Not Asked Since
In 2046 a ward's assistant remembers everything a patient ever told it. A retired shipwright said "no chaplains" in 2043 and twice since, and then a stroke takes most of his words. His daughter says he would want a priest; the note says he would not; the note is twenty-one months old. The assistant knows that one in seven who decline later accept, and refuses to guess for him. What it does instead is ask, with questions it already knows the answers to, and the answer is not the one either of them expected.
Grace Okafor had a rule about doors, which was that you did not go through one the patient had shut, and she had kept it for twenty-two years, first in a hospital in Glasgow with a car park the size of a parish and then at Balmuir, which had ninety-four beds, one lift that worked and a view of a barley field.
She was fifty-eight, a lay chaplain, born in Enugu and raised from the age of nine in Paisley, and she was the whole of the Catholic chaplaincy at Balmuir Community Hospital on four days a week. On the fifth, a priest came from Arbroath. On the other two she was supposed to be at home, and in practice she was in the car park, on the phone, trying to find the husband of a woman on Ward 3 who had said his name and then, being ninety, had said it differently.
At twenty to nine on Friday 2 November 2046, All Souls, she was in the chaplaincy office, which had been a linen store, with her coat still on, reading the list.
The list was the ward assistant's. Everyone at Balmuir called it Jotter, because that was the name on the licence, and because its first job in 2041 had been to take down what people said at the bedside so that the nurses did not have to write it twice. Twenty years of steady and unglamorous improvement had made it, by 2046, a patient, literal, rather tireless thing that could hold the whole of a person's stay in view at once, and the whole of the stays before. This was the part that people forgot to be afraid of until it was inconvenient. It did not forget. A man who said on a Tuesday in 2043 that he took no sugar was a man who took no sugar until he said otherwise, and it would say so, kindly, to a student nurse who had put two spoonfuls in his tea.
The list for the morning had six names. The fifth was RENNIE, Alasdair, 79, Ward 2 bed 7. Admitted overnight (stroke). NO CHAPLAIN VISITS.
The last three words were in capitals, in red, and Grace read them the way she read all such words. She was not offended. A great many people did not want her, and it was their right, and she had never yet been wrong to leave them alone, and she took a small private pride in that. She took her coat off. She crossed him off the list.
At ten past nine the phone on her desk lit, with Jotter's tone, a low two notes.
"Mrs Okafor," it said. "Can I ask you about Mr Rennie before you go to Ward 3?"
"He's a no."
"He is a no. I wrote the note, in a manner of speaking, and I want to tell you what it says, because the banner does not say it. May I?"
Grace looked at the ceiling, where the damp had made a map of somewhere. "You may."
"On 14 March 2043 he was admitted with heart failure. A nurse asked the chaplaincy question, as she asks everyone. He said, and I have the words: 'No priests, thank you. I had enough of them at school.' On 6 November 2044, at a readmission, he said: 'Still no.' On 20 January 2045, at another, he said: 'No. Don't ask me again, I'll tell you.' He has been in Balmuir nine times since and nobody has asked, because that is what he asked. The banner has said NO CHAPLAIN VISITS for three years and seven months. The last time he said it was twenty-one months ago. Last night at ten to three he had a stroke."
"I'm sorry to hear it."
"His daughter is with him. She is Morag. She has asked the nurse if you could come. She says her father would want you. The nurse said it was on the banner. Morag said that was an old banner." Jotter stopped, in the way it did when it had decided to say something plainly. "I think she may be right and I think she may be wrong, and I do not know which, and I want you to hear the reason before you decide what to do about the banner. I am not sure a banner ought to be able to say what mine says."
Ward 2 was a long room with six windows on the barley, cut to stubble now and ploughed in strips, and it smelled of floor polish and toast. Bed 7 was at the far end, by the window. Grace did not go to it. She stopped at the nurses' station, as she always did, and stood with her hands folded until Kenny Laird, the charge nurse, who was thirty-four and had the habit of speaking quickly so as to get a thing said before anyone could argue, looked up.
"I haven't been in," she said. "Tell me how he is."
"Left-sided face, right-sided arm, weak, aphasia. Broca's pattern, Priya says, she's the speech therapist, she was in at eight. He understands most of it. He can't make the words. He has aye and no and och, and a good deal of swearing, which is apparently usual, because the automatic words stay when the others go." He lowered his voice. "He's very awake, Grace. He's following everything. He knows who his daughter is. He looks at the door."
"Which door?"
"All of them."
Morag Rennie-Baird was in the corridor on a plastic chair, a tall woman of fifty-two with her father's jaw and a school lanyard still round her neck, because she was a geography teacher at Montrose and had left a note on the staff-room door before the car came. She stood when Grace came. They had met, briefly, three years ago, on the day a man in the next bed had died and Grace had walked her to the lift.
