Waiting Room

He shifted his shoulders so that the frayed cuff-edge of his old blue suit rode up above his battered wristwatch exposing its weathered face. The glass had so many scratches on it that it actually appeared cloudy. He had to squint to make out the hands. He had been sitting here for just over six hours.

He stared at the watch for a while after he had actually ascertained the time. He was looking at the watch itself. It was a fairly cheap timepiece, and the fact that it still worked fifteen years after it was first purchased, said a lot about the purchaser. They say a gift bought with a good heart is worth more than a gift with a great price tag. His wife had bought it for him when he was working out in Sasol. She had told him to remember her every time he looked at it. As he sat on that wooden bench he thought of nothing else but his wife. For all of their lives together it was her that had waited for him, and now it was his turn to wait for her. There are two predominant emotions when it comes to waiting for anyone or anything. Fear and Hope. The fear is a constant which grows with each passing moment. It normally manifests itself in a question which you keep asking yourself over and over, each time a little more anxiously. Did he remember to pick me up? Are they going to say yes? What will the results be? Hope sears into your brain suddenly, dispelling the fear, in an exhilarating rush as you see a car that looks like his, or the phone rings. It is hope that will eventually break your spirit, not the fear.

Around him the waiting room went on about its daily business. It’s strange that a room that’s name implies such pensiveness is always the most frenetic. Patients shuffled through its narrow walkway, while nurses ducked impatiently around them sometimes chastising them for their lethargy. Little children played nonsensical games, while their mothers snapped at them half-heartedly, her mind pre-occupied with the business of waiting. The industrial strength detergent used to wipe the walls and floors barely concealed the smell of dried blood and excrement. Babies’ cries mingled with the anguished moans of the injured and inflicted, to create the official theme song of the Public Hospital Waiting Room. Cheap make-up ran down tear-streaked faces. Lips were pulled back from yellow teeth in grimaces of pain, as ruined legs were hoisted onto rickety beds. Wheelchairs were pushed in and out of the swinging doors. Some carrying broken bodies with little hope of repair, others were carrying bodies which had just received an extension on their expiration dates. There were hundreds of people in that room with him. Even though the reasons were different, almost to a person, the fear was the same. Few of them dared to hope.

He had always worked away from their modest home. They had never measured time apart in minutes or hours, but rather in weeks and months. He would come home from these blue-collar expeditions and find the calendar on the wall in the kitchen marked with notes in her neat handwriting. Sometimes he would flip back the pages and read them. He always noticed how the notes become more detailed and the tone more excited, as the date of his most recent return had approached. Those notes were to him both intimate and expressive. The fact that she put them up right there in the kitchen for all to read made him feel both proud and ashamed. He would imagine her sister or a friend reading the same paragraph he was reading at the time, and blush. He had thought sometimes to take a pen and write a response next to her words but those calloused hands of his had never been intended for that type of thing. The only time he picked up a pen, since he had dropped out of school in Standard six, was to sign his timesheets on a Friday. He hadn’t worked for almost eight years now. His body, which had always been lean and wiry, was now emaciated. His mind had become increasingly unreliable. His hands were still as big and as calloused as they always had been. These artisans hands seemed over-sized and comical attached to this old mans body. The palms seemed almost swollen with the extra layers of skin that had built up over the years. The knuckles were misshapen because of the calcium deposits and all the times he had broken his fingers over the years. Hands that had held all types of tools, and that had contributed to the manufacture of all manner of things in their history. They had been destructive too. He clasped his hands together tightly as the memories of those times washed over him.

For better or for worse, through sickness and in health, till death do us part. Probably the most quoted extract from any ceremony of any kind. How many times have those words been whispered in mock sincerity by one young lover to another? How many married couples actually run into the ‘For Worse’ and get through it? When you say ‘I do” at the appropriate time during this ceremony, do you actually understand how bad ‘For Worse’ can actually get? He had said ‘I do’ almost 44 years ago. When he sat and looked back he could remember a fair amount of ‘For better”, coupled with a whole lot of ‘For Worse’. They had parted for periods both long and short during those years. They had been apart mostly because of his work, but also for less noble reasons. During the latter part of his working years, and all through his retirement, they had been truly content. She had started writing on the calendar when he was an old man already. She had only started caring enough to count the days when he was already in his fifties, when his youth and hers had been mostly forgotten. He couldn’t speak for her, but the truth was he had had a hard time forgetting the young man he once was. Even now as his memory failed him and it became a mental strain to remember his street address, some of his most lucid memories were of that brash young man. That street-wise, cocky, self-assured boy that he had once been. The face that stared out at him from the battered ‘Book of Life’ that was currently in the left front pocket of his coat. She had married that young fool, had made him her husband. He had made her his trophy then, then later his accessory, his employee, his stress-reliever and many other things. He had married her in his youth, but she had only become his wife when his youth had deserted him. All the guilt and regret that he felt now was only compounded by the fact that she had been his wife and played her part from day one. From the very beginning she had been the reason for all their ‘For Better’, while he had taken it on himself to be the provider of the ‘For Worse’. Every time she left, she came back partly because of his promises and oaths, but mostly because of her vows. He didn’t know if she would come back this time. This was the first time in 44 years that they had been confronted by the ‘Through Sickness’ clause in their sacred marriage contract. He feared that this time they would be parted for good.

