The Ministry of Wellness

At the time when everyone was jumping from one job to another; Yvonne congratulated herself on her good fortune to be securely employed within a ministerial department: retail stores had been and gone, industries and financial institutions disintegrated, but the state was enduring and ineluctable. And what could be more secure than a job with the Ministry of Wellness?  For birth and death were a perpetual cycle, punctuated by bouts of illness, and the Ministry of Wellness held a special role in this eternal circuit; expertly conveying its citizens from cradle to grave.

Yvonne was employed as a clerk at a Wellness Hub - or doctors’ surgery as they used to be known.  This particular hub was a small primary care unit, housed in a former department store - for who could afford to buy anything new nowadays?  People bought their standardised goods from government outlets, using their retail credits, and being in a Ministry job meant that Yvonne would obtain extra coupons to spend.

On her first day, Yvonne had wondered if it might not also be her last, as she stood in the rain slick street, grappling with her collapsed umbrella.  Exasperated, she finally admitted defeat and strode towards the overflowing dustbin next to the bus stop, the umbrella's black form hanging bat-like from her outstretched hand, realising that it was inevitable that she arrive at the Wellness Hub looking like a drowned corpse.

At the same moment, the number 217 accelerated as it reached the bus shelter, soaking the wretched people who were huddling beneath its canopy.  In the wake of the tsunami, drips of filthy water ran from their grey faces and dripped down the backs of their raincoats, making them shake with fury at the outrage and bring curses down upon the driver.  “Bastard,” Yvonne swore under her breath, as the dirty green rectangle of the double-decker receded from view.  There would be a twenty-minute wait for the next one.  “Quicker to walk,” she thought, as she dropped the dead chiropteran into the rubbish bin and squelched in her now ruined navy court shoes in the direction of the town centre.

She reached what used to be Coopers Emporium ten minutes late, but the Wellness Hub was in such a state of chaos that no one noticed her tardiness.  As she applied her peppermint green surgical mask at the front door, she bumped into a fast-food delivery driver coming out the other way; his insulated bag now sagging emptily and his water-streaked motorcycle helmet obscuring his vision.  Forced upwards by the face covering, Yvonne’s breath fogged up her glasses, so she stumbled blindly into the lobby, pulling her mask down beneath her nose.

“Mask on, please!” scolded a receptionist from behind a glass partition; the graphite hardness of her eyes, like pencil points in her pale, doughy face.

“I’m sorry,” Yvonne answered pathetically, “I couldn’t see where I was going.”

“Check-in using the touch screen in the waiting room.”

“Oh, no.  I’m not here for an appointment – it’s my first day working here.  I’m Yvonne, the new clerical assistant.”

The receptionist sighed and turned to her colleague, seated at a neighbouring workstation.  “Do you know anything about this, Polly?” she asked the other woman, who was unpacking a Happy Meal from the depths of a brown paper bag and lovingly arranging the colourful polystyrene containers next to her keyboard.

“Nah, no one’s said anything.  Is someone expecting you?” Polly stared through the protective screen at Yvonne, while simultaneously pouring French fries into the lid of a burger box.

“Yes.  Mrs Linnaeus.” 

Yvonne fished a soggy letter of invitation out of her sodden coat pocket and flapped it like a dead herring at the woman seated behind the glass.  

“Come through the waiting room.  First door on the left,” the first receptionist barked. As she spoke, she stretched out a chubby hand to retrieve a greasy sausage in batter from its Styrofoam nest on top of a pile of green prescriptions.

In the waiting room, a huddle of forlorn patients stared up at a television screen, trying to ignore the commotion at the far end of the vestibule, where a noisy gaggle of blue-uniformed nurses hurried back and forth with a mop and bucket, cloths and a bottle of disinfectant spray.  Yvonne briefly glanced up at the screen, as frail looking silver-haired man smiled weakly beneath the red logo of the Ministry of Wellness.  “If you notice blood in your pee, even just once, report it to your Wellness Specialist…” his tinny voice implored, distorted by the deafening volume of the television set, to a high-pitched squeal.  No wonder the nurses were shouting, Yvonne thought to herself, as she passed from the room and looked for the next doorway on the left.

Yvonne politely knocked on a blue door marked Clerical and on entering was surprised to find herself on the other side of the glass-fronted wall of the reception office. 

“That TV’s a bit loud,” she said to Polly, the second receptionist, nodding in the direction from which she had just come.

“Yeah,” Polly agreed dismissively.  “We lost the remote – you get used to it.”

She was busily sanitising her red raw hands, using foam from a pump dispenser, her empty Happy Meal boxes now discarded in the bin beneath her desk.

The lead receptionist, with her immense back towards Yvonne, was talking to a patient on the phone, while a collection of other ringtones provided a cacophonous background din.

