by Lia Mills
‘Could we carry him up to them? Or as far as the hospital, if they won’t take him?’ I was calculating the distance in my mind. I wasn’t thinking about Hubie ’til I saw the fury in his eyes. Everything stopped. Of course we couldn’t carry the boy all that way. I wasn’t strong enough. He only had one usable hand.
I stared him down. ‘Dote could help.’
Dote told May to stay in the back hall, minding Paschal. We got the soldier ready to carry, twisting the corners of the blanket he lay on and gathering him into a kind of hammock, with Dote at one shoulder. I had the other. Hubie, his good hand bunching the blanket at the man’s swaddled feet, directed us out, around the tricky corner at the door, trying not to knock him, across the gravel and on to the road – just as the shooting started again, louder and fiercer than before.
We stopped at the gate, trying to gauge the risk. I could still see one of the water-jug girls and some nurses on the bridge. ‘They’ll be hurt.’
‘Oh!’ There was horror on Dote’s face at the sight of the carnage. She paused, gathered herself together, and we continued.
Leaving the pavement for the road was like stepping off a quay on to a boat, precarious balance, black depths waiting below. The skin of the canal puckered and sent darts of reflected light into my eyes. We made our awkward way towards the ambulance. The drill of shots had us flinching, even as we moved away from them. The shocking sound of men weeping. A black pit of space opened inside my head, ready for me to fall into it and disappear. I crouched over our bundle and watched the ground pass beneath. My shoes appeared and disappeared down there, as remote as though attached to someone else’s feet. My ears were lungs, straining and loud. I told myself to keep going. As if you’re not afraid.
We came to a woman huddled over the still form of a man with twisted legs. I was looking at the ruin of a face, a jagged hole where a cheek should be, the flap of a chin sagging down the length of a bloodied neck. The woman knelt on her folded skirt and whispered a prayer where the dead man’s ear should have been.
My shoulders and arms burned from the weight of that skinny young soldier. We half lifted, half dragged him along, bumping the ground; we couldn’t help it. He screamed at us to Stopit! Stopitforchristsssake! We struggled into the scant shelter of a young tree to wait for the ambulance, now reversing towards us. There, in the tufted grass, was a bloody pulp of flesh and white feathers, a crush of webbed orange feet. The ruined white-and-black head of a swan spelled rotten luck for someone.
Just when I couldn’t take another step, someone took the weight from me. My knees gave way and I stumbled, but caught myself before I fell. A man in a black St John Ambulance coat had the boy’s shoulders. Another one took the feet from Hubie. Dote sat on the grass, panting, ignoring the dead bird. I rubbed the circulation back into my burning palms, my stinging fingers.
The St John’s men lowered the injured boy to the ground. ‘Here we go, son. You’ll be all right, we’ve got you now,’ the first one said. ‘I’m Fitz.’ His voice was like Dad’s, low and steady. A voice I’d trust. ‘We’ll get you on to a proper stretcher, Christy’ll get it, we’ll have you in the rig in no time.’
‘It’s his leg that’s hurt.’ The boy looked light as a feather, lying there on the ground. Not a day over sixteen.
They lifted the boy, blanket and all, on to the stretcher. He grunted in pain. They carried the stretcher towards the open van. His arm shot out and grabbed mine as he passed. ‘Come with me.’
‘They’re taking you to hospital,’ I said. ‘You’re safe now.’
‘Please.’
‘It’s not allowed,’ Christy said.
The boy squeezed my hand so hard the bones cracked. His knees came up, and his shoulders, so that they nearly dropped him. ‘Whoa, steady!’ Christy glared, as if it was my fault.
The boy shivered. ‘Please.’ His teeth chattered.
‘Well –’ Fitz looked at Christy. ‘It’s all of two minutes away.’
‘Get in, so,’ Christy said.
‘Don’t, Katie,’ Hubie said.
‘Why not?’
He dropped his eyes. ‘You might not get back. The fighting might start up again.’
‘I’ll be all right at the hospital. I know people there.’