Wife-beater. He had never seriously hurt her. Wife-beater. Hadn’t broken a bone, or a rib or even given her a black eye. Wife-beater. Had never kicked her or struck her with a closed fist. Wife-beater. In those years it had almost been acceptable. Wife-beater. It had almost been incumbent on a man to illustrate his position in the household in a practical fashion. Wife-beater. She had called him that the morning after the first time he had ever slapped her. Wife-beater. He had laughed his cocky laugh as she stood there with her bag in the doorway behind her. Wife-beater. He had told her that she would have to come back to him. Wife-beater. Even her own mother would tell her that it was nothing. Wife-beater. She had told her family, and probably her friends what he had done. Wife-beater. She had come back as he had predicted. What they had said about him to her he would never know. All those times when she had left him she had gone back to her mother. To her family and their neighbours who had never changed from the day her family had moved in there. One big community of people who had no inclination or reason, to move in any direction except sideways. Crabs in a bucket. He despised every generation of them. From the old men playing cards on the side of the flat, to their ambitionless daughters hanging washing out on the lines, even their grubby grandchildren playing in front of the flat. He had been a grubby grandchild once and that was where he chose to end the cycle. Whenever he had to return to this backward place, he had walked amongst these zombies with his head held high. He was no rich man, but he was better than them. He had never held those powerful, skilled hands of his out to anyone. He had used those hands to build a bridge out of the apathy that was his hometown. He had taken her with him. She was the most beautiful thing that ever grown in that pitiful wasteland. He had plucked her from that abysmal, arid ground and taken her with him. But for too long she had been nourished with that tainted water, sometimes she showed her roots. It was then that he discovered that the seed had also been sown in him. It had been easy, so easy the first time. Wife-beater. It had become easier every time after that, so natural. Wife-beater. When had he stopped? He couldn’t remember the last time. How old had he been? How old had she been? As they had wheeled her into that room this morning and she had looked at him and released his hand, what was she thinking behind that weak smile? Wife-beater. Did she remember all of them together as one big tapestry of violence? Wife-beater. Did she remember the last time clearer than the times before? Wife-beater. Or did she remember the worst ones more? Wife-beater. The times on her birthday’s or the day of her Father’s funeral? Wife-beater! Wife-beater! Wife-beater! He wanted to ask her. But she had already answered hadn’t she? She had made it clear how she felt about him that first time hadn’t she? She had stood there, half out of the door, and called him by the title he had earned. Wife-beater…..

He was startled out of his reverie by a commotion in the waiting room. There was a naked man crossing the floor just in front of him. The man had torn off his robe and draped it over the pay-phone and was now lurching across the passage towards the rows of benches that occupied most of the designated waiting area. His indecent stroll through the waiting room was treated with indifference by the majority of its current inhabitants. Most of them had been here before, or to another waiting room just like it, and had as such “seen it all”. Mothers pulled their children close to them and covered their eyes, there were some muted giggles from some others, and that was the extent of the reaction amongst the unwilling spectators. Eventually the lone nurse in the nursing station spotted the naked offender and reddened visibly, not from embarrassment, but rather from exasperation.

Just another Tuesday in public hospital. Was it Tuesday? Well it was definitely daytime and that meant she had already been here quite a while after six, which was when her shift had ended. Who was supposed to be relieving her? Every day and every night here was an administrative nightmare. It was her least favourite of an assorted variety of nightmares that haunted every surreal corner of this maze. She had had dreams once of making a difference, but they had dissipated quickly under the flickering incandescence of these fluorescent bulbs. Who did she report to? Who gave her orders? Would she ever find her way out? Where would she go? Right now she couldn’t even go home. It wasn’t about her sense of duty, or even that she cared. It was just that right now there was a crowd of people pressing against the duty office window, bleating questions and waving documents. The naked man was just a bonus. She sighed and picked up the radio to alert the guards. When the guard arrived he grabbed the naked offender and manoeuvred him over to the nurse’s station instead of going straight out. The nurse looked up at him as he approached. He nodded his head in the direction of the man in the blue suit. She saw who he was motioning to and cursed loudly. She deliberated for a moment and then waved the guard away. He shrugged his shoulders and moved off with his nude captive. She would wait for someone to relieve her and she would deal with the man in the blue suit on her way out.

She stood just outside the main gate of the hospital in the area that should have been a parking lot. Instead it now served as a minibus taxi rank. Almost all the patients, and most of staff, used this mode of transport so it was a natural and necessary reformation. She glanced over at the figure in the blue suit next to the gate. She could see his body heaving as the sobs racked his emaciated frame. What a torturous life the old man lived. His wife had died eight months ago from cancer. He would keep pitching up at the hospital thinking she had just been admitted. His ever more unstable kept dragging him back to that day. Was it Love? She wasn’t enough of a romantic to believe that. Was it a guilty conscience? She wasn’t enough of a cynic to believe that one either. Whatever it was, it was heartbreaking to see the old man relive his wife’s death over and over. She saw a minibus approaching and stuck her hand out to flag it down.

An original work by Neil B Green!

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