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Nurse Duffy

Nurse Duffy — attending nurse

Character Profile
Stories Book of Thoth Saga (Vol. I)
Species Human
Status Active
Occupation Hospital Nurse
Patient on File Robert Knight
First Appearance Cambion, Chapter Forty-Seven: How to Save a Life

Nurse Duffy

“Can you hear me, Robert?”

Overview

Nurse Duffy attended Robert Knight through the run of his coma at the regional hospital. Tall, spare, her hair cropped close, she moved through the ward in crepe-soled shoes that turned her into something the manuscript describes as a phantom. She measured life in percentages of pulse-ox. She came and went on the schedule of the chart and on no other schedule that the room could read.

In Chapter Forty-Nine: Life on Mars, at 14:20, the door sighs and she steps in. She sets her clipboard at the foot of the bed, scans the monitors, gives a small nod — approval or confirmation, barely moving her features. Her gloved hands work with practised method: pulse, pupils, capillary refill, two fingers pressing to Robert’s neck. She speaks once, firm and even: Can you hear me, Robert? Speech calibrated for the narrow space between life and absence. Her gaze flicks to the monitor. The lines hold steady. She waits. Movement does not come.

Her pen pauses mid-box, then finishes the mark. She straightens the sheets. She brushes a fleck of dried mucus from the corner of his mouth. She collects her chart and eases the door shut. The latch clicks softly. The whole sequence is the work of a woman whose competence has been folded into a bedside manner so quiet it almost passes for absence. The fleck-brush is the giveaway. It is not a clinical action. It is the act of a person who has decided, on her own time and without instruction, that an unconscious child should not be left with anything on his face.

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Beyond the Scene

Duffy has been a nurse since she was nineteen, which is twenty-six years ago. She trained at the same regional hospital she now works in, lives in a flat ten minutes’ walk from it that she has been meaning to redecorate since 1991, and has not held the same shift pattern for two consecutive months in over a decade. She likes night shifts. The ward is quieter at night and the doctors are fewer and the work is mostly with the patients themselves rather than with the people who outrank her. She is not married. She has a sister in Liverpool she sees twice a year and a cat she did not entirely choose called Stanley. The cat is her only roommate and the arrangement suits both of them.

What she is professionally good at is the management of bodies whose minds are absent. The skill set has its own quietness. She can move around an unconscious patient for an hour without disturbing the angle of his sleep. She can change a sheet without lifting the patient. She can read a monitor in the time it takes most people to find their reading glasses. She does not perform the part of nursing that involves being seen to be caring. She has, in twenty-six years, watched colleagues exhaust themselves on that part and concluded that the part that mattered was the part that happened when nobody was watching. The fleck-brush at Robert’s mouth was an example. She did not know anyone was registering it. The room was registering it. The boy’s uncles were registering it. Toby in particular noticed and did not comment. Duffy noticed him noticing and also did not comment. They had a brief professional understanding without exchanging a word.

The Knight boy stayed with her, in the way some patients do without obvious reason. She had attended several long-coma cases over her career and had developed a working sense of which ones were going to come back and which ones were not. Robert was, in her professional reading, neither. He was somewhere else. Not gone, not coming back, not in the building in any meaningful sense. The monitors said one thing. Her hands, when they touched him, said something different. She did not have a vocabulary for the difference. She has never tried to acquire one. The acquiring would not, in her view, change what she did at his bedside, and what she did at his bedside was the entire content of her relationship with him.

Trivia

  • The crepe-soled shoes are not a stylistic choice. They are the standard quiet-ward footwear of nurses who have learned that footfall on a long corridor of half-asleep patients is a thing that causes harm. Duffy has been wearing them, with replacements, for twenty-six years. She owns one pair of regular shoes, which she puts on for her sister’s birthday and otherwise keeps in a box.
  • She speaks once in the manuscript — Can you hear me, Robert? — and otherwise communicates through the geometry of her presence: the small nod at the monitor, the pause of the pen, the click of the latch. Of the named hospital staff in Cambion, she uses the fewest words and lays the most hands on the patient. The economy is deliberate.
  • The fleck of dried mucus she brushes from the corner of Robert’s mouth is the closest thing to a private gesture in Cambion’s hospital chapters. It is not in her job description. Dr Patterson, who has the formal authority over the case, does not perform an equivalent. The two women’s relationships with Robert are different shapes for the same reason. Patterson is responsible for the diagnosis. Duffy is responsible for the body.

Appearances

Title Role Notes
Cambion
Book One · Book of Thoth Saga		 Minor; Bedside Authority First appears in Chapter Forty-Seven: How to Save a Life as the recurring rhythm of the ward, measuring life in percentages of pulse-ox. Returns at 14:20 in Chapter Forty-Nine: Life on Mars for the named bedside scene — clipboard at the foot of the bed, methodical examination, the single spoken line to Robert, the small private gesture of brushing the fleck from his mouth.