Fitz and Christy lifted the boy into the back of the boxy-looking vehicle. I climbed in beside him, awkward in my skirt. They put the stretcher on a rough floor spread with a horse blanket. I hunkered down between the boy and a groaning bulldog of a man who never opened his eyes in the short, rattling journey to Baggot Street.
I took the boy’s rough hand in mine. His grip was surprising, his knuckles big on callused fingers. I wondered what work he’d done before soldiering, who was waiting for him at home.
Liam wrote about the enemy being men just like him. They bleed the same and weep and moan and die in no way different to the way that our own men moan, weep or die. The one sure thing is that it happens. You do your best not to believe the evidence of your own two eyes. It happens whether you believe it or whether you don’t. The power of wishing counts for nothing here. I tell you, Katie, the world is not at all what we imagined.
By the time we got to the hospital, the boy’s teeth were clacking off each other.
‘Why does he shake like that?’ I asked Fitz. ‘Is he having a fit?’
He didn’t answer. I prised my fingers free. Released, my hand felt naked, unnaturally light. My knees creaked like an old woman’s when I clambered out of the ambulance to let the men to do their work. The boy’s pink-rimmed eyes followed me. Someone else, a nurse, applied pressure to the blood-soaked bandage at his thigh as the stretcher emerged into the hospital yard. Men in ordinary street clothes came to help carry the whey-faced bulldog of a man, who was still groaning.
Inside was bedlam. People crying. A woman with two children clinging to her skirt held the arm of a nurse and begged for something I couldn’t hear. A reek of Jeyes fluid and sour sweat. People in medical clothes moved quickly through the halls, steering clear of reaching hands, their eyes blind to individuals.
Fitz found a chair, so I could sit beside the boy. I took his cool, slippery hand again. ‘I’m still here. I’ll stay, as long as I’m let.’ A slight pressure on my fingers was the only sign that he’d heard, or that he was aware of me at all.
A nurse began to unwrap the bandage. Blood spurted in a small arc, splashing my face. His eyes fluttered and closed. His grip on my hand relaxed. The nurse was joined by another, who cut his tunic with scissors. A doctor came. I was in the way. I’d never felt so useless in my life. How many hundreds of times had I walked past this hospital and never given proper thought to all that happened here, the world of pain and illness that turned in its own path, right next to mine. How careless I’d been.
In the distance, at the far end of a busy corridor, I saw Bartley’s familiar gangly figure, the streak of white hair in a thicket of black falling across his forehead. I was surprised by a rush of relief. ‘Bartley!’
‘Katie?’ He went white as paper. ‘Has something happened to Alanna?’
‘She’s in Herbert Park, with Isabel. She’s fine. Everyone’s fine. How’s Eva?’
‘She’s upstairs.’
‘You moved her here? Why?’ I looked around the overcrowded hallway. She must be bad, or they’d surely have left her where she was.
‘Last night.’ He looked uncomfortable. ‘We wanted to keep a closer eye on her, and I’m glad we did. She needs paracentesis.’
I thought he’d said ‘Paraclete’, imagined beating wings, tongues of flame. ‘What?’
‘It’s a minor procedure, to drain the excess fluid. It’s putting strain on her kidneys. She’s having trouble breathing.’ He lifted my sticky hand and held it between us, turning it over and back. ‘What’s this, blood?’
‘I got caught up in fighting. At Mount Street.’
‘Were you on the bridge?’
‘No. I’m not that brave. I only helped carry someone out.’
‘Sounds brave to me. I’m glad you’re safe.’ He squeezed my fingers gently before releasing them.
We stood back against the wall to make room for a porter who pushed a creaking wheeled chair past us. The patient’s eyes were closed. He looked to be in pain. One half of his head had been shaved; his skin was like puffy yellow wax.
