Short story · 4 min read · Set in Ostrova ·
The Three Waiting Rooms
On an island with one clinic and one long causeway, patients have begun to arrive in waiting rooms that belong, on paper, to the buildings next door, with the next buildings' queue numbers already clipped to their coats.
On Ostrova the clinic stands at the top of the hill, in buildings converted in 1974 from the coastguard house and the bakery beside it. The conversion produced two waiting rooms. Room 1 is behind the surgery door, under the poster about fish. Room 2 is past the records cupboard, where the radiator ticks. There is no Room 3. The pencil plan taped inside the drugs cabinet shows two rooms and stops there, and the caretaker's key list stops with it, so the matter is considered settled.
The annex across the yard is the bakery side nobody kept. It has been shut since 1979, when the island stopped baking its own bread, and it holds spare chairs, a flour smell, and a tea urn nobody owns up to. The harbour still keeps the annex on its schedules as a cold store, in case.
On the second Tuesday of October the district nurse found Mrs. Enid Close sitting in the annex at twenty to ten, three chairs deep, her coat across her knees and a green paper slip clipped to the lapel. The slip said No. 41. Her appointment had been for Room 2 at 9:40, and her Morris Minor had not stirred from its space by the sea wall all morning. Mrs. Close said she had kept her eyes closed on the walked-over stretch from the car and assumed she had been shown into Room 2; she had heard her number called and stood up to it, because she is seventy-four and answers to most things that sound official.
Practice manager Dilys Owen entered three facts in the day book. The slipstock was clinic issue, roll six of the 1974 printing, serial unbroken. The dart was clinic-issue green. And the annex had no queue to take a number from. The harbour's booking ledger for the annex, which the harbour still keeps against the day it reopens, opened that morning at 9:07 and showed one number taken. One queue, one number, and the number was forty-one. There is no number one anywhere in that book, and no entry to say what the first forty were.
The clinic's own roll that morning reached 26 by ten o'clock and stopped at noon on 33. None of the two ranges overlapped, and nobody could make them. After that the two rolls went on apart, the clinic on its own arithmetic and the annex on whatever the annex is on, and the fortnightly totals agreed at the foot of the page the way totals agree when nobody watches them closely, which is the part Mrs. Owen does not care to think about on the ferry home.
It kept on. Mr. Ronald Beake came up for a dressing and was received in the school entrance lobby, seated, No. 12 clipped to his sleeve; the caretaker's chalk line there had counted to 11 by nine sharp, so 12 was, on the school's own books, next. A week later a man sent for his lungs was found waiting in the loan library's annexe with No. 7 clipped to him, though the library had issued nothing that day. By the first frost it had happened eleven times in five buildings, and the buildings were never the same twice. What stayed constant was the clipped number being, by that building's own quiet count, next.
Dr. Marsh wrote to the county surveyor for the 1974 plans, in triplicate, and the reply came back courteous. The county plans draw the annex in as Room 3 of the clinic. The annex's own plan of record, drafted the same week by the same office, draws the clinic in as the annex's Room 3. Each building, on paper, is the next one's waiting room. Nobody at the surveyor's could locate which building the first room stands next to. The correspondence stopped there, at the first room, more or less politely, and the file was closed on the grounds that both plans were certified.
The practice adapted as practices do. There is a second clipboard now, and a second dispenser, and the laminated cards put up in 1974 have been copied out by hand in three rooms: WAIT HERE TO BE CALLED. The patients tear a slip, clip it where the darts reach, sit. Islanders do not ask the clinic to explain its buildings; they ask it for plasters and certificates, and are given both.
Mrs. Close comes monthly now, with her heart pills and her hearing. She clips her own slip, because the darts are easier than pins. Last month she told Mrs. Owen, in the kindly tone people keep for the institutionally embarrassed: they call you when it's your turn, you only have to be listening.
At the foot of October's page Mrs. Owen keeps the running total the county wants, and beneath it the question she was told not to write and wrote anyway, in pencil, small. The annex ledger opened at 9:07, before anyone on the island was due anywhere, and its first number was 41. What was 41 called for?