The One They Call
The forms at St Chad's are kept on a shelf by the window, and on Tuesday mornings Aditi is kept there too, in the blue volunteer's jacket, for two hours, because the hospital found that people fill the forms in faster when somebody is standing near them.
Norman was holding the pen as though it were heavy.
“What's this word?” he called across to the desk. The receptionist was on the phone and didn't look up, and Norman's ears went red, because it had come out of him like an order and he'd heard it himself.
“Try it the long way round,” Aditi said. “Excuse me, could you tell me what ‘referral' means on this form?”
He tried it. He carried the sentence over to the window like a full cup, and the receptionist put down the phone and explained it in about ten seconds, and threw in a second thing he hadn't asked for, which is what happens.
“I don't understand this bit either,” he said, coming back, and they did the same trick with ‘consent', which turned out to mean saying yes in writing to something he had already said yes to twice out loud.
Then he stopped at ‘next of kin', and he stopped for a long time.
“It's the person we'd call first,” Aditi said. “If anything happened while you were in there.”
“And if I don't put anybody?”
“You can ask them that,” she said. “Do you want to?”
Norman looked at the box. “Could you tell me,” he said carefully, to nobody in particular, “what happens if I leave it empty?”
“I don't know,” Aditi said. “I'm only a volunteer. But I'll find you somebody who does.”
He didn't need her to. There's a woman two doors down from him who has had his spare key for eleven years and feeds the cat when he's away, and after a while he wrote her name in the box in small capitals. The next box said Relationship, and he sat with that one as well.
“Neighbor's fine,” Aditi said.
He wrote neighbor. Then he crossed it out and wrote friend, and asked whether that was allowed. She said it was.
“I'll ask her tonight,” Norman said. “Is that how I'd say it? ‘I was wondering whether you'd mind being the one they call.'”
Aditi said that was exactly how she'd say it herself.
He practiced the sentence twice on the way to the window, under his breath, because he had one more question to ask that day and it wasn't for the hospital.