A miasma of antiseptic smells and a taste of metal overwhelmed me of a sudden. My knees buckled. Bartley caught my elbow and stopped me falling. ‘Come with me.’ He brought me to an empty common room, where a tea-urn stood on a scarred trestle table. ‘When’s the last time you ate?’ He made me wash my hands at a sink in the corner and put me in a chair while he fussed with the urn and a cup. ‘It’s lukewarm, but better than nothing.’ He added several spoons of sugar.
‘No sugar.’
‘You need it.’ He watched me drink, refilled my cup.
My mind skittered across the bloody surfaces and blacknesses I’d seen today, insides turned out. The eminent men whose portraits lined the walls loomed, solid and indifferent to all I didn’t want to hear. I dropped my head, looked at the shape my knees made under my stained skirt, a stain on my shoe. ‘Can I see Eva?’
Bartley led me down a corridor towards a flight of stairs. On the way he stopped to talk to a man who he introduced as Eva’s surgeon.
‘Why are you not looking after her yourself?’ I asked, when we’d moved on.
‘It’s not allowed.’
‘But she’d prefer it.’
He looked back, over his shoulder. The trace of a smile crossed his face. ‘I wonder would she.’
‘She says you’re the best surgeon there is.’
We’d reached a landing. He pushed open a swing door and held it for me.
‘She has to say that.’ He looked pleased all the same. ‘It’d be unethical; my judgement would be compromised. Bad enough we’ve to do this on the ward, but everywhere’s so busy’ – he glanced up at the clock on the wall – ‘and I’ve to get back. I’ll leave you with her. Don’t stay long, Katie. You’re not to tire her. And don’t get in the way.’
He steered me into a side room, where Eva was, and introduced me to Gwen Townsend, the sister-in-charge. She made the chilliest of bows, folded her hands into the bib of her apron.
I crossed to stand between Eva and the window. I could see her better from here. She was flushed, and her face seemed puffy, but her eyes were bright. She gave me a weak, worried smile. ‘You and Bartley will be friends yet.’
‘Threat or promise?’ I said, sitting into a chair beside her, turning my back on the nurse.
Sister Townsend went out and came back with a steel tray of instruments under a cover. She laid the instruments out with a pair of tongs, where Eva couldn’t see them, while we waited for the surgeon. At last he came and busied himself at the sink.
‘You’ll have to leave now, Miss Crilly,’ Sister Townsend said.
The surgeon looked around, his hairy forearms soaped over the wrist, and raised his bushy eyebrows. ‘Wait outside.’ His voice was gruff but his eyes were kind.
I waited ’til he said I could go back in and sit with her again. She was drowsy. I listened to the low exchange between doctor and nurse at the door: abdominal dropsy, peritoneal cavity and Bartley’s word, ‘paracentesis’. He left and Sister Townsend came back in to open the window. ‘Time’s up, Miss Crilly. She’s asleep.’
I looked around the room. ‘Is there nothing I can do here?’
‘She needs rest.’
‘I mean – in general.’
She stood by the door, waiting for me to go out in front of her.
‘Please, sister. There must be something. Anything. I’d like to be useful.’
Her doubt was obvious. I could have found Bartley, I suppose, and asked him, but I wasn’t sure his opinion of my usefulness would be much better than hers. Anything I’d ever learned in my life up to now had been a waste. The Bible story about the wise and the foolish virgins made a new, appalling kind of sense. The nuns in school said it was about guarding the purity of the soul so that we’d die in a state of grace, because you never knew the day or the hour; but it wasn’t that at all. It was about being ready to act, so that when a crisis came one knew how to rise to meet it. I had no skills to apply anywhere that mattered, least of all here, with life and death all around me. I could only get in the way. ‘There are voluntary aides downstairs.’ She looked at my hands. ‘It’ll be dirty work. Washing and the like.’
I spread them for her inspection, glad of their wholeness, the blunt fingertips and short nails that Florrie shuddered at.
I was put to work where I could do the least harm, gathering soiled linen into a wheeled hamper and bringing it to the laundry.
