‘I was a deadbeat once,’ said Peter, maintaining eye contact. ‘Alcoholic. Drug addict.’ Hayes was the wrong person to share such intimacy with, he knew that, but he couldn’t help himself. He was, he belatedly realised, in no state to be here at all, among these people. He needed to be unconscious, or among the ?????.
‘It’s not a crime,’ said Hayes in her unemphatic monotone. ‘I don’t judge anybody.’
‘I committed crimes,’ said Peter. ‘Petty crimes.’
‘Some people go through that, before they straighten out. Doesn’t make them bad people.’
‘My father was terribly disappointed in me,’ Peter pushed on. ‘He died a broken man.’
Hayes nodded. ‘It happens. You work here for a while, you find out that lots of your colleagues have got real sad case histories. And some haven’t. No two stories alike. It doesn’t matter. We all get to the same point.’
‘And what point is that?’
She raised her fist in a gesture of triumph, if ‘triumph’ was the right word for a fist so loosely clasped, so amiably raised, so unlikely to be noticed in the context of this convivial cafeteria. ‘Working toward the future.’
Dear Peter, wrote Bea at last, after he had spent what felt like an eternity in prayer and worry.
I’m sorry I didn’t respond for so long. I don’t want to talk about what’s happened but I owe you an explanation. Thanks for reaching out to me. It doesn’t change the way things are, and I don’t think you can understand where I’m at now, but I do appreciate it.
A lot of things led up to this. Our church has hit a setback, to put it mildly. Geoff has absconded with all funds. He and the treasurer were having an affair and they’ve flown the coop together, no one knows where. But the accounts are cleared out. They even took the collection bags. Remember how we prayed for God’s guidance to choose a pastor to replace you? Well, Geoff was the one. Make of that what you will.
Opinion is divided on what to do next. Some people want to sort out the mess and try to keep it going and some feel we should just start afresh with a new church. They even asked me if I would be pastor! Brilliant timing.
Two days before this fiasco, I started back at work. I thought it would be bliss with Goodman gone. But the place has changed. It’s filthy, to begin with. The floors, the walls, the toilets. No cleaning staff and no prospect of getting any. I pulled out a mop and got busy on one of the bathrooms and Moira almost bit my head off. ‘We’re nurses, we’re not here to scrub floors’ she said. I said ‘What about staph? What about open wounds?’ She just stared me down. And maybe she’s right – the workload is bad enough as it is. A&E is pandemonium. People running around unsupervised, shouting, scuffling with the orderlies, trying to wheel their sick mums and dads and kids up to the wards before we’ve had a chance to triage them.
All the patients are poor now. Not a single well-educated middle-class specimen among them. Moira says that anyone with money has abandoned the NHS completely. The rich ones defect to France or Qatar, the average folks find themselves a nice walk-in pay-per-service clinic (there’s loads of them springing up everywhere – whole new communities are forming around them). And our hospital gets the dregs. That’s Moira’s word for them, but to be honest that’s what they are. Stupid, boorish, loud, ugly and very, very frightened. Forget about caritas – it’s a struggle to even keep your cool when you’ve got a drunken lout with blurry tattoos yelling straight into your face and jabbing you in the shoulder with his nicotine-stained finger. It’s an endless parade of bloodshot eyes, acne, smashed noses, slashed cheeks, cracked ribs, scalded babies, botched suicides. I know I used to complain that Goodman was trying to fill our hospital with easy cases but there is a difference between offering all levels of society access to medical care and letting an entire hospital be overrun by a pig-ignorant mob.
Time has run out on me, it’s 6.30, I have to go to work now. I haven’t even told you what happened to make me finally snap but it’s hard for me to face it myself and writing takes so long and I didn’t know I would write this much about other things. I thought I would just come straight out with it, but it will cause you so much pain and I wish so much I could spare you that pain forever. I must go now.
Love,
Bea.
At once, he responded:
Dear Bea,
I am so worried about you, but relieved to hear your ‘voice’. It’s true that we all misunderstand each other – only God has perfect understanding – but we shouldn’t let the grief of that frustration stop us trying. My work with the Oasans confirms this over and over.
The news about Geoff and our church is deplorable but the church does not consist of Geoff or the treasurer or a particular building. This setback may prove to be a blessing in disguise. If we owe money we can repay it and even if we can’t, it’s only money. What goes on in the hearts and souls of human beings is the important thing. It’s encouraging that our congregation wants to start afresh with a new church. Ordinarily, people are terrified of change so this is an amazing example of courage and positivity. Why not start a simple fellowship in someone’s front room? Just like the early Christians. Complicated infrastructure is a luxury, the real essentials are love and prayer. And it’s great that they want you to be pastor. Don’t be angry, I think you would do a superb job.
Your comments about the changes at the hospital are only natural given the increased stress but they confirm my sense that maybe now is not the time for you to be working. You have a baby growing inside you. Or at least I hope you do – have you had a miscarriage? Is that what’s shaken your faith in God? I’m worried sick. Please tell me.
Whatever it is, it has taken you to a very bad place spiritually. Those ‘pig-ignorant’ people who are crowding into your hospital are all precious souls. God doesn’t care whether someone has acne or bad teeth or a bad education. Please remember that when you met me I was an alcoholic waste of space. A deadbeat. If you had treated me with the contempt I deserved I would never have been rescued, I would have just got worse and been ‘proof’ that types like me are beyond redemption. And who knows, some of the women you’re seeing on the wards may have family traumas not a million miles away from what happened to you. So please, no matter how hard it is, try to hang on to your compassion. God can make miracles occur in that hospital of yours. You say yourself that these people are frightened. Deep down, they know they desperately need something that medicine can’t give them.