Content Warnings (click to reveal)
Discussed: death, terminal illness
Lost Vocation
For his venial sins Lloyd Buckley spent one summer as a wardsman in the St. John of God Hospital in Bendigo. The plan was to save as much as possible before his university studies claimed his attention for the following semester. Philosophy and Languages were his majors. Lloyd had not yet learned that to tell people he was a student studying Philosophy and Languages was not what they wanted to hear. They wanted something more concrete. Languages were his strength, much to the irritation of his Catholic father, who was happier to think of Lloyd as ‘my son the hospital orderly.’
Lloyd’s father wanted Lloyd to choose a career that would help those less fortunate. And he thought Law was the place to do that, not philosophy. In the meantime, to work by the sweat of his brow for the benefit of others was a good start. Good, honest fisherman’s work. Something to put calluses on his hands.
As chance would have it, wardsman was the job he found. It was close to home. It paid well. It opened his eyes in ways that his father might not have anticipated. His job, in short, was to push people in wheelchairs to their various appointments about the hospital, down narrow paths towards clinicians, radiographers, therapists of all sorts. Push them gently, of course, through a winding walk to the appropriate door. Then, after they had finished their business, he would wheel them back to the wards, help them into their beds, pour them a drink, turn on their televisions. Good works.
It amazed Lloyd that, in the time between a bed in Ward-three-west and the maze of corridors leading to x-ray, for instance, how ready people were to divulge to an utter stranger the most intimate details of their lives, or at least the gory facts of their illnesses. He put it down to nerves. Some wanted to show him their scars, but it was not his place to offer an opinion. One day a woman he was escorting to see her specialist said to him, quite conversationally:
‘I never loved my husband, you know. Imagine that, after all these years.’
Lloyd stared at the back of her head. She said nothing further until they reached the door of her date with Dr. Memento Mori.
‘He was a decent enough man, but sometimes decency isn’t enough.’
Lloyd was never sure how he was supposed to respond during these moments of revelation, so he kept quiet. In that respect, he supposed, a stranger pushing a wheelchair was like some sort of a confessor. As if the mere voicing of secrets was its own absolution.
Lloyd did not think these thoughts at the time, however. He was merely filling his wallet and, incidentally, getting a little life experience along the way, such as it was, in the carnage scattered about him. He looked with envy at one of the cleaners changing the fan belt on an orbital polisher. He thought that might be one of those practical accomplishments of which his father would approve. How to change the fan belt. He wondered, no, he knew if he was handed an orbital polisher and pointed to a stretch of hallway he could make that linoleum gleam like a movie set. He could make a place like this sparkle with a shining, germless glow.
He identified this in himself as ambition.
Each morning he wandered through the wards, speaking briefly with the patients, looking for the one he was supposed to deliver to the next doorway in the system. A Mrs. Ambrose, in her bed, nodded at him as if she were being asked a perpetual question. One old fellow, sitting in the chair beside his bed said: ‘I’ve been sitting here for four hours and my bottle is quite full. I’ve rung for the nurse but she won’t come.’
Lloyd delivered reports on the state of the weather outside, which could be seen but not experienced. He received much advice in return on how to deal with it.
One day Mrs. Fowler, the matron, summoned him to the post-op theatre where the nurses were just cleaning up. Lloyd had never been in theatre before and was interested to see the bright lights and all the silver fittings. It looked much more prosaic than on television. Television didn’t capture the smell of the chemicals. Matron handed him a bucket with a cloth draped over the top of it, like a bead veil over a dish of trifle.
‘Take this to the furnace at the bottom of H-block. Ask for George. He’ll take care of things.’
‘What is it?’
Matron raised her eyebrows. She had not been expecting curiosity. She lifted the cloth for a moment so he could see the contents of the bucket.
Filling it, almost to the brim, was an enormous breast. She let the cloth fall back.
‘Here’s the other. Satisfied?’
She handed him a second bucket, similarly veiled. He took it from her. They were heavy. The lights in the ceiling felt hot on his head. Lloyd went down in the elevator feeling like the sorcerer’s apprentice, albeit a queasy one. He stood with some talkative people feeling utterly foreign to himself. All he needed now was for someone to stop him and casually ask what was in the buckets? The doors opened. He was conscious of walking carefully so as not to trip and spill everything over the floor. He went out a side door, down some stairs, and across a car park carrying the two buckets, looking for H-block and a man called George who would take care of things.
Most of the patients at the St. John of God were elderly. There was a fair bit of palliative care, also many patients with dementia and associated issues. Lloyd was often mistaken for someone else, visitors, family members and so on. One February day Matron asked Lloyd to wheel the elderly, nodding, Mrs. Ambrose down to Medical Imaging so she could have an MRI, or was it a CAT? Lloyd did not need to know the details. He liked the machine however, its orifice shaped like a giant, spacey donut, yet sensitive enough to be able to pick up an aberrant cell. Like many a doctor, Lloyd was more interested in the technology than the human ailment.
The philosopher in him had not yet thought to question this.
Wrapped in her dressing gown Lloyd helped Mrs. Ambrose into the chair. There were Christmas cards still sticky-taped to the rails of her bed. Her hands shook uncontrollably. She nodded as if in continual conversation with herself. For some reason Mrs. Ambrose had got it into her head that she was being wheeled off in order to make room for some new, incoming patient. There was a shortage of bed space and, given that she was dying anyway, or so she believed, (why else had her family left her here? they told her nothing, but she knew…she knew), they might as well vacate her bed now as much as later. Piecing this together Lloyd explained that he’d bring her right back after the MRI. She’d be back in time for lunch. She was not, as everyone kept telling her, to worry. The tyres of the wheelchair squeaked on the floor, as did Lloyd’s shoes. He could smell the polish. Mrs. Ambrose wept softly as they waited by the elevator, but crying, he knew, was just a nervous reflex in the aged and confused. It didn’t mean anything.
