The Swimming Pool (2016)
“The morning is empty and expectant, the traffic lanes bank-holiday clear. I park on yellow lines opposite the hospital’s emergency bays, where a lone police car idles, windows down, its driver smoking a cigarette.
The hospital has opened a new wing since I was last here, a curved, glossy structure, the lines of which distort as you walk under a glass canopy to the entrance. Inside, the atrium foyer is empty, like an evacuated hotel, the reception desk unmanned, the check-in monitors unused. The... only sign of life is at the Patient Transport desk, where a driver directs me to the third floor.
I pass signs for Breast Radiology, Rheumatology, Neurology, doors to a thousand nightmares past and future, before taking the lift towards the one that the Channings are living in the present. The school-age artworks, no different from those on the walls of my classroom at Elm Hill Prep, are a reminder that Georgia is, in law and in medicine, still a child.
The doors to the unit are locked and I ring and wait, watch through a narrow glass panel as preoccupied staff move between further sets of secure doors.MoreLess
The hospital has opened a new wing since I was last here, a curved, glossy structure, the lines of which distort as you walk under a glass canopy to the entrance. Inside, the atrium foyer is empty, like an evacuated hotel, the reception desk unmanned, the check-in monitors unused. The... only sign of life is at the Patient Transport desk, where a driver directs me to the third floor.
I pass signs for Breast Radiology, Rheumatology, Neurology, doors to a thousand nightmares past and future, before taking the lift towards the one that the Channings are living in the present. The school-age artworks, no different from those on the walls of my classroom at Elm Hill Prep, are a reminder that Georgia is, in law and in medicine, still a child.
The doors to the unit are locked and I ring and wait, watch through a narrow glass panel as preoccupied staff move between further sets of secure doors.MoreLess
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