He held back the curtain and the ward watched with troubled eyes. We didn’t speak till we reached the office. Then he sat down and drew a diagram. I studied it. ‘Can she do?’
‘Maybe this time.’ He looked up, slowly. ‘At least the blood situation is healthy.’
‘Yes.’ From the first call, the donors had been ringing the hospital offering pints, or arriving in person. A rota system was now in operation.
‘I wish her kids were a wee bit older. The eldest is only sixteen. A bright, bonnie lassie who’s hoped to be away to the mainland to university, but I don’t see her leaving her brothers and wee sister without their mother. The wee one’s a beautiful child with her mother’s bone-structure and colouring.’
I stared at the drawing and saw Mrs Laurensen’s face. ‘She could be Spanish.’
‘Probably has some Spanish genes. Some of the Armada’s crew ended their lives in the Shetlands.’ He reached for the ward diagnosis list. ‘Calum’s doing quite nicely. No further signs of spasticity?’
‘No.’
‘Let’s hope he’s got away with it. Early, of course.’
‘Yes.’
‘Now old Norris is more rested, did Sister tell you I’ll probably do him Thursday morning?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that I want to tell him myself?’
‘Yes.’
There was a brief silence. ‘How do you think he’ll take it?’
‘He wants it.’
‘He’s told you so?’
‘Yes,’ I said wearily. I liked him, but I didn’t feel up to a chat with him or anyone. I wanted solitude, silence.
‘I must get down and see if Mr Black’s here.’ He went over to the window. ‘Could be a fine evening for fishing.’
‘Good.’
Sister was back. ‘Sorry I’m late, Staff. I got caught by donors below. Wanting me, Mr Moray?’
‘No, thank you, Sister. Just taking another look at Mrs Laurensen.’
‘In a hurry?’ He shook his head. ‘If you can step back after seeing Mr Black ‒ he’s come ‒ I’d like a word over the radio message I’ve promised Ellen I’d send Gil once she was round from her op. It’ll suit me to take Staff’s report first.’
‘I’ll be back, Sister.’
When I was going off, she asked if I had anything, planned for the evening. I remembered, with horror. ‘Party, Sister.’
‘Where?’
‘Not sure. Some student’s affair, I think. Cathy McNab’s younger sister’s up here on holiday and she came round to the Home last night to ask Cathy and I as they’re short of girls.’
‘So what else is new on Thessa? Wear your oldest jeans, lass.’
Cathy McNab, another staff nurse, was twenty-four, and her sister Isobel, was nineteen. They came from Fife and were tallish, sturdy, attractive rather than pretty, brunettes. Cathy was presently the better looking as Isobel was still suffering from acne and her first year of higher education. She wore granny glasses, frayed jeans and a sulky expression. She told us we rated our second-class citizenship, when on discovering the party was not being given by her student friends, and that she didn’t know the host’s name, we wanted to back out. ‘Which century are you living in? Much more fun going to a party without a chap as one meets so many more people. Anyway, Chuck said they’d enough chaps when he asked me. He’ll be there. The three chaps who rent the bungalow work for his firm. Chuck’s super! And ‒’ she threw down her ace, ‘in oil!’
Cathy frowned. ‘Brain or brawn?’
‘Super IQ! And so adult! Such a relief after all those spotty boys in college! Come on ‒ taxi’s waiting!’
My brain had switched off since I got off-duty. I followed Isobel into the back of the taxi in the mental oblivion of a sleepwalker. Cathy sat in front as the driver was a student on a holiday job and she had to tell him the way. Chuck had written down the address for Isobel and it was just outside the other side of the town. The bungalow stood alone about twenty yards back from the road and a hundred odd from the nearest house. We heard the party when we drew up. ‘Have fun, girls!’ said the driver. I followed the others up the path and my brain switched back on directly the front door opened.
I never discovered ‘Chuck’ nor our hosts’ names. There were three of them, and they were young, fair, tanned, and if not yet as drunk as their ninety-nine per cent male guests, not far behind. Their welcoming embraces removed Isobel’s sulky expression. Cathy and I looked at each other as tumblers of neat whisky were thrust into our hands. A very long fifteen minutes later, we managed to propel ourselves and red-faced appendages to the same spot. We used mainly medical jargon.
‘Prognosis nil. I think total excision, stat, Cathy.’
Stat means, at once.
