow this tube or you’ll go into liver failure and die. Do you understand?’ But all Sharon did was shriek for Darren again and then clamp her mouth shut against the intrusive poking pale-yellow tube. Sharon was seventeen. She wore laddered black tights and a bra. They’d stripped her of everything else. She’d drunk a bottle of sherry, a bottle of whisky and a bottle of wine during the course of the evening, and taken twenty-five paracetamol tablets, a whole bottleful, for love of Darren, who had taken Debbie to the cinema instead of her.
Darren was nineteen, and sitting out in the waiting room, reading the sports page of last Saturday’s Sun. I’d noticed him earlier when I took my turn to wait for attention. He had acne and cropped pale-reddish hair. What he thought it was impossible to tell. He did not stir. If Sharon’s voice had reached him he was deaf to it. Or perhaps it just bored him. He’d heard it too often.
‘Sharon,’ said Nurse Fitt, ‘we want to help you but if you don’t make an effort yourself we can’t.’
I lay in the next cubicle, in no urgent medical need, and listened. The curtains between us were open. Sharon went into fits of bitter weeping. ‘Oh Darren, Darren, my heart is breaking.’ I believed her. I’d cried like that myself, in my time.
Sister Radice, all bosom and big dark eyes, fetched me a cup of tea. I was privileged. I had responded to medical treatment and could now be sent home. I was waiting to be fetched. ‘These girls,’ she murmured, ‘they don’t know how dangerous paracetamol is. They take it by the handful. We do our best but sometimes they don’t make it. I blame the drug companies.’
‘Oh, Darren, Darren,’ cried Sharon, lovesick Sharon, and tears came to my own eyes.
‘I want to go to the loo,’ yelled Sharon, suddenly, furiously, like the spoilt and naughty child she was.
‘Not yet, not yet,’ said she who was a legend in her own time, ‘it can wait. Just swallow the tube.’
‘It can’t wait,’ said her patient nastily. ‘What am I supposed to do, wet my pants?’
‘Better than dying,’ said Nurse Emily, but Sharon didn’t agree.
‘Leave me alone,’ Sharon begged, ‘leave me to die.’
‘Look,’ said Nurse Emily, who was little more than a child herself, but at least was sensible, ‘if you die your parents will go mad.’
‘They’re mad already,’ said Sharon, cunningly. ‘They hate Darren anyway.’
‘Not surprised,’ muttered Emily Fitt. ‘So do I.’
Sharon’s sick soaked into a newspaper on the floor. They’d made her vomit when the ambulance came in; given her an emetic before she’d had time to protest. The young doctor (Dr Angus Love, according to his lapel badge, but how could one be sure? Perhaps they made their names up?) had poked through the mess, fish and chips swirling round in sherry, whisky and wine, but only found four paracetamol tablets, half-disintegrated, which meant there were another twenty-one left inside her. She’d have to be stomach-pumped, but a conscious patient, when it comes to it, is more difficult than one in a coma. He’d left the job to Emily. He was busy. Everyone was.
‘I say,’ said Sharon, plaintively, between shrieks and sobs. ‘I feel rather sick.’
‘I expect you do,’ said Emily Fitt. ‘Sick to death. Swallow the tube!’
‘You want to hurt me.’
‘We don’t want to hurt you. Why should we want to hurt you?’
‘Because you don’t like me,’ said Sharon, acutely. ‘Because I love Darren! Darren, save me! Let me see Darren. Please, let me see Darren.’
‘No,’ said Nurse Emily Fitt, and the department filled again with the sound of Sharon’s noisy distress, and Sharon’s furious little laddered and holed foot banged against the partition wall and saline drips everywhere trembled and faltered, and heart monitors, over-sensitive, gave perfectly absurd readings.
‘I love Darren. I want to die for Darren!’ cried Sharon.
‘Just shut up, will you,’ said Nurse Emily. ‘If you think I haven’t better things to do than look after you, you’re mistaken. There are children in casualty. You’re scaring them to death carrying on like this. You don’t want to frighten little children, do you?’
‘I love Darren,’ shrieked Sharon. ‘Fetch me Darren, you bitch!’
‘Swallow the tube.’
‘No. Wont.’
‘Die then,’ said Nurse Emily Fitt, and she went off to attend to a heart attack (or so he feared) and a young woman with an abscess on her Fallopian tube (or so she said, and she was certainly grim and white with pain and would swallow anything at all, even poison, to put a stop to it). I was formally discharged.
‘Goodbye,’ said Nurse Emily Fitt, cheerfully, escorting me to the door.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘tell her if she dies Debbie will get Darren.’
‘That’s an idea,’ said Nurse Emily, but I didn’t think she was going to go back and say any such thing. I had a feeling that if young Dr Love didn’t return quite promptly from the broken back (I’d heard them. Mother of three, drunk, backwards out of a first-floor window. The doctor, slowly and clearly: ‘Mrs Able, do you understand? Try to listen. You are in hospital. You fell out of a window and have broken your back. We are admitting you’) to look in on Sharon, she would simply go into liver failure and die, and Nurse Emily would be busy elsewhere, and Sister Radice would break the news to Darren, who would look up from the sports page and be quite astonished, if so strong an emotion were available to him, which I rather doubted, at what could happen if you took Debbie to the cinema one Sunday night, instead of Sharon.