St. Culine: Soup Hospital
Sunlight glinted from shallow puddles on the road, the white painted markings obscured by bright reflections until it was impossible to know where one lane ended and another started. It shone upwards from damp areas on the pathway too, but rather than hiding the truth the pavement light instead warned Jin of where to avoid planting a foot if he wanted to give wet shoes a miss. First impressions were important, he knew, and if he gained an initial reputation as someone who had sodden feet and shoes then it would stick. Instead of falling into that rookie trap he gratefully heeded the advice of the reflections and stepped around the water. Starting his first real hospital job after qualifying was terrifying enough without those kinds of avoidable errors.
Cars hissed through standing water in the road next to him, and he kept walking and looking for the safe and dry path. With his eyes down it was impossible to miss the sudden and characteristic splash of colour outside the automatic double doors; a patch of drying red that was trying to turn brown, with small flecks of green so dark that they were almost black. It was splattered against the pavement in a messy circular smear that Jin had seen enough times to tell what it was even before the smell hit him. Classic tomato and basil. It was hard to say if it had crème fraiche or not without taking a sample, but that was academic by the time it had hit the pavement.
Seeing carnage like that had knocked the wind out of Jin completely when he was first training. It still played on his mind a little, but was becoming less shocking and more bleakly familiar every time. The reality of the job involved seeing those kinds of things until he became desensitised, so that he could get on with the work that needed to be done. As thoughts about how that spillage may have occurred tried to press their way into his mind, and Jin in turn pushed them back away, the doors slid open and he stepped into St. Culine Soup Hospital.
Jin’s shining black shoes clicked distinctly against the pale orange tiles of the floor as he proceeded past the reception desk. There was a queue of people lining up for information or trying to book in, some of them accompanying soups of their own and others presumably there to visit resident broths. A minestrone was lying quietly in a bowl, in the arms of a tired looking woman. A man joked with his flask of pea and mint. At the front of the queue as Jin walked past there was a group of three people in their twenties chatting quietly to one another. Although he can’t hear what they were saying properly, it seemed like they were discussing which ward to find their soup in; a nice early visit like that helped morale for everyone.
In an effort to seem like a down-to-earth and non-pretentious addition to the staff, Jin tried to make eye contact with the receptionist such that there could be a follow-up acknowledging nod, but she was busy on the phone. Eyes fixed on her monitor, she was loudly discussing the correct procedure for making an appointment with the nutritional composition consultant and had no time for idle interaction with new doctors. For as long as he dared Jin kept looking over, but a near miss with a bin forced him to look where he was going once more; there would be time for more eye contact attempts in the future, he was sure.
Brightly coloured signs on the wall pointed towards the various departments and wards, with colour-coded paintwork in the destination wards to drive the navigational certainty home. St Culine was the largest soup hospital in the country, catering for the full gamut of liquid food-types known to modern medicine, and so it had to plumb nearly the entirety of the colour pallet to distinguish elements of the soup palate. It had a Goulash Wing, coloured in a pale orange, a broth ward of drab brown, and even a specialist ‘cream-of’ unit that took up the noble mantle of beige. World-leading experts in the treatment of unusual or severe soup problems worked within those walls and it would be Jin’s honour to learn from and work alongside them.
A salmon pink corridor assailed him first on his journey, aligning with the red signage of the ‘General Tomato Based’ department. Several bright white doorways, flanked by trollies with empty serving trays, led off to corridors with individual wards and attending sous-nurses. Jin had spent much time in wards like that across the various hospitals of his previous placements, dealing with pH imbalances and incorrect proportions of vegetable chunks for the most part. While it lacked the glamour and exotic appeal of the more niche specialisms, it could be just as brutal and heart-breaking as any soup medicine and represented the initiation rite for all soup doctors.
Beyond the end of the General Tomato department was the green of ‘Pea, Spinach and Other Leafy’. Leaning against one wall was a middle-aged gentleman looking down at his phone. It must have been around the time for morning rounds within that ward, to disseminate necessary additives, salts or seasonings for in-patients. The gentleman looked up at the sight of Jin, but looked down again disinterestedly upon seeing that it wasn’t someone he recognised. That look of not-exactly-disappointment-but-general-disinterest was something else that Jin had been forced to get used to. He made no attempt to distract the man from his important telephonic business and pushed open a double doorway on the opposite side to the ward doors, taking the subsequent staircase up to the first floor.
A sojourn through the broth ward with its beefy and watery aromas led Jin into the staff common area, his nominal base of operations in lieu of an office. Inside there were already a handful of other doctors and nurses going about the rituals of their various shift patterns. It housed the general chatter of colleagues, the fridge Tetris of a few people placing lunches into the small communal appliances by the wall, a muted television set onto the news, and a hard-faced woman leaning against some form of breakfast bar and staring at a clipboard. Her hair was pulled into a tight ponytail high up on her head, and she’d chosen to accentuate the draconic nose stabbing out of her face with small, thin, round glasses. They looked a lot like someone had balanced two pennies on either side of a chef’s knife, and snapped directly up at him as soon as he entered the room.
“Ah. Doctor Hahn, welcome.” She said. In three impossibly long strides she seemed to cover the complete width of the room and was upon him, her body seeming to articulate more like a cricket in the wind than a human. “Your locker is over there, number 57. Here’s the key.”
“Hello. Thanks.” Jin replied, accepting the small steel key that she was offering to him. He recognised her as Doctor Sharon Boyle, because that’s who she was. Jin had spent time in her company during his interview for the position, and although she didn’t leave the impression of being an unpleasant person, he’d definitely seen steel girders which were less rigid and emotionless than she was.
“I have your duty and patient list for the day. Put your things away and we’ll get started.” She instructed. Jin nodded and hurried through the common room towards his locker, weaving past a few bench seats installed for the benefit of those who wished to channel the experience of a gym shower room. His eyes scanned along the row of bright blue doors, each one adorned with white numbered tickets in small holders, and searched for 57. First his eyes fell on locker 17, which was directly adjacent to locker 63. Puzzled, he looked down to see lockers 13 and 02 underneath them. His lips pursed themselves while he tried to work out what pattern he was missing, but expanding his search to lockers 0.3 and 00 didn’t help. After a cursory glance at the other lockers, he forgave himself for trying to find order in the midst of absolute chaos and accepted the inevitability of a locker-by-locker search.
Locker 57 transpired to be a bottom level locker sandwiched between locker 1 and locker C-12. It rose up to approximately thigh height, with “The Bernard Cribbins Memorial Locker” situated directly above. Whilst the numbering system was singularly unhelpful, his locker was immediately distinguishable from all others by the enormous dent in the thin metal door. It had clearly sustained a heavy blow at some point in the past, enough to send the top and bottom corners buckling outwards so that they were ready to snag on anything and anyone careless enough to walk by too closely. It wasn’t a wonderful start to the day, but Jin decided that causing a fuss this early on would only set a poor impression; he could make a land-grab for superior locker space once his position in the hierarchy was better established.
As efficiently as he could, Jin pushed his jacket and loose belongings into the locker and sealed it, in as much as it was possible when the concave nature of the door left enormous gaps at the top and bottom. Conscious to take the optimal path back to Sharon and demonstrate that he was no time waster, he strode back across the common room at glancing incidence to every obstacle in his path, the risk of stubbed knees and toes barely entering his mind.
“OK, I’m ready.” He confirmed, rolling up the sleeves of his palest blue shirt to demonstrate that fact.
“Get yourself a white coat from the rack first.” Sharon ordered impassively.
“Oh, yeah. Sorry.” Jin replied, cursing himself. There were no cracks in Dr Boyle’s mask of stoicism but he could feel the weight of potential judgement on himself as he took the perilous journey back to the coat rack by the lockers. With the shame of forgetting to put on a coat playing on his mind, however, a grazing blow against the edge of a locker rack left him with what felt like a light scratching wound. He styled it out and pretended that nothing had happened, but couldn’t help wondering if Sharon would see through his ruse. Only time would tell, he supposed.
On a long rail hung dozens of blue plastic suit bags, each one zipped up to the top and hiding a fresh, clean white coat. Jin flicked through them and looked for the square information patches sewn into the left breast of each bag, finding disappointment after disappointment as his preferred ‘Med’ was nowhere to be seen. Lost among a sea of ‘XS’ and ‘XXL’ he swam, scanning patch after patch for those three letters that signalled he would have a well-fitted coat for the next few days. Too many times during his training had he been forced to suffer through narrow shoulders, baggy sleeves, missing buttons, torn lapels and even a collar that was completely sewn shut on one occasion; he’d been forced to wear it like a cape, since putting it straight in the used pile just felt wasteful.
Without feeling the joy of finding the correct size Jin reached the end of the rack, and he was forced to accept the reality that his patients’ first glimpse of him would be one in which he seemed utterly unable to dress himself correctly. A sigh escaped him, disappearing among the disappointing coats, and he grabbed a second-best ‘S’. It was always better to have a slightly clingy sleeve than one which dangled too far and ended up with broth soaked into it. Other patients tended to feel uneasy with elements of the previous appointment soaked into their doctor’s clothing.
Putting it on as he went, Jin returned to Sharon via the same locker corner, picking up a dull bruise on the side of his thigh and rattling the thin metal frame as he went. There would be no hiding that one, but he didn’t have to give anybody the satisfaction of reacting to it.
"Our first patient is in the general tomato based ward. This way." Sharon said emotionlessly, either ignorant or apathetic to Jin’s performance in walking through the common room, and led the way with her elongated daddy-long-legs strides. If it weren't for the fact that Jin could see the ceiling he would have suspected that she was a mis-proportioned marionette being operated by someone with too loose a grasp on human ambulation. Trying and subsequently failing not to stare at her unnatural gait, Jin followed along.
Doctor Boyle skittered through the hallways with her high-kneed and lengthy stride. When they reached the staircase Jin half expected her to scuttle down along the wall, but she used the steps and handrail like any responsible staff member would be required to for insurance purposes. Managing to reach the bottom without incident, and even succeeding in operating the door rather than bumping ineffectually into the glass panel, Dr Boyle rounded the corner into General Tomato-Based and her white coat swept around her in a wide arc as she went. Jin barely managed to keep her in his line of sight as she dived into a room to one side of the corridor.
“This is the ward.” Sharon announced, slightly redundantly given that she was already entering it. Jin caught the doors just before they swung fully shut and sidled his way in, coming to rest in a familiar ward setup. Separated by floor-to-ceiling sheets of baking paper were clean, white porcelain bowls filled with the soups under the care of St Culine. An array of red soups occupied the room, each one flanked by trays of utensils for straining, scooping, stirring, and otherwise tending to the needs of a hearty, warming meal. Underneath each bowl was a modern electric hob to keep the patients simmering gently, and every position was stocked with a basic spice rack for emergencies. St Culine spared no expense.
"Our first case of the day is a red lentil with low sodium levels, complaining of feeling dull and generally being bland; aren't you Hamish?" Sharon said, standing next to the first patient on the right and mechanically attempting to appear human as she alternated her attention from Jin to the patient. The presumed-Hamish bubbled its assent. "Take a look at the charts and tell me what you think." She added, lifting a clipboard of papers from the edge of Hamish’s bowl.
Jin accepted the proffered clipboard after an awkward wave of greeting to Hamish, and flicked through Hamish's details, making mental comparisons of the measured levels against the normal ingredients list for red lentil.