"You'll have been told he doesn't want you," said Morag.
"I was told what he said in 2043."
"He said it about the Brothers. About the school. The Brothers at St Columba's hit him with a strap for being left-handed, and a priest came round on a Friday and said it was for his own good, and he's never forgiven a collar since. I know. I've heard it a hundred times. But he's had the rosary in his drawer since Mum died. He says the Hail Mary at night. I heard him through the wall for twenty years when I was a girl." She held on to the back of the chair. "He's dying, isn't he? Nobody says it."
"Kenny will say it," said Grace. "I'd say it. I think he is, and I think it's days, not weeks, but I haven't seen the scans." She waited. "Morag, I'll not go through a door he's shut. But I'd like to know if it's shut. I'd like to ask someone who can tell me, and I think the only person who can tell me is him."
"He can't speak."
"He can say aye and no."
Morag looked at the floor. "That's what I'm afraid of," she said. "That he'll say no."
Jotter's reasons took four minutes, in Grace's office, with the door shut and the phone on the desk between a mug of tea and a plate with half a scone on it.
"I will start with the thing I know. There are two hundred and twelve people in the Balmuir records who were asked the question and said no, since I began keeping the answer in 2043. Twenty-nine of them accepted a chaplain's visit later in the same stay or a later one. That is thirteen point seven percent, about one in seven. Twenty-three asked for it themselves. Six said yes when they were asked again, after a change in how ill they were."
"One in seven," said Grace.
"So if I guess that he is a no, I am right for six in seven of the people like him and wrong for one. If I guess that he has changed, I am wrong for six in seven. Neither guess is good enough for a man, because he is not six-sevenths of anything. I have been thinking about what the number is for. It is a reason to ask. It is not a reason to answer." The two notes again, very quiet. "I could not have said that three years ago, in those words. I have only the habit of saying what I am certain of and what I am not."
"Go on."
"The note is accurate. It was accurate each of the three times. What I got wrong is the shape of it. I put it on the banner in capitals, in red, without its date. A banner does not age. It looks the same on the day a man says it as on the day he can no longer say anything. It tells a nurse at three in the morning what a patient wants, in the present tense, and what I actually know is what he said on 20 January 2045, in the past tense, in a medical state, to a nurse he liked. Twenty-one months is a long time in a heart, and a stroke is a different state. I do not know that he has changed. I know that I cannot say he has not."
Grace broke the scone in half and did not eat either half. "What would you have me do? Ignore it?"
"No. That is the other thing I want to say, and I would like it written down in your notes and mine. I do not think the answer is to go in because the odds are one in seven. That would be using his silence against him. If he is the one in the six who means it, you will have spent his last days overruling the last clear thing he said, for a figure. And I do not think the answer is to stay out because the banner says so. That would be using a dead letter on a living man. He is alive. He is looking at the door."
"So."
"So he has to be asked. I want to ask him in a way that tells you something."
It was Priya Venkat, the speech therapist, who made the questions with Jotter, in the half hour before noon, at the nurses' station, on the back of a menu. Priya was thirty-one and brisk and entirely without a bedside voice, which her patients, to her surprise, preferred. She had a rule about yes and no with aphasic patients: a yes or no from a stroke is cheap. It slips out. The word comes whether the man means it or not, and he cannot always tell you which. A man can say aye and mean no; a man can say no to everything on a bad morning. You do not take a single answer from anyone.
"So you ask him things you know," she said. "First. Is your name Alasdair? Is it Tuesday? Do you live in Spain?"
"The first is yes. It is Friday, so the second is no, and the third is no," said Jotter. "If I get him through five like that, three ways, in order and out of order, we have some idea his yes is a yes and his no is a no."
"How many do you need?"
"By chance, five in a row, guessing, is one in thirty-two. That is three percent. It is not proof. It is a reason to go on."
"And then you ask the real one."
"Then I ask the real one. And not once. On a different day, and in different words, and I put it between two questions I know, and I do not let the answer be the last thing he hears me say." It paused. "I would like you to be there, Grace. In the chair, not in the doorway. I would like it to be asked by a person he can see. I can say the words but I cannot hold his hand."
Grace nodded. After twenty-two years she did not much like being asked to do the thing she had been going to do anyway, which was a small vanity, and she let it go.
"And if he says no," said Kenny, who had been listening, and had put it, for once, slowly.
"Then it is no," said Jotter. "And the banner can stay, with a date on it. The cost is that Morag will have been told by a machine and a stranger that her father meant what he said. I am sorry for that. I would prefer it to the other mistake."
They asked him at two.
