Books / Fiction / The Cable and the Quiet
Literary fiction
The Cable and the Quiet
Ewan McLeod keeps a GP practice running: the phones, the complaints, the rota, and the store cupboard where a spare network cable sits coiled on the lower shelf. On Thursdays he visits his father, in a house that has been quieter since his mother died. Everyone depends on Ewan. Nobody asks who he depends on.
The opening
The lights in reception were already on when Ewan arrived, though the practice itself had not yet begun.
He preferred the building at this hour, not because he disliked the staff, or even the patients, though there were individual examples of both about whom he was prepared to remain undecided, but because it was simply easier to understand the place before it filled.
Near the skirting below it, the grey network cable had worked loose from the plastic trunking again.
It wasn't a repair. It was no longer a trip hazard. For the moment those were close enough to the same thing.
Ewan disliked the word temporarily when nobody could identify the conditions under which the temporary state would end.The Cable and the Quiet
Ewan's flat had always been quiet, but that was not the same thing.The Cable and the Quiet
His father stood in the doorway with the hall light behind him, smaller in it than Ewan usually let himself notice.The Cable and the Quiet
