Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Long Acre ·
My Eleventh Minute Chair
The waiting-room clock at Long Acre clinic has no eleven minutes past, and the steward who keeps that room would like one other pair of hands alive to say so.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: "Winnie Cropper, clinic steward"
The waiting-room clock at Long Acre clinic does not have an eleven minutes past. I am Winnie Cropper, steward here nineteen years come spring, and I am telling this to the Archive flat and plain, because there is nobody left in the room at that time of day to tell it crooked.
From ten past, the hand skips. It sits at ten past, the clock ticks the minute out like any clock, and at the next turn of the works it is twelve past, and the eleventh minute is not in the room. I have proved the room short against three keepings of the time: my own kitchen clock at home, the hall clock in the records yard, and Mr Fred Mead's factory watch, because Mr Mead is our last patient out on Thursdays and his trade was time to the second. All three keep their eleven. The waiting room does not keep it, is my finding, and I keep waiting rooms for a living.
I have one way of measuring that does not lean on any clock, and it is the broom. I do the floor in eleven strokes a minute, always have, a stroke is a stroke. At ten past I lay stroke ten down; the next thing my arm does is stroke eleven; and by the sound of the hall clock I lay stroke eleven at twelve past. The missing minute has gone somewhere between the bristles and the wall. I do not know where. The broom does not know where. The broom is not invited to speculate and neither am I, only I am paid to notice, and I have noticed.
The last patient is Mr Mead, mac and stick, eye clinic, always last, by his own arranging, and he leaves at five. At the door he looks back along the chairs the way you look back at a dog told to stay. Then I bolt the door, put out the wall lights, and on my last round I stand in the middle of the room from ten past until the clock's next turn. That is when I feel it most. The keeping of the room at that minute is a weather, that is the only word I have; the air holds itself the way a glass holds a drink somebody has not finished. And when I lay my hand flat on the middle chair at ten past, the chair gives, half an inch, the give of a seat easing under somebody taking the weight slowly. The springs are old. That is what you would write if you were writing it instead of me, and I wrote it first, and I underlined the springs.
Mr Mead leaves the room. The eleventh minute stays. I have watched the season round on that: whatever the last patient leaves of himself on the middle chair, the room is kind about it, and holds it, and at the turn of the works the room is only a room with the chairs pushed in, and my broom starts at one past with the rest of the world.
I have asked at the infirmary and I have asked at the Mercy, and the stewards there keep the eleven like anybody and they never heard myself out to the end; they were always wanted elsewhere, as stewards are. So it goes in uncorroborated, which will suit the shelving. Here is my corroboration anyway, and the Archive can take it or leave it on the same hook its badge hangs on: nobody has ever confirmed the minute to me, and nobody has ever been in that room with me at ten past, ten past, when I wanted the company. Whether that is because there is nothing to confirm, or because nobody stays to be company, is the question I am leaving in the middle chair; and I will be standing in the room either way, from ten past.