‘Stat.’ She glanced at the back of Isobel’s head. ‘Five, you rep. mist.’
I nodded and she went into action. She had done a children’s training before her general. She shoved her way through the crowd, hauled Isobel by the arm, ignoring her and other protests with a maternal ‒ ‘Just wait, boys, whist now! Would you stop a girl from powdering her nose?’ She could have been addressing a rowdy kids’ ward, and though there were several objections, she got them both out into the hall. A pair of men closed the door and leant against it, but whether intentionally or because they needed the support I couldn’t tell. It seemed sensible to wait a few minutes before using the same excuse, particularly as I was wearing a hefty young man as a feather boa. He had decided I was an air hostess he had met in Atlanta, Georgia. ‘Honey ‒ honey ‒’ his breath was so high in alcohol I was surprised his cigarette didn’t set it alight, ‘I would come fly with you just anytime. Why don’t we go find a bed?’
‘Not just yet, as I’m thirsty.’ I emptied my glass on the floor and held it up. ‘You need another drink. Go and get me one too.’ A push from the crowd had us up against a wall. ‘I’ll wait here.’
He shook his head very sadly. ‘I know you’ll go right away. Everyone goes right away from me.’
‘Not me. Remember Atlanta, Georgia?’
‘And I called you Mary.’ He relaxed the half-Nelson to dry his eyes. ‘Can you imagine that? Such a beautiful name. And you are ‒ so ‒ beautiful ‒’
‘And you are gorgeous.’ I steadied his shoulders before he fell on me. ‘The bar’s over the other side.’ I turned him round. ‘Just keep straight on.’ I intended following, but another man moved in directly he stumbled forward. The replacement was English, incoherently amorous, and only a problem as he needed my shoulders to stand upright and was very heavy.
A slight, fair girl had been backed against the same wall about a yard off and was entwined by a sad, slurred Scotsman. We caught each other’s eyes and managed to edge close enough to prop our burdens against each other, which removed the weight if not the main problem. The party had caught on. ‘You two aren’t slipping away.’
The four other women present were propping up the bar. They were considerably older than ourselves and most of the men, and at the shrill, pointless laughter stage. They didn’t look as expensive or as tough as Klondyke Annie, and their flushed faces were tired and a little stupid. In another place they would have saddened me for the human race as well as my sex. There I just felt sickened.
The fair girl and I tried tact, firmness, coyness, the little woman act. We might have succeeded if someone hadn’t carried in a fresh crate of whisky and handed out bottles. Suddenly the atmosphere altered nastily. The red faces moved nearer, started the slow handclaps and the chant: ‘Take ’em off! Take ’em off!’
We exchanged a final glance and reacted simultaneously as the arms lunged. We ducked sharply, then charged up through the toppling figures using elbows, knees, feet, and drunken weights indiscriminately. Through the combination of shock, our jeans, our being sober, and the door left open after the last crate arrived, we got clear. Cathy and Isabel broke off a violent argument in the road and we bolted from the front door and the four of us raced on down the road. We
didn’t stop running till out of range of the irate voices shouting after us and in the first quiet, grey, lighted residential street. When at last we had breath and time for speech, Isobel wanted to call the polite.
‘Are you daft?’ protested Cathy. ‘First you were mad because I got you out, now you want to turn the lot of them in! What for? You’re not hurt, are you, Charlotte?’
‘No,’ I gasped.
The fair girl’s name was Jeanie. She said if any damage had been done, it was by Charlotte and herself. ‘Think we’ve wrecked the poor laddies for good?’
‘Maybe we were a bit tough seeing most were far too sloshed to be capable.’
Isobel was indignant, ‘You’ve not been raped?’
‘Not after the amount of whisky they’d had! And it’d be most unfair to holler for cops,’ I added, ‘as if anyone’s daft, it’s us. Accepting blind dates ‒ turning up all girls together in a taxi ‒ asking for it! They could probably get us under an infringement of the Trades Descriptions Act. We should’ve walked out the moment we walked in.’ I remembered Jeanie. ‘Or did you come with a guy?’
