Just a prank

Nearly the whole time we were waiting to see the doctor in Casualty, two girls, who were waiting for the results of spinal x-rays after a car accident, kept moving around the room, retelling the details of the accident in a myriad of telephone calls too complex to follow as a homeless woman groaned her soliloquy on a chair in the corridor and a one-eyed elderly woman with arthritic hands sat through the emptying of two bags of fluid into what might have been her daughter -- until soon, all that stuff about the car accident, we were hearing, was just a prank, and the friends they were talking to should call back their mothers and just say the earlier calls were full of lies. They were to say, we all heard, that the girls had fallen out of a tree or walked into a car or a wall or something because otherwise their mothers would go ballistic. Even when their doctor arrived and asked them to accompany her into a room, they stayed on the phone, negotiating the exact wording of the calls to the mothers that their friends had to make as soon as they could.

Octopus

She told me that right after that conversation we should never have started about the phone a bus actually came and someone sitting opposite had asked if she knew the pendant on the necklace she was wearing resembled an octopus at rest. He must have been searching all night for someone with a necklace like this, because he talked the whole way about octopi and squid, and as she stood up to leave he asked her how many legs an octopus had (her answer of course was wrong as an octopus only has two, as he'd already said).