Cloud with falling raindrops design

Nineteen seventy-one, a night sister called Joan Pike kept a cloud pinned to the cupboard door. Not a real one, mind. She'd drawn it in pencil on the back of a drug chart, fat and grey, with its belly bulging and little tears hanging off the bottom in rows. Every time a patient died on her shift she'd add one drop, tear-shaped, with a dotted line trailing down the margin. The porters thought it morbid. The consultants thought it a bit much. Nobody ever asked her to stop.

The winter the boiler failed, the roof leaked over the east bay every night, and Joan stopped drawing. She just sat under her cloud with a mop and a torch, listening to the buckets fill. Then a lad from the coal yard came up the stairs soaked to the skin, saying his father was still breathing in bed nine. Joan set down the mop, took the pencil from her apron, and drew one drop that didn't fall. It hung there under the cloud, its dotted line going nowhere at all.

By morning the rain had stopped and the drawing was still on the cupboard. Nobody had the heart to rub it out. The sister on days will tell you it's been painted over twice and still shows through. Mind the wet patch by the lift on your way down. Some nights it's still raining in there.