Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Mercy General ·
The Log of the Second Triage
On nights the rota strikes the second triage desk unmanned, the log shows the desk answering calls, and by every other book the callers were seen in the morning.
- filed: "after the transfer of files"
- reference: "MG/TR/11"
1. Provenance: log volume MG/TR vol. 11, received from the night registry of Mercy General among the transfer of files, spring receipt, unmarked carton four, spines damp. Purpose of this form: to examine the entries in that volume which carry the desk designation Two, and to say what a struck station is doing with hours.
2. The night triage station was kept, till recently, at two desks, by custom and by brass plate. Desk One stood on the street-door side and took walk-in and telephone together. Desk Two stood at the corridor end, its plate screwed over the junction box, its chair drawn up under the annexe window, and its hours cut off in the spring of 1979 by works notice W/341.
3. On the withdrawal of Desk Two the plate went to stores, the chair went to stores, the overflow junction was re-routed to day registry, and the rota squares for the night station were struck through in red diagonal with the word per marriage of ink and habit: unmanned. The striking is continuous from that spring to the close of the volume. There is no second strike, no second hand, no erasure; nothing in the rota to correct and nothing corrected.
4. The volume, however, continues entry lines under Desk Two after that date, and this office has transcribed three at hazard. Monday the 14th, 02.11: caller man, top of the stairs, chest going badly, advised upright, window open, kettle on; rung back 02.24, easier; set down for Sister's morning list. Tuesday the 29th, 03.04: caller woman for her mother, heart going like a bird in a closed room, advised to sit close and hold the wrist she knows; rung back 03.31, slower now; morning list. Friday the 2nd, 02.47: caller man in off the boats, hands gone numb from the freezing hold, advised warm water and to work the fingers small; rung back 03.15, waking; morning list.
5. Distribution: Desk Two lines fall on sixty-one nights of the two quarters examined, without clustering, without season the calendars would own to, even across the week as a careful rota is even. The hand is one hand the volume through, spare, unornamented, a size smaller than Desk One's entries — the hand of somebody writing to fit the ruled space, and fitting it.
6. Outcome: every Desk Two line closes with a return call, a morning list or an attended, none left open, none ruled off outside its night. Against the matching numbers, the district long book for the same dates carries, in a clerkly hand, seen at Mercy, none the worse. Callers were triaged, advised and seen; no call in the period answers twice; the two desks divide their nights like good neighbours. The arithmetic of the night is clean on both its halves. What the rota leaves out is one of the halves.
7. Identity: the ink matches the volume's own stock. Photocopies were laid before Sister Joan Pettifer, retired night sister, who could neither claim the hand nor finally exclude it. That will be the second chair getting on with its salt, she said, and then, before the tea had cooled, corrected herself: I cannot say whose hand it is. I hung my cape on that chair nine winters, that is all I know of it. Asked after the struck squares, she said the rota is about wages and not about callers, which remark this office records as sympathy and files as no evidence.
8. Plate and stores: brass plate TRIAGE — DESK TWO located in stores, tag 44, wrapped in wax cloth. Its packet card shows checked and repacked every July since withdrawal, initials in soft pencil, a different clerk each year, none of whom, reapproached, remembers issuing or being issued.
9. Disposition: volume retained under this reference, the transcriptions above being true copy. The form leaves standing, for whoever opens the carton next, the question the rota was never built to answer: a desk taken off a plan may not take calls; a log may not invent; and the callers, by every other book, were seen in the morning either way. Which one of these the Archive is asked to believe, and which two it is asked to leave out in the corridor, unmanned, till morning — the night has filed its opinion, and the desk keeps it.