"I'd say he needs 50cc salt, a spoon of mixed herbs, basil in particular, and maybe a spoon of oregano or coriander." Jin assessed quickly, eager not to keep Sharon waiting.
"Not incorrect. We’ve been giving two grams of seasoning thrice per day. Half oregano, half basil. Salt at dusk as well. Should get Hamish's here back to health within the fortnight." She told him. It felt like being a trainee again; there were no guaranteed correct answers and every doctor had their own preferred flavour of treatment. Jin would just have to get used to Sharon’s tastes until he was operating completely autonomously.
"Got it." He said. "Feeling alright there today Hamish?"
Hamish mustered the enthusiasm for a short tirade of symptoms which were making progress to feeling healed, spoke highly of the care he had received, and outlined all sorts of gratitude through the accepted soup medium of bubbles, sloshes, and hot tomato-stock currents.
"Well don't boil over. Just keep it simmered and you'll be poured out of here in no time." Jin said with a warm smile, eager to show off his bowl-side manner while Sharon was there. She made no indication either way as to how she felt about matters but Hamish bubbled contentedly.
The doctors stepped away from Hamish, and Jin leaned over to the nurse at his station in the corner. “Hi. I’m Dr Jin Hahn, first day here.”
“Morning doctor, nice to meet you. I’m Douglas Embos.” The nurse replied with a short nod. He went immediately back to looking through his paperwork.
“It looks like the charts are all continuing their trends in the right direction. I’d say to keep Hamish here for another three or four days and then release him to home-kitchen care.” Jin relayed to Sharon and Douglas.
“We’ll be pressured to have it done in two days.” Dr Boyle replied. “We’re low on bowls as it is and seasonings can be administered easily enough by an amateur sous chef.”
Douglas kept looking down, but shook his head slowly.
“I mean… it seems like a row risk case. Maybe there’ll be a little prolonged blandness for a couple of extra days. I’d prefer to keep him here until we’re sure though.” Jin said, trying not to outright defy Sharon straight away.
“Me too.” Douglas added, still poring away over his sheets of numbers.
“The bowl schedule will need to be maintained for new admissions whatever we do.” Sharon stated simply. “Our next patient is in the back corner over there.”
"Are incidences of seasoning deficiency still increasing among the lentil demographic?" Jin asked as they moved away from the nurse station. He already knew that there was an upward trend in general, but if the bowl schedule for new admissions was that tight then it implied things were getting worse.
"We've seen an increase across nearly every demographic, regardless of base and primary flavour constituent." She replied. "Averaging six cases per month at the moment across every ward, but there seems to have been a recent spike among the cream-ofs."
"People assuming that because it's cream it doesn't need additional flavours on the palate? Trying to over-emphasise the base ingredient?"
"Possibly, but idle speculation is dangerous. All we can say for sure at the moment is that frequency is increasing and when polled it seems that lack of education is the primary factor here. We need to find some way or another of getting correct seasoning practices out to the people more effectively."
“Right” He accepted. There was always a push to educate the public about these things, but it was like trying to educate forests not to burn when someone drops a cigarette on dried leaves. He'd seen a handful of posters in the corridors of the hospital espousing the virtues of an emergency home cookbook and spice kit, the wisdom of regular seasoning checks and the perils of failing to perform a taste test when problems are first suspected, but he suspected that the only people reading them were the authors and people who had needed the advice several months prior.
Another nurse was checking the next patient when Sharon and Jin arrived at the side of the bed. Using a long, thin metal skewer she was probing at several floating elements within the orange-red base and verifying the consistency of the chunks. Standard care work, but vital.
“Good morning.” Jin said to both of them.
“Oh, er, morning. I won’t be long, doctor.” The nurse replied. She got a solid piece of carrot with her skewer and gently slid it back off against the rim of the bowl. “Some of these chunks still need a bit longer really, but it’s an improvement on where we were last week.”
“Thank you. I’m Doctor Hahn by the way.”
“Welcome.” She said distractedly, wiping the skewer down and making notes on the bowl-side clipboard.
“Doctors!” someone shouted from the doorway to the ward, taking Jin by surprise. Several of the patients popped small bubbles, startled by the outburst. One of the receptionists had dashed onto the ward. “We need some extra hands in emergency admissions.”
Articulating in a way that shouldn’t have been possible for someone with a human skeleton, Dr Boyle scurried away and Jin gave chase. Clearly a quiet first day would have been too much to ask for.
In the emergency admissions wing they immediately saw the problem, shrouded as it was by a cluster of attending nurses.
“Stand aside, let me see.” Dr Boyle ordered as she wound her legs forward through the crowd. Her body followed once there was space, and Jin followed, using the space created by Sharon’s chaotic movement.
“Minestrone. Typical neglect case. Whoever has custody of this soup hasn’t taken even basic care. For whatever reason they’ve left it to get cold and just fester without even basic, minimal stirring or reheating.” Sharon assessed, as cold as the soup was.
“I did not neglect it!” A woman shouted angrily from the crowd.
“Look at the skin there; thick and heavy. It’ll be a delicate operation, but you’re qualified. Scrub up, get your apron on, and get to work on it in re-heating room 2.” Sharon continued, instructing Jin and ignoring the woman.
“Uh, yes. Right away.” Jin said, immediately de-threading himself from the gaggle of people and rushing to the re-heating rooms. He could hear Sharon robotically ordering nurses to get a stock-pot on a trolley and arrange support for the operation, amid further shouts from the soup’s ostensible guardian. It was all irrelevant to him; all that mattered was navigating his way back through the hospital.
Jin stood in the re-heating room, awaiting his patient. Hairnet on, he held his white-gloved hands out and away from his body to keep them sterile whilst double and triple checking the array of utensils and appliances at his disposal for the procedure. Knowing that he would need to command immediate respect and confidence from the assisting team, he had chosen a long apron with a novelty tuxedo print across the chest. The association as a respectable and formal gentleman at an evening event would demonstrate his focused and no-nonsense attitude to important procedures, far more so than the ‘Sun’s out, guns out’ apron he’d passed over.
A rumbling of wheels and shouted instructions gave Jin a second’s warning before the doors slammed open and a shining steel stock pot was wheeled in by a team of sous-nurses.
“Hat, doctor.” One of them said as they span the pot into position, nestling it among the trays of utensils and resting the bottom onto a small support hob.
“Oh! Yes. Thank you sous-nurse.” Jin said, as another of the nurses placed the traditional tall, white, bulbous hat onto his head.
“Hob set to gas mark 3, doctor.”
“Thank you. Small tongs?” Jin asked, holding out one hand and stepping up to the edge of the pot. A pair of small tongs were placed into Jin’s waiting palm and he gave them the traditional test clack just to make sure they opened and closed as expected. From its cavity the minestrone was looking up at him through the thick skin, clearly feeling smothered and unwell. The tops of several chunks of vegetable were frozen in place, cresting just through the skin.
“Are we not going to try to stir it back in first?” asked a sous-nurse on the opposite side of the pot. She was pulling a soft frown with eyebrows that, if Jin’s eyes were to be believed, had been drawn on that morning.
“It’s too thick and dry at this stage. I don’t think it would ever dissolve correctly and there’d be lumps. The best thing is to just get it out of there.” Jin said, gently sliding the tip of the tongs down the side of the pot and making first contact with the skin. Below him the minestrone gave no indication that it had noticed, having completely lost sensation in the skin.
With one corner of the tong tips, Jin tried to hook just the edge of the skin upward. It deformed wetly under the pressure, bending down like soft felt and allowing a small pool of liquid minestrone to flow over the top.
“I need someone with a teaspoon, please. Help me to keep liquid soup off the top and scrape it away into the bowl.”
“Right away doctor.” One of the sous-nurses agreed. Within seconds there was a shining teaspoon in place and ready to assist.
A second attempt to pick up the edge of the skin passed the same way as the first. Conscious that he didn’t want to disrupt the healthy soup underneath too much, Jin changed tactic and pushed at it rather than trying to lift it. Folds formed and then bunched up in the skin, trapping small pools of soup between themselves but doing the job of contracting the skin’s length and exposing healthy soup underneath.
“Spoon to brace, please.” Jin requested. A second teaspoon was immediately in place to hold the folded skin back in its concertina.
Carefully Jin pinched at the now exposed skin boundary and started to very carefully lift. Minestrone trickled slowly down it, forming pools here and there were chunks had made low points in the surface until the bailing spoon carefully scraped it back into the mix.
“Easy does it…” he muttered to himself, gingerly raising the skin upwards and away from the soup. “Have a dish ready for this, please.”
Higher and higher the skin rose, peeling away from the liquid surface. Jin could feel the weight in his tongs.
“Small tear starting, doctor.” A sous-nurse warned. Jin peered at the far side of his tongs and saw that there was indeed a rupture forming where a piece of potato had weakened the skin.
“Damn. Thank you nurse. Monitor and prepare a second set of tongs. We might need to catch this in two halves. I don’t want to start lowering it down now.” Jin instructed. The sounds of hurried motion and tool preparation rang in the background. He could see the minestrone bubbling with greedy convection currents, gasping as the heat from below started to kick-start its simmering while the air above graced its surface for the first time in too long.
“Tear progressing.” The sous-nursed said urgently.
“Second tongs in here now, please!” Jin pleaded. He was still lifting but more slowly, and the skin on the opposite side of the tear was no longer rising with him. “Support from the spoon. Hold that other side up.”
The teaspoon which had previously been holding back the folds rotated around to support the weight of the limp skin, causing it to fold lazily over the convex back. Another nurse was still diligently scraping and bailing liquid soup off the skin and back into the main bowl, but the extra motion was making it all the more difficult to keep the thick, leathery layer intact.
“Lift with me please, nurse. We might be able to get it out like this.” Jin asked.
“Are you sure this is wise doctor?” She asked.
“I think it’s our best chance until the tongs are here.” Jin replied, somewhat avoiding the thrust of the question. “We’ll go slowly.”
With reluctant trust the nurse obeyed and gently started raising the spoon along with the tongs.
“I can feel the skin slipping doctor.” She said. Jin could see that she was right; rather than coming straight upwards the skin was sliding across the back of the spoon.
“Tongs?” he asked again.
“Here doctor.” Another nurse finally said, directing them into bowl and pinching the loose end of the skin that was retreating hastily over the spoon.
“OK, good. Now up we go.”
As a unit the two tongs and the spoon supported the full, limp weight of the skin and removed it wholly from the minestrone, with the first teaspoon still salvaging as much fluid as possible.
“Dish here.” A voice said as a metal tray appeared underneath the tool assembly. A clanking of metal on metal followed by the wet squelching of an extracted skin falling on top of them.
“Good work everyone. Grade two wooden spoon, please.” Jin requested with a relieved sigh, shortly thereafter feeling a wooden handle in his palm. “Thank you sous-nurse. Stirring at one revolution per second.”
The minestrone sloshed gratefully around the spoon, its settled lumps and stratified constituents once again mixing into a homogenous whole.
“Uniformity returning to normal levels. No evident fragments of skin left. Looks like a success to me.” Jin assessed. “Someone take over the stirring please?” An eager hand appeared on the spoon’s handle and relieved Jin of the duty. “Thank you. Take it out to the simmering ward when you’re ready.” He instructed, breathing a sigh of relief as the adrenaline faded away. Riding the success of his first operation he strode back into the changing room.
Whilst Jin was peeling off the gloves and pushing his apron into the laundry bin, Sharon scuttled through the changing room door with a typically nonplussed expression.