‘With my boyfriend’s pal. We’re all up on holiday and he’s had a row with his girlfriend. We were having a drink last night when this man got talking and asked the four of us tonight and said they were short of girls. Then the other two had their barny and my boyfriend tonight’s got a terrible cold, so I said I’d come with Hugh. I was sorry for the wee man as he was awful glum. But his parents are that strict ‒ not a dram in the house ‒ and that first glass they gave him had him flat. On the kitchen floor when I last saw him and I was hoping to slip away. My boyfriend’ll want to murder him ‒’ She held up her watch to a street lamp. ‘It’s that early? What’ll we do now?’
I suggested we went back to our Home and had a nice cup of tea.
‘English, of course,’ said Jeanie. ‘Just tell me, gurrrl, where’d you pick up that get-away tackle? I’d mine from my brother when we were kids and he was boss of his gang in Glasgow. First time I’ve used it.’
‘And me. I once had an Australian fella who said it might come in handy and taught me.’
‘In oil?’
‘Medic. Cathy and I are nurses. Isobel’s a student.’
Jeanie said she was an air hostess.
I stopped walking. ‘Not from Atlanta, Georgia?’
‘No. And the name’s not Mary, beautiful!’
Suddenly, relief hit us. We laughed so wildly Isobel was sure we would be picked up as drunk and disorderly. She was still annoyed with us when she left with Jeanie after tea and chocolate cake.
In bed that night I thought of Sunday papers, and the glorious weather on one particular Sunday afternoon when an Australian called Doug had stopped the car in a quiet country lane and told me it was time I learnt a few judo throws. ‘I hope I’ll always be around,’ he said, ‘but obviously I can’t be and you ought to know a trick, or two. I’ve taught my sisters. What do you say?’
‘If it’ll make you happy?’
‘Just to look at you does that. Let’s take a walk.’
An hour later we had both been out of breath, mostly with laughter. ‘You’re a fast learner, Charlie. Enough for one day. To be continued.’
There had not been time. I hadn’t let myself remember that afternoon until that night on Thessa. I remembered it with a strange and previously unexperienced mixture of joy and sadness. I could hear Doug’s voice and his laugh. I wished I could believe he was laughing now, but since his death I had lost my capacity for belief, along with so much else. But after the first months of grief and bitterness, then months of the anger that hardens into resignation, and finally the queer neither happy nor unhappy kind of limbo in which I had existed until I came to Thessa, I realized the two qualities by which I would always remember Doug, were the two by which he would want to be remembered. His laughter and his thoughtfulness. Perhaps other dead men ‒ if the dead could feel ‒ would be hurt, angry, to be remembered with gratitude for helping me out of a tight spot I should have had the intelligence to avoid. Not Doug. His laugh would raise the roof of heaven and have the angels falling about, ‘Good for you, kid! Good for me!’
I got up, leant out of my open window and watched the black sea and the flashing lights from the lighthouses. I listened to the water lapping against the rocks and over two years after his death, that night on Thessa I said my requiem for my dead lover.
Chapter Eight
Jeanie called at the Home after lunch next day and we had coffee in my room. Cathy was working. Jeanie had first dropped in on Isobel and found her just awake and having breakfast in bed. ‘Sardines out the tin, stale buns from a torn paper bag, dirty pants and tights all over the shop and her last night’s clothes just dropped on the floor. Can you tell me why a college education seems to turn a girl into a dirty slut?’
‘I guess it’s just a reaction from the kitchen sink. Snag is, eventually the washing-up has to be done. How’s Hugh today?’
She laughed. ‘Clutching his head and groaning! He only got back in time for breakfast and can’t remember anything between taking that whisky and waking on the kitchen floor this morning surrounded by bodies. And his girlfriend’s after my blood for not looking after him better!’
‘Oh, no! What’s your boyfriend say?’
‘He’s too sorry for himself with his cold to say anything yet. I’ve left him with his head under a towel inhaling Friars Balsam. Isn’t that right for a stuffy head?’
‘Yes. Going to marry him?’
She took her coffee to the window and looked out. She had neat features, a very good skin, and the same translucent green eyes as Jenny Pringle. Jenny was prettier and in some moods, beautiful, but Jeanie was infinitely the more attractive as there was so much more vitality in her face and manner. Jenny had to be pleased to smile. Jeanie needed only to be amused by the world or herself. I could not picture Jenny Pringle ever finding herself amusing since to laugh at oneself generally involves losing face. I did not think she would forgive herself, or anyone else, for causing that inevitable loss of dignity.
