Dresses to Dances

“The doctors will provide you with dictaphone notes from patient sessions, you need to type and file them,” explained Mrs Jamaica, one of the medical secretaries.

I took a seat at my temporary desk in the small office I would share with two other medical secretaries for the next two weeks. So far, only Mrs Jamaica, who looked to be twenty-five years old but was in fact forty with two children, was at work.

At the adult outpatient clinic in Bloomsbury Mews, I had been ordered as a New Zealander to cover the New Zealand medical secretary on leave.

“Also, there is the front desk.”

Mrs Jamaica’s grin held a secret she found amusing that I instantly sensed was concerning. She turned and pointed from our office through a door to a large reception desk enclosed by glass, much like a bank teller’s reception. A two-inch gap divided the desk from the glass which stretched to the ceiling. Through the gap you could slide paper, pens and sound. On the other side of the glass was the patient waiting room.

“You’ll have a few people drop in to hang out in the day lounge,” said Mrs Jamaica, and pointed to a corridor. “They’ll just walk through there.” She paused and looked at me, seriousness overcame her. “They know where to go.” I returned the stare hoping my silence and searching eyes would elicit elaboration, but to no avail. Mrs Jamaica snapped out of her respite and smiled warmly before moving to the next subject, continuing to outline my role for the next two weeks.

I would share reception duties with her and another medical secretary. While in the shared office, I was to type patient dictaphone notes and book appointments; and in the glass booth, greet clients and transfer calls.

“When they come in for their appointment, ring their doctor and tell the patient to wait in the waiting room.” She motioned to three tatty seats set against a discoloured wall next to a coffee table with at-least-five-year-old ripped magazines.

She stared though into the waiting room before turning quickly to her left. “See this red button?” I looked on the wall on our side of the glass reception booth. Mrs Jamaica chose her words. “If something. Really bad. Happens. Push this button.”

I looked at the giant red panic button. “What is really bad?”

“Say, if someone becomes extremely agitated or abusive or a fight or something happens out there.”

We looked back into the reception area. Fighting could explain the condition of the seats and magazines. I was tempted to ask if the glass was bulletproof and noticed the gap between the glass barrier and front desk was wide enough for a maniac to get a hand through and grab my neck – if I slouched forward. Failing strangulation, a bullet could go under the glass and hit me at chest height. Good thing the place was full of doctors.

Mrs Jamaica snapped out of her brief but necessary grim diversion to give further job instructions before I sat at my desk in the safety of the small office and got to work.

Just before 10am, the other medical secretary strolled in and greeted me, dumping her giant handbag on her desk. With intense focus she proceeded to dig around her handbag until she produced her roll-your-own cigarette supplies and placed these on her desk. She picked up her phone, told the person on the other end she was at work, hung up the phone, and watched me from behind the cigarette she was rolling.
She had long dark auburn hair, tanned skin and a cat-bum-smoker’s mouth. I put her in her mid-forties.

A female staff member around the same age came downstairs and opened our office door. They went outside for a smoke.

I called her Mrs Led Zeppelin because when she did talk to me, she began by telling me her sister was going out with Robert Plant, Led Zeppelin’s lead singer.

By this stage Robert Plant must have been sixty years old and it struck me as sad that someone would be proud to be the sister of the woman sleeping with an aged rocker. It wasn’t like Robert Plant was in his hot and sexy creative prime. I looked at Mrs Led Zeppelin and imagined a sister who looked much the same, and thought about sex between Mrs Led Zeppelin’s sister and Robert Plant: a disturbing thought. At twenty-two years old I thought, or rather hoped, adults stopped having sex at forty. At twenty-two years old, I found anyone over thirty unattractive.

After a few days I determined Mrs Led Zeppelin’s workday and work ethic.

She arrived an hour late, turned on her computer, went outside for a smoke, returned to her desk and made a phone call, talked to Mrs Jamaica who leaned back in her chair listening, smiling and saying little, then disappeared for an hour, returned to her desk and talked for thirty minutes with whoever might drop by her desk, went for a smoke, typed some medical notes for five minutes, went for an hour and a half lunch break – probably with her sister and Robert Plant – then in the afternoon repeated the cycle minus the lunch break.

On my first morning at the adult outpatient clinic, I sat behind the glass at reception transferring calls and greeting patients who seemed to be the same people who asked me for money outside Tube stations. The patients were a combination of people suffering serious psychological problems, having drug issues, dealing with traumatic experiences, or all of the above.

“I’m here for my slow-release injection,” was my first enquiry from a dishevelled, agitated, fully bearded man tapping on the glass like I hadn’t seen him even though I was looking at him.

“Sorry?” I said. “You’re here for what?”

“I’m here for my slow-release injection.”

