CORRIDORS

I’d always prefer to walk down corridors than go through their doors. Evil twins waiting at the end of them, space lord motherfuckers striding down them, the confused and lost staring down them as their lover walks away. Badly lit ones in chain hotels in small towns, sounds drifting in and out as you travel down them. Deserted ones in doomed office buildings. This one is the longest hospital corridor in Europe. Like a human motorway with separate lanes for wheelchairs and a fast lane for people sprinting towards good news and bad. Endless junctions lead off not to towns and villages but to illness and ailments. Each turn off is its own little community, headed by receptionists with either more patients than patience or more patience than patients. It takes 3 minutes and 48 second to walk the corridors length at normal pace. Add one minute if you are walking with a waddling, heavily pregnant woman. Take away a minute if you’re doing a walk of grim urgency towards a ward. Strange choices of music come from speakers dotted along the way. Last time, Sinatra was on his last “it’s up to you” just as I reached the end. I play a game with myself to see if I can stand at one end and be there for the moment that the corridor is deserted. It never quite happens. Always, a distant figure creeps into view just as the last person fades. If you walk down far enough, the atmosphere will change. Frosted glass, restricted area. The approaching rattle of a trolley, its dazed cargo being wheeled towards an uncertain hour. The automatic doors part solemnly like crematorium curtains to eject a surgical-masked man to approach a bench-full of drained faces, delivering news like a bomb whose shrapnel will dig into body parts and embed itself forever. All this a mere 100 yards away from the frivolity of dermatology. And from this mother of all corridors springs a much shorter one. Both ends clearly visible, no entry doors at each end. I pace up and down it like a swimmer doing lengths, knowing that pretty soon I’m going to have to open one of the doors.