Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Thornhill Surgery ·
The Register of Sleeps
A practice nurse finds the overnight register now lists one more sleeper each night than the observation ward can hold.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "Irene Vosper, practice nurse"
The night book at Thornhill Surgery is a green ledger kept in the drawer under the signing clock, and I have written it for eleven years without one line of it coming back to trouble me. Until the second of November.
We run four observation beds in the back ward, numbered from the door. Bed 1 takes the chest cases, bed 2 the sedative watch, bed 3 the elderly overnight, and bed 4 stands under the window with its head to the latch. At half past ten I enter each sleeper as she is put down: name, bed, time the lights go out. The night doctor signs opposite at his second round, and at three o'clock I do the night check and sign the small column at the foot of the page. Eleven winters of that small column have given me figures that sit flat on the line.
Since the second of November the sleepers column has carried one more figure than the ward carries beds. I counted the columns first, then the rooms, then the patients. The sum that will not sit flat is the sleepers: five lines where four beds are let. The beds are right. I have had them out and numbered them twice.
The fifth line is always bed 4, the window bed. It is entered between my lines and the doctor's, in ink of the same weight as mine, in a hand as steady as mine goes steady after forty years of prescriptions. The name is never one of ours; it is always a plain name a roll would hold without noticing — K. Meech one night, D. Purkiss the next, F. Wadland after that — spelled the way the register of births spells them, and gone by the following page. The blankets on bed 4 are turned down each evening before the first patient is brought up, and the window is latched from the inside.
At three I stand at the window bed with the torch shaded and count what breathes behind me. Four. The page says five. I do not enter testimony; I enter counts, and the count on the page is one ahead of the count on the ward, every night, without exception and without any drama to explain it.
On the twelfth I kept Dr. Prentice, the night locum, five minutes past his last round. We counted together at the foot of the ward like a pair of stock clerks: four glasses on four bed-tables, four rows of breathing, five lines of entries. He was quiet for a while and then wrote a memo, which he signed. Since then he has signed three further memoranda, one for each week the ledger has run ahead. Sister Bramwell has examined the book on two occasions and initialled the margin as a witness, and the senior partner took it home over a weekend and returned it with a paper flag set at the window entries. So it is corroborated. It is corroborated in the only way this practice corroborates anything, by counter-signature, and no signature so far has gone further than the count, because none of us has managed to put into the minute what the count is of.
I no longer write the window line out. I simply read it, and initial below it, and do the small honest additions that are left to me. Whether anyone else has confirmed more than the arithmetic, I cannot say; what I can say is that the signatures are all there now, in the file, agreeing about five and four.
What the signatures do not cover is the question I carry home along Burghley Walk each morning. If the register is never wrong about its count, and never right about a name, and the ward is never wrong about its beds, then one of those three has to give before the winter is out — and I have begun to wonder which of my four sleepers the ledger is keeping its line open for, and whether it means to close it.