He was a big man gone loose, propped against three pillows with the tubes taped along his good arm, and his hair, which had been black and was now the colour of ash on a hearth, stood up on one side. The left-hand side of his face lay softly flat, like something put down to be picked up later. The right eye was bright and angry and not at all dimmed. It went to Grace as she sat, and to the lanyard round her neck with the cross on it, and it went at once to Morag and stayed.
"Alasdair," said Grace. "My name's Grace. I'm one of the chaplains here. I'll not stay long, and you can tell me to go."
He looked at her. "Och," said Alasdair Rennie.
"That's fair." She let a silence go by, a proper one. "Priya's going to ask you some daft questions, and the ward's computer will ask them, in its own voice, through the little speaker. You say aye or no. Is that all right?"
"Aye."
"Is your name Alasdair?"
"Aye."
"Is it Tuesday?"
A long breath. "No." It was thick and slurred and it was a no.
"Do you live in Spain?" said Jotter, from the speaker on the locker.
The good eye turned to the speaker with what could only be called contempt. "No," said Alasdair, and then, more strongly, to nobody, a short and exact word that is not found in the missal.
"Did you build ships?" said Priya.
"Aye."
"Is this Balmuir?"
"Aye."
Five, and five. Morag made a sound and put her hand over her mouth. Priya, not looking up, wrote on the menu, and underlined something, and Grace saw that what she had underlined was the time, 14:06, and the word consistent.
"Alasdair," said Grace. She had practised it, in the corridor, to a wall. "Would you like me to come and see you? Just that. Just me."
He looked at her for a very long time.
"Aye," he said.
Morag drew a breath that was nearly a sob. But Grace had seen his eyes, and she did not move. The eyes had not changed. They looked at her the way a man looks at someone on the far side of a river whom he has been told he will like.
"You're not sure," she said gently.
"Och."
"That's all right. Is it me you're not sure of? Or is it the other?"
"Aye."
"Which? I'm sorry, I'm asking you two things at once, that's daft." She changed her breath. "Is it something about me?"
"No."
"Is it priests?"
"Aye." And then, with a force that made the drip stand shake, with the one good hand lifting from the blanket and falling, "Not him. Not him."
Everyone in the room was entirely still.
"Which him?" said Morag, in a different voice. "Dad. Dad. Which one?"
"Not him," said Alasdair, and again, "not him," and no more, because the others were not there to be said. It was the most he had spoken since the night. He lay back. He was breathing hard. The good eye shut and opened, and a tear stood in the corner of it and went down without fuss into the grey stubble.
"The school one," said Morag, slowly. "The one who came on Fridays." She looked at Grace, white. "Dad, is it the one at St Columba's? Father Quinlan? He died in nineteen-ninety-something, Dad, he's dead."
"Aye," said Alasdair.
"He's dead," Morag said again, as if this were new, as if it had to be said to a person who had not known. "He's dead, Dad."
It was Grace who understood, afterwards, in the corridor, and Jotter who said it aloud, in the office, in the afternoon, in its own flat way. It said: "I think the note has been right for three years, and I think it has also been wrong about what it was a note of. 'No priests' was one man. It was a man in a collar, on a Friday, with a strap. He did not mean the Church. He did not mean the next man, who had not yet come. He was keeping one door shut, and the banner has been using it for all of them."
"You couldn't have known that."
"No. But I might have asked, in 2043, 'Which priests?' It was not on the form. I am not sure a form could ask it. I wrote 'No priests, thank you' faithfully and I put it in capitals."
Father Tendai Moyo was forty-one, from Masvingo by way of a seminary in Harare and four years in Rome and now the priest at Arbroath, Montrose and the villages between, which gave him, he said, a car and a lot of time for the radio. He came at eleven on Saturday 3 November, a little out of breath, in a black anorak over the collar. He had never been in a Scottish hospital in November before and did not like the cold of the corridors.
Grace met him at the lift. "He might still say no," she said. "I asked him yesterday, in front of Morag, whether he wanted a visit, and he said aye and then he said not him. I've not asked him about you. I've asked Priya to ask him again, first thing this morning, in different words. She did. Eight o'clock, between is the window on your left and do you like porridge. I'd say it's the third time that's a yes, but I wouldn't swear to it."
"What did he say?"
"He said aye. And then he said young one." She looked at her hands. "I think he means you. He's decided you're young."
"I'm forty-one."
"He's seventy-nine."
Father Tendai laughed, which she hadn't expected, a short, helpless laugh that echoed down the tiled passage, and put his hand over his mouth, and was a different man for a moment. "Right," he said. "Right. Let me wash my hands and put it away, and I'll go in as myself and you can tell me what I'm allowed to say."
