God Forgets About the Poor by Peter Polites

Author:Peter Polites [Peter Polites]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ultimo Press
Published: 2023-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

PART 5

2017

CANTERBURY HOSPITAL

HONOURED CITIZEN

Honoured was lying on a stretcher and an orderly was pushing her through the hallway. All she could see was the ceiling of Canterbury Hospital above her, with its grey fibreboard and fluorescent lights of boredom. She was thinking about the bouquet of Australian native flowers she had received, how the strong dome shape of the waratah had added colour and warmth to the hospital room.

The bed she was lying in was steered towards the Acacia ward. She was wheeled past the front station where she looked to see if she recognised any of the nurses. The hospital bed glided on the linoleum floors. The noise of the rolling wheels was a common sound to her. Hospitals were a part of her life. Wheeled beds and wheelchairs were just domestic furniture now. There was no element in these institutions that could shake her into a new series of emotions, but as age encroached, she was starting to think more and more about these moments in them.

At the end of the ward, the orderly turned the gurney in to the room and parked it next to the bed. She spoke in Greek to the young man that pushed her. She had found out that he was ancestrally a mainlander, from the area of Thessaloniki. She assumed that his mother was a fine baker of sweet breads and pastries. Her tours of that northern city were fresh in her mind. It was a communist heartland and had the finest bakeries bequeathed to the city from its once strong Jewish population. She mentioned that her daughter had taken her to Labour and Socialist museums when they were there. But what she really liked was the bakeries. Oh! The senses and flavours came back to her, emerging at the back of her tongue, the warmth of the chocolate on the roof of her mouth, the crunch of nuts on her teeth, the soft yellow bread floating in her mouth as she chewed it—a pleasured prayer remembered, far from here, in a mountain city. The mouth memory was quickly wiped away by an automated spray of antibacterial air freshener that was mounted on the wall next to the bed.

She had asked the young male assistant if he knew her son and he had cocked his head, making her assume that he did, intimately, more than he would have liked to disclose. His tilted head and too-pristine haircut made her think that her son and this man had once had an intimate transgression. In the park, some darkened street, under a bridge. She didn’t ask him again, didn’t even mention her son, just talked to the orderly about the three days she had spent at the hospital, how the doctors had sent her for scans of her replaced body parts. She only had septicaemia, she told him. A blood infection that had started in her legs. Downplaying it in hindsight, but somewhere inside she realised the risk it had posed to her life, close to death.

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