“Successful procedure. Our next case is a hearty broth, so it’s in the cardiac soups ward. Join me there in room four.” She stated, before walking back out. Her torso didn’t have to turn to follow her legs for nearly two whole strides.
Jin shuddered and rubbed at his face with de-gloved hands, smearing talc over his cheeks. Rest was, apparently, for other people.
Over the next few hours of the day Jin and Sharon walked the hospital, attending to their list of patients, making introductions, and occasionally giving one of the broths a personal stir to show a good bowl-side manner. If this was intended to be an introduction to normal working life at St Culine then Jin suspected that he was going to rapidly become a very tired man.
As they were walking between wards a beeper sounded from Sharon’s wristwatch, making a shrill announcement that it was some noteworthy time or other.
“Ah. It’s time for Poter’s treatment. You’ll be seeing a lot of Poter over the next couple of weeks.” She said, turning on her heel and articulating her way towards another staircase.
“What’s Poter’s condition?” Jin asked. He was quickly establishing that information would be drip-fed or clipboard-supplied unless he asked directly.
“He’s a traditional potato and leek, cooked to an older recipe, but not bad in principle. The problem is that he’s suffering from a severe leek deficiency. Best hypotheses at the moment are that it’s just down to poor storage but we may never know the true cause.”
“How severe of a deficiency are we talking here?” Jin pushed.
“He’s borderline just potato soup at this stage, and the levels have been slow to stabilise.”
Jin held silence as he tried to comprehend the situation. If the leek content was that low then it would be dangerous to simply throw in a full portion; it would sap so much heat and change the moisture level so greatly that the soup could lose its consistency permanently, not to mention the impact of a heavy swing in flavour. Seasoning it back to optimum condition might be impossible after a shock like that.
Poter’s ward was in the Critical Ingredient Replenishment wing. Through a swipe-access doorway they found a decontamination antechamber, and Sharon wordlessly led the way by pulling on a white plastic over-suit. Jin did the same, casting a concerned eye over all the warning signs regarding cross contamination, not allowing jewellery to fall into the patient, and being careful not to thrust surgical equipment into plug sockets.
“Why do we need quite this many precautionary measures for missing ingredients?” Jin asked, not finding answers among the posters.
“Poter’s composition is sufficiently delicate that any wrong ingredient, even a small amount, could significantly disrupt his flavour and set us back several days in his treatment.” Sharon explained.
Jin nodded. He thought that all of this was extreme overkill, but didn’t think that it would go down well if he pointed it out. Instead he went along with the procedure and quarantined his own body within thin, rustling, sterile plastic. It flew in the face of humanising himself as a caregiver, but if everyone else was doing it then at least he’d look like a team player.
Once Sharon was satisfied that both of them were suitably sealed within their own personal tents she opened the next doorway and revealed Poter’s room. Aside from the prominent and strictly enforced dress code the ward was much like any other; Poter was sitting calmly in his bowl, nurses were attending and monitoring, and Jin was left to watch Sharon’s biologically impractical ambulation.
“Good afternoon Poter. This is Dr Hahn. He’ll be looking after you from now on, but I will still be on the premises.” Dr Boyle relayed, with all the warmth of an iceberg.
“Hello Poter.” Jin said with a small wave. He wasn’t sure what the point of an introduction was when the only exposed part of his body was the eyes, but courtesy demanded that it happened all the same. As he stepped up to the edge of the bowl, however, courtesy was challenged again as he tried to stifle a gasp. Poter really was as bad as Sharon had made out; a nearly uniform beige colour with the merest shreds of leek bobbing here and there.
Poter used a series of splashes and sinking chunks of potato as a greeting, and then gave the impression that he wanted assurances of Jin’s credentials as a soup-specialist and culinary caregiver, especially in light of the high quality of treatment that Dr Boyle had provided him previously, via the means of deeply expressive bubbles and eddy currents.
“Dr Hahn is fully qualified and ranked highly among his peers, Poter. He is perfectly capable of providing the treatment you need and his judgement has been certified.” Sharon praised. At least, Jin thought it counted as praise; it was hard to tell whether Dr Boyle felt anything at all, but the message had been positive so Jin took it as a win.
A sceptical slosh emanated from the bowl.
“I will also be monitoring your condition, but Jin is the primary consultant here.”
This seemed to go a little way towards placating Poter. He simmered quietly.
“We need to prepare the leek dosage. Based on the current readings from Poter’s charts he is responding to the treatment thus far, so I think we can get away with another dose of ten grams of green leaf.” Sharon instructed. She led the way over to a small countertop on the far side of a baking-paper curtain with a series of sharp knives and a refrigerator. Standing to one side, she allowed Jin to do the honours of selecting a small section of leek, stored in an air-tight bag, and placing it on the counter’s chopping board.
“I’m assuming we’re medicating with small shreds. A gauge twelve slice or smaller?”
“Correct. I have been using a gauge twelve for the last few days. At first I was using a gauge fifteen; the slice callipers are in the drawer below you, along with the rolling pin and icing bag.”
“It shouldn’t need to come to those.” Jin said with some shock in his voice. He couldn’t even imagine a circumstance in which rolling a soup would be necessary.
“Agreed.” Sharon replied simply.
With methodical cuts Jin sliced the leek into administrable segments, whilst Sharon peered stoically over his shoulder. She didn’t even breathe like she was emotionally invested in the situation. Her lungs just inflated and deflated pneumatically, a set of bellows blowing air through her system because the engineering of her body required it. Jin found it more off-putting than if she’d been breathing heavily and judgementally down his neck.
"Good enough?" Jin enquired, once he felt that he’d cut enough, stepping aside to make a show of letting Dr Boyle inspect the leek.
"Uniformity could be better, but that will come with practice. This will be fine" she assessed.
Dr Hahn looked down at what appeared to him to be completely identical slices of leek. He would have suspected that Dr Boyle was making sport of him, but that would have required her to be able to feel amusement.
Amid non-descript bubbled complaints about rough stirring and heavy handed sprinkling from Poter, Jin stirred his prepared leek into the patient’s potato-rich stock. Once he’d finished however there was an unmistakable simmer of contentment at the replenished flavour.
“Keep letting that infuse, Poter. We’ll be back on the normal schedule for your next dose.” Sharon said, skittering away before she’d even finished speaking.
“Nice to meet you, Poter.” Jin added for the sake of politeness, before following.
There wasn’t even as much as a ‘Well done’ or a ‘What did you think about Poter’s condition’ before Sharon swept Jin off to continue on the rounds. Her robotic persuasions extended beyond communication with human beings and well into nutrition, it seemed, as she showed no indication of allowing Dr Hahn to stop for lunch. Nor had he been given the opportunity for brunch, an early afternoon snack, or a cup of cardboard-flavoured vending machine tea. He was no stranger to being worked hard by senior doctors; when he was still getting his soup licence Jin had been expected to work whole months on the night shift, slaving away over strongly flavoured goulashes and personally thickening cream-ofs with viscosity issues. Since he’d qualified, though, he’d hoped that the workload would calm down to manageable levels. If Dr Boyle was anything to go by, that hope was very much in vain.
“… but because she’s a miso we’ll need to see some insurance documentation before starting treatment in earnest.” Sharon was relaying, standing next to a dark, watery soup in a porcelain bowl. Jin’s attention, wasted on his brain, had instead been hijacked by his stomach. It pulled every shred of his concentration inwards, away from what his eyes and ears were telling him, and directing it down to the rumbling, burning sensation in his stomach.
“Mm.” he said on autopilot.
“Doctor?” a nearby nurse asked. Sharon snapped to attention.
“Yes nurse?”
“I’m worried about Little Pois. It looks like… I don’t know, maybe it’s silly.”
“Explain.”
“I just… it looks like something is separating.” The nurse said, embarrassed by what she was saying.
“Separating? Interesting. This way Dr Hahn.” She said without looking round, scuttling purposefully towards the neighbouring ward.
Through the starving fog that his mind had become, Jin was faintly aware that she was leaving and that he had to follow. He allowed his body to take the same path that she had done, while his mind dreamed of the sandwiches waiting for him within locker 57.
Sharon was standing close to a steel stock pot. One hand was on her face; Jin presumed her hair must have been in the way. Slowly he shuffled over to join her, using as much of his body’s remaining energy as he dared, and looked down into the bowl to see what the nurse had been warning them about.
He’d never seen anything like it. None of the text books had mentioned separation of primary constituents, nor had anything he’d seen during his training prepared him for the reality of what was waiting in that bowl. Little Pois, as the nurse had called her, was a pea and mint soup. It was another classic recipe, a workhorse among the more aromatic dishes, but something had gone dreadfully wrong; the pea and the mint had drifted apart from one another, forming pockets and pools of mint among the sea of pea. Any subtle interplay between the gentle, muted pea flavour and the clear, freshness of the mint was gone, leaving instead patches of strong flavour that vied against one another for precedence within the mouth.
“The pea is rejecting the mint.” Sharon said quietly. Jin was starting to worry about how hungry he’d become, because it almost sounded like her voice had wobbled. “I’ve never seen a case this bad before.”
“It looks well beyond stirring.” Jin observed. “We could try folding the mint back in instead?” He offered.
Sharon shook her head.
“She’s more like two soups sharing one bowl at this stage.” She bit her lip and seemed to be mulling something over. “We have to perform an emergency mint-ectomy.”
The bottom fell out of Jin’s stomach, so it was a stroke of luck that it was entirely empty by that stage.
“That’s insane! No-one’s ever proven the success of that procedure, and even if they had it’s only the realm of specialists. We owe it to her to mend these two flavours back together.”
“This is a specialist case! Little Pois has already gone over the brink, the schism has occurred, and all we can do is pick up the pieces! Better to save a pea soup than send a pea and mint down the drain!” Sharon shouted back, stunning Jin into silence. Her eyebrows had tilted down, her nose had scrunched up, and her voice had increased in volume. What she was saying was extreme enough to be shocking under normal circumstances, but more importantly than that she was displaying an emotion. Either that or somebody, somewhere, had flipped a switch, or changed a 0 to a 1 in her programming, but given all the radio frequency shielding the hospital had to safeguard its equipment, remote controlling seemed unlikely. Jin had to, therefore, accept the possibility, however much it contradicted his previous experiences, that Dr Boyle was a human in possession of human emotions. He didn’t know how to cope with that, especially when his blood sugar was so low.
"I'm saving this soup, Dr Hahn. You're either helping or you're out of the room." She declared.
"I'm helping, Dr Boyle. I'm helping." He said with arms raised in surrender. "If you think it can be done."
"I do." She said, the tension melting rapidly from her face. Whatever dark influence had taken her was falling away under the force of her automaton's will. "Nurse? Re-heating room 1 to be prepared for me. Dr Hahn, get ready to assist me in the procedure. I'll take care of things here with Little Pois."
"Got it." Jin said, narrowly resisting the urge to salute his new insect overlord, before dashing off to the changing rooms yet again.
"But Dr Boyle specifically requested room 1." Jin heard a familiar nurse complain through the changing room wall. He was surprised at how clearly he could hear the exchange over the rustling of sterile clothing.
"Room 1 is already booked. We can't just throw another patient out at the last minute like this. Use room 3." The clerk repeated.
"Make them use room 3 then!"
"Why?"
"Because Dr Boyle is going to be heading to room 1."
"Not if you let her know that she needs to be in room 3!"
