Stephen's ward

A ward on the ground floor? What’s the point of it?
Stephen pondered this as he sat in a flimsy NHS dressing gown and looked out at the people filing past his window occasionally looking in at all the sick people.
There was little else to do. An old man snored in the bed across from him. An old man coughed and moaned in the bed next to him. Other old men made other low noises across the room. They were the sort of noises that stopped you from doing other things, things that required some concentration, things that actually passed the time.
The television was on all day. The nurses would use it to wake everyone up by putting on the breakfast news at 7am. But it seemed to only wake up Stephen. The nurses might have to shake some of the other men. They might tell the nurses to get off them. They might ask them to give them a kiss. Some nurses would laugh at this; tell them they’re a dirty old dog. One nurse got angry and took a man’s breakfast away.
At the moment it was 3pm. The television was dreadful. It seemed stuck on ITV1 and a presenter - perhaps it was Des O’Connor - flirted with a girl a third his age and seemed to wink at the watching audience, and smile like he was just a teenager.
Along with the main entrance doors to the ward, there was a room where the orderlies seemed to go and chat, perhaps sip tea. Perhaps they did some form of work in there, but Stephen had never been in to check, nor seen them working whenever the door was left open.
He had taken to standing at the window, mid-way between the two lines of beds on the ward and the rear door to the orderlies’ room. He did this in order to attempt to interest, entertain or otherwise amuse himself during the remainder of his stay on this ward.
He heard snatches of conversation. Football talk, thoughts on the different nurses, how bad they thought their jobs were, what they were getting up to later that evening. It was all quite dull, but less so than watching Des O’Connor.
While he was pretending to look out of the window (which he might pretend to do for stretches of about 20 minutes at a time), he had begun to notice that more wildlife than simply the families and friends of the sick and dying were scurrying past the window.
All manner of crows haunted the hospital grounds. Rooks, jackdaws, magpies - they lighted on fences, cars, earth mounds and huge waste bins. They scrabbled around for whatever would sustain them. He might see a few sparrows, maybe a blackbird or a robin (its red breast was fading at this time of year).
Some days he would see something that would actually get his full attention. He’d stop listening to the orderlies whining, he couldn’t hear the old men coughing and dying anymore. Even the sound of the dread TV would be blocked out. On those days, he would watch the ugly scampering of a huge brown rat.
The rat would use the shelter provided by the industrial-sized waste bins to plot his skirmishes into enemy territory. This open ground contained a wide range of debris, discarded food, paper, stones, small beetles. The rat would dart out to inspect and sniff at it before perhaps putting it into its mouth and then darting back into cover.
While Stephen was utterly fascinated by the exploits of the rat, he was also thoroughly disgusted by it. Today, as he watched the rat he noticed how close it was roaming to the hospital edge, how fearless it had become. He also noticed that one of the orderlies was going back and forth through the ward with sacks of refuse, passing through an open double door (probably a fire door) in the orderlies’ room and taking the sacks to the giant bin. The rat didn’t seem to have retreated to the safety of its bin lair and was instead waiting and watching underneath a Ford Fiesta that was parked near to the windows of the next ward along.
It would be easy for the rat now, easy to invade and spread disease through the shiny hospital. Stephen felt uneasy for the first time since hearing he was very ill. Sweat was beading on his spine and his legs were suddenly very weak. His white knuckles clamped onto the window sill. His head whirled as the rat flew from under the car and out of sight, close in to the hospital wall. Stephen collapsed and his vision thickened with cloud.
He awoke in his bed, he had been sedated. He tried to alert the nurses or the orderlies that a rat, that death carrying creature, might be here, in this very room, clambering up onto sterile equipment and urinating into the cups that hold the medicine.
But all he could do was drool. Drool and flop. Flop and drool, and watch Des O’Connor and his willing female wink and smile, smile and wink back at him.