Terminal by Michael Perfect
I do sickness.
I do head colds, heart conditions and high blood pressure. I do conjunctivitis, sinusitis and gastroenteritis. I do oral surgery, ruptured tendons, viral infections and reactive depression. I do skin disorders, broken limbs, panic attacks and radiotherapy. I do illness, I do sickness, I do absence.
But absence arrives in so many forms.
Staff attendance records. Return-to-work interview summaries. Self-certification forms, doctors’ notes and transcripts of early-morning telephone calls, coughing and wheezing omitted. The absence is always there before I am. Every morning a confused stack of papers deposited on my desk, waiting to be ordered, input, filed. I enter dates and reason codes, I type managerial remarks into the comments panel, and I make the final, decisive, godlike click: PAID/UNPAID.
Sick pay is the benchmark of civilization. The ultimate, Darwin-defying expression of human trust, distrust, empathy, indifference. I believe you. I don’t believe you. Tick a box. Your poor thing, take care of yourself, come back whenever you’re ready. You lying shit, if you’re not back on Monday you won’t be back again. Tick a box.
Sickness also arrives in unexpected forms, scrawled at the bottom of payroll documents or added to the end of an email. Head injuries skulking in holiday requests; cancers lurking in pension plans.
Even though there are days when the sickness seems to pile up endlessly around you, occasionally something comes through that reminds you there’s purpose in what you’re doing. You follow a long-term absence for a period of months, receiving sporadic, incomplete information – dates that don’t match, doctors’ notes with no signatures. You watch the lists of symptoms grow progressively longer, you follow the gradual deterioration of condition – always painfully slow – and all you can do is hope. But sometimes you get that long-awaited diagnosis. You’ve laboured and toiled with the various, intricate developments and finally your efforts pay off. The word smiles up at you. Terminal. Means, nothing more to be input on my terminal. You pass the file to a completely different department, you click the close icon, and you know that you have done your job well.
I don’t do maternities and I don’t do compassionate leave. Birth and death aren’t my department. Everything else is sickness, and belongs to me.
Michael Perfect is an academic, and works in the English Literature department of Liverpool John Moores University. He spends really quite a lot of his time thinking about fiction, and teaching it, and analysing it. Occasionally he finds time to try writing it.
Photo – Copyright Catherine Perfect
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