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘Downstairs for your test.’
‘Downstairs?’ she began to sniff and wail.
‘Yes.’
‘The morgue is downstairs. You’re taking me down to the morgue.’
‘No Mrs. Ambrose, I’m not doing that.’
‘All for the sake of a bed. I don’t want to die in the morgue.’
‘No. The morgue is for people who have already died.’
‘Look at me. I’m not dead.’
She tried to turn in the chair and grip his hands. She sobbed.
‘It’s just a test,’ said Lloyd. ‘I’ll bring you straight back.’
She rocked from side to side. The elevator went ping.
‘Please, I don’t want to die in the morgue. Please take me back to die in my bed.’
‘You’re not going to die.’
That broke, Lloyd knew, the first rule of wardsmen, not to comment on the patient’s prognosis. How did he know that she wasn’t going to die? When they were in the lift her whimpers became more amplified and metallic. The philosopher in him wondered what might happen if the lift jammed and he was suddenly stuck in here with her for several hours? He noted there was a phone behind the little stainless-steel door. And a trapdoor in the ceiling. Suddenly Mrs. Ambrose seemed to form the opinion that Lloyd was her parish priest, come to take her to the morgue.
‘Please Father, let me go back to my bed. I promise I’ll be good.’
‘You’ll be fine Mrs. Ambrose,’ said Lloyd. ‘It won’t take long.’
The lift descended. Mrs Ambrose squealed in fear when it bumped at the bottom. The doors opened and they made their way through the windowless corridors. A sobbing woman in a wheelchair attracted very little attention from the other staff members going about their business. Mrs. Ambrose tried to fling herself out of the chair. Lloyd had to hold her back by one shoulder. It felt like a crumpled ball of paper. She scratched at his hand, softly keening.
Eventually he found the Medical Imaging office and a nurse ushered them straight through. In the room, there was a gurney. Lloyd might have predicted that.
‘Oh my goodness,’ cried Mrs. Ambrose, ‘A slab!’
Lloyd manoeuvred her from the chair to the table.
‘Ups-a-daisy.’
‘Ow, ow, I’m dying.’
He helped her out of her dressing gown. The opening in the back of her smock gaped draughtily. She clung to his neck.
‘Please Father, don’t leave me to die in the morgue.’
‘This is not the morgue, Mrs. Ambrose, this is Medical Imaging. You’re having a test.’
‘I don’t want to die on a slab. A slab! Like a cow! Please Father. If I’m to die here you must give me the last rites.’
‘I don’t know them.’
He lifted her thin legs on to the table. He looked at her foot and realized, with a shock of intimacy, that it reminded him of his mother’s foot.
‘Please, the last rites. I beg you.’
He had to think.
‘In nominie Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti…er…’
‘Not that bit. Skip to the unction. Give me the unction.’
She shook uncontrollably. Lloyd mumbled a few more Latinate phrases, ‘Caveat emptor… terrae incognita… ipso facto’… He remembered his Ovid:
‘Lente currite noctis equi.’
What did that mean again? Oh yes, Run slowly, horses of the night.
‘The unction, the unction.’
Discretely, he dribbled some spit onto his thumb and made a little squiggle in the shape of a cross on her forehead, the effect of which was to calm her instantly. She stopped trembling.
‘Thank you, Father. Thank you.’
‘Amen, Mrs. Ambrose.’
She breathed a long, exhausted sigh. He suddenly hoped she would not expire on him right there and then on the gurney. Her stomach gurgled.
‘You’re very young for a priest,’ she said, looking at him at last, ‘but then everyone looks young to me.’
‘Just rest Mrs. Ambrose. Relax. It’ll all be over in a minute,’ Lloyd said, a phrase which made her take several short breaths and start crying again. She lay on the table, her hands clasped over her chest, blubbing softly, but he had to admit, happily. A nurse bustled in, followed by the Radiographer with his chart. He glared at the orderly for upsetting the patient, and turned to check a few dials on the donut, which, with its flashing lights, looked like it might blast off at any moment.
Lloyd took his leave. Mrs. Ambrose calling out ‘Goodbye Father, goodbye,’ and ‘I’m ready now. I’m prepared. I accept my fate,’ to no one in particular. The nurse gave him a cynical look. Lloyd could see scuff marks on the lino and knew that he would be the man for that job if only they’d let him. Cleaning was honest work, he realized, but was it quite the work for a burgeoning philosopher? It was close to twelve and his lunch hour. They would surely find someone else to take Mrs. Ambrose back to the ward. Lloyd wondered what she would think when she arrived, still alive, back in her own bed with the afternoon shows on television and a plate of sandwiches on her table. None of the other wardsmen would listen to her tale of resurrection. He wondered if he could get into trouble, or even lose his job, for impersonating a priest. He thought about those ordinary sandwiches waiting for her, how good they would taste, what a blessing they would be.
Mark O’Flynn has published seven collections of poetry, most recently Undercoat (Liquid Amber Press, 2022). His novels include The Last Days of Ava Langdon, (UQP, 2016), Grassdogs (Harper Collins, 2006) and The Forgotten World (HC, 2013). He has also published two collections of short stories White Light, (Spineless Wonders) and Dental Tourism (Puncher & Wattmann, 2020). He lives in the Blue Mountains.
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