"I'd have to tell Dr Boyle that room 1 is busy and then that room 3 is booked. That's two extra things! If you just change the existing booking then I don't have to do any extra things at all. It makes more sense and is more efficient that way round." The nurse protested with a worryingly sincere conviction.
"Room 3 is booked for you." The clerk said with finality. Jin heard a door slam and footsteps stamping away along the corridor.
All-new concerns about critical thinking and resource utilisation occupied Jin’s mind as he finished the laborious process of putting on his sterile clothing. Finding no peace with what he’d overheard, he gave up thinking about it and turned once again to the apron rack. Where he'd needed to be commanding and authoritative in the morning's operation, this one required a wholly different approach. It was solemn. It was serious. He was here in support of a colleague performing a dangerous and experimental procedure and his garb needed to set everyone else in the room into that mindset. Not knowing what exactly he was looking for but feeling assured that he'd know what it was when he saw it, Jin flicked past apron after apron, rejecting the novelty maid's pinny, the muscular torso print, the BBQ King, and even the workhorse Kiss The Chef. When at last he saw it, the right choice practically leapt out at him.
"We're in room 3 for some reason. I guess some people can fail to follow simple instructions." Dr Boyle announced, skittering through the doorway. Dr Hahn turned to face her.
'Mummy and Daddy's Little Kitchen Helper' his apron said, in brightly coloured bubble writing. Jin knew he'd made the right decision when Sharon nodded approvingly and almost cracked a smile. Not quite, of course; two emotions in one day would have been unheard of. Jin’s apron deferred to her authority by casting her as the ostensible Mummy and Daddy, it showed he was there to help and learn by being the Little Kitchen Helper, and the brightly coloured text was experimental in its form. Even if nothing else he did that day had impressed her, he thought, at least this would secure his place by her side.
Together they took urgent steps into the re-heating room and waited. A full complement of sous-nurses were close behind, setting up equipment, preparing utensils and consulting recipe books. Bright strip lights reflected from shining steel dishes. A muted murmur filled the room as they all waited for the patient.
The characteristic bang of a trolley against a double-door announced Little Pois’s arrival. Although urgent, it still seemed unnecessary to Jin for everyone to behave so roughly with the re-heating room doors; they could easily be pushed open with a hand under even emergency circumstances. If it continued to happen long into his tenure at St Culine, Jin decided he would raise it with the board. At that moment, however, there were more pressing matters for his attention.
Little Pois bubbled groggily as she was wheeled into position. Her sickly patches of mint ichor sat on the surface of the soup like sores; the parts of her own composition that she was, for reasons unknown, rejecting.
“We need to keep the heat as low as we can. Any convection or bubbles will carry the risk of mixing the mint back in.” Dr Boyle told the assembled team. There was solemn nodding from the hob controller, who inched the dial downwards. Below Little Pois’ bowl the blue flames retreated down to a cobalt glimmer, just about licking up to the base of the pan.
“This is highly risky, Sharon. When we start scooping out the mint puddles we’ll be exposing core soup to the cold air. With the flame that low she’ll have an even harder time keeping her simmer going.” Jin said with palpable concern. The bubbles around the edges of Little Pois surface were already starting to calm and fade beneath the surface.
“Then we must be quick about it. You’ll take the left side and I’ll take the right. Number three ladle, I think.” She instructed Jin. “Sous-nurse; be ready with a strainer to filter out any pea that we extract. Little Pois needs to keep all the stock she can.”
“Yes doctor.” The nurse replied.
Jin walked uneasily to the other side of the bowl, standing opposite Dr Boyle and finding a number three ladle offered to him. It was one of the smaller and more nimble utensils for manual decanting, whilst still keeping enough volume to bail out the majority of the mint pockets. Dr Boyle certainly had tool-size estimation down to a fine art. Without another word she had leaned over Little Pois with her own ladle in hand, delicately lowering it into position over the first mint puddle.
“Remember to dip it slowly and aim for the middle of the mint. It should flow into the scoop more readily than the pea does, so you can use that fact to limit the amount of healthy stock you remove.” Dr Boyle advised, making liberal use of the term ‘remember’. This was the type of procedure that got mentioned once a year in a fringe, strictly speculative paper, and it certainly wasn’t part of the standard soup medicine syllabus.
With reluctant curiosity Jin watched Sharon’s ladle press into the minty ichor, gradually disappearing beneath the green surface until the thinner, more translucent mint started to flow like a viscous waterfall into its scoop. In a circle around it the pea-boundary drifted slowly inwards.
“Pea incoming.” Jin warned.
“It’s fine.” Sharon replied, her focus unwavering from the ladle.
“You’ve only got a few seconds.”
“I’m aware.”
Brighter, thicker pea stock started to crest the edge of the ladle as Sharon lifted it, leaving a thin sheen on the edge of the scoop.
“Hm. Perhaps that was a little late.” She conceded whilst pouring the mint into a ramekin being proffered by a sous-nurse. “You’ve seen the technique now, though. Time is of the essence Dr Hahn.”
“Right.” Jin agreed, still not feeling much more confident. The low-level simmer was worrying to look at, but even that amount of motion still made the mint wobble in place. Dr Boyle had been right to turn down heat. Emulating the motions Sharon had taken he started to lower his ladle towards the larger of the mint pockets on his side. When he finally made contact the buoyancy of the soup proved stronger than he’d anticipated, and his own stomach started to churn as he pushed down against it to force the ladle under the surface.
Gently at first the mint trickled inwards, adding weight to the scoop and taking some of the strain away.
“Dishcloth.” He croaked as the sweat beaded on his forehead. A sous-nurse dabbed it away with a coarse dishcloth that smelled strongly of surgical strength dish detergent; not only would it absorb the sweat, but also cut through any grease and keep his forehead free of limescale build-up.
His eyes skittered more erratically than Sharon’s gait as he tried to keep watch over both the pea tide and the ladle’s scoop. Sharon’s nerves had been steely, but his own were more fraught and he lifted the scoop away with an easy few millimetres left between it and the boundary.
“Too early.” Sharon said bluntly. “That ichor puddle is shallow now. It’ll be difficult to scoop the rest out.”
Jin looked into the soup as he poured out his mint and couldn’t help agreeing; a few more seconds might have risked a pea wave, but it would have at least removed nearly all of the ichor. Experimental procedures, it seemed, were difficult to get right.
Twenty minutes of tense dishing up followed, leaving them about three quarters done. Jin’s hand were starting to cramp, the smell of mint was starting to grow overpowering, and it was getting increasingly difficult to avoid removing pea stock. There was a silver lining in the knowledge that Jin’s forehead was going to be free of limescale for several years with the amount of wiping it had experienced, but that was little consolation to him in the moment.
“Heat a little higher.” Dr Hahn said, flexing his fingers in between scoops.
“It’s hard enough without more currents.” Dr Boyle countered. “We just need to hurry up and get the rest of the mint out.”
“She’s going to get cold and start forming a skin.” Jin argued, still flexing. “Besides which your hands must be seizing up as well; it’s getting risky.”
“It’ll be less risky if we both keep going.”
Jin tried to catch her eye but she was too intent on the mint-ectomy. Accepting that there was no chance of convincing her Dr Hahn took up his grip on the ladle again and kept bailing.
The pickings were poor. Where Little Pois had come in with large puddles the procedure had left them all as shallow smears and the occasional mint fleck. Both Jin and Sharon had been effectively relegated to skimming mint from the top and passing it through the pea strainer.
“Viscosity still increasing.” Jin said.
“Ugh.” Sharon muttered. It seemed to Jin that she was laying it on a bit thick in telling him to just get on with it.
“We’ve still got time, I get it.” He said, trying to cut her off before she could get a full blown snipe in, but there was another grunt as he was speaking and it didn’t sound like a chastisement. Jin looked up just in time to see Dr Boyle’s fingers tremble, twitch, and lose their grip on the ladle.
Time seemed to slow down, which isn’t traditionally a medical technique but would prove to be incredibly useful if it could be harnessed. As it was, the chrono-slowdown mostly served to allow Jin to see the ladle start to lean over and descend towards Little Pois’ already depleted stock. Stifled professional gasps rippled around the bowl, making the sound of a fan trying to be subtle whilst hiding behind a stack of loose papers.
Jin could hear Sharon trying to say something but her mouth was moving so slowly that he couldn’t understand it. All he knew was that allowing the ladle to drop into Little Pois would have a devastating effect on her temperature equilibrium, as well as just being incredibly unpleasant for Dr Boyle to use from that point onwards; no-one ever wanted to use a slimy utensil.
His ladle moved before he knew it should be doing anything, instinct taking over from his conscious mind. Skimming across the surface of Little Pois it left a tiny wake of rippled pea stock, covered by an almost oily layer of rejected mint. Nearly the whole scoop of Dr Boyle’s ladle had disappeared into the soup and the joint with the handle was getting dangerously close to the surface. A small spray of soup kicked up and splattered against it from the bow wave of Jin’s approaching tooling. Sharon started to flinch. It seemed like the distance between the two ladles was still an insurmountable chasm, and that Little Pois would imminently find herself to be a pea and ladle soup with hints of mint. It would be a headline failure for the mint-ectomy technique and a disciplinary for Dr Boyle, but worse than that it would be devastating for Little Pois. The joint of scoop and handle disappeared beneath the pea, leaving just an obelisk of steel to slip quietly downwards. Dr Boyle closed her eyes.
There was a clink.
“Nurse. A spoon to support.” Jin ordered. Teetering on the scoop of his own ladle was the handle of Dr Boyle’s, held just above the soup’s surface and delicately balanced. Dr Hahn’s already tired fingers trembled as they gripped and held the extra weight.
“Yes doctor.” One of the sous-nurses finally replied through her shock. There was a frantic scrabbling to one side as Jin perspired with the exertion, the sounds of spoons promising relief.
“It was good that you did that.” Sharon replied distantly, staring down at her ladle with eyes re-opened.
Within seconds a teaspoon appeared in the bowl and hooked itself underneath the top of the ladle handle. Another quickly joined, and then two more. In another gentle manoeuvre Jin and the sous-nurses teased the fallen utensil upwards, until it was finally clear enough of the surface for Sharon to grasp the end and lift it from the bowl. Carefully she deposited it on a nearby tray.
“Thank you nurse. Someone please salvage what pea stock you can from the ladle.” Jin said, panting with relief. “We can’t do any more here. It’s too risky.” He added with a note of finality. Sharon merely nodded.
Evening sunlight streamed through the window of the general tomato ward, transforming the red tomato bases into a golden colour. Their tins would all undoubtedly say to keep out of direct sunlight, but any soup doctor worth their salt knew that a bit of sunshine did unwell soups the world of good.
Jin looked up at the wall clock and realised that the end of his shift had flown past whilst he’d been treating a tomato and basil complaining of viscous stock syndrome.
“Well, Bert, we’ll keep you on the boiling water supplements for a couple more days and see how you feel after that. Try not to let your sediments settle and you should be fine.” Dr Hahn said. Bert gurgled gratefully and Jin took his leave.
When he made it back to the common room he saw Dr Boyle gathering her own things together. She nodded as he came in.
“You did your job today, Dr Hahn.” She said mechanically. Jin took it as a compliment.
“Thanks.” He said. She nodded again and briskly skittered out with shins that seemed to bend like knees.