Jeanie thought she would maybe marry her boyfriend when she got tired of her job. She had been flying two years and still enjoyed it. ‘I can see that maybe in another year I’ll start getting bored. Ross keeps asking me, but he doesn’t mind waiting. How about yourself? Too keen on your job?’
‘Pro tem.’ I joined her at the window.
‘When did you say last night you go back to the Smoke?’
‘Weekend after next.’
‘Think you’ll ever return to Thessa?’
I watched the wheeling gulls. ‘I’d like to, but it’s one hell of a way from London.’
‘Not by air.’
‘Not if you can land by air!’ I told her of my delayed arrival. ‘Haven’t you flown this run?’
‘No, but I’ve heard that problem before. I’ve not done much inter-Britain, apart from the Belfast run.’
‘Recently? What’s it like?’
‘Och, hen, it varies.’
‘Ever run into trouble, or can’t you say?’
She tapped the wooden sill with her knuckles. ‘I’ll just say I’ll not tempt providence. But there was one time we’d a wee bit trouble expected ‒ and we flew in to a fantastic reception. Helicopters guarding us above and either side ‒’ she smiled slightly, ‘and our pilot cursing blue murder that he’d crash without any help from the bombers if the bloody choppers didn’t stop protecting him and get out the light! And when we opened the doors ‒ floodlights and a great circle of soldiers with rifles at the ready! It was just like being in a movie!’
‘How’d the passengers take it?’
‘Some were a wee bit on edge but as it all went smoothly they smoothed out.’ She blinked at the gulls and there was a new tension in her face.
‘Sorry, Jeanie. I shouldn’t have asked.’
‘It’s not that.’ She paused for a few moments. ‘I was just remembering our return the next day. We were carryin
g a party of kids going away for a break. They were grand kids. Awful good. No fuss, no greeting, just ‒ thanks very much, miss. And there was this wee laddie sitting alone up front.’ She faced me. ‘It was a grand day. Sunny. Warm. And there he sat not talking with the others and he’d not take off his anorak. He kept his two arms folded tight. Like so.’ She huddled herself. ‘I went and sat with him and had a wee chat. Come on, hen, I said, take it off and roll up your sleeves or you’ll melt away. I’ll give you a hand. He said, “I can’t, miss.” Why not, hen? So he showed me his arms, but carefully, so the others’d not see.’ She stretched out her left arm and ran her right forefinger from the inside of the wrist to the upper forearm. ‘Two long scars up both arms. Terrible scars. How’d you get these, laddie? I asked. Know what he said?’ I shook my head, slowly, painfully. ‘ “I was jumped, miss.” ’
‘Jumped?’
‘His word. I asked, why you, hen?’ She took a long breath. ‘He just looked at me with the eyes of a sad old man. “It’s the troubles, miss,” he said as if I were the kid. Just a wee laddie. Maybe ten.’ She paused again. ‘I was awful upset.’
‘I’ll bet.’
‘You’ve nursed this?’
I nodded. ‘We’ve had a few kids injured by bombs in Martha’s. We never stop having in kids chewed up in road accidents, but at least, those are accidents.’
‘Can you understand anyone ‒ for anything ‒ intentionally risking hurting kids?’
‘No,’ I said and we were silent.
Then she said, ‘You know I said it was like being in a movie?’
‘Yes?’
‘Not after that wee laddie. You know?’
‘Yes, I know.’
She stayed a little longer, then I walked with her to her digs and went on alone down to the harbour simply as that was where the road took me. I was thinking of our conversation, of that Saturday night in Cas. and Magnus’s face before he went to talk to the parents, and then of other faces in Martha’s Accident Unit. The faces of my own generation raised in front of the television screen, raised to viewing human suffering through the eyes of the camera, raised to confusing fiction and fact. No need to get too upset, kiddiwinks, just a film, just a story, just actors not real people. Bang, bang, he’s dead. No he’s not! Out of camera range he’s wiping off the ketchup and going home to the gas bills, the mortgage, and if he’s lucky, the V.A.T. invoices. No need to cry over that little girl. She wasn’t run over. Wonderful how some of those child actors can act. It’s a newsreel? Well, yes, but you’ve got to remember the camera you can’t see. Newsreel reporters have to get dramatic stories so obviously they pick the very worst cases ‒ and look at the way that child’s smiling! Would a really hurt child smile like that?
In Storm and In Calm Page 13
