Script quote across two fingers

Ward 14 had its usual Tuesday, which is to say a man in bed nine asked for his wife every twenty minutes until she came in at four, and then he slept like a stone. I sat by the desk with the tea urns ticking as they cooled and thought about the boat you were on when you last wrote, the one with the leaking hull you swore was sound. You said the bilge pump ran all night and you never slept through it, so you were always half awake, listening for it to stop.

Mrs Okafor in bay three asked me tonight whether the river was high. There is no river near this ward, only the car park and the bins, but I told her it was running fine, and she said good, because her husband fished it when they were young. I didn't correct her. Someone on the rota had written on the whiteboard in purple marker, we'll all float on anyway, under the fire drill times, and nobody had rubbed it off. I stood looking at it for a while before I understood it was a joke from the agency nurse who left last month.

At four I did obs on the last patient, and the sky over the multistorey went from black to a dishwater grey. I wanted to tell you I finally get it. Not the whiteboard. The sentence. You don't float because the water is calm. You float because you stop trying to swim against the whole sea at once.

I'm off at eight. Write back and tell me the pump finally quit.

Love, Anna