This staff member was spitting down the sinks and no one said anything. Should I? In my struggle, I started missing my beloved straight talking Filipinos.
The day surgery department in the hospital was friendly enough and the sandwiches it offered the patients were not bad considering. There were both ham, cheese and pickle and salmon. In the staff room, parathas were going down alongside fried plantain and nurses with straight backs and big crosses hanging proudly on chains around their necks were checking every newcomer out.
“Hello, I don’t know your name!?” they asked while giving the stranger an up and down. In the NHS, protocol forbidden jewellery tend only to be tolerated on female consultants, whose stone infused rings are so expensive that not even the bugs dare stay there for any length of time. Here, the cross-bearing nurses had come to climb up to the consultants’ level and I dare you to challenge them!
Some staff felt seemingly rather like at home; One of them worked her way up and down along the bays where she took patients’ observations and offered them drinks; “Teacoffeelemonchocolate”, she rattled off to bemused faces, and on her way she stopped by the couple of sinks that faced the patients and loudly cleared her throat before she, with a blob ejaculating sound, spat out the flem she’d managed to bring up.
She wasn’t a bad worker, nor was she an unpleasant character, but she had this rather unconventional way of letting go of excess spit, sputum and such – all in front of her patients. Surely this wasn’t right? I glanced around – no one else among the staff seemed to have noticed. What to do? I was just the agency nurse guy – there for a few weeks or months or so, before moving along. Should I’ve told my line manager? That’s the correct way, the much used and usually preferred way, of dealing with matters within anything NHS.
But it’s a boring way and it’s reinforcing the autocracy of the system, something that, I’ve come to believe, creates alienation and prevents creativity and makes the holiest cow of Britain seem even more stupid as she chews the cud of her citizens’ sickly mess. It’s got to be better to talk straight to each other, no?
So I did. Up close, but not too close. It was important to keep it personal, not intimidating. I let any potential frown or visible tension go from my face and my voice was put into suitable gear; Low in frequency and volume and friendly enough for being welcoming and serious enough for… Being taken seriously.
“It doesn’t look very good when you’re spitting down the sinks in front of the patients,” I told her and felt my face getting hot. Not only was the whole situation awkward, but I had talked about how things looked rather than how they were. Why? I don’t know. Maybe the line manager route wasn’t so bad after all?
My spitting colleague looked back at me. Somehow, she was even closer now. I could see the pores in her smooth skin and she could no doubt see every crack, bag and wrinkle in mine. She was supposed to have been challenged, yet I was the one feeling exposed. Her face was happy and the smiling mouth said “Yes” and I realised she hadn’t understood a thing of what I’d tried to say. It’s so hard this thing, straight talking.
“Yes?” said I and “yes” she repeated, still just as happy. This was going nowhere! My sweaty hands started fumbling with a pen which soon decided to escape from the embarrassing mess with a jump down the floor where it rolled away and hid under a trolley.
I started reaching down for it but changed my mind half way and with panic building up, I turned my head and looked around the room: Where were my beloved straight-talking Filipinos when I needed them the most? Amazingly, none of the over 15000 (fifteen thousand) Filipinos within the NHS were present. They were all tucked away in my memory – Far way back in their homeland, some twenty-five years ago:
At the quiet pretend-paradise beach, Small Laguna, we were a handful of westerners who were enjoying some quality time while attended to by the local Filipinos from the nearby town of Puerto Galera. Some of us were there mainly for the diving, others for the dope and others, still, for the girls. Occasionally, people were there for all of these things. My diving teacher put some effort into explaining, as he spoke to me in a slow and drawn out-way at the porch of his rented cottage where he puffed away on a cheeky one with his Filipina girlfriend perched up on his lap, that he had drunk beer from a bottle while sitting at the bottom of the sea. “Ja, you kind of need to suck the beer out, you see” he said in his German-Austrian accent.
We were of different sorts and into different things but we all tolerated each other as civilised westerners do – especially on holiday. That is, until a crazy Swedish woman showed up. She talked too much and couldn’t be still. As she stood by the bar drinking San Miquel, her feet kept stubbornly marching on, up and down on the spot. She displayed a complete ignorance of social codes and an abundance of funny behaviours. Poor devil – she wasn’t right in the head; Still, that could have been almost alright; the holiday clown, the funny nutter, but it wasn’t alright because she broke the taboo above all others in the free world: She smelled.
She stank, she reeked of dirty old sweat and moist mouldy groins. She had the stench of a trooper in the trenches, you smelled her from 10 metres distance and it was horrible. Our paradise was disturbed and we hated her for it and what the heck were we to do? There’s nothing you can do about a mad woman suddenly showing up and stinking the whole place down, is there?
The landlady, a large woman called Sonia, asked me to talk with the woman as we came from the same country. Sonia, in her naivety, thought that having a shared culture and language would make it easier to deliver the much-needed advice. I threw my arms out: “You want me to talk with a woman I don’t know about how she smells, are you crazy?” I walked off, shaking my head.
The next day the mad woman came up to the bar on her own as usual. This girl wasn’t the kind that comes with friends, but usually, she was accompanied by a cloud of flies and now there were none. And as she stood beside me, doing her stationary tramping, I couldn’t smell anything. Nothing but my own fresh breath of cigarettes and beer and the odd whiff from the black bin liners, full of cans, wipes and used condoms, that were brewing and baking in the hot sun where they had been thrown out by maids and awaited to be shipped away to some forgotten landfill site just outside paradise.
“Hello”, she said too loud while she stood too close, but at least she wasn’t smelling! “Yes”, she continued despite not having got a reply from me, “today I showered. I showered and changed clothes.”
” That’s… That’s great”, I stammered pathetically while looking away and meeting the eyes of my smiling landlord, big Sonia, who was winking at me from the other end of the bar.
“Yes”, said Sonia later when it was only us two, “I told her like this: ‘Annika, you know; you smell! You need to wash! Wash a little bit here and a little bit there’” and as she said this her hands were moving in scrubbing circles between her legs and under her arms. And after that, the crazy Annika didn’t smell any more. She was still mad and she still disturbed our time in Paradise, but she didn’t stink. Because big Sonia had told her that she needed to wash a little bit here and a little bit there.
Flushed and sweaty, I stood on the ward and surrendered to the fact that no one would come to my rescue and, looking into a pair of big brown innocent eyes, I managed an apologetic and unconvincing:
“Er… Yes… You were spitting down the sinks in front of the patients and… It doesn’t look good.”
“I was spitting?” The happy colleague looked at me in disbelief, seemingly unaware of her bad habit.
“Yes, you were spitting”, I said, quickly turned away and walked off with a red-hot face and very much missing big Sonia who would, I’m sure, have been so much better at this.
David Ingemarsson 2018
Leave a Reply