Coins Only: Why It's Easier to Talk to Strangers
The clock over the doors said ten to three when I sat down under it.
My father had a fall at home one evening in February. My mother rang, and by ten I was at the hospital with him. He's seventy-four and retired. They kept him overnight behind a curtain to watch him, and he went home the next afternoon, fine, complaining about the tea. My mother is eighty, so my sister went round to sit with her.
About quarter to three he fell asleep with his mouth open, the way he does in front of the TV, and I went looking for something to eat. The only vending machine was two corridors away, in a waiting room outside the operating theatres. That's where the clock was.
A man about my father's age sat across from the machine with a handbag on his knees and his coat buttoned wrong. The handbag was his wife's. He said she'd gone through those doors at midnight and nobody had come out since.
For about a second I was glad it was his wife through there and not my father. I'm not proud of that second. It went.
The machine took coins only. He'd tried his card on it twice and it had just looked at him. I had change, so I bought a bag of cheese and onion crisps and held it out. He took one. After that the bag sat on the empty chair between us.
The TV on the wall showed football highlights with no sound. At 3:12 a goalkeeper let one in under his body, and the man said the keeper wanted dropping. I said everybody's allowed one bad night. At 3:40 the highlights came round again, and so did the argument. Neither of us gave an inch.
Somewhere in between, folding the empty crisp bag smaller and smaller, he told the bag and not me that he and his wife had had words at teatime. About the heating. He'd gone up to bed without making it up. He couldn't tell his daughter that. She'd be in first thing, and then he'd be her dad again.
So I told him I hadn't been to see my father since Christmas. It's forty minutes in the car.
I think that's why it's easier to talk to strangers, at that hour anyway. With a stranger there's nobody to be. On those chairs he wasn't anybody's dad, and I wasn't the one who only comes at Christmas. We never said our names. We said everything else.
For years three in the morning was me lying awake under the bedroom ceiling. That night I saw who it belongs to. A woman with a mop came down the corridor at half past three and said morning to us, and meant it. Somewhere across town, I suppose, the bakers were up. And the worried have always been up at three, on chairs like these, holding somebody else's bag.
Just before four the doors under the clock opened and a nurse looked along the chairs. He was on his feet before she'd said a word. He picked up the handbag and went through with her, and the doors swung shut behind them. The crisp bag was on his chair, folded into a small square.
