"I think he's sleeping, but I'll pop my head in and check for you - just give me a minute".
The woman with the badly bleached blonde hair, moved around the desk where she had been busily filling out a crossword and brushed passed the man in the dark suit and the even darker overcoat. She gave him a brief smile and disappeared around the corner.
The man stood unsmiling, his features neutral and cold; his nose was large and the prominent feature, after the eyes. The eyes were sharp and focused - which made him look every bit the predator.
Within the minute she reappeared. "He's awake so you can go through if you want," she said. The man nodded and followed the small blue line painted on the shiny linoleum floor. The line meandered around the corridor and through a closed set of double doors at the far end. A sign above the doors proclaimed 'Ward 7' in the same blue as the line on the floor.
He pushed the intercom on the left side wall and listened as the buzz was followed by a few moments of silence, then a jovial voice spoke "Hello?"
"I am here to see Mr. Baker - Charles Baker," the man said, in a tone of authority. "Right oh," the voice replied, and he heard a minute click as the left hand of the two doors opened slightly.
The ward smelled faintly of disinfectant and urine. The man barely noticed, instead he walked with a purpose, glancing left and right into the rooms as he passed. The nurse stationed at the desk was a large woman with small, beady eyes that shone as she greeted him. "Mr. Baker is in room 14, it's the third one on your left after the toilet."
The man nodded at her and walked on with barely a glance. She thought him strange, and even a little eerie. No specific reason, just his look she supposed, and how he carried himself; dressed all in black with shoes as shiny as the polished linoleum of the corridors. She immediately thought of an undertaker.
A black number 14 was stuck on the wall at the entrance to the room - which contained four beds, two of which were empty; their sheets neatly folded back and the linen white and clean. The first bed to the left contained a woman who seemed to be asleep; her mouth was open a little and her eyes closed. She didn't move as he swept into the room and stopped in between the beds, his gaze locked on the old man near the window.
The top sheet was pulled up to his chest, which was thin and scrawny, like a plucked chicken. His breath came out in whistles as the lungs fought to drag oxygen in. What little hair was left on his head, was wispy and dry-looking. The air conditioning unit blew directly onto his face and the hair was flopping across his eyes and nose.
He seemed to sense someone watching and turned his head slowly to regard the visitor in the room, who remained where he was, just staring with an impassive expression pasted onto the cold, chiseled face.
"Hello," Mr. Baker said. "Do I know you?" Nothing coming back from the strange guest. Instead, he walked to the bedside and pulled up and chair, sitting down slowly - the shoes creaking a little. He regarded the old man with a look that was almost contempt. He spoke in a slow and deliberate way, stretching out the syllables as if he had trouble forming them. "I think you know why I am here."
Mr. Baker seemed to consider this, a puzzled look on his face, before it slowly dissolved into something like understanding. He nodded back at the stranger and closed his eyes. "Yes, I believe I do," he said.
"Good." He lifted a hand and fumbled around in the inside pocket of the jacket he wore, before finally locating what he searched for and brought it out. Mr. Baker looked at it and half-smiled. He knew what was coming.
The papers were held together with string and tied in a small knot at both ends. They looked old and yellowed with age - much like himself, he thought. The man shuffled them together and flipped the first page open; scanning the page for a few moments before reading the first paragraph.
He listened carefully as the stranger read from the paper, his thin lips cold and sterile, forming the words and sending a chill down his spine, regardless of the stuffiness in the room. It felt surreally like a macabre version of 'This is Your Life' and despite the occasion, he had to stifle a laugh.
The man in the dark suit continued until he reached the bottom of the first page. He looked up and caught the gaze of Mr. Baker, their eyes locking together in an act of defiance on one side, inevitability on the other.
Time seemed to stretch out. It felt that no more reading would take place when he slipped the first sheet to the back of the pile and immediately began on sheet two.
Charles Baker was a proud man, fighting for his country in the war, seeing things that no man or woman should ever have to see. He was old now; old enough for his life to feel as if two or even three lifetimes had passed already, and the end was close; he knew that.
The stranger had reached the end of page two, and paused as he had after the first, eyeing Charles intently, looking for a spark of acknowledgement. He stared back.
Page three was longer than the previous two. The man talked none-stop, touching on things that Charles had either forgotten, or had chosen to file into the part of his mind reserved for things unpleasant. One of those was the death of his close friend at the hands of a German soldier on the sand of a French beach. The blood soaking quickly before the tide covered it completely and washed it all away. Charles was face-down underneath two other fallen comrades, his head tilted slightly to allow full view of his friend's slow painful slide into nothingness.
The stranger wanted to recount all of this for him, and more. He was powerless to stop him, or to cover his ears; it came at him at a hundred miles an hour.
For years after the war, he descended into a black hole of misery and despair. Images of maimed bodies and bloodshed haunted dreams that never let up. Often during this time, he wished for the ignorance of death, an ignorance that would free him of the shackles that held tight. Those times seemed distant, so far away that the mist that shrouded them almost blocked out everything. This stranger had blown all that away and cleared the path for all those memories to come crashing down like the waves of a turbulent sea onto a rocky shore.
Mr. Baker turned his face away from the man and faced the window, which looked out onto the hospital gardens with their trees and shrubs that were just beginning to bud. It looked lovely and peaceful, a place to sit in the warm sun and reflect. He could feel tears well up and had to fight hard to keep them from spilling over. He did not want to show any weakness to this man. The reading continued.
A while later, a nurse came shuffling along the corridor and popped her head around the corner. "Visiting time is over now, if you want to say your goodbyes and make your way out, please," she said, before moving on to the next room. The man in the dark suit had finished talking a few minutes before and was sitting quietly. Waiting. He stood and replaced the papers into his jacket pocket and turned to leave. His slid the plastic chair against the wall underneath the window and gave a thin smile before he turned and walked away, his very shiny shoes echoing with each footfall.
Charles Baker watched him go. His rheumy old eyes followed his progress until he was hidden by the curtain around the bed next to his. Alone once more, he recounted his life, from early childhood, through to late adulthood, and all the choices and decisions made along the way. He was tired, very tired, and so lost it seemed. The man had shared things from his life that he himself had thought lost forever, gone into the fog that was his old and worn-out mind.
The old man-tiredness was threatening to steal him away and he welcomed it, giving himself over to it for perhaps, he suspected, the final time. He closed his eyes and let sleep take him down, his chest rising and falling, rising and falling, his mouth dropping open just a tiny bit, as though trying to say something that no one could hear. He began to dream of warm sunshine and clear blue skies overlooking a brilliantly white sandy beach. He wasn't alone on the beach, he ran with his wife, Sandra, together laughing and clutching on to each other as the swell of the sea brought the waves rushing up to meet them.
On and on they ran, along the endless sand. Mountains with high peaks and white caps loomed in the distance as they closed in on the sea and ate up the beach. This was ten miles away. Twenty miles maybe. Suddenly, he wanted to see where the granite cliffs met the water, wanted it more than anything. He smiled, both in the dream and in his hospital bed. It was the last thought he had before he breathed in for the final time. His chest deflating as the air left his lungs, and then all was still.
Only the steady hum of the hospital machinery broke the silence of the evening.
