The Boy Behind the Curtain: In the Shadow of the Hospital Summary & Analysis

Winton mulls on the idea of the hospital as a shelter, a refuge in the most desperate times. We’re relieved by the sight of a hospital when we need one, but the rest of the time the word holds fear and dread. He was told as a child that it was a safe place where people went to get fixed, and where babies were born, but at the age of five he realized it was a place nobody wanted to go.

As a five-year-old, Winton experiences the fear that hospitals represent when his father goes to one and comes out completely broken and unrecognizable. When he comes home, he breathes through a hole in his neck, and his eyes are red. Five-year-old Winton is terrified, but he sees his mother and others chatting to his father cheerily and plays along.

When Tim’s father is mostly recovered, he still has to walk with a stick, and whenever he has to go back to the hospital for more surgery, Winton worries that he’ll never come home, or that he’ll come home an unrecognizable stranger again. His mother, seeming to realize his anxiety about the hospital, takes him to see his father after a surgery. Tim’s walk through the hospital to his father’s room is like a “gauntlet of horrors,” and when he reaches his father, he cries at the prospect of having to leave the same way he came in. 

As an adult, one of the images Winton sees when he thinks of a hospital is of the main character in Johnny Get Your Gun, a quadruple amputee covered in bandages. The horror of it is in the corner of his mind during every hospital visit he makes.

Though in childhood his family makes several hospital visits and he’s well-acquainted with the place, Winton is never admitted as a child. When he’s 18, though, he wakes up in a hospital bed with glass in his hair, pain everywhere in his body, and a sensation of overwhelming fear. He is disoriented, lacks memory of the accident, and feels weak and confused. He learns that, while the hospital is an unpleasant place to visit, it’s far worse being a patient.

Even though the chaos, fear, and pain of being acutely injured or ill is overwhelming, Winton finds that it’s at least a distraction. But the long road of recovery is the real challenge. The constant noise and bustle of the hospital prevents him from resting, and he constantly wants what he can’t have—pain relief, a pillow, and some peace. In hospital, he realizes, people become worse versions of themselves: callous, greedy, and tired of being confined and infantilized. Looking back, he wonders how people ever write about anything other than wars and hospitals, and he understands why so many people choose to die at home rather than in a hospital ward.

Winton ends up marrying a nurse, who brings home signs of the hospital in the way she smells and the stains on her clothes. Sometimes, reluctantly, he meets her in the hospital cafeteria for lunch, but he’s too distracted to be a good conversationalist. When his wife is heavily pregnant with their first child, he thinks about how strange it must be for people in their last days of life to be cared for by someone carrying life in her body. And when she returns to work, he brings their son to the hospital for her to feed him on a break from her shift on the oncology ward.

For five years, Winton and his family live next door to Fremantle Hospital, a large metropolitan hospital. It seems like its own world at times, more like a power plant than a healthcare facility. Winton tries to see the hospital’s proximity as a reassurance—if his children need help, it’s right there. The hospital also provides a great deal of excitement via the emergency entrance, where you can find people in all kinds of moods and situations.

Fremantle Hospital is embedded in its urban surroundings rather than isolated and set apart, as a suburban hospital might be; its bright lights and security guards often give Winton the feeling that he’s unwelcome in his own neighborhood. The hospital seems to have its own microclimate, an “aura of hope and dread.” Winton sees people enacting their lives publicly, almost like theater. Frightened hospital visitors seem to lack social awareness and lose even basic skills like driving and parking. Their emotions are on show for any passer-by to see.

One night, Winton wakes to hear someone ramming against the doors of the mental health unit with his car, desperate to be admitted. Another time, he’s standing at a pedestrian crossing beside a car in which a woman screams nonstop. Healthy and in no pain, Winton feels uncomfortable next to such an obvious display of distress. He realizes that his patience and empathy for many of the hospital’s injured patients is dissipating, especially when it comes to the Saturday night crowd, who are mostly implicated by the dangers of pleasure. Still, he witnesses kindness from strangers waiting to be picked up and from nurses and medics. Walking past the hospital on his way to work, his tasks seem inane when compared to those of the doctors and nurses emerging after night shifts.  

After a while, Tim’s family moves a few blocks away from the hospital, tired of its incessant energy. But Winton realizes its effect extends beyond its immediate vicinity. One day he gets a call from an estranged friend who, in one of the wards of the hospital, can see his roof from his window. His friend asks him to visit. When he does, and sees his tiny, bald friend wearing only a diaper, he’s shocked and thinks at first that he has the wrong room. His friend is obviously close to death. They make peace, and after his visit, Winton regularly looks up at the hospital and wonders about the people looking down through the windows. For the first time, he considers the shadow of yearning that hangs down from the patients in the hospital.

When Tim’s first grandchild is born, he waits in the hospital for the first bit of news. The place is claustrophobic, and he can’t calm down. Eventually he goes out into a courtyard with his wife, where his son finds him and shows him his new grandchild. Winton accepts the miracle presented by a hospital, along with its dread. Later, his father shows him the lump in his chest from his new pacemaker. Winton knows that if he lived a few decades earlier, his father would’ve been long dead—instead, he’s able come home from hospital the day after the procedure.