The Waiting Room
There were three of us in the waiting room at four in the morning. The vending machine at the back was out of everything except the small packets of cream crackers that nobody wanted. The television on the wall was tuned to a news channel with the sound off and the captions on a two-second delay, so that the presenter's mouth would stop moving and then the words would catch up. The coffee machine next to the vending machine was, the night nurse had told us earlier, broken.
I was there for my brother, who had fallen off a ladder at eleven at night doing something he should not have been doing at eleven at night, and who was now, the registrar had said with an exhausted patience, being assessed. The woman in the corner, who was perhaps seventy, was there for her husband. The young man across from me, who had been asleep on his row of chairs when I had come in at one and who had woken up around three and had not really gone back to sleep, was there for his mother.
We had not spoken. This is the way of hospital waiting rooms at four in the morning. Each of us had read every poster on the wall. Each of us had checked our phones and put them away and taken them out and checked them again. The young man had a paperback with him, a thriller with a cover that had been creased so many times that the title was no longer fully legible, and he had been holding it open at the same page for