Love on the NHS Read Online Free Page B

the sight of Luke. Their faces reddened with embarrassment and they quickly retreated after sneaking a peek. He was transferred to another station, then a hospital in central Paris. There a doctor strapped him to his bed for the night. Luke looked pleadingly to the doctor but he merely returned a look of pity and crossed himself.
     
     
     
     

VII
     
    Luke woke on the morrow to the sight of two paramedics. They unstrapped him and lifted him onto a stretcher, on which he was taken to an ambulance. Once he was strapped to the stretcher the ambulance left the hospital and began to drive away.  Luke could look up out of the window and see trees and just about glance some passing shops or houses. Then he could hear cars all around and could see no more buildings. He realized he must be on a highway.
    For what seemed a short eternity he wondered where he would end up, relieved at least to be out of England. When the ambulance came to its last stop and the doors opened he was outside a clinic in the provincial town of Clermont. His straps were undone and he was accompanied into a little stone building, then into a small room with a bed. Nurses popped in and out, eagerly scrutinizing his silence. How ironic that Luke interested people more when he had nothing to say. Whenever he usually spoke people took little notice. Tired and eager to say something to the nurses being nice to him, Luke broke the silence after five hours. A psychiatrist had come in who, judging from her expression appeared genuinely interested in his distress. He began by explaining he was English and she smiled as he related his life story.
    After the psychiatrist left, the nurses came back to see Luke and looked wounded. They did not stay for long. He guessed they were sad he had not spoken to them. Then he was put back in the ambulance and transported to a hospital just outside the town. A massive institution, it consisted of around a hundred buildings. Some of the architecture had two-tone cream and white walls while some consisted of exposed vermilion bricks. The roofs had warm red tiles and between most the buildings high wire-mesh fences controlled access.
    Like psychiatric wards and hospitals he had stayed in in England, there was a lot of neglect towards patients from staff. It was far cleaner, though, than any English hospital he had been in. The worst part about wards in England were the filthy floors in toilets. They were never tiled floors, always cheap lino or carpet irredeemably stained with urine and faeces. In Clermont the floors were all tiled and mopped three times a day. The disinfectant that was regularly used made the toilets sheen. At meal times, three courses were served and Luke would have enjoyed it if he wasn't so English. He was afraid of trying new foods.
    The language barrier was a major obstacle. Though he met marvelous characters, conversations were laboured. One has to wonder why a continent as small as Europe has to have so many languages. Its citizens can not communicate with one each other, even though they share a parliament. Those who suffer the most are people with learning disabilities, low intelligence and those who have had a poor education. It is fine and dandy for the privileged, with their privately funded educations that teach foreign languages from infancy, to wax lyrical on the beauty of so much diversity. So much tradition, they marvel! How wonderful! But it is, practically speaking, ridiculous and will in time make the European Union struggle to compete with America - which is a similar size but united in its lexicon.
    Despite the difficulty talking, Luke was fond of some of the others. He was no little Englander. He attached himself to no country at all really, loathing all nationalists. A man's loyalty was to his own feelings and convictions, not where he just happened to be born. Besides, Luke had more in common with the misfits from other countries than the masses of his own; no different to how a poor