The Call Bell

The third-floor staircase smelled different. Colder, and underneath the cold a faint sweetness, like cut flowers a day past their best. The torch beam showed me bare treads, a handrail thick with dust, and at the top a fire door propped open with a folded towel — propped, I noticed, from the third-floor side. Someone up here had wanted to come and go. The corridor beyond was the twin of the one downstairs. Same blue carpet, though here it had gone the colour of an old bruise. Same doors, same numbers on small enamel plates. But the air did not move, and the silence was not the silence of an empty place. An empty place is restless — pipes, settling timber, the small complaints of a building cooling at night. This silence was attentive. It was the silence of a room that has heard the door open and is waiting to see who came in. The call bell for room 31 was still chiming. I could hear it now without the panel, a real sound coming from a real room, thin and sweet down the dark length of the corridor. I followed it. 28. 29. 30. The doors were shut. And then 31, and its door stood open, and a low light burned inside that was not my torch. It was a bedside lamp. An ordinary bedside lamp with a yellowed shade, switched on, and by its light I saw a hospital bed made up with clean sheets, a water jug, a chair, a window boarded over from the inside. And in the bed, propped on pillows, an old woman, small and neat, her white hair brushed, her hands folded on the turned-down sheet. Her thumb rested on the call button. As I stepped into the doorway she lifted it, and the chiming stopped, and the silence afterward was enormous. "There you are," she said. "I've been ringing and ringing." I have been a nurse for twenty-six years. The body knows what to do before the mind has finished arguing. I crossed to the bed, I checked the water jug, I said, in the voice I use for frightened patients at three in the morning, "I'm so sorry to keep you waiting. I'm Della. What do you need, my love?" She smiled at me. Her eyes were a pale, washed blue, and they were kind, and they were the eyes of a person who has been alone for a very long time and has learned to be patient about it. "I need you to do the rounds properly," she said. "All the rooms. They don't, you see. The new ones. They do downstairs and they pretend up here is empty, and it isn't, it isn't empty at all, and we ring and we ring." She patted the sheet beside her hand, a small tidy gesture. "What's your name again, dear?" "Della." "Della." She tried it, the way Mrs. Cardew downstairs tried her sister's name. "You wrote us in the book. I felt it. The others never wrote us down. You can't discharge what isn't written, that's the thing nobody understands. We were never discharged, Della. We were just stopped being written." I should have been afraid. I want to be honest with you about every part of this, and the honest part is that I was not afraid, not of her. I looked at that small brushed-haired woman with her thumb resting near the button, and what I felt was the thing I have always felt walking into a room where someone has been waiting too long for help. I felt that I was late. I felt that it was my fault for being late, and that the least I could do, now that I was finally here, was stay long enough to find out how many of them there were. "Tell me your name," I said, and took the chair beside the bed, and got out the small notebook I keep for things the official logbook is too narrow to hold. "Edith Fern," she said, and her folded hands tightened with something that I realise now was relief. "Room thirty-one. Oh, it's good to be written down. Now. Shall I tell you about the others, or shall we start the rounds?"