Shortlisted: ‘Bobby Hospital’ by John Armstrong

Bobby’s opening goes like this:

Awful familiar face on you. Vincent’s right?

His messages feel like eyes on the back of my neck so quickly I throw a glance over my shoulder around the breakroom but it’s only the one nurse with the hollow stare striking the coffee machine with her open palm repeatedly. So I turn back around to my phone trying to relax my shoulders down into the leatherette couch and of course I consider not replying but there’s this one photo in particular of Bobby crouching down next to this big benevolent labrador retriever on some beach somewhere with both dog and boy looking out beyond the camera and across the sea. The way Bobby has his hands resting across the labrador’s neck and flank and the closeness of their two skulls tells me that their relationship is old and comfortable and full of depth and trust and reciprocity and I think to myself that sweet pup probably loves the beach more than anywhere else in the whole wide world and feeling myself sink a bit further down into the couch corner I start typing.

guilty x
patient or visitor?

It’s gone two at this stage but Bobby comes back straight away.

The appendix went on me there a few weeks ago. Fighting fit again now thanks to yourself.

There’s no chance he’d know me unless he managed to stay awake through the general and even then I’d have looked like a ghost made out of blue plastic.

i’m surprised you remember me?

Again those three little dots.

How could I not. The eyes on you.

I’m in the middle of replying when I get bleeped for a car crash. The guy is more glass than man at this stage and although we’re obliged to fight every losing battle in here some nights it’s hard to find the belief. I stand and I swab and I unclamp a clamp and desperately want to say something to convince the team that the situation might still be salvageable like I used to on the pitch in the galloping rain with the girls all huddled round me with their shins rising up like columns and their ponytails twisted into rope. I want to say something but instead I unclamp my clamp and then clamp it again.

By the time I’m set free with the blue dawn stretching up over me Bobby has already worked his way around to asking me out. I read his message as I’m walking to my car and despite myself I feel a smile spreading. When I find my bed I drop for a solid six hours which hardly ever happens me anymore and all that morning I dream of a cube made of pure flawless glass. I watch the cube rotate slowly in space like its own clean little planet. I sustain the cube’s every angle and attend to every face in turn as it turns to face me. I feel so peaceful it’s like an ache and when I wake I’m sweating and the sheets are gathered up round me like warm seaweed.

So we grab a drink and even with young Bobby sitting right there in front of me I still can’t place him. I try imagining him laid out naked on the table between us with his eyes closed and solemn and his cock flinching away like a lab rat but Bobby looks too healthy to be familiar in his chequered shirt buttoned right up to his throat. Anything I say about my job Bobby says wonderful. Like that: wonderful. Anger flashes up inside me every time he says it because maybe fetishing is too strong a word but that’s how it feels. Like I’m suddenly sainted because sometimes I help cut people open. I want to tell Bobby that most days the job makes me feel like a psycho because people stop being people and start being these loose collections of bits and pieces gathered around singular structural flaws and the hospital is the place where even one flaw means the end of everything and of course I want to tell Bobby this but he's saying wonderful again and I realise I have no idea what I’m after saying to him while I was away inside myself seething.

So we sort of stumble into the sex. When I mention I live nearby and Bobby offers to see me to the door. It’s only when I glimpse the appendectomy scar creased in below his belly button that I think maybe I do know him after all. Everything he whispers in my ear sounds like he’s quoting pornography from memory but soon we fold in together and I forget myself. Which is nice. Afterwards I fall asleep on his arm and dream of a glass orb nestled snug like an egg inside my skull. Then I dream of a glass pyramid rising high up above me towards its final point. The gentle light of dawn parts my bedroom curtains and refracts across the pyramid’s facets in soft shades of amber and crimson.

In the morning I’m stumbling towards the kitchen in my oversized Ramones tshirt when the buzzer goes.
Delivery says the static.

So I stand on the landing in my bare feet watching the two men negotiate the impossible geometries of the stairwell swinging the pane of glass up and around and over the bannister. Nothing I can do to help but it feels rude to return to my bed and anyway that’s where Bobby remains splayed out like a horizontal Christ. I decide the two men must be father and son because the younger looks so openly pissed off at every instruction barked from behind the older man's moustache. When the two men rest the first pane of glass up against the living room wall I offer them both coffee and the son opens his mouth to think about it but the father says we won’t thanks.

