A Madness of Angels

“That is why most people come to a hospital. What exactly appears to be the problem?”

I rolled up a coat sleeve to reveal one of the blood-bandages. Her lips thinned. She made a little ummm noise, tutted, then barked, “Very well, come this way, chop chop.” Turning on one heel, she set off down the corridor. I struggled to keep up, striding as fast as I could without breaking into a run. “I suppose you have tried the regular services; there is a waiting list, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And? Please don’t waste my time with the usual inadequate excuses, Mr Swift. ‘I just happened to be playing with the bones of the dead’ or ‘It just so fell out that I accidentally summoned the spirit of a thousand shards of falling glass’ or other feeble tales. I really don’t care how the injury was inflicted, I simply need the full information to make a good diagnosis.”

She turned into a room as mouldy and dark as the others; but unlike them, it was possessed of a large wooden cupboard with another padlock across its doors, and a dentist’s chair set in the middle, with a bright lamp lit up above it. Although the lamp had no electrical lead, it grew brighter as the nurse approached it. She waved me to the chair, and as I sat down she added another “Well?! What happened?”

“Honestly – I was attacked by the living shadow of a sorcerer, a creature of darkness and hunger that longs to drink my blood and which I managed to defeat by the use of a wish-spell and a lot of burning light. It dug its nails into my arms; and now they won’t stop bleeding.”

“Interesting,” she said in a voice of a woman who couldn’t care less. She reached into her apron and pulled out a pair of glasses that she rested at the end of her nose, and a pair of very sharp-looking scissors. “But nothing special. I don’t suppose you killed this living essence of darkness?”

“I doubt it.”

“Wouldn’t that have been the most sensible reaction?” she said, peering at me over the tops of her glasses straight down the sharp tip of her nose as I lay on the chair.

“It’s a shadow,” I replied. “It dies when the man that casts it dies.”

“How terribly tedious,” she intoned. “You know, sometimes, I don’t know why I bother – they all come back here eventually.”

She started snipping neatly at the bandages around my arms, and when they came away, tutted at the bloody half-moon indents in my skin. “Yes, well…”

“I… do not know what it is I should offer you for your help,” I said as we turned our head away and half- closed our eyes against the sight of our own blood.

“Offer me?” A shrill note of indignation entered her voice. “Young man, there are three things that make Britain great. The first is our inability at playing sports.”

“How does that make Britain great?”

“Despite the certainty of loss, we try anyway with the absolute conviction that this year will be the one, regardless of all evidence to the contrary!”

I raised my eyebrows, but that simply meant I could see my own blood more clearly, so looked away and said nothing.

“The second,” she went on, “is the BBC. It may be erratic, tabloid, under-funded and unreliable, but without the World Service, obscure Dickens adaptations, the Today programme and Doctor Who, I honestly believe that the cultural and communal capacity of this country would have declined to the level of the apeman, largely owing to the advent of the mobile phone!”

“Oh,” I said, feeling that something was expected. “Oh” was enough.

“And lastly, we have the NHS!”

“This is an NHS service?” I asked incredulously.

“I didn’t say that; I merely pointed out that the NHS makes Britain great. Now lie still.” I lay still and tried not to flinch as her fingers probed the tender flesh on both my arms. She tutted again.

On a whim I asked, “What about the Beatles?”

“What about them?”

“Do they make Britain great?”

“Don’t play silly buggers in my hospital, thank you.”

“Sorry.”

After a while she said, “Did you collect some buddleia?”

“Yes. Was that OK?”

“There’s plenty around, why should I care?”

“But… you asked.”

“A nurse is supposed to put the patient at ease during unpleasant procedures, in order to facilitate a calm and quick medical process.”

“You haven’t done anything too unpleasant…” I began, then hesitated.

“The word you caught your tongue up on was ‘yet’,” she said with a small-toothed grin. “I’m glad you thought it through before making a rash utterance.”

“This is a reassuring medical procedure?”

“You survived – badly – being attacked by a living shadow, essence of darkness,” she said. “A little honesty isn’t going to hurt. Not as much as the medicine.”

“Do you enjoy what you do?”

“It’s a living.”

“How?”

She pulled a key out of her pocket and undid the heavy padlock on the cupboard. Inside, the shelves were in shadow. “You’re scared of doctors,” she said briskly to the clinking of jars. “You’re frightened by medicine. It’s fine. You’ve also had a couple of splintered ribs, a twisted ankle, a lot of bruising and been clinically dead sometime in the last two years. So I can understand your point of view.”

“How do you know all that?”

“I read your palm, do you really want to know?” she retorted in an uninterested voice. Turning, she revealed a large glass kitchen jar containing some sort of dark, sludgy goo. “Crushed rat’s skull, desalinated Thames water, ground dried moss scraped from the base of a leaking pipe in Kings Cross station, a pinch of mortar dust and a vestige of unleaded petrol drawn from the top of a puddle of torrential August rain; ground together, microwaved for ten minutes and filtered with the light from a photographer’s lamp for three days and three nights – sound all right to you?”

“For what?”

She tutted again at my impertinence. “Mr – Swift, wasn’t it? Mr Swift, did you bother to consider some of the medical implications of being injured by a creature of pure darkness before you rashly engaged it in mortal combat? I doubt it. Young people never do. You all think you’re immortal. Lie still.” She popped the top off with the hiss-snap of escaping pressure, and from one of her pockets, which I was beginning to suspect were not nearly big enough for all the things that she seemed to fit in them with perfect ease, pulled out a small wooden spatula. She scooped a large dollop of the slippery, shining dark gunk from the jar, took a grip of my right wrist, pulling my arm straight with a hand like an iron clamp, and started smearing the stuff across my wounds with the casual air of a grandmother icing a birthday cake.

The effect was like eating hot Vietnamese curry: for the first few strokes of the spatula, there was no sensation beyond that of thick soap bubbles moving on the skin, or of sticky flour being washed off the fingertips. Only when the mind had been fooled into thinking that it wouldn’t be so bad did the burning hit. It started as a dull itch, quickly rising to an intense, fiery pulse that went right down to the bone and shot up past the elbow joint and into the shoulder blade; my fingers burnt and my neck cramped. We jerked at the shock of it, but her grip was unrelenting, and her face showed no sign of humour as she muttered, “Don’t be a baby.”

“It hurts!” we whimpered, mostly for the relief of having breath in our mouth and sound in our ears; any sort of sense to distract us.

“And it’ll be over soon,” she said. “If it was really that bad I’d have thought about giving you an anaesthetic; but you know how it is with budget cutbacks these days.” On our skin the dark substance started to mix with our blood, in brownish-black whorls the colour of treacle. “You’ll get a little dizziness,” she added, “but please try and control any latent sorcerous urges you might have to incinerate my hospital. Despite its infinite patience, the NHS isn’t that understanding, and we have to serve everyone equally.”