Whilst reaching through the gap behind his buckled locker door, reasoning that opening it was a bit redundant, he noticed a chalkboard hanging on the back wall. Written on it in tall white chalk lettering was:
“Soup of the Day: Little Pois. Dr Sharon Boyle and Dr Jin Hahn”
Jin smiled to himself. Working on what ended up as the soup of the day on his first shift was something of a trial by fire. He hoped that in days to come he’d be able to take shelter in the pan.
Cars hissed through standing water in the road next to him, and he kept walking and looking for the safe and dry path. With his eyes down it was impossible to miss the sudden and characteristic splash of colour outside the automatic double doors; a patch of drying red that was trying to turn brown, with small flecks of green so dark that they were almost black. It was splattered against the pavement in a messy circular smear that Jin had seen enough times to tell what it was even before the smell hit him. Classic tomato and basil. It was hard to say if it had crème fraiche or not without taking a sample, but that was academic by the time it had hit the pavement.
Seeing carnage like that had knocked the wind out of Jin completely when he was first training. It still played on his mind a little, but was becoming less shocking and more bleakly familiar every time. The reality of the job involved seeing those kinds of things until he became desensitised, so that he could get on with the work that needed to be done. As thoughts about how that spillage may have occurred tried to press their way into his mind, and Jin in turn pushed them back away, the doors slid open and he stepped into St. Culine Soup Hospital.
Jin’s shining black shoes clicked distinctly against the pale orange tiles of the floor as he proceeded past the reception desk. There was a queue of people lining up for information or trying to book in, some of them accompanying soups of their own and others presumably there to visit resident broths. A minestrone was lying quietly in a bowl, in the arms of a tired looking woman. A man joked with his flask of pea and mint. At the front of the queue as Jin walked past there was a group of three people in their twenties chatting quietly to one another. Although he can’t hear what they were saying properly, it seemed like they were discussing which ward to find their soup in; a nice early visit like that helped morale for everyone.
In an effort to seem like a down-to-earth and non-pretentious addition to the staff, Jin tried to make eye contact with the receptionist such that there could be a follow-up acknowledging nod, but she was busy on the phone. Eyes fixed on her monitor, she was loudly discussing the correct procedure for making an appointment with the nutritional composition consultant and had no time for idle interaction with new doctors. For as long as he dared Jin kept looking over, but a near miss with a bin forced him to look where he was going once more; there would be time for more eye contact attempts in the future, he was sure.
Brightly coloured signs on the wall pointed towards the various departments and wards, with colour-coded paintwork in the destination wards to drive the navigational certainty home. St Culine was the largest soup hospital in the country, catering for the full gamut of liquid food-types known to modern medicine, and so it had to plumb nearly the entirety of the colour pallet to distinguish elements of the soup palate. It had a Goulash Wing, coloured in a pale orange, a broth ward of drab brown, and even a specialist ‘cream-of’ unit that took up the noble mantle of beige. World-leading experts in the treatment of unusual or severe soup problems worked within those walls and it would be Jin’s honour to learn from and work alongside them.
A salmon pink corridor assailed him first on his journey, aligning with the red signage of the ‘General Tomato Based’ department. Several bright white doorways, flanked by trollies with empty serving trays, led off to corridors with individual wards and attending sous-nurses. Jin had spent much time in wards like that across the various hospitals of his previous placements, dealing with pH imbalances and incorrect proportions of vegetable chunks for the most part. While it lacked the glamour and exotic appeal of the more niche specialisms, it could be just as brutal and heart-breaking as any soup medicine and represented the initiation rite for all soup doctors.
Beyond the end of the General Tomato department was the green of ‘Pea, Spinach and Other Leafy’. Leaning against one wall was a middle-aged gentleman looking down at his phone. It must have been around the time for morning rounds within that ward, to disseminate necessary additives, salts or seasonings for in-patients. The gentleman looked up at the sight of Jin, but looked down again disinterestedly upon seeing that it wasn’t someone he recognised. That look of not-exactly-disappointment-but-general-disinterest was something else that Jin had been forced to get used to. He made no attempt to distract the man from his important telephonic business and pushed open a double doorway on the opposite side to the ward doors, taking the subsequent staircase up to the first floor.
A sojourn through the broth ward with its beefy and watery aromas led Jin into the staff common area, his nominal base of operations in lieu of an office. Inside there were already a handful of other doctors and nurses going about the rituals of their various shift patterns. It housed the general chatter of colleagues, the fridge Tetris of a few people placing lunches into the small communal appliances by the wall, a muted television set onto the news, and a hard-faced woman leaning against some form of breakfast bar and staring at a clipboard. Her hair was pulled into a tight ponytail high up on her head, and she’d chosen to accentuate the draconic nose stabbing out of her face with small, thin, round glasses. They looked a lot like someone had balanced two pennies on either side of a chef’s knife, and snapped directly up at him as soon as he entered the room.
“Ah. Doctor Hahn, welcome.” She said. In three impossibly long strides she seemed to cover the complete width of the room and was upon him, her body seeming to articulate more like a cricket in the wind than a human. “Your locker is over there, number 57. Here’s the key.”
“Hello. Thanks.” Jin replied, accepting the small steel key that she was offering to him. He recognised her as Doctor Sharon Boyle, because that’s who she was. Jin had spent time in her company during his interview for the position, and although she didn’t leave the impression of being an unpleasant person, he’d definitely seen steel girders which were less rigid and emotionless than she was.
“I have your duty and patient list for the day. Put your things away and we’ll get started.” She instructed. Jin nodded and hurried through the common room towards his locker, weaving past a few bench seats installed for the benefit of those who wished to channel the experience of a gym shower room. His eyes scanned along the row of bright blue doors, each one adorned with white numbered tickets in small holders, and searched for 57. First his eyes fell on locker 17, which was directly adjacent to locker 63. Puzzled, he looked down to see lockers 13 and 02 underneath them. His lips pursed themselves while he tried to work out what pattern he was missing, but expanding his search to lockers 0.3 and 00 didn’t help. After a cursory glance at the other lockers, he forgave himself for trying to find order in the midst of absolute chaos and accepted the inevitability of a locker-by-locker search.
Locker 57 transpired to be a bottom level locker sandwiched between locker 1 and locker C-12. It rose up to approximately thigh height, with “The Bernard Cribbins Memorial Locker” situated directly above. Whilst the numbering system was singularly unhelpful, his locker was immediately distinguishable from all others by the enormous dent in the thin metal door. It had clearly sustained a heavy blow at some point in the past, enough to send the top and bottom corners buckling outwards so that they were ready to snag on anything and anyone careless enough to walk by too closely. It wasn’t a wonderful start to the day, but Jin decided that causing a fuss this early on would only set a poor impression; he could make a land-grab for superior locker space once his position in the hierarchy was better established.
As efficiently as he could, Jin pushed his jacket and loose belongings into the locker and sealed it, in as much as it was possible when the concave nature of the door left enormous gaps at the top and bottom. Conscious to take the optimal path back to Sharon and demonstrate that he was no time waster, he strode back across the common room at glancing incidence to every obstacle in his path, the risk of stubbed knees and toes barely entering his mind.
“OK, I’m ready.” He confirmed, rolling up the sleeves of his palest blue shirt to demonstrate that fact.
“Get yourself a white coat from the rack first.” Sharon ordered impassively.
“Oh, yeah. Sorry.” Jin replied, cursing himself. There were no cracks in Dr Boyle’s mask of stoicism but he could feel the weight of potential judgement on himself as he took the perilous journey back to the coat rack by the lockers. With the shame of forgetting to put on a coat playing on his mind, however, a grazing blow against the edge of a locker rack left him with what felt like a light scratching wound. He styled it out and pretended that nothing had happened, but couldn’t help wondering if Sharon would see through his ruse. Only time would tell, he supposed.
On a long rail hung dozens of blue plastic suit bags, each one zipped up to the top and hiding a fresh, clean white coat. Jin flicked through them and looked for the square information patches sewn into the left breast of each bag, finding disappointment after disappointment as his preferred ‘Med’ was nowhere to be seen. Lost among a sea of ‘XS’ and ‘XXL’ he swam, scanning patch after patch for those three letters that signalled he would have a well-fitted coat for the next few days. Too many times during his training had he been forced to suffer through narrow shoulders, baggy sleeves, missing buttons, torn lapels and even a collar that was completely sewn shut on one occasion; he’d been forced to wear it like a cape, since putting it straight in the used pile just felt wasteful.
Without feeling the joy of finding the correct size Jin reached the end of the rack, and he was forced to accept the reality that his patients’ first glimpse of him would be one in which he seemed utterly unable to dress himself correctly. A sigh escaped him, disappearing among the disappointing coats, and he grabbed a second-best ‘S’. It was always better to have a slightly clingy sleeve than one which dangled too far and ended up with broth soaked into it. Other patients tended to feel uneasy with elements of the previous appointment soaked into their doctor’s clothing.
Putting it on as he went, Jin returned to Sharon via the same locker corner, picking up a dull bruise on the side of his thigh and rattling the thin metal frame as he went. There would be no hiding that one, but he didn’t have to give anybody the satisfaction of reacting to it.
"Our first patient is in the general tomato based ward. This way." Sharon said emotionlessly, either ignorant or apathetic to Jin’s performance in walking through the common room, and led the way with her elongated daddy-long-legs strides. If it weren't for the fact that Jin could see the ceiling he would have suspected that she was a mis-proportioned marionette being operated by someone with too loose a grasp on human ambulation. Trying and subsequently failing not to stare at her unnatural gait, Jin followed along.
Doctor Boyle skittered through the hallways with her high-kneed and lengthy stride. When they reached the staircase Jin half expected her to scuttle down along the wall, but she used the steps and handrail like any responsible staff member would be required to for insurance purposes. Managing to reach the bottom without incident, and even succeeding in operating the door rather than bumping ineffectually into the glass panel, Dr Boyle rounded the corner into General Tomato-Based and her white coat swept around her in a wide arc as she went. Jin barely managed to keep her in his line of sight as she dived into a room to one side of the corridor.
“This is the ward.” Sharon announced, slightly redundantly given that she was already entering it. Jin caught the doors just before they swung fully shut and sidled his way in, coming to rest in a familiar ward setup. Separated by floor-to-ceiling sheets of baking paper were clean, white porcelain bowls filled with the soups under the care of St Culine. An array of red soups occupied the room, each one flanked by trays of utensils for straining, scooping, stirring, and otherwise tending to the needs of a hearty, warming meal. Underneath each bowl was a modern electric hob to keep the patients simmering gently, and every position was stocked with a basic spice rack for emergencies. St Culine spared no expense.
"Our first case of the day is a red lentil with low sodium levels, complaining of feeling dull and generally being bland; aren't you Hamish?" Sharon said, standing next to the first patient on the right and mechanically attempting to appear human as she alternated her attention from Jin to the patient. The presumed-Hamish bubbled its assent. "Take a look at the charts and tell me what you think." She added, lifting a clipboard of papers from the edge of Hamish’s bowl.
Jin accepted the proffered clipboard after an awkward wave of greeting to Hamish, and flicked through Hamish's details, making mental comparisons of the measured levels against the normal ingredients list for red lentil.
"I'd say he needs 50cc salt, a spoon of mixed herbs, basil in particular, and maybe a spoon of oregano or coriander." Jin assessed quickly, eager not to keep Sharon waiting.
