Waiters know all of time's tricks; waiters know that suddenly, unwontedly, everything will seem brightly-lit, every object in the room will seem etched, super-real. And now nothing, not even the dropping of a petal from a bunch of wilting roses in a jar across the ward, or the twitching of an eyelid of a sleeping woman in the bed opposite, will escape you. Every breath, every scraping of a chair leg, every tinkling of a spoon in a mug of tea, every dropped biro, every swish of the swing doors.
You’re capturing it all in pin sharp resolution, the big stuff – the chattery noise and the comings and goings clustered around the nurses’ station – and the small. The music of the spheres and the itching of microbes. Nothing escapes. And yet you know you will carry nothing of it away. If you want to set it down, you will have to re-imagine it entirely. Make it up.