“Wellness Hub,” Polly said graciously, turning to her computer screen.  Yvonne briefly wondered how to respond, but then realised that the receptionist was wearing a headset, through which she was communicating with a patient.  “Please may I ask the reason for your call…” she continued in soothing, musical tones, honed by a series of Ministry of Wellness training courses.

Just then, an enthusiastic looking woman, Yvonne remembered from her interview as Mrs Linnaeus, bustled into the room clutching a folder bursting at the seams with documents.

“Ah, there you are!  Come with me – let’s get you acquainted with the Wellness System.”  

She grabbed Yvonne by a damp sleeve and dragged her to a desk piled high with papers, which was tucked away in an alcove at the back of the room.

“Okay – see how you get on with these,” Mrs Linnaeus' voice tinkled brightly.  She pushed the folder into Yvonne’s arms, then turned on her heel and disappeared for the rest of the day.

Removing her mask for the first time, Yvonne noticed that the fatty smell of burgers was undercut by a more pungent aroma of faeces and antiseptic.  There must have been an accident in the waiting room she realised - no wonder the patients looked so mortified.  She hoped that no one else would walk through the blue door and waft the stink in with them.

The receptionists had obviously been fortified by their breakfast and were now taking call after call, so that one conversation seemed to merge with the next.  The constant trill of the telephones, the sound of people trudging in through the automatic front door, the roar of the rain in the street outside, combined with the muffled proclamations from propaganda films in the waiting room and made Yvonne’s head ache.  She noticed that the phone on what must now be her desk was also ringing, but she declined to answer it and gratefully located a button on the keypad labelled mute.  Its red light flashed angrily, but she ignored it and switched on what she decided must be her desktop computer.

Yvonne surveyed the room, searching for somewhere to hang her coat, and trying to take everything in.  Slipping the sodden garment onto a coat hanger and sliding it onto a horizontal metal coat rail, that hinted at the room’s former use, she sought out other features of the Wellness Hub’s old life as a retail store. 

There were full-length mirrors along one wall, which reflected a lank haired middle-aged woman back at her, whose eyes were now panda rimmed with smudged mascara.  She remembered childhood trips to Coopers with her mother to buy new school uniform and spinning round to get a full view of herself from the front and behind.  The now grown-up Yvonne likewise rotated 360 degrees, beside the cubby hole which housed her new place of work, and as she came to a stop she noticed a faded sign above the doorway which read Ladies’ Fitting Room. 

Some weeks later, Yvonne was frantically sorting through the latest pile of incoming medical letters, outpatient prescriptions and discharge summaries; attempting to make sense of the strange terminology and abbreviations. She selected a radiology report from the paper mountain to her left: “MRI IAM NAD” a consultant had scrawled across it in biro.  Yvonne scratched her head and hid it right at the bottom of the second pile to her right: “Hope patient dies before I have to work this out,” she said aloud with a conspiratorial chuckle to herself.

“Not likely,” a male voice boomed behind her left shoulder, making her jump with fright.  “Not from that, anyway.  It says his inner auditory meatus is perfectly healthy.”

Yvonne turned her head and found herself facing a wall of Harris tweed.  It was the gigantic Dr Galen, to whom she had never before spoken.

“Oh…thank you…doctor…sir…Galen…” she stammered nervously, looking up into his shiny roseate face, which made her think of her grandmother's perfumed soap.

“Dr Galen will do.  And who might you be?”

“Yvonne Ivanovitch, doctor.”

“Jolly good. Back to work then.”

And with that he was gone - a blur of checked wool and flaming ginger hair, chased by a receptionist waving a handful of green paper in his direction.  “Dr Galen, please!  Just your signature on these prescriptions!” 

A moment later, Polly waddled back through the blue door with a look of victory on her face.

“You have to hunt them down!” she purred.

“He’s rather a large prey - even you couldn’t eat a whole one.” Yvonne said.  Then immediately regretting it, she buried herself in a pile of filing again.

At lunch time, Yvonne decided to explore another part of the building.  The Wellness Hub only used one of the old department store’s floors, with the consulting rooms and offices constructed from partitions made from the leftover shop fittings: chrome, glass, mirrors, bright overhead lighting and shiny polished floors.   Perhaps the MOW had thought conversion would seem clean and clinical, but the resulting effect was one of a hall of mirrors, and Yvonne felt that she was being constantly shadowed by her own doppelgänger. 

In the corridor an elderly gentleman was patting himself down frantically.  “Have you seen my sock?” he mumbled through his face mask, his eyes darting hopefully about Yvonne’s person.  He pulled up his trouser leg to reveal one bare foot in a shabby brown shoe.