"Not incorrect. We’ve been giving two grams of seasoning thrice per day. Half oregano, half basil. Salt at dusk as well. Should get Hamish's here back to health within the fortnight." She told him. It felt like being a trainee again; there were no guaranteed correct answers and every doctor had their own preferred flavour of treatment. Jin would just have to get used to Sharon’s tastes until he was operating completely autonomously.
"Got it." He said. "Feeling alright there today Hamish?"
Hamish mustered the enthusiasm for a short tirade of symptoms which were making progress to feeling healed, spoke highly of the care he had received, and outlined all sorts of gratitude through the accepted soup medium of bubbles, sloshes, and hot tomato-stock currents.
"Well don't boil over. Just keep it simmered and you'll be poured out of here in no time." Jin said with a warm smile, eager to show off his bowl-side manner while Sharon was there. She made no indication either way as to how she felt about matters but Hamish bubbled contentedly.
The doctors stepped away from Hamish, and Jin leaned over to the nurse at his station in the corner. “Hi. I’m Dr Jin Hahn, first day here.”
“Morning doctor, nice to meet you. I’m Douglas Embos.” The nurse replied with a short nod. He went immediately back to looking through his paperwork.
“It looks like the charts are all continuing their trends in the right direction. I’d say to keep Hamish here for another three or four days and then release him to home-kitchen care.” Jin relayed to Sharon and Douglas.
“We’ll be pressured to have it done in two days.” Dr Boyle replied. “We’re low on bowls as it is and seasonings can be administered easily enough by an amateur sous chef.”
Douglas kept looking down, but shook his head slowly.
“I mean… it seems like a row risk case. Maybe there’ll be a little prolonged blandness for a couple of extra days. I’d prefer to keep him here until we’re sure though.” Jin said, trying not to outright defy Sharon straight away.
“Me too.” Douglas added, still poring away over his sheets of numbers.
“The bowl schedule will need to be maintained for new admissions whatever we do.” Sharon stated simply. “Our next patient is in the back corner over there.”
"Are incidences of seasoning deficiency still increasing among the lentil demographic?" Jin asked as they moved away from the nurse station. He already knew that there was an upward trend in general, but if the bowl schedule for new admissions was that tight then it implied things were getting worse.
"We've seen an increase across nearly every demographic, regardless of base and primary flavour constituent." She replied. "Averaging six cases per month at the moment across every ward, but there seems to have been a recent spike among the cream-ofs."
"People assuming that because it's cream it doesn't need additional flavours on the palate? Trying to over-emphasise the base ingredient?"
"Possibly, but idle speculation is dangerous. All we can say for sure at the moment is that frequency is increasing and when polled it seems that lack of education is the primary factor here. We need to find some way or another of getting correct seasoning practices out to the people more effectively."
“Right” He accepted. There was always a push to educate the public about these things, but it was like trying to educate forests not to burn when someone drops a cigarette on dried leaves. He'd seen a handful of posters in the corridors of the hospital espousing the virtues of an emergency home cookbook and spice kit, the wisdom of regular seasoning checks and the perils of failing to perform a taste test when problems are first suspected, but he suspected that the only people reading them were the authors and people who had needed the advice several months prior.
Another nurse was checking the next patient when Sharon and Jin arrived at the side of the bed. Using a long, thin metal skewer she was probing at several floating elements within the orange-red base and verifying the consistency of the chunks. Standard care work, but vital.
“Good morning.” Jin said to both of them.
“Oh, er, morning. I won’t be long, doctor.” The nurse replied. She got a solid piece of carrot with her skewer and gently slid it back off against the rim of the bowl. “Some of these chunks still need a bit longer really, but it’s an improvement on where we were last week.”
“Thank you. I’m Doctor Hahn by the way.”
“Welcome.” She said distractedly, wiping the skewer down and making notes on the bowl-side clipboard.
“Doctors!” someone shouted from the doorway to the ward, taking Jin by surprise. Several of the patients popped small bubbles, startled by the outburst. One of the receptionists had dashed onto the ward. “We need some extra hands in emergency admissions.”
Articulating in a way that shouldn’t have been possible for someone with a human skeleton, Dr Boyle scurried away and Jin gave chase. Clearly a quiet first day would have been too much to ask for.
In the emergency admissions wing they immediately saw the problem, shrouded as it was by a cluster of attending nurses.
“Stand aside, let me see.” Dr Boyle ordered as she wound her legs forward through the crowd. Her body followed once there was space, and Jin followed, using the space created by Sharon’s chaotic movement.
“Minestrone. Typical neglect case. Whoever has custody of this soup hasn’t taken even basic care. For whatever reason they’ve left it to get cold and just fester without even basic, minimal stirring or reheating.” Sharon assessed, as cold as the soup was.
“I did not neglect it!” A woman shouted angrily from the crowd.
“Look at the skin there; thick and heavy. It’ll be a delicate operation, but you’re qualified. Scrub up, get your apron on, and get to work on it in re-heating room 2.” Sharon continued, instructing Jin and ignoring the woman.
“Uh, yes. Right away.” Jin said, immediately de-threading himself from the gaggle of people and rushing to the re-heating rooms. He could hear Sharon robotically ordering nurses to get a stock-pot on a trolley and arrange support for the operation, amid further shouts from the soup’s ostensible guardian. It was all irrelevant to him; all that mattered was navigating his way back through the hospital.
Jin stood in the re-heating room, awaiting his patient. Hairnet on, he held his white-gloved hands out and away from his body to keep them sterile whilst double and triple checking the array of utensils and appliances at his disposal for the procedure. Knowing that he would need to command immediate respect and confidence from the assisting team, he had chosen a long apron with a novelty tuxedo print across the chest. The association as a respectable and formal gentleman at an evening event would demonstrate his focused and no-nonsense attitude to important procedures, far more so than the ‘Sun’s out, guns out’ apron he’d passed over.
A rumbling of wheels and shouted instructions gave Jin a second’s warning before the doors slammed open and a shining steel stock pot was wheeled in by a team of sous-nurses.
“Hat, doctor.” One of them said as they span the pot into position, nestling it among the trays of utensils and resting the bottom onto a small support hob.
“Oh! Yes. Thank you sous-nurse.” Jin said, as another of the nurses placed the traditional tall, white, bulbous hat onto his head.
“Hob set to gas mark 3, doctor.”
“Thank you. Small tongs?” Jin asked, holding out one hand and stepping up to the edge of the pot. A pair of small tongs were placed into Jin’s waiting palm and he gave them the traditional test clack just to make sure they opened and closed as expected. From its cavity the minestrone was looking up at him through the thick skin, clearly feeling smothered and unwell. The tops of several chunks of vegetable were frozen in place, cresting just through the skin.
“Are we not going to try to stir it back in first?” asked a sous-nurse on the opposite side of the pot. She was pulling a soft frown with eyebrows that, if Jin’s eyes were to be believed, had been drawn on that morning.
“It’s too thick and dry at this stage. I don’t think it would ever dissolve correctly and there’d be lumps. The best thing is to just get it out of there.” Jin said, gently sliding the tip of the tongs down the side of the pot and making first contact with the skin. Below him the minestrone gave no indication that it had noticed, having completely lost sensation in the skin.
With one corner of the tong tips, Jin tried to hook just the edge of the skin upward. It deformed wetly under the pressure, bending down like soft felt and allowing a small pool of liquid minestrone to flow over the top.
“I need someone with a teaspoon, please. Help me to keep liquid soup off the top and scrape it away into the bowl.”
“Right away doctor.” One of the sous-nurses agreed. Within seconds there was a shining teaspoon in place and ready to assist.
A second attempt to pick up the edge of the skin passed the same way as the first. Conscious that he didn’t want to disrupt the healthy soup underneath too much, Jin changed tactic and pushed at it rather than trying to lift it. Folds formed and then bunched up in the skin, trapping small pools of soup between themselves but doing the job of contracting the skin’s length and exposing healthy soup underneath.
“Spoon to brace, please.” Jin requested. A second teaspoon was immediately in place to hold the folded skin back in its concertina.
Carefully Jin pinched at the now exposed skin boundary and started to very carefully lift. Minestrone trickled slowly down it, forming pools here and there were chunks had made low points in the surface until the bailing spoon carefully scraped it back into the mix.
“Easy does it…” he muttered to himself, gingerly raising the skin upwards and away from the soup. “Have a dish ready for this, please.”
Higher and higher the skin rose, peeling away from the liquid surface. Jin could feel the weight in his tongs.
“Small tear starting, doctor.” A sous-nurse warned. Jin peered at the far side of his tongs and saw that there was indeed a rupture forming where a piece of potato had weakened the skin.
“Damn. Thank you nurse. Monitor and prepare a second set of tongs. We might need to catch this in two halves. I don’t want to start lowering it down now.” Jin instructed. The sounds of hurried motion and tool preparation rang in the background. He could see the minestrone bubbling with greedy convection currents, gasping as the heat from below started to kick-start its simmering while the air above graced its surface for the first time in too long.
“Tear progressing.” The sous-nursed said urgently.
“Second tongs in here now, please!” Jin pleaded. He was still lifting but more slowly, and the skin on the opposite side of the tear was no longer rising with him. “Support from the spoon. Hold that other side up.”
The teaspoon which had previously been holding back the folds rotated around to support the weight of the limp skin, causing it to fold lazily over the convex back. Another nurse was still diligently scraping and bailing liquid soup off the skin and back into the main bowl, but the extra motion was making it all the more difficult to keep the thick, leathery layer intact.
“Lift with me please, nurse. We might be able to get it out like this.” Jin asked.
“Are you sure this is wise doctor?” She asked.
“I think it’s our best chance until the tongs are here.” Jin replied, somewhat avoiding the thrust of the question. “We’ll go slowly.”
With reluctant trust the nurse obeyed and gently started raising the spoon along with the tongs.
“I can feel the skin slipping doctor.” She said. Jin could see that she was right; rather than coming straight upwards the skin was sliding across the back of the spoon.
“Tongs?” he asked again.
“Here doctor.” Another nurse finally said, directing them into bowl and pinching the loose end of the skin that was retreating hastily over the spoon.
“OK, good. Now up we go.”
As a unit the two tongs and the spoon supported the full, limp weight of the skin and removed it wholly from the minestrone, with the first teaspoon still salvaging as much fluid as possible.
“Dish here.” A voice said as a metal tray appeared underneath the tool assembly. A clanking of metal on metal followed by the wet squelching of an extracted skin falling on top of them.
“Good work everyone. Grade two wooden spoon, please.” Jin requested with a relieved sigh, shortly thereafter feeling a wooden handle in his palm. “Thank you sous-nurse. Stirring at one revolution per second.”
The minestrone sloshed gratefully around the spoon, its settled lumps and stratified constituents once again mixing into a homogenous whole.
“Uniformity returning to normal levels. No evident fragments of skin left. Looks like a success to me.” Jin assessed. “Someone take over the stirring please?” An eager hand appeared on the spoon’s handle and relieved Jin of the duty. “Thank you. Take it out to the simmering ward when you’re ready.” He instructed, breathing a sigh of relief as the adrenaline faded away. Riding the success of his first operation he strode back into the changing room.
Whilst Jin was peeling off the gloves and pushing his apron into the laundry bin, Sharon scuttled through the changing room door with a typically nonplussed expression.
“Successful procedure. Our next case is a hearty broth, so it’s in the cardiac soups ward. Join me there in room four.” She stated, before walking back out. Her torso didn’t have to turn to follow her legs for nearly two whole strides.
Jin shuddered and rubbed at his face with de-gloved hands, smearing talc over his cheeks. Rest was, apparently, for other people.
