Grotesque encounter · 3 min read · Set in St. Kilda Infirmary ·
Oda Brandt in the Ward at St Kilda
A nurse on the night ward at St Kilda Infirmary opens a window for a patient who has asked for air, and the cold that comes in is a woman who swallowed a winter, who needs the window kept open and the ward kept cool, and who asks, politely, to be allowed to breathe in peace.
The night ward at St Kilda Infirmary was always too warm. The radiators were turned up high, the air was thick with disinfectant and the sweet smell of dying flowers on the windowsills, and the patients in the long white beds tossed and turned under heavy blankets, unable to sleep. Nurse Aileen Shore had worked the ward for eleven years and had learned that the only cure for the heat was fresh air. She opened the top sash of the long window at the end of the room every night at two, whatever the staff nurse said.
On a bitter February night, a frail old man in bed nine asked her in a whisper if she would open the window wider. He said he could not breathe. Aileen went to the window and pushed the sash up to its full height, and a rush of cold air swept into the ward like a tide.
It was not ordinary cold. It was white and dense and smelled of snow and iron, and it moved across the floor in a slow, heavy wave, lifting the edges of the blankets and setting the flowers trembling in their vases. Aileen stepped back. The cold did not stop at the window. It gathered itself at the far end of the ward, and shaped itself into a woman.
She was tall and pale, with long white hair and a long grey coat, and her breath frosted in the air as she stood there. Her eyes were the blue of deep ice. She looked round the ward with a calm, courteous interest, as though she were a guest who had been shown into a room that was rather too warm for her liking.
"Good evening," she said. Her voice was low and clear, with a faint northern lilt. "I'm sorry to startle you. I was only asked to come in for a breath of air."
Aileen asked her who she was. The woman smiled, and her lips were blue.
"Oda," she said. "I swallowed a winter, many years ago, to keep a village warm through a hard season. I've been trying to get it out ever since. The ward is very kind. It gave me somewhere to sit."
Aileen looked at the patients in their beds. The old man in bed nine had closed his eyes, and his breathing had eased, and a faint frost had formed on the blanket beside his cheek. The others were quiet. Most of them had stopped tossing and were lying very still, their faces peaceful, their breath coming slow and even.
"You're not hurting them?" Aileen asked.
"Only giving them room," Oda said. "A winter needs somewhere to go, when it's cold inside. I keep the window open and the air moving, and everyone sleeps better. It's only when people try to shut me out that I get restless." She glanced at the sealed window of the staff room, where a fan was humming, and her frown was not unkind. "I'd like to be allowed to breathe in peace. That's all I ask."
Aileen said she would try. The staff nurse came in at that moment, saw the frost on the floor and the open window, and started shouting about the draught. Oda turned her head, very slowly, and looked at her, and the staff nurse stopped shouting and walked quietly back to the desk.
The window has been left open every night since. The ward is cool now, the radiators barely warm, the patients sleeping well. Aileen has stopped worrying about the cold. She sits by the window at two in the morning with a cup of tea, and Oda sits beside her, very still, her white hair stirring in the draught, and the two of them listen to the snow falling silently over the infirmary roofs, and neither of them speaks, because the ward has learned to be quiet for them, and it is easier, Oda says, to breathe in company than alone.