THE GHOST PATCH

By the eighth night of the freeze the car park behind the Ropemaker Annexe had grown a skin of ice that even the grit lorry had stopped arguing with, and Gwen Pritchard had stopped trusting the radiators. She wore a cardigan under her tunic and carried a mug of tea from chair to chair, a mug being the one hand-warmer a ward permits.

She was fifty-four, from Merthyr, with twenty-six years of nights behind her and the vowels she had never tried to lose. Seven patients lay in the long room on the first floor, each in a recliner with one arm held out to a machine, and the machines were doing what they did, which was to take the blood out, clean it and give it back. This was the night list. Nobody chose dialysis at four in the morning. You were put there because your pressure dropped in the daytime sessions, or because you couldn’t be spared from a job, or because there had been no other chair.

The annexe was fifteen years old and had been built under a finance deal that the trust’s board signed in 2009 and, as far as Gwen could tell, never understood. The trust owned the patients. A company owned the building: the lifts, the lights, the heating, the sockets, the generator in the car park. Its name was on a brass plate in the lobby and on none of the paperwork she was ever asked to sign.

On the wall beside the nurses’ station hung a screen that had come with the building. Nobody had been trained to read it. Most nights it showed a pale green floor plan and did nothing, and the ward had come to treat it as furniture. At 04:09 the plan turned amber and a box opened over the middle of it.