Over the next few hours of the day Jin and Sharon walked the hospital, attending to their list of patients, making introductions, and occasionally giving one of the broths a personal stir to show a good bowl-side manner. If this was intended to be an introduction to normal working life at St Culine then Jin suspected that he was going to rapidly become a very tired man.
As they were walking between wards a beeper sounded from Sharon’s wristwatch, making a shrill announcement that it was some noteworthy time or other.
“Ah. It’s time for Poter’s treatment. You’ll be seeing a lot of Poter over the next couple of weeks.” She said, turning on her heel and articulating her way towards another staircase.
“What’s Poter’s condition?” Jin asked. He was quickly establishing that information would be drip-fed or clipboard-supplied unless he asked directly.
“He’s a traditional potato and leek, cooked to an older recipe, but not bad in principle. The problem is that he’s suffering from a severe leek deficiency. Best hypotheses at the moment are that it’s just down to poor storage but we may never know the true cause.”
“How severe of a deficiency are we talking here?” Jin pushed.
“He’s borderline just potato soup at this stage, and the levels have been slow to stabilise.”
Jin held silence as he tried to comprehend the situation. If the leek content was that low then it would be dangerous to simply throw in a full portion; it would sap so much heat and change the moisture level so greatly that the soup could lose its consistency permanently, not to mention the impact of a heavy swing in flavour. Seasoning it back to optimum condition might be impossible after a shock like that.
Poter’s ward was in the Critical Ingredient Replenishment wing. Through a swipe-access doorway they found a decontamination antechamber, and Sharon wordlessly led the way by pulling on a white plastic over-suit. Jin did the same, casting a concerned eye over all the warning signs regarding cross contamination, not allowing jewellery to fall into the patient, and being careful not to thrust surgical equipment into plug sockets.
“Why do we need quite this many precautionary measures for missing ingredients?” Jin asked, not finding answers among the posters.
“Poter’s composition is sufficiently delicate that any wrong ingredient, even a small amount, could significantly disrupt his flavour and set us back several days in his treatment.” Sharon explained.
Jin nodded. He thought that all of this was extreme overkill, but didn’t think that it would go down well if he pointed it out. Instead he went along with the procedure and quarantined his own body within thin, rustling, sterile plastic. It flew in the face of humanising himself as a caregiver, but if everyone else was doing it then at least he’d look like a team player.
Once Sharon was satisfied that both of them were suitably sealed within their own personal tents she opened the next doorway and revealed Poter’s room. Aside from the prominent and strictly enforced dress code the ward was much like any other; Poter was sitting calmly in his bowl, nurses were attending and monitoring, and Jin was left to watch Sharon’s biologically impractical ambulation.
“Good afternoon Poter. This is Dr Hahn. He’ll be looking after you from now on, but I will still be on the premises.” Dr Boyle relayed, with all the warmth of an iceberg.
“Hello Poter.” Jin said with a small wave. He wasn’t sure what the point of an introduction was when the only exposed part of his body was the eyes, but courtesy demanded that it happened all the same. As he stepped up to the edge of the bowl, however, courtesy was challenged again as he tried to stifle a gasp. Poter really was as bad as Sharon had made out; a nearly uniform beige colour with the merest shreds of leek bobbing here and there.
Poter used a series of splashes and sinking chunks of potato as a greeting, and then gave the impression that he wanted assurances of Jin’s credentials as a soup-specialist and culinary caregiver, especially in light of the high quality of treatment that Dr Boyle had provided him previously, via the means of deeply expressive bubbles and eddy currents.
“Dr Hahn is fully qualified and ranked highly among his peers, Poter. He is perfectly capable of providing the treatment you need and his judgement has been certified.” Sharon praised. At least, Jin thought it counted as praise; it was hard to tell whether Dr Boyle felt anything at all, but the message had been positive so Jin took it as a win.
A sceptical slosh emanated from the bowl.
“I will also be monitoring your condition, but Jin is the primary consultant here.”
This seemed to go a little way towards placating Poter. He simmered quietly.
“We need to prepare the leek dosage. Based on the current readings from Poter’s charts he is responding to the treatment thus far, so I think we can get away with another dose of ten grams of green leaf.” Sharon instructed. She led the way over to a small countertop on the far side of a baking-paper curtain with a series of sharp knives and a refrigerator. Standing to one side, she allowed Jin to do the honours of selecting a small section of leek, stored in an air-tight bag, and placing it on the counter’s chopping board.
“I’m assuming we’re medicating with small shreds. A gauge twelve slice or smaller?”
“Correct. I have been using a gauge twelve for the last few days. At first I was using a gauge fifteen; the slice callipers are in the drawer below you, along with the rolling pin and icing bag.”
“It shouldn’t need to come to those.” Jin said with some shock in his voice. He couldn’t even imagine a circumstance in which rolling a soup would be necessary.
“Agreed.” Sharon replied simply.
With methodical cuts Jin sliced the leek into administrable segments, whilst Sharon peered stoically over his shoulder. She didn’t even breathe like she was emotionally invested in the situation. Her lungs just inflated and deflated pneumatically, a set of bellows blowing air through her system because the engineering of her body required it. Jin found it more off-putting than if she’d been breathing heavily and judgementally down his neck.
"Good enough?" Jin enquired, once he felt that he’d cut enough, stepping aside to make a show of letting Dr Boyle inspect the leek.
"Uniformity could be better, but that will come with practice. This will be fine" she assessed.
Dr Hahn looked down at what appeared to him to be completely identical slices of leek. He would have suspected that Dr Boyle was making sport of him, but that would have required her to be able to feel amusement.
Amid non-descript bubbled complaints about rough stirring and heavy handed sprinkling from Poter, Jin stirred his prepared leek into the patient’s potato-rich stock. Once he’d finished however there was an unmistakable simmer of contentment at the replenished flavour.
“Keep letting that infuse, Poter. We’ll be back on the normal schedule for your next dose.” Sharon said, skittering away before she’d even finished speaking.
“Nice to meet you, Poter.” Jin added for the sake of politeness, before following.
There wasn’t even as much as a ‘Well done’ or a ‘What did you think about Poter’s condition’ before Sharon swept Jin off to continue on the rounds. Her robotic persuasions extended beyond communication with human beings and well into nutrition, it seemed, as she showed no indication of allowing Dr Hahn to stop for lunch. Nor had he been given the opportunity for brunch, an early afternoon snack, or a cup of cardboard-flavoured vending machine tea. He was no stranger to being worked hard by senior doctors; when he was still getting his soup licence Jin had been expected to work whole months on the night shift, slaving away over strongly flavoured goulashes and personally thickening cream-ofs with viscosity issues. Since he’d qualified, though, he’d hoped that the workload would calm down to manageable levels. If Dr Boyle was anything to go by, that hope was very much in vain.
“… but because she’s a miso we’ll need to see some insurance documentation before starting treatment in earnest.” Sharon was relaying, standing next to a dark, watery soup in a porcelain bowl. Jin’s attention, wasted on his brain, had instead been hijacked by his stomach. It pulled every shred of his concentration inwards, away from what his eyes and ears were telling him, and directing it down to the rumbling, burning sensation in his stomach.
“Mm.” he said on autopilot.
“Doctor?” a nearby nurse asked. Sharon snapped to attention.
“Yes nurse?”
“I’m worried about Little Pois. It looks like… I don’t know, maybe it’s silly.”
“Explain.”
“I just… it looks like something is separating.” The nurse said, embarrassed by what she was saying.
“Separating? Interesting. This way Dr Hahn.” She said without looking round, scuttling purposefully towards the neighbouring ward.
Through the starving fog that his mind had become, Jin was faintly aware that she was leaving and that he had to follow. He allowed his body to take the same path that she had done, while his mind dreamed of the sandwiches waiting for him within locker 57.
Sharon was standing close to a steel stock pot. One hand was on her face; Jin presumed her hair must have been in the way. Slowly he shuffled over to join her, using as much of his body’s remaining energy as he dared, and looked down into the bowl to see what the nurse had been warning them about.
He’d never seen anything like it. None of the text books had mentioned separation of primary constituents, nor had anything he’d seen during his training prepared him for the reality of what was waiting in that bowl. Little Pois, as the nurse had called her, was a pea and mint soup. It was another classic recipe, a workhorse among the more aromatic dishes, but something had gone dreadfully wrong; the pea and the mint had drifted apart from one another, forming pockets and pools of mint among the sea of pea. Any subtle interplay between the gentle, muted pea flavour and the clear, freshness of the mint was gone, leaving instead patches of strong flavour that vied against one another for precedence within the mouth.
“The pea is rejecting the mint.” Sharon said quietly. Jin was starting to worry about how hungry he’d become, because it almost sounded like her voice had wobbled. “I’ve never seen a case this bad before.”
“It looks well beyond stirring.” Jin observed. “We could try folding the mint back in instead?” He offered.
Sharon shook her head.
“She’s more like two soups sharing one bowl at this stage.” She bit her lip and seemed to be mulling something over. “We have to perform an emergency mint-ectomy.”
The bottom fell out of Jin’s stomach, so it was a stroke of luck that it was entirely empty by that stage.
“That’s insane! No-one’s ever proven the success of that procedure, and even if they had it’s only the realm of specialists. We owe it to her to mend these two flavours back together.”
“This is a specialist case! Little Pois has already gone over the brink, the schism has occurred, and all we can do is pick up the pieces! Better to save a pea soup than send a pea and mint down the drain!” Sharon shouted back, stunning Jin into silence. Her eyebrows had tilted down, her nose had scrunched up, and her voice had increased in volume. What she was saying was extreme enough to be shocking under normal circumstances, but more importantly than that she was displaying an emotion. Either that or somebody, somewhere, had flipped a switch, or changed a 0 to a 1 in her programming, but given all the radio frequency shielding the hospital had to safeguard its equipment, remote controlling seemed unlikely. Jin had to, therefore, accept the possibility, however much it contradicted his previous experiences, that Dr Boyle was a human in possession of human emotions. He didn’t know how to cope with that, especially when his blood sugar was so low.
"I'm saving this soup, Dr Hahn. You're either helping or you're out of the room." She declared.
"I'm helping, Dr Boyle. I'm helping." He said with arms raised in surrender. "If you think it can be done."
"I do." She said, the tension melting rapidly from her face. Whatever dark influence had taken her was falling away under the force of her automaton's will. "Nurse? Re-heating room 1 to be prepared for me. Dr Hahn, get ready to assist me in the procedure. I'll take care of things here with Little Pois."
"Got it." Jin said, narrowly resisting the urge to salute his new insect overlord, before dashing off to the changing rooms yet again.
"But Dr Boyle specifically requested room 1." Jin heard a familiar nurse complain through the changing room wall. He was surprised at how clearly he could hear the exchange over the rustling of sterile clothing.
"Room 1 is already booked. We can't just throw another patient out at the last minute like this. Use room 3." The clerk repeated.
"Make them use room 3 then!"
"Why?"
"Because Dr Boyle is going to be heading to room 1."
"Not if you let her know that she needs to be in room 3!"
"I'd have to tell Dr Boyle that room 1 is busy and then that room 3 is booked. That's two extra things! If you just change the existing booking then I don't have to do any extra things at all. It makes more sense and is more efficient that way round." The nurse protested with a worryingly sincere conviction.
"Room 3 is booked for you." The clerk said with finality. Jin heard a door slam and footsteps stamping away along the corridor.