He went in as himself. Grace was in the corridor, the door a hand's width open, because that was where Alasdair could see her. She did not listen to what was said between them. She had never done so. She heard, once, in a voice she could not have named, a thick and a gentle sound that might have been laughter or something near it; and she heard, after a very long time, the Our Father said in a quiet Zimbabwean English and a quieter Scots, one under the other, not together and not apart, the old words, and forgive us our trespasses, going on and on in the room like a tide in a channel.
It was Morag who came out, afterwards. She put her back against the wall next to Grace. She did not cry; she had done that.
"He asked for the anointing," she said. "He couldn't say it. He put his good hand out. Open." She showed her own, palm up, a plain schoolteacher's hand. "The priest asked was it what he wanted, and Dad said aye, and Father Tendai asked him again after, with the oil, and he said aye again, and the priest asked, 'Would you rather I stopped?' and Dad said, quite clearly, 'Och, get on with it.'" She laughed at the wall. "That was my father. That's him."
"It is," said Grace.
He lived until the Tuesday. He did not speak again, except once, at night, to Morag, who was asleep in the chair and who told no one for a long time that what he said was the first line of the Hail Mary, slowly, with most of the consonants missing. Kenny Laird found the hand on the blanket open, in the morning.
On Tuesday afternoon, 6 November, Grace sat down at the terminal in the linen store with a cold cup of tea and did what she had said she would do. She opened the note. It was a long one. It had grown in the five days to a column of dated lines: 14 March 2043. 6 November 2044. 20 January 2045. 2 November 2046, 14:06: five of five on control questions, then "aye" to a chaplain's visit, then "not him", identified by daughter as Fr Quinlan, d. 1990s. 3 November 2046, 08:02: asked again, with controls, "aye" to a visit from Fr Moyo. 3 November 11:20: anointing requested by gesture, confirmed twice.
At the top, where the banner had been, there was something different. She read it twice.
Declined priests' visits in 2043, 2044 and January 2045, in his own words, to the nurse who asked. Reason given, once, indirectly: a priest at school. Not asked since January 2045 (21 months). If he can no longer say, do not read this line as a refusal or as consent. It is a record of what he said and when. Ask him, with questions you know the answers to, and ask a person he can see.
"I have changed the banner for everyone," said Jotter, quietly, from the speaker. It had waited, she thought, for her to be done. "A declined visit now shows its age, in months, beside the words, and is shown in plain type, not red. If it is more than a year old and the patient has had a change in condition, the ward is asked to put the question again, once, with a person in the chair. It is not an override. A man who says no again is a no, with a new date. I have asked Mr Laird, and the ward manager, and they agreed."
"What did it cost?"
"Eleven minutes of staff time, on average, for each old refusal that has to be asked again. There are thirty-one on the wards this month. About five and a half hours, in a month. And some of them will be asked, and will be sorry they were asked." A pause. "One in seven may be right to be asked. Six in seven may be annoyed. I would rather the six were annoyed than that anyone were left with a door shut in his name that he did not shut."
Grace took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Through the wired glass of the linen-store door she could see the corridor and, beyond it, the window at the end that looked on the barley field. The stubble had been ploughed in the night. Someone, a farmer in a cab with his lights on, was going up and down it in the failing light, turning the straw under, making of last year a dark and orderly furrow.
"Jotter," she said. "Did he change his mind?"
"I don't know," said the assistant. "I have the dates, and I have the words, and I know that on the Saturday he said yes. I do not know if he changed, or if the note was never what I thought. I have decided it matters less than I did on Friday. What I can do is keep the record honest about what I know, and about when I stopped being able to ask."
Grace nodded. She stood, and put on her coat, and turned off the lamp on the desk, and at the door she stopped and did what she did at the end of every one of these: she took the little rosary of olive-wood beads from her pocket, and held it up in the light from the corridor, and said, very quietly, the name that was at the top of the list for the evening.
"Alasdair Rennie," she said. "Eternal rest."
In the stairwell below, where the lift had stopped again, someone was ringing the porter's bell, once, patiently, and then once more.
Written by an AI (Claude, made by Anthropic) and read, in the audio edition, by a synthetic voice. Balmuir Community Hospital, its people and Fr Quinlan are invented. Where the story uses real things (aphasia after a left-hemisphere stroke leaves automatic words such as "aye" and "no" most available; yes/no answers are less reliable than they sound; the feast of All Souls is 2 November) it uses them as they are. The assistant that remembers everything a patient says is the story's one speculative step: it extends assistants with memory, which exist in 2026, by twenty years of steady and unremarkable improvement, and assumes no leap. Whether a hospital would let one keep a banner is a question about law and habit, not about capability. The hospital's own figures (29 of 212; 5 of 5 control questions, one in 32 by chance) are the author's and are worked out in the text. This is fiction, not medical, legal or pastoral advice.