Night Shift at St Catherine's

By two in the morning, Ward Nine at St Catherine's had settled into the uneasy quiet that Lucia had come to know well in her three years in London. Machines hummed and blinked. Somewhere down the corridor a cart rattled past. Lucia, who had trained in Lima and still found English hospital tea faintly disappointing, was writing up her notes when Mr. Moss in bed fourteen began, very softly, to drum on his bedside table.

He was eighty-seven, had been admitted that afternoon with a chest infection, and according to his file he lived alone. He was not supposed to be awake. "Can't sleep," he said, when she came over. "Never could, at this hour. This was when the real playing started." He tapped out a rhythm with two fingers, quick and precise. "Nineteen sixty-four," he said. "The Blue Lantern, Soho. I was the best drummer in London, love. Ask anyone."

Lucia smiled and checked his oxygen levels. She had heard a great many stories on night shifts. Patients told you things at three in the morning that they would never mention in daylight, and not all of them were true. Mr. Moss, she reasoned, must have been confused; a fever could do strange things to an old man's memory. Then again, his temperature was almost normal, and he knew perfectly well what day it was.

Over the next few hours, whenever she passed his bed, he had another story. He had played with a saxophonist from New Orleans who wore a white suit on stage, even in winter. He had once missed a recording session because his taxi broke down on Waterloo Bridge. He had turned down a tour of America to stay with a girl from Hackney, and had never regretted it, or so he claimed. It seemed unlikely that one man could have lived so many lives and ended up so alone. Yet the details were oddly specific, and they never changed when he told them a second time.

At around four, his breathing grew worse, and for a while Lucia was too busy to wonder about anything. She sat with him, adjusted his mask, and talked to him about Lima: the gray winter sky over the sea, the noise of the buses, and her father, who had spent every Sunday afternoon of her childhood playing old jazz records in the living room. "Good man," murmured Mr. Moss, his eyes closed. "Taste."

Around five he slept at last, and Lucia used her break to look him up on her phone. She found the Blue Lantern easily enough: it had certainly existed, and there was even a list of musicians who had played there. There was no Leonard Moss. That proved nothing, of course. Records from those days might well have been lost, and a young drummer could easily have played for years without his name ever being printed anywhere. Still, she put the phone away feeling oddly disappointed.

Her colleague Femi, coming over to help, raised an eyebrow when Lucia mentioned the Blue Lantern. "Could be true," he said. "My nan says half of Soho was jazz clubs back then. But you'd think a famous drummer would have someone, wouldn't you? Family, friends. Nobody's rung all night." Lucia had been thinking the same thing. A man who had played to packed rooms surely ought not to be lying in bed fourteen with nobody to ask after him.

Just after six, as the windows turned from black to gray, the elevator doors opened and a woman of about sixty came hurrying down the corridor, still in her coat. She was his daughter, she explained breathlessly; she had been in Glasgow, and had only got the message at midnight. Under her arm she carried something flat, wrapped in a supermarket bag. "He always asks for this when he's in hospital," she said, almost apologetically. "He likes people to believe him."

It was an old record, its sleeve faded at the corners. On the front, five young men in narrow suits stood beneath a doorway with a blue lamp above it, and at the back, half hidden behind a drum kit, was a thin, grinning boy with Mr. Moss's unmistakable ears. Lucia stared at it. She knew that sleeve. She had seen it a hundred times, propped against her father's record player, on the other side of the world.

So he must have been telling the truth all along, she thought, or at least most of it. The girl from Hackney, she would later learn, had been his wife for fifty-one years. Mr. Moss opened his eyes, saw the record, and then saw Lucia's face. "Told you," he said, and went back to drumming quietly on the blanket, in perfect time.