Prescriptions

The nurse’s name is Priya, and on Wednesdays she does not buy chocolate. On Wednesdays she buys a small bottle of orange juice and drinks it very slowly, looking out of the window at the empty street, as if she is waiting for a bus that stopped running years ago.

Theo has never asked. It is one of the rules of the night shift, unwritten but absolute: you do not ask people why they are awake.

Tonight she breaks it herself. “Do you ever sleep?” she says, not looking at him.

“In the mornings. With a towel over the window.”

“I can’t anymore.” She turns the juice bottle round and round in her hands. “Not since my mother. I lie down and my brain goes through everything she ever said to me, in order, like a filing cabinet.”

Theo does not know what to say, so he does what he always does at four in the morning. He comes round from behind the counter, pulls up the two plastic chairs that are supposed to be for customers waiting for prescriptions, and sits down beside her.

They watch the street together until the sky over the bakery opposite turns the colour of weak tea, and neither of them says anything at all, and it is, he will think later, the best conversation he has ever had.