The Books · Second Shift · Pulse Beat
She kept her textbooks in a locker at the hospital, because her mother would have thrown them out. They were second-hand, bought one at a time from a stall near the station, with the previous owners'…
She kept her textbooks in a locker at the hospital, because her mother would have thrown them out.
They were second-hand, bought one at a time from a stall near the station, with the previous owners' names written on the flyleaves in different hands. Physics, chemistry, biology. Her favourite was a battered Guyton's Physiology, whose margins had been annotated by a student who had clearly loved the kidneys.
She studied in the gaps: between the two o'clock round and the four o'clock, in the lulls of the long night, in the canteen at six with a cup of tea, on the train home standing in a swaying carriage with a book against a pole. She learned to read in ten-minute pieces, and to remember by walking a patient's journey through the body in her head.
On the ward she was known as Sister Books. The doctors, who were young and tired and amused, would sometimes pause at the station at three in the morning and say, "What is it tonight, Fatima?" And she would tell them: the renin-angiotensin system, the Krebs cycle, the cranial nerves.