The tapping increased with his distress and Mrs Jamaica dashed to my aid. “Just take a seat in the lounge,” she said, “and the nurse will come for you soon.”

Mrs Jamaica flashed him her patient smile and watched Mr Slow Release Injection walk through to the day lounge.

“You’ll get a few like that,” she said, as if that were all the explaining required. “He knows he needs to go into the lounge.” She looked at me blankly. I felt her eying me, undertaking a psychological assessment of her own, before she turned and went back to her desk. I checked the red button’s location and stretched my arm towards it. I would have to get off my chair to sound the alarm.

Often patients didn’t know their doctor’s name or turned up for non-existent appointments or turned up at the wrong time insisting they see doctors without an appointment. Luckily, Mrs Jamaica helped because Mrs Led Zeppelin was never around.

The friendly doctors and staff welcomed me and asked the same obligatory questions I had come to recognise as a London temp. “Where are you from? How are you finding the job so far? How long are you here for? Do you ever feel like harming yourself? How often do you hit yourself in the head like that?” I answered their questions with my best practised smile and kept the enthusiasm level low, self-consciously aware smiling too much might result in my never getting out from behind the glass.

My first morning went reasonably smoothly and just before lunch I left my reception post and asked Mrs Jamaica where I should go for lunch. Mrs Jamaica smiled and Mrs Led Zeppelin licked a roll-your-own cigarette paper then paused.

“You’re going to come back aren’t you?” asked Mrs Led Zeppelin.

I was surprised, “Yes, of course I’ll be back.”

“Because the last temp left at lunch time and did not come back,” said Mrs Led Zeppelin, and they laughed that breath-holding nervous laugh people use to soften a situation filled with tension.
I didn’t tell them all New Zealanders come back because we need the money.

At this time the New Zealand dollar converted to thirty-three pence. My new medical secretary friends did not realise the desperation of an unemployed New Zealander living in a shitty Earl’s Court hostel.

Rather than feeling compelled to flee the madness, I could not wait to get back from lunch. This was my most enjoyable job in London so far. The staff were friendly and the patients special. I could relate to them. They had imaginations.

Over the next two weeks, I typed patient notes and prescriptions from a dictaphone. “I have prescribed Mrs Marther 2mg of Haloperidol and Thorazine to help her sleep. Stop. We will reassess her medications at next week’s appointment. Stop.” The doctor’s monotone voice sounded dead to his patient’s pain. “Please book Mrs Marther an appointment for Monday, January tenth at ten am. Stop.”

Most interesting were the patients’ delusions. Every medical dictaphone recording held a tantalising story leaving me in a perpetual state of anticipation, waiting for the next bizarre report. One patient was sure “her old school friends are hiding in her closet stealing her dresses to wear to dances.” It conjured an image and story that stays with me.

It’s nineteen-fifty in a small English village. At the local hall once a month on a Friday night, dances are held. It’s all the teenage folk can talk about for the weeks leading up to the dance. The previous week, Miss Juniper drove with her mother to the nearest town and bought herself a new dress. It’s a beautiful blue satin frock that flares from the waist with a large matching blue bow at the back. Every night, Miss Juniper takes the dress from her free-standing wooden wardrobe in the two-hundred-year-old stone cottage family home she shares with her seven siblings, and lays the dress on her bed, gazing at it with reverence, enraptured by its beauty. She tries the dress on and turns around in front of a full-length mirror and imagines Fred Turner, the general store owner’s eldest son and most handsome boy in the village, asks her to dance. She is usually a wall flower but something about the way she looks in her blue satin dress and the way their eyes meet across the hall on a crisp and foggy evening makes Fred notice her. In some of her fantasies he asks her to marry him on the night of their first dance. She is in love with the idea of Fred before she knows him. Then, one evening, just before bed, at the time this trying-on-the-dress ritual takes place, she opens her closet to find the blue dress missing.

Someone has stolen it! Miss Juniper thinks it is Agatha, her friend from church who has her eye on Fred. Thing is, Miss Juniper doesn’t realise she is sixty years old and lives in a half-way-house in central London.

Outside her window a train passes and shakes the building. Miss Juniper never got married, she was always that strange girl the boys wouldn’t talk to, and all Miss Juniper’s mother ever wanted was for her daughter to get married.

The next day Miss Juniper tells her doctor about the school friend she suspects was in her closet and stole the dress to see if the doctor can help. And he can. He prescribes Thorazine.

The adult outpatient clinic was a strange, fascinating and too-brief glimpse into the lives of doctors and mental health patients who I left, along with Mrs Jamaica and Mrs Led Zeppelin, behind the glass partition with their delusions and medications. The New Zealander I filled in for returned and I had to move to my next seven pounds per hour administration job.

I would have loved to stay longer.