Entity story · 4 min read · Set in Alder Hill ·
Breathe With It
In a hospital basement the ferns breathe in time with the ward above, and the night porter who waters them has begun to notice how the largest one chooses.
The garden was planted in 1961 for morale, which is a word that appears once in the hospital's minutes and never again. It sits two floors beneath the respiratory ward, a long room under strip lights, ferns in low ranked beds below a green-striped awning of glass, the humidifier sighing in the corner at fixed intervals. Brass nameplates at the end of each bed of fronds, numbered to match the beds above: 1 through 24. The bed plaques are polished by hand. Nobody remembers agreeing to that either.
The fronds move. Not with the draught. They curl and uncurl, slow and measured, and by 1971 the night porters had noticed the rhythm was not the ferns' own. It was the ward's. A fringe over bed 7 breathed at the rate of the patient in bed 7, to within half a breath a minute, and if bed 7 slept, bed 7's fern slowed with it. The porters began to keep a rate log on a clipboard by the humidifier. The log has never once been lost, and this in a hospital that loses annual leave forms in the same year it prints them is, in Emeka Nwosu's opinion, the first strange thing.
The second was learned by his predecessor's predecessor and passed down on the first night, along with the keys: the ferns go quiet *ahead* of the patients. A frond that drops its rate before the corresponding chest does is the earliest sign the ward will get, and there is no signlier one, and so the porters' rate log gets walked up two floors every night at 02:00 and 04:00 and read out flat, like a shipping forecast, to whoever is holding the floor. The nursing staff copy the numbers without asking how they were taken. It has been worth knowing for fifty years.
The third thing was the large fern.
It stands at the end of the lowest bed, darker than the rest, older in the frond, and its breathing does not match anybody in the ward above, and did not when it first took up a rhythm in a summer nine years ago. It develops its own pace — slower than anyone on the ward, deliberate as a sleeper dropping off — and it keeps the pace, night after night, whatever the ward does. Nwosu learned the rest of its history from a page of the log kept folded behind the clipboard: the patient in the bed above it then had been a year unresponsive, and the year the fern started, the patient began to breathe with it, and stabilised for fifteen months, and when the fern wilted one dry August — nobody had watered it; the rota had lapsed at the holidays — the patient died within that same hour. The rota was reinstated. The rota has initials now at the foot of every page.
Nwosu keeps his night on the rota like any other duty, but he has begun, without filing it anywhere, to stand near the large fern first. He checks the humidifier, notes the rates, and then stays — out of what he would call thoroughness — and watches the fronds lift and settle. In his first winter he watched too long. His own chest settled to the room without being asked, down to the slow count, and he stood there matching it for the length of a cigarette he did not smoke, feeling his breathing borrowed and quietly returned. Then he went up to the ward.
The morning after, he was handed the usual overnight line at handover: bed 14 had had the best night in a month. He said nothing about the fern. Bed 14 had had six days of everything tried and nothing working, and Nwosu had walked into the basement at a quarter past one and found the large fern holding its slow, unscheduled rhythm, and bed 14's plaque — he could see it from the door — was the one nearest that end of the trough.
He watered it. He initials the rota. The rate log shows, that night, a column of ordinary figures with one figure stood apart from the rest.
There is a theory among the porters about which patient the large fern will settle on next, and how it reads the ward to make the choice. It is not written down. It is not spoken at handover. It is passed, when it must be, in a nod at the humidifier and a number under the breath. The facts behind it are patient enough: never the youngest, never the loudest, never the one the family has already chosen flowers for. And the porters take turns sitting with it, one hour, no schedule anywhere, the turns arranged in the car park.
Nwosu waters the large fern and writes his rate in the log and initials at the foot of the page. It has never been anyone's turn yet, in nine years of turns, to find a frond settling at the pace of his own chest.
He begins each shift by holding two fingers inside his own wrist, and wondering whose bed the plaque by that fern is really numbered to, and whether, on the night it stops being numbered at all, the ward will be told.