Bank Job by James Heneghan

at Broadway Station, Billy didn’t move. So I knew we weren’t going to Vancouver General Hospital.
    At Burrard Street Station, Billy sat and looked out at the platform. A bunch of giggling teens made their way to the escalator. This was the stop for St. Paul’s Hospital. We had run out of hospitals.
    â€œShouldn’t we be getting off?” I asked him.
    He shook his head.
    There was only one more stop, and I was beginning to think I hadn’t heard Billy right. Maybe he’d said hostel, not hospital. But what about Lions Gate Hospital on the North Shore? Maybe we were heading for the SeaBus.
    We were at the end of the line, Waterfront Station. I followed Billy off the train, up the escalator and out onto Cordova Street. So it wasn’t to be Lions Gate. Billy steered me east through the rain towards Gastown. He didn’t say a word. I was beginning to worry. Had he lost it? Had his mind suddenly flipped? We left Gastown behind and marched along Water Street onto Powell. Everyone walked past a man lying unconscious in a shop doorway, cradling a wine bottle in his arms. This was the downtown eastside where the drunks and the drug addicts and the homeless people hung out. Well, we were criminals now. We belonged here.
    We came to a small brick building with a sign planted in the scruffy grass: May’s Place in big letters, and underneath that, The May Gutteridge Community Home.
    â€œCome on,” Billy said, leading the way through the door. He stopped at a small reception desk and an older woman with white hair and a nurse’s uniform flashed him a saintly smile. “Hello, Billy,” she said. “Hang your coats on the rack and go right up.”
    I followed Billy up a flight of stairs and down a hall. This had to be the smallest hospital in the world. The doors were open. I counted six beds, one per room, all occupied. I turned my eyes away, trying not to stare. Billy had obviously been here before. He stopped in front of an open door, and we went in. The small room smelled of disinfectant. The walls were painted a light blue. A window looked out at another building. In the bed was a geezer with his eyes closed. He looked like he might be dead. Then I remembered why we were here. This geezer was Billy’s dad.
    Billy pulled two chairs over to the bed, one on each side, and sat in the one close to the window. I sat, wondering what I was doing here. I hated hospitals.
    The room was silent.
    â€œFunny little hospital,” I whispered.
    Billy looked at me from the other side of his dad’s bed. “It’s a hospice.”
    â€œA hospice?”
    â€œFor the downtown eastside people.”
    Then I remembered that a hospice is a place where people go to die.
    Billy said, “He’s got cancer real bad. The doctor told me it’s only a matter of days.”
    I had never been in a room with a dying person before. It was a bit scary. I imagined Death dressed in black, hovering over the bed like a filmy ghost, waiting to take Billy’s dad away.
    I looked at the frail old man’s face. He looked pinched and pale and had thin bloodless lips. I saw no resemblance to Billy whatsoever.
    â€œYour dad lived around here?”
    â€œYeah. I just found out. Few days ago. He’s been here three weeks. Social Services called Janice. My old man had put me down as his next of kin.”
    On his birthday, Billy said that his dad had been a big guy who wore a leather jacket like the one I gave him. Maybe the man sleeping in the bed had been big once, but he wasn’t big now. “Was that the last time you saw him, when you were little and he gave you rides on his motorcycle?”
    Billy nodded. “One day he went off on his motorcycle, and I never saw him again.”
    A nurse with short black hair came in, smiled at us, looked at the sleeping man, took his pulse and left.
    We sat in silence for a long time. Billy’s dad didn’t wake up.
    I got pins and