All-new concerns about critical thinking and resource utilisation occupied Jin’s mind as he finished the laborious process of putting on his sterile clothing. Finding no peace with what he’d overheard, he gave up thinking about it and turned once again to the apron rack. Where he'd needed to be commanding and authoritative in the morning's operation, this one required a wholly different approach. It was solemn. It was serious. He was here in support of a colleague performing a dangerous and experimental procedure and his garb needed to set everyone else in the room into that mindset. Not knowing what exactly he was looking for but feeling assured that he'd know what it was when he saw it, Jin flicked past apron after apron, rejecting the novelty maid's pinny, the muscular torso print, the BBQ King, and even the workhorse Kiss The Chef. When at last he saw it, the right choice practically leapt out at him.
"We're in room 3 for some reason. I guess some people can fail to follow simple instructions." Dr Boyle announced, skittering through the doorway. Dr Hahn turned to face her.
'Mummy and Daddy's Little Kitchen Helper' his apron said, in brightly coloured bubble writing. Jin knew he'd made the right decision when Sharon nodded approvingly and almost cracked a smile. Not quite, of course; two emotions in one day would have been unheard of. Jin’s apron deferred to her authority by casting her as the ostensible Mummy and Daddy, it showed he was there to help and learn by being the Little Kitchen Helper, and the brightly coloured text was experimental in its form. Even if nothing else he did that day had impressed her, he thought, at least this would secure his place by her side.
Together they took urgent steps into the re-heating room and waited. A full complement of sous-nurses were close behind, setting up equipment, preparing utensils and consulting recipe books. Bright strip lights reflected from shining steel dishes. A muted murmur filled the room as they all waited for the patient.
The characteristic bang of a trolley against a double-door announced Little Pois’s arrival. Although urgent, it still seemed unnecessary to Jin for everyone to behave so roughly with the re-heating room doors; they could easily be pushed open with a hand under even emergency circumstances. If it continued to happen long into his tenure at St Culine, Jin decided he would raise it with the board. At that moment, however, there were more pressing matters for his attention.
Little Pois bubbled groggily as she was wheeled into position. Her sickly patches of mint ichor sat on the surface of the soup like sores; the parts of her own composition that she was, for reasons unknown, rejecting.
“We need to keep the heat as low as we can. Any convection or bubbles will carry the risk of mixing the mint back in.” Dr Boyle told the assembled team. There was solemn nodding from the hob controller, who inched the dial downwards. Below Little Pois’ bowl the blue flames retreated down to a cobalt glimmer, just about licking up to the base of the pan.
“This is highly risky, Sharon. When we start scooping out the mint puddles we’ll be exposing core soup to the cold air. With the flame that low she’ll have an even harder time keeping her simmer going.” Jin said with palpable concern. The bubbles around the edges of Little Pois surface were already starting to calm and fade beneath the surface.
“Then we must be quick about it. You’ll take the left side and I’ll take the right. Number three ladle, I think.” She instructed Jin. “Sous-nurse; be ready with a strainer to filter out any pea that we extract. Little Pois needs to keep all the stock she can.”
“Yes doctor.” The nurse replied.
Jin walked uneasily to the other side of the bowl, standing opposite Dr Boyle and finding a number three ladle offered to him. It was one of the smaller and more nimble utensils for manual decanting, whilst still keeping enough volume to bail out the majority of the mint pockets. Dr Boyle certainly had tool-size estimation down to a fine art. Without another word she had leaned over Little Pois with her own ladle in hand, delicately lowering it into position over the first mint puddle.
“Remember to dip it slowly and aim for the middle of the mint. It should flow into the scoop more readily than the pea does, so you can use that fact to limit the amount of healthy stock you remove.” Dr Boyle advised, making liberal use of the term ‘remember’. This was the type of procedure that got mentioned once a year in a fringe, strictly speculative paper, and it certainly wasn’t part of the standard soup medicine syllabus.
With reluctant curiosity Jin watched Sharon’s ladle press into the minty ichor, gradually disappearing beneath the green surface until the thinner, more translucent mint started to flow like a viscous waterfall into its scoop. In a circle around it the pea-boundary drifted slowly inwards.
“Pea incoming.” Jin warned.
“It’s fine.” Sharon replied, her focus unwavering from the ladle.
“You’ve only got a few seconds.”
“I’m aware.”
Brighter, thicker pea stock started to crest the edge of the ladle as Sharon lifted it, leaving a thin sheen on the edge of the scoop.
“Hm. Perhaps that was a little late.” She conceded whilst pouring the mint into a ramekin being proffered by a sous-nurse. “You’ve seen the technique now, though. Time is of the essence Dr Hahn.”
“Right.” Jin agreed, still not feeling much more confident. The low-level simmer was worrying to look at, but even that amount of motion still made the mint wobble in place. Dr Boyle had been right to turn down heat. Emulating the motions Sharon had taken he started to lower his ladle towards the larger of the mint pockets on his side. When he finally made contact the buoyancy of the soup proved stronger than he’d anticipated, and his own stomach started to churn as he pushed down against it to force the ladle under the surface.
Gently at first the mint trickled inwards, adding weight to the scoop and taking some of the strain away.
“Dishcloth.” He croaked as the sweat beaded on his forehead. A sous-nurse dabbed it away with a coarse dishcloth that smelled strongly of surgical strength dish detergent; not only would it absorb the sweat, but also cut through any grease and keep his forehead free of limescale build-up.
His eyes skittered more erratically than Sharon’s gait as he tried to keep watch over both the pea tide and the ladle’s scoop. Sharon’s nerves had been steely, but his own were more fraught and he lifted the scoop away with an easy few millimetres left between it and the boundary.
“Too early.” Sharon said bluntly. “That ichor puddle is shallow now. It’ll be difficult to scoop the rest out.”
Jin looked into the soup as he poured out his mint and couldn’t help agreeing; a few more seconds might have risked a pea wave, but it would have at least removed nearly all of the ichor. Experimental procedures, it seemed, were difficult to get right.
Twenty minutes of tense dishing up followed, leaving them about three quarters done. Jin’s hand were starting to cramp, the smell of mint was starting to grow overpowering, and it was getting increasingly difficult to avoid removing pea stock. There was a silver lining in the knowledge that Jin’s forehead was going to be free of limescale for several years with the amount of wiping it had experienced, but that was little consolation to him in the moment.
“Heat a little higher.” Dr Hahn said, flexing his fingers in between scoops.
“It’s hard enough without more currents.” Dr Boyle countered. “We just need to hurry up and get the rest of the mint out.”
“She’s going to get cold and start forming a skin.” Jin argued, still flexing. “Besides which your hands must be seizing up as well; it’s getting risky.”
“It’ll be less risky if we both keep going.”
Jin tried to catch her eye but she was too intent on the mint-ectomy. Accepting that there was no chance of convincing her Dr Hahn took up his grip on the ladle again and kept bailing.
The pickings were poor. Where Little Pois had come in with large puddles the procedure had left them all as shallow smears and the occasional mint fleck. Both Jin and Sharon had been effectively relegated to skimming mint from the top and passing it through the pea strainer.
“Viscosity still increasing.” Jin said.
“Ugh.” Sharon muttered. It seemed to Jin that she was laying it on a bit thick in telling him to just get on with it.
“We’ve still got time, I get it.” He said, trying to cut her off before she could get a full blown snipe in, but there was another grunt as he was speaking and it didn’t sound like a chastisement. Jin looked up just in time to see Dr Boyle’s fingers tremble, twitch, and lose their grip on the ladle.
Time seemed to slow down, which isn’t traditionally a medical technique but would prove to be incredibly useful if it could be harnessed. As it was, the chrono-slowdown mostly served to allow Jin to see the ladle start to lean over and descend towards Little Pois’ already depleted stock. Stifled professional gasps rippled around the bowl, making the sound of a fan trying to be subtle whilst hiding behind a stack of loose papers.
Jin could hear Sharon trying to say something but her mouth was moving so slowly that he couldn’t understand it. All he knew was that allowing the ladle to drop into Little Pois would have a devastating effect on her temperature equilibrium, as well as just being incredibly unpleasant for Dr Boyle to use from that point onwards; no-one ever wanted to use a slimy utensil.
His ladle moved before he knew it should be doing anything, instinct taking over from his conscious mind. Skimming across the surface of Little Pois it left a tiny wake of rippled pea stock, covered by an almost oily layer of rejected mint. Nearly the whole scoop of Dr Boyle’s ladle had disappeared into the soup and the joint with the handle was getting dangerously close to the surface. A small spray of soup kicked up and splattered against it from the bow wave of Jin’s approaching tooling. Sharon started to flinch. It seemed like the distance between the two ladles was still an insurmountable chasm, and that Little Pois would imminently find herself to be a pea and ladle soup with hints of mint. It would be a headline failure for the mint-ectomy technique and a disciplinary for Dr Boyle, but worse than that it would be devastating for Little Pois. The joint of scoop and handle disappeared beneath the pea, leaving just an obelisk of steel to slip quietly downwards. Dr Boyle closed her eyes.
There was a clink.
“Nurse. A spoon to support.” Jin ordered. Teetering on the scoop of his own ladle was the handle of Dr Boyle’s, held just above the soup’s surface and delicately balanced. Dr Hahn’s already tired fingers trembled as they gripped and held the extra weight.
“Yes doctor.” One of the sous-nurses finally replied through her shock. There was a frantic scrabbling to one side as Jin perspired with the exertion, the sounds of spoons promising relief.
“It was good that you did that.” Sharon replied distantly, staring down at her ladle with eyes re-opened.
Within seconds a teaspoon appeared in the bowl and hooked itself underneath the top of the ladle handle. Another quickly joined, and then two more. In another gentle manoeuvre Jin and the sous-nurses teased the fallen utensil upwards, until it was finally clear enough of the surface for Sharon to grasp the end and lift it from the bowl. Carefully she deposited it on a nearby tray.
“Thank you nurse. Someone please salvage what pea stock you can from the ladle.” Jin said, panting with relief. “We can’t do any more here. It’s too risky.” He added with a note of finality. Sharon merely nodded.
Evening sunlight streamed through the window of the general tomato ward, transforming the red tomato bases into a golden colour. Their tins would all undoubtedly say to keep out of direct sunlight, but any soup doctor worth their salt knew that a bit of sunshine did unwell soups the world of good.
Jin looked up at the wall clock and realised that the end of his shift had flown past whilst he’d been treating a tomato and basil complaining of viscous stock syndrome.
“Well, Bert, we’ll keep you on the boiling water supplements for a couple more days and see how you feel after that. Try not to let your sediments settle and you should be fine.” Dr Hahn said. Bert gurgled gratefully and Jin took his leave.
When he made it back to the common room he saw Dr Boyle gathering her own things together. She nodded as he came in.
“You did your job today, Dr Hahn.” She said mechanically. Jin took it as a compliment.
“Thanks.” He said. She nodded again and briskly skittered out with shins that seemed to bend like knees.
Whilst reaching through the gap behind his buckled locker door, reasoning that opening it was a bit redundant, he noticed a chalkboard hanging on the back wall. Written on it in tall white chalk lettering was:
“Soup of the Day: Little Pois. Dr Sharon Boyle and Dr Jin Hahn”
Jin smiled to himself. Working on what ended up as the soup of the day on his first shift was something of a trial by fire. He hoped that in days to come he’d be able to take shelter in the pan.