Dr Nick Read

A crisis of beans.

It wasn’t that she was meant to set fire to the hospital.  It just happened.  Well, it had been a long day and he had been on at her again!    ‘Have you recruited more volunteers?  Where’s the revisions on the protocol?  And have I seen the data from your last set of experiments yet?  Karen, how do you expect to get your PhD unless you work until you drop and then get up and work again.’  I mean, what was this guy on?    

So she cancelled her dinner engagement with Rob and stayed late again, agreeing to meet him for a drink when she’d finished.  But she was hungry.   Was there anything in this Godforsaken hole that she could eat.  Ah, the baked beans!  She fed them to her volunteers and measured the hydrogen they exhaled.  There were cans of them stacked all around the room, enough to launch a Zeppelin.  OK, she’d fart all night but what the hell.  She was hungry. 

So she opened a can and stuck it on a tripod and lit the Bunsen burner.  Then the phone rang in the office.   ‘Could we talk about this last set of experiments.’  ‘Could you open up the database and just check…..’   By the time she’d finished, she’d forgotten all about her beans.    Bloody smoke alarm was blaring somewhere.  But, it was always going off.   Fuck it, she was late and needed a glass of wine.  And now the bastard lift wasn’t working and something had happened to the lights.  Nothing for it but the stairs, but she was on the eleventh floor.   

It still didn’t register when she saw the fire engines.  There were five of them lined up in the road, sirens still blaring,  blue lights sweeping the buildings on either side.  Firemen in helmets and bright yellow overalls with axes and torches were tumbling from the cabs and rushing past her to the stairs.  Funny time for a fire drill, she thought, as she rushed out into the cool night air. 

Rob was none too pleased about being kept waiting, but he could see she was flustered,  ‘Did you get anything to eat, love?’ he asked.

She stared  at him, with focussing, unfocussed,  then  her eyes grew wide and her mouth opened    ‘Oh fuck! Oh fuck, fuck, fuck!      

They’d started evacuating the patients by the time she got back.  Some were standing there in little groups, shivering in their light green hospital dressing gowns, more were coming out in chairs or on stretchers.  She tried to get in but a policeman stopped her. ‘You can’t go in there miss; there’s a bomb.’

‘No there isn’t, it’s only a can of beans.’

‘Aye, you might say that, but move along now.’

When she got back to Rob’s, the news was on.  ‘We break into the programme to report a possible terrorist attack on Sheffield’s Royal Hallamshire Hospital.’  She listened in shocked silence.  She could see it all, the beans charring, catching fire, setting the papers and the boxes alight, the cans exploding, the sprinklers going off, the lights shorting, panic, evacuation.  Oh fuck!  It was the only thing she could say. 

It was all over the newspapers the next morning.  Terrorist attack in Sheffield!  There were even  questions in the house.  ‘Why had the right honourable gentleman ignored our warnings?’  ‘Why hadn’t this government improved security in our public institutions?  Why had they cut funds to the fire service and the police?    There was no way the government, already in trouble, could survive a vote of no confidence.  They held  a snap election and lost.  ‘Fired’, the headlines screamed.  The Conservatives got in on a ticket of Health and Safety.  And six months later, Britain joined the Americans and declared war on Iran.

It’s all chaos. A butterfly flaps its wings in West Africa and there’s a typhoon in the South China Sea.   Karen cooks beans on toast ……. and well, anything could happen.