Four Minutes Fast, by Ronald Peake

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

The waiting room on the second floor had nine chairs, a rubber plant and a clock that ran four minutes fast. Terry had checked it against his own watch eleven times since midnight. He was twenty-two, he had been a father for no minutes at all, and nobody would tell him anything.

The only other person in the room was an old man in a brown suit who sat very straight in the corner with a hat on his knees. He had been there when Terry arrived. He had not moved.

At two o’clock Terry could bear it no longer. ‘First one?’ he said, and then felt foolish, because the man was seventy if he was a day.

The old man looked at him for a long moment, as though deciding whether the question deserved an answer. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not a first anything.’ He turned the hat a quarter turn on his knee. ‘My wife is on the ward along the corridor. They tell me it will be tonight.’

Terry understood, slowly, that the man did not mean a baby. His face went hot. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think.’

‘Why should you? You have other things to think about.’ The voice was dry, but not unkind. ‘Boy or girl?’

‘Don’t know yet. They sent me out. Said I’d be in the way.’

‘You would.’ For the first time something moved at the corner of the old man’s mouth. ‘I was put out in the yard, with the coal. Nineteen twenty-one. It was raining.’

They sat. The clock ticked its four minutes ahead of the world. After a while Terry went to the urn on the windowsill and drew two cups of tea, and put one into the old man’s hands without asking whether he wanted it, and the old man took it without saying thank you, and somehow that seemed right to both of them.

At twenty past three a nurse put her head round the door. She looked at the old man first, and Terry saw him set down his cup very carefully on the floor between his feet. But she said, ‘Mr Rowley? You’ve a daughter. Both doing fine.’

Terry stood up and found that his legs would not work properly. He looked back at the corner.

‘Go on,’ the old man said. ‘Go and look at her.’

At the door Terry stopped. ‘I hope,’ he began, and could not think how to finish.

‘I know,’ said the old man. He picked up his cup again and held it in both hands, and when Terry looked back from the end of the corridor he was still sitting very straight, alone, waiting for the other nurse.

What impressions does the writer create of the relationship between Terry and the old man? How does the writer create these impressions?

You must refer to the language and structure used in the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.