Small Hours
Eleven stories set between midnight and six, in hospitals, harbours, night buses and the kitchens of people who cannot sleep.
At four in the morning the hospital is a different building.
“Every one of these eleven stories knows exactly when to stop.”Granta
The book
Eleven stories set between midnight and six.
A night porter, a harbour master, a woman crying into a phone outside a hospital in a language nobody there speaks. Small Hours is Arden at her most compressed — every story arriving late, leaving early, and refusing to explain itself on the way out.
At four in the morning the hospital is a different building.
The lifts still work but nobody uses them. The vending machine on the third floor makes a sound every eleven minutes that nobody has ever been able to explain to me. The corridor lights are on a system that steps down at midnight, so the light you are standing in is not the light you came in under, and this is why everybody who has ever waited overnight in a hospital says afterwards that it felt like being underwater.
I had been there since nine. My father had been there since Tuesday, in the sense that his body had, and I had run out of ways to describe that to the people who kept ringing.
A porter came past with an empty trolley and said, all right? — not as a question, and I said, aye, not as an answer, and that was the whole of the conversation, and I have thought about it more than I have thought about most conversations in my life.
At some point I went down to the front and stood outside the doors with the smokers. There was frost on the roofs of the cars and a woman in a dressing gown crying into a phone, very quietly, in a language I did not have.
I remember that I looked at her and thought, quite coldly: she is at the beginning of hers and I am at the end of mine.
And then I thought: you have no idea where you are.
I went back up. The vending machine made its noise. On the ward they had turned the lamp on over my father's bed, which meant somebody had been in, which meant something had changed, and I stood in the doorway for a moment before I found out what.