Bodily Harm

I've been doing a lot of clearing out lately, and came across an old pair of crutches. Not as old as the being-run-over-by-a-bus incident, but still. Not technically my property.

So I decided to take them somewhere they'd be more useful. Like a hospital, for instance.

But MRI, my local, is big and rambling and has very few parking spaces and precious little useful signage, so I found myself this morning driving around randomly, past a myriad of "NO PARKING" notices and a couple of wheel-clamping buggies, but no orthopaedics department.

I could have parked somewhere remote and wandered around on foot, but I'm nine months' pregnant* and walking / standing / generally being on one's feet are extremely taxing operations, particularly when carrying anything at all other than the several sacks of potatoes strapped to my middle, and especially when I don't know where I'm going or how much further I might have to go.

In the end I found something called the "Adult Rehabilitation Unit." Which may well involve crutches, no? Not only that, but it had an empty disabled parking bay outside. Not that I'm disabled, although I'm sure I could argue the case... but no. Not to a wheel-clamper, I couldn't. So I parked and ran - well OK, waddled a little more quickly than normal - in. No reception, no obvious location for crutches, just a bored-looking nurse and a very old man. And me, suddenly feeling furtive.

I hid the crutches in a doorway, round a corner, where nobody could see me. If challenged, I would say... that I was... er... oh fuck it, look at me, I'm about to give birth! Watch out, my waters are breaking!

Nobody challenged me. I left. My car didn't get clamped. None of the exciting endings, which you were already anticipating, happened.

Or did they? Will we ever know? Did the crutches ever get moved?

Will they stay in that doorway for several weeks, everyone thinking that someone is about to come back and reclaim them, someone who will be reduced to crawling through inhospitable hospital corridors like a dying fish without them?

Will they ever reach a useful home?

Will someone, being rehabilitated in fact from a long prison sentence or maybe a hideous designer-drug addiction and not in any more need of crutches than his or her co-clientele, fall over the crutches and break their neck or even their leg (in which case at least they'll have some perambulatory assistance immediately to hand)?

Will I be traced from CCTV footage and charged with manslaughter, or Wilful Abandonment Of Hospital Property?

I don't know. I don't really care. It's an SEP**.

As long as they don't have CCTV footage.



* This is really bugging me. I want to include an apostrophe in the phrase "nine months' pregnant" but I'm not sure why. The pregnancy doesn't really belong to the months, does it? I know I'm probably wrong. But I can't seem to stop myself.

** Somebody Else's Problem


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