Lookalike in Mouse's Trousers



Actually it was probably a thumb spica but what are a few medical quibbles?

Just describing a face is as difficult as drawing it. How do some people walk out of casualty with deadpan faces - is it shock? Nothing other than physical woosiness and a strange feeling of being part of a book for me thank you. Everyone here is either a film star or not. Some are stars but I cannot work out who belongs to who. The relationships seem strange and beautiful, like Beatrice is here among us - someone unaware of how attractive they are, cut out of a book and detached from the normal hum of the everyday - the little conversations that are necessary to get by in this place of small crises, the minutiae of the medical - she is calm and walks and talks as if just visiting from somewhere much more worthy of her. And yet she has the normal things we all carry - the bag, the coat, the mobile that receives texts and calls which make her smile in some unalarmed way. The pain must have gone or not hit her yet or is that the reason, a mess of painkillers and muscle relaxants taking the top and bottom of her world? And in all these people, these triggers for stories in my head, tales to make sense of the random input, this woman is the most mysterious for looking like someone famous and yet not being. It is all down to drugs I think - absence of mine and presence of hers. Here are the playing children, calm again in crises, running happily and not pinned down while parents with minor injuries seem content to leave them be, as am I. There is a steady stream of casualties and staff and the strange in-between people who could be either, some confident in their destinations some haltingly inquisitive, reading the many notices - attend triage before reception (because the four-hour target clock starts at reception and triage can work out if you are likely to collapse and drop blood on the clipboards) - this reception, that reception - pre-op and none of those coloured lines that take you other parts of the world that is this hospital. No major stuff comes in today, no sirens in the distance. And it is only after an hour or two that I realise that the grey ceiling is actually clear glass onto a greyer sky when a wheeling gull sweeps across the view-screen and suddenly the room becomes the universe, the instantaneous increase in space hitting me almost physically. And now we are out, the small procedure completed without fuss or consultation, the X-rays transmitted instantaneously from machine to desk in what must be the peak of free medicine. And all we do is complain at the wait.