So father and son heft up five more panes of glass like slides lifted out from beneath some enormous microscope with their hands protected from incision inside big green goalie gloves. The two begin the assembly in the space between the couch and the TV shunting the coffee table away into a corner making my living room feel suddenly small. I stand there sipping my coffee and imagining one of the glass panes tipping slowly over and shattering all across the floor leaving me to discover glints and shards embedded in the soles of my feet for months to come.

Then Bobby comes padding down the hall with one corner of last night’s chequered shirt tucked provocatively down the front of his jocks.
Good sleep? I ask with my arms folded over my chest.
Yeah he says worrying his bedhead and joining the vigil. After a few more sips I glance sideways at Bobby and can see the picture forming behind his eyes. Suddenly he’s stepping forward and at first mortified I think he’s offering to help the father and son as they stoop to raise the final pane but instead he sidles round them and takes a long loping stride into the centre of the cube.

Then Bobby turns to look at me. He spreads his arms out wide. Yeah? he asks me.
Yeah I say. Yeah.
And the fourth wall goes up.

As the father gives the cube one last wipe the son hands me a clipboard to sign.
Here Bobby what’s your last name? I call out to him.
But Bobby is too busy gazing up in awe at the glass like a visitor to some gothic chapel. I still have him down in my phone as Bobby Hospital so that’s what I sign.

We spend most of that first morning laughing. There’s a rectangular slot like a letterbox cut in one side of the cube and I try passing Bobby a bowl of granola but we both fumble simultaneously and send yoghurt scything down both sides of the glass and this sets us both going. Then Bobby says he’s not really hungry so much as gasping for a piss and this cracks us up again and Bobby’s saying no no no because he really is desperate so I dig out a coke bottle from the recycling and I turn away and listen. Bobby hesitates handing the bottle back but I insist with a flex of my reaching fingers because after all I’m a medical professional so he passes it out through the letterbox sideways with its sloshing contents a deep amber and nearly hot in my hand. After a moment Bobby starts laughing again and his laughter invites me to laugh too so I do.

I decide I’d better take a spin over to Bobby’s apartment to collect a few of his bits. I find his keys in the pair of jeans he’s left pooled at the foot of my bed.
If we’re really doing this says Bobby as I’m leaving with his voice muffled behind the glass and I wait to see if there’s more to that thought but there isn’t.

When I let myself into Bobby’s apartment I discover that all the lights are on and all the windows are open and all the taps are running. In the kitchen all four electric burners have been left going full blast as well as the oven and the fridge is standing wide open revealing six or seven different cheeses covered over with clingfilm. Bobby never mentioned roommates so I work my way around turning everything off. The place feels basically clean if neglected as if Bobby inhabits only a few of its corners. At first I think he doesn’t own any underwear besides the pair he’s wearing but then I discover a stash in the laundry hamper compressed down under their own weight like dead leaves. Seeing no other option I put on a wash. Standing there watching Bobby’s jocks tumble over themselves behind the porthole I feel the pulse of a notification in my back pocket and I find that Bobby has sent me his share of the rent along with a gif of a puppy dangling a slice of pepperoni pizza from his mouth and the puppy looks so happy that I begin to feel ok again.

I make us pesto pasta for dinner and we eat on the floor with our plates on our laps and the glass between us. I apologise at least four separate times for overdoing the penne but Bobby insists that he’s just happy getting fed. Then it’s bedtime and I feel funny leaving him in there on his own so I offer to sleep on the couch but Bobby insists he’ll be fine. I feed a blanket through the slot and I try a pillow too but can’t make it fit. There’s something so Catholic in the way I have to help Bobby brush his teeth passing him a bowl of water with both hands into which he can spit and a separate bowl of water with which to rinse and a hand towel to dab the corners of his mouth.

I still don’t understand how you recognised me I say watching him push the toothbrush from one side of his mouth to the other.
Yeah I dunno says Bobby through a mouthful of foam. It sort of feels like I dreamed you.

Of course we try it. Through the slot I mean. To begin I imagine the separation might make things more interesting but the only way we can work the angles is if I prop myself up on a chair. That night in my dreams there are no cubes or spheres or pyramids of any kind. Just space rushing headlong past me like a long horizontal fall.

