Page 85 of King’s Ransom

I spent all of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in the waiting room of Phelps Hospital, alone, waiting for any news about Audrey’s condition.

(I didn’t take my backpack with me. I’d run out of sultanas and didn’t need my laptop or burner phones.)

An emergency department is an interesting place to watch people and, when I wasn’t reading my book, I observed the various personalities who worked in or came to the ER.

For instance, I got to know the janitor’s mopping routine.

He was a short bespectacled grey-haired Chinese-American fellow named Kenneth Wong, and as he diligently went about mopping the floors of the emergency ward he did so in the same perfectly repeated pattern every time.

He’d start in the waiting area—I would lift my feet as he mopped under my chair—then move on to the ladies’ room and the men’s room, then the hallways. After two hours, he would return and follow the exact same order again.

He would smile at the tiny older Chinese-American lady working in the gift shop whenever he passed her and I soon discovered that they were married. They would dine together on their breaks, using chopsticks to eat noodles that they had prepared at home.

It was very sweet.

Kenneth didn’t speak much English, but as he mopped the floor under my feet, he would always smile broadly and say, ‘Thank you, sir.’

The patients who came through the emergency room were a varied bunch.

Most were classic minor cases: kids with sprained wrists from ice-skating accidents; older folks who’d had falls.

Two more serious cases involved a car accident victim and a man who’d fallen off a ladder while changing bulbs on the Christmas lights on his roof.

One set of visitors, however, caused an unpleasant incident late on Christmas Eve.

(It was very quiet. I was the only person in the waiting room. Kenneth was mopping the men’s room.)

Four inebriated twenty-something young men came in.

One of them, in his stupor, had stumbled while leaving a bar and smacked his head against the pavement. He was now bleeding from his forehead and his buddies had brought him to the hospital.

They were all dressed in expensive polos.

Rich boys.

As Nurse Narelle had taken the injured one away to get some stitches, his drunken buddies either checked their phones or stalked around the waiting room.

One of them said loudly, ‘I gotta piss. Where’s the john?’

He spied the men’s room, where Kenneth’s cart was parked across the doorway, and marched to it.

‘Sorry. Um. Excuse . . .’ Kenneth said in halting English. ‘One minute, sir.’

‘Fuck you,’ the lad said. ‘If you’re gonna live in my country, learn to speak English better.’

He then swiped all the cleaning gear off the top of Kenneth’s cart: wash rags, buckets and solvents spilled everywhere.

Kenneth dropped to his knees to clean up the mess.

I went over to help him, gathering up some of the scattered items and replacing them on the cart.

‘Please, no need help,’ Kenneth said.

‘It’s okay.’

As I assisted him with the clean-up, I glanced into the men’s room and blinked at what I saw.

The drunk lad was peeing against the wall.