Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Mercy General ·
The Ward Called by Its Old Name
An admissions clerk hears the tannoy page a ward by the name that was struck from it in the year of the new plans, and the call is not logged at the switchboard.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "June Fairless, admissions clerk"
I am the admissions clerk for Mercy General, nights, and I have kept that desk for eleven years.
The tannoy of this hospital is old and honest. It says what it is given and nothing else, in the voice of a woman recorded in the year of the new plans, and it pronounces carefully, the way the plans themselves pronounce. The new plans are the ones that renumbered us. In that year every ward was given its number and the old names came off the boards. Rookery Ward became Nine. The doors were repainted, the lists were rewritten, and at desk level a ward is a number and a number is a door. The old names went somewhere lower down, to the plans office, which does not hurry, and there they have stayed.
At 03:12 on a Tuesday the tannoy said: sister to Rookery, please. Sister to Rookery. It said it in the recorded voice, calm, no urgency in it, the way it says the visiting hours, and then it went on to its ordinary business, theatre lists and medical staffing, the recorded woman saying theatre and staffing as if they were places too. I noted it in the day book with the time, because things said at that hour get noted at that desk or they get lost.
Forty minutes on, at 03:52, the tannoy said it again. Sister to Rookery, please. The same voice, the same volume. That is the part my book holds and I did not have to think to hold it, because ward calls are not repeated unless they have gone unanswered — that rule is in the hospital's standing instructions, and it has been in them longer than I have been at the desk; a call that has been answered is not repeated, because there is nobody left to call to.
Mr Aldous Stubbs is the night porter and keeps the porter's book in the lodge by the ramp. He logged both calls, the second with a line under it, without our comparing books. His book and mine agree word for word, time for time. That is corroboration as this hospital manages it: two hands, two rooms, one set of words, and neither of us has a reason to make a word of Rookery up, there being no Rookery.
I did the checks. The staff list holds no sister of that name and no sister posted to Nine whose name is a place. The switchboard log shows eight calls made that night, none out and none in at those minutes, and the tannoy is fed from the switchboard, so the log and the tannoy disagree at desk level, and the porter's book stands with the tannoy and not the log. The ward itself reported a usual night. Ward Nine's charge nurse was asked and said the usual, which is: quiet, two rounds, nothing asked of her.
So the books corroborate each other and the switchboard does not, and the number does not, because there is no Rookery to call a sister to — only Nine, with the old paint faintly under the new on its doors if you know to look. What my page keeps open, and what I have kept open on purpose, is the arithmetic of the two calls. Calls repeat when the first has gone unanswered. There were two. Somebody was heard from, then. I have kept this desk eleven years and I was standing three steps from the speaker at the first call, and I would like to be told who was heard from, and from where, when every board and every book in this building says the name was taken down and no place answers to it but a number that was sound asleep.