A few weeks go by and I’m still on nights so we don’t see much of each other. Before I leave for work Bobby pushes his lips and nose out through the slot sideways. Then he sits up texting me and sending me gifs. I’m in the theatre holding up a scalpel but my mind is on my phone back there in the locker and what Bobby Hospital might be texting me and the lead surgeon clears her throat and they all laugh and tease me about my new squeeze and behind my mask they can’t tell whether I’m blushing.

Later I stand there watching Bobby curled up in the middle of his cube swaddled in his nest of blankets and clothes and plates dashed with toast crumbs and his laptop with its charger running up and out of the slot and I wonder briefly how he could possibly be ok in there but looking at him now the question isn’t even worth asking and I desperately wish I could climb in there with him and be the little spoon.

I wake up at lunchtime possessed with the notion of hosting a dinner party because I haven’t had a chance to introduce Bobby to the girls.
We could even do some matchmaking I announce with a laugh. You must know some single lads.

Honestly I don’t says Bobby.

While I’m boiling Bobby’s eggs I listen to him on a work call with his little telemarketer headset and his bare chest and his laptop balanced on his crossed legs.
Yes yes that’s it exactly he says with a laugh.

I’m feeding Bobby as best I can but he’s only getting thinner so I’ve devised a routine of planks and pushups and callisthenics which we do together before I leave for work. By the end the glass is so fogged over with his breathing that I can hardly see him.
You could always quit says Bobby breathlessly behind the fog.

We need the exercise I reply.
Your job I mean. I’m making enough. Especially with all the weekend overtime.
I tell him I’ll think about it as he uses the tip of his finger to trace a tiny smiley face on the glass but by the time I’m out the door I’m already done thinking about it.

It takes me too long to realise that Bobby never learned how to fight. I’m desperate to fuck him out of it for all his little indignities but every time I try he looks out beyond me with his mouth sucked in. While I'm at work I begin to imagine ways of pushing him over the edge. I could take up smoking again and sit by the slot puffing in at him til I reawaken his boyhood asthma. I could refuse to empty his bottles and watch the piss slowly rise up around his ankles. I could recruit someone new from the app to come and fuck me up against the cube. Then he’d have no choice.

What breed is he? asks the cashier as I place a fresh box of shit bags up on the counter. Labrador I say and smile for her.

Then it’s the weekend and I’m driving across the city to see my parents and they look so delighted to see me coming up the drive and they embrace me in turn first dad then mam then dad again with Bosco up on his hind legs looking for my hand. We sit on the back patio drinking rum and cokes and I’ve told Bobby to text me if he needs anything and he doesn’t. After dinner mam washes and I dry and she asks me whether I’ve been on any dates and I shrug and set the tumbler up on the shelf.

Get on the apps my darling she says. Not exactly romance but it’s what everybody’s doing.

When I return home Bobby has his hand reaching out through the slot with a full bottle. How’s everybody? he calls after me as I retreat to the bathroom.
Grand I shout back. Asking for you.

The next night I’m in the breakroom on the app trying to remember what I’d been feeling in the first place and here’s young Bobby again on the beach beside his gorgeous pup and I realise with a cold sliding sensation that Bobby has never once mentioned this dog. All the times he could have brought up his enduring love for his best friend living happily down the country with his parents or the weight of absence he feels every day at the pup’s passing after minimal suffering following one last trip to his favourite place in the whole wide world so with trembling fingers I text him:

what is your dogs name

Bobby comes back straight away but it’s just two question marks like this: ??

the labrador from your profile Bobby what is his name

I lean over my knees with my eyes closed and after a moment feel the phone pulsing in my grip.

Oh yeah I dunno.
She belonged to a lad my parents knew. I think she got hit by a car?

When I land back home I discover that someone has left the back door wedged open with a lonely red brick and I stand in the threshold staring down at its pockmarks and craters and rough edges wondering softly to myself why have I never dreamed about a brick. The door latches shut behind me and I’m climbing the stairs one hand on the bannister the other behind my back and I’m back in the apartment back in the living room and Bobby has his back to me sitting up against the glass with his earphones in nodding away to himself and I can see over his shoulder that he’s on the app and there’s me in my blue dress and my hair up out in the garden raising a champagne glass like a little trophy laughing away.