The forty-third folder

Always rotate.

*

The filing cabinet was institutional green, the kind of colour that reminded him of hospitals.  His grandmother, a fantastically difficult woman, had managed to die in one.  A hospital, and an institutional green filing cabinet.  He barely remembered her, just remembered the colour of the walls as he held his mother's hand while they walked along the echoing corridors that seemed to never end.  Finally they would come to some double doors that led onto a ward, and at the start of the ward were the private rooms.  The smell of disinfectant, always strong, was strongest outside the double doors as though trying to prevent the miasma of death from creeping out.  His mother would open the doors, and her hand would always be shaking, and they would venture on to the ward.  The matron would stop them, a clipboard in her hand and a stern look on her face.  His mother would face her and a strange look would cross the matron's face and she would usher them into the second private room, where his grandmother would be lying in bed, staring out of the window and waiting to die.

There were never any flowers in the room, because his grandmother hated unnecessary colours.  She had worked on a dairy farm when she was younger, and considered things that grew to be either food for the cows or things for the cows to trample on.  Or crap on, as she once said in a loud voice while he was listening, and he giggled and his mother looked angry.  The bedsheets were beige and the blanket was grey and had little holes in it here and there that he'd stick his fingers through, wiggling them around, while his mother tried to make conversation with a woman who didn't want her there.  They never stayed very long, and he never knew who was more relieved that the conversation was over.

*

If there are long periods of inactivity, it is better to adjust the bilateral hinge downwards with a sharp motion.  If the hinge snaps, the motion was too sharp.

*

The filing cabinet was institutional green, the same green found in mental health retreats and state-funded hospices, where the nurses will tick you happily off a checkboxed list but won't pick you up off the floor and put you back in the chair because of the Health and Safety at Work Acts.  Luckily the floor in the hospice was heated, so lying on it was kind of pleasant until they could get Old Lou, who didn't know anything about his rights, or health benefits, or lifting people back into chairs, to come and pick them up again.  Some people preferred the floor.

He opened the filing cabinet.  The top drawers held many manilla folders suspended on little rails.  There were dividers between some of the folders, thick navy-blue pieces of card with numbers written on the little tabs to help with the filing.  He didn't recognise the order of the numbers, which started 4, 6, 9, 21, 22, 25....

*

Still rotating?

*

Someone had crossed out the number 46 and written 43 in its place.  He didn't know whether they'd corrected a number in the sequence, or if the number 43 was somehow more important than 46.  His grandmother had died in room 46 of the hospital, somehow half-squeezed into a low drawer of an institutional green filing cabinet.  She looked happy when they found her, which is more than she'd ever done when he'd seen her while she was still alive.

The cause of death was registered as misadventure, and his mother held his hand while they went to the funeral.  In the big car with too many seats on the way there, a big man with a red face who kept crying suddenly sat bolt upright and giggled.

"Let's put the fun back into funeral!" he said in a too-loud voice, and the people next him began to shush him, but this was the most interesting thing that happened for the whole car ride.  At the cemetary there were hundreds of people and the vicar had to stand on the headstone to make himself heard by them all.  When he finished talking, everyone walked past the grave, casting in a handful of soil, so that the gravedigger barely had anything left to do by the end.

*

Inside the forty-third folder were some birth certificates and some very old, sepia-toned photographs.  His grandmother was not his mother's mother.

*

Insufficient rotation may cause the bilateral hinge to misalign.

*

"She's not dead, you know," his mother said quietly as they walked away from the graveyard.  They weren't going in the big cars, so they were catching a bus back home.  His mother seemed relieved that no-one had stopped them and asked them to go to the wake.  "They all think she is, but they didn't see her in that hospital."

*

He put the folder back in the filing cabinet and slid the drawer closed.  He didn't miss the sound of the door opening behind him, for all that the arrivee had tried to hide it by the filing cabinet's noise.  He didn't want to turn round, but he knew who had to be behind him.

*

Always rotate.

Dr. Verfuegbar

Instruments clatter in the tray, the kidney-shaped tray.  The nurse is holding it an angle, an angle slightly less than thirty degrees, and the instruments have obeyed the implacable law of gravity and slid to one side.  They have clattered together as they have done so.  Dr. Verfuegbar looks angry, and I wish he didn't.  He's holding a marker pen.
"Nurse!" he says.  She starts, and I wonder how she can look so unsexy in a nurse's uniform.  The fabric is cotton, and it's stretched in all the right places, but yet it does nothing for me.  Then the doctor's pen comes back into my eyeline.
"Try to be quieter," he continues, now that he's got her attention.  "I am drawing on the patient.  These will be incision lines, and it is important that they are in the right place."
The nurse looks at me, and there's something cold and alien in her eyes.  She looks like she thinks I'm not real.
"Dr. Verfuegbar?"  Her voice is glutinous, like the words are caught in mucus in her throat and have to pull themselves free.  "Dr. Verfuegbar, you're half-way through drawing a copy of 'Portrait of the Artist as a Spoon'."
That would explain why he seems to have been using the marker-pen on me for ages.
"What?  Oh.  That can't be right," says Dr. Verfuegbar.  "How invasive is the surgery this patient is having?  Am I removing a particularly difficult tattoo?"
"No-o-o-o."  There's a pause while the nurse finds my notes; she'd put the kidney-shaped dish down on top of them.  "Ah.  He's here to have a verruca removed."
"Really?"  Dr. Verfuegbar looks puzzled.  "Why have we given him a general neural block then?"
"We haven't," says the nurse.  "It's a partial block from the neck down.  He's still awake, just insensate."
"Hmph.  Makes me feel like a vet when you do that," says Dr. Verfuegbar.  "Do we have any of those worming pills left?"
"I'm afraid not," says the nurse.  "The last delivery was blown-up a half-mile from the hospital."
"Land-mines again?"
"No, just shelling.  It might have been bad luck."
"Everything's broken here, nurse," says Dr. Verfuegbar.  "Do you even remember why the war started?"
"I can't remember why the war's continuing," says the nurse, and things beneath her tight cotton jacket shift.  The wrong way.
"Do we have an eraser?" asks Dr. Verfuegbar, staring at me.  "I think it might be wise to remove some of these incision lines in case I don't perform the surgery.  It would be bad if we removed healthy tissue."
"What's so unhealthy about a verruca?"  I suddenly realise that I hate the nurse.
Dr. Verfuegbar stops looking on the tables for the eraser and stands very still.  I hope he's thinking.
"That's a very good question," he says slowly.  "Perhaps we should be removing the patient from the verruca?  After all, keeping the verruca alive is cheap and easy, whereas the patient is costly and will take weeks to recover."
I really want to say something now, but my throat won't work.  I can just about breathe fractionally more heavily if I try very hard.  No-one seems to notice.
"How big is the hospital incinerator?"
"I'll have to go and measure it, Dr. Verfuegbar," says the nurse.  She sets my notes back down, unfolds an extra pair of insectile arms from the front of her nurse's shirt, and leaves the operating theatre.  Dr. Verfuegbar looks down at me, and his eyes are cloudy with cataracts.
"What was I doing?" he asks to the room in general, his hand reaching out for a scalpel.