Just then one of the nurses flew past, screeching, “I haven’t seen it Mr Affleck.  Go and ask at reception!”

“She must have it,” Mr Affleck said desperately to Yvonne.  “I took them both off for my diabetes foot check and now I’m only wearing one.”  He showed her the other foot which was clad in threadbare grey wool.

“Ask at reception,” Yvonne gave her stock response to the patient.  She preferred to keep contact with the clientele to a minimum, as she only seemed to further confuse them.  At first, she had wondered why the clinical staff were so brusque, but now she understood that conversations with patients tended to take a circular form, whereby they asked you the same question over and over again in the hope of receiving a different answer.

“Are you sure you haven’t seen it?”

“Really, you should ask at reception Mr Affleck.  Hopefully it will turn up in the lost property box?”

Yvonne continued around the corner, to where the consulting rooms were found.  Most of the blinds were down for the sake of confidentiality, but Dr Galen was catching up with his referrals and the shades were raised to reveal him pacing around his office whilst roaring into a dictaphone.  Yvonne admired his room.  It was the least impersonal of all the consulting rooms; in resistance to the clinical modernity of the MOW, there were anatomical diagrams on the walls and plaster models of body parts around the room, which lent it the air of a cabinet of curiosities. It was spacious, on account of his seniority, but Galen's bulk made it seem tiny.  As he bellowed into the tape recorded, he brushed past a human skeleton which was suspended in the corner, disturbing its bones, so that they rattled; then he tripped over a pile of books and upset a coffee cup over the papers on his desk.  His smooth pink face reddened and Yvonne had the feeling that she was in some way responsible for the disturbance in his equilibrium.  

When she returned to reception, Yvonne found that Mr Affleck's quest for his missing sock had increased in intensity.  Inexplicably, the lead receptionist, Margarita, was speaking on the telephone to the pharmacy on the High Street, to see if he had dropped it in there.  

"I've retraced my steps and I can't find it!" the poor man wailed and insisted on pulling up his trousers legs to show the old lady in the queue behind him.  The line of patients was now out of the door and they fidgeted and scraped their feet in impatience.  A woman with an eye patch stared at Yvonne unnervingly with her one good eye, obviously trying to attract her attention, so she pretended to be fascinated with the pile of medical records on the tea trolley.

Mr Affleck started turning out his pockets and his house keys, handkerchief and a collection of coins scattered to the ground.  

"My foot's really cold!  That nurse, Daphne, has me sock.  I just know it!"

He started sobbing into his face mask and Yvonne was almost moved to tears.  Instead, a strange feeling came over her, and before she could stop herself, she shouted through the glass partition:

"I know Mr Affleck - I'll pin the devil!"

The receptionists' mouths gaped and Mr Affleck was shocked into silence as Yvonne removed her name badge from her cardigan, bent the safety pin out of shape, and started jabbing it into the upholstery of Margarita's swivel seat.

"I pin the devil! I pin the devil! I pin the devil!" Yvonne chanted with each assault on the chair.

Just then the blue door labelled "Clerical" flew open and in wafted a strong chemical stench, followed by nurse Daphne waving something in the air.

"Has Mr Affleck gone?" Daphne hollered.  "I found his sock under pile of couch rolls and then I went and dropped it in the chemical spill outside the cleaning cupboard."

"Is it liquid nitrogen?" Polly cried.  "They've been storing it in there for the cryogenics."

"Cryotherapy!" Daphne corrected.  "No, I think it's one of those industrial sized bottles of hand sanitiser - it's gone everywhere.  Yvonne, go and put some hazard signs up before someone slips and breaks their neck!"

"I don't know where they're kept.  Polly - you go and fetch them and I'll stand there and warn people," said Yvonne pulling on her peppermint green surgical mask and rushing out of the door, followed by Polly rattling the keys to the cleaning cupboard and nurse Daphne waving a soggy sock.

They collided outside in the corridor, whereupon Yvonne inhaled the chemical fumes from the spillage and felt suddenly light headed.  Just then, the one-eyed woman, rushing from the waiting room in haste to make her appointment with the Ophthalmologist, misjudged the distance between herself and the other women and sent them all flying.

It was completely dark.  Lying in an ethanol puddle on the cold corridor floor, Yvonne was aware of the roar of blood in her ears and the repetitive electronic bleep of the receptionist's panic button.  Far in the distance, Dr Galen boomed the words "depth perception," which resonated in her brain like an echo.  She felt something clammy being lifted from her eyes, then everything was blinding white light. Bandages? her delirious brain wondered.

"Oh, you've found my sock!” exclaimed a delighted voice; muffled, as though through a shroud, and then it all went black again.

[Edited to combine Parts 1 and 2]