‘But we’re overstretched,’ said the nurse in the supply room. ‘Don’t be too quick to change sheets and covers, unless they’re obviously stained.’ The nurse was flushed, distracted. ‘Please God that will change. People are very good, they’re bringing bedlinen and towels from their homes.’
‘What about dressings?’
‘They need a separate basket. Could you manage two?’
‘This smaller one, inside the other?’
I was pleased with myself but she just nodded, and left.
I patrolled the corridors, moved in and out of treatment rooms and cubicles, bundling soiled linen into the hamper’s separate compartments, delivering it to the laundry to be sorted further. I tried not to get in anyone’s way. Tried not to stare too openly at the wounds and injuries I couldn’t help seeing as I passed.
I was tired and worried about too many things; it was hard to keep anything clear in my head. It began to feel like a dream, pushing a cart up and down a hospital corridor, listening to cries and whispers, smelling blood. Human skin was a miracle I’d never considered, like nothing so much as a living canvas bag, deceptively taut and smooth, a receptacle for things never meant to be seen, let alone spilled, so much disorder and mess and dear God the smells, and sounds, things I’d never forget no matter how long I lived.
A nurse came out of a room and saw me with my hamper, almost full. ‘In here needs clearing,’ she said, and hurried on, leaving the door ajar. I pushed it open and backed into the room, pulling the basket. An old man was asleep on a high bed under a sheet, his face turned away from me.
‘Hello?’ I said.
He didn’t answer.
He wasn’t breathing.
It was indecent to look at him, so undefended. I glanced at the door, stepped closer.
An argument broke out in my head. I didn’t know this man. I’d never seen him before. I’d no right to stare at him now. But he had something to tell me. I stood beside him and looked into his face, his eyes half open. I’d read about the unseeing eyes of the dead, but that was wrong. It wasn’t so much that his eyes didn’t see, as that there was no one there to look. His colour was like a slab of fat on a skirt of meat, grey and mottled, his mouth an oval of surprise. I touched the wrist with a cautious finger, then laid the back of my hand against the chill, waxy skin. I stared at the face, the thin lips fallen back on yellowed teeth.
The door creaked, let in a woman in a porter’s overalls. I stepped away from the body and busied myself lifting clothes from the floor and folding them on to a shelf. She tsked and pulled the sheet up over his face. ‘They must have forgotten. They’re run off their feet.’ Her brisk, matter-of-fact voice broke the spell I’d been under. She looked at me out of a pleasant, matronly face under a cap of white hair. ‘Are you a volunteer too?’
I nodded. The stuff of the man’s clothes was coarse and strange in my hands. A pair of trousers. A white cotton vest. The most extraordinary things I’d ever touched, not being my brother’s, or my father’s, but a stranger’s. A stranger who was dead.
She bustled about, straightening things I hadn’t seen were crooked. ‘I haven’t seen you before.’
‘I only just started.’
‘I’ve been coming in since Monday.�
�� She looked around, taking stock. ‘Terrible, isn’t it?’ Although she looked rather as though she was enjoying herself. ‘They’ll move him soon, there’s ones waiting on a bed.’ She lifted a chart from the end of the bed. ‘No name.’
‘What happened to him?’ There wasn’t a mark on him, that I could see.
‘Heart, it says. Is that his coat?’ She held out her hand.
A man’s overcoat lay crumpled in the corner. I picked it up. Not thinking, I slid my hand in the pocket. There was grit in the seam, a cold key, two small coins, a wallet.
She gave me a peculiar look. It woke me up to where I was, my hand inside the lining of a stranger’s pocket. The intimate, greasy friction on my skin was shocking, but not as bad as my intrusion. I pulled out the wallet and gave it to her. ‘His name might be in there.’ She rolled the clothes up on top of the chart, put the wallet in plain sight on top of them and left.
I pushed my hamper of linen out after her, wondering. To think of that man leaving his house that morning, putting the necessaries into his pockets. Every day we cross such ordinary thresholds, not paying attention, no notion of what lies in wait.
I didn’t feel the hours pass ’til a nurse came and said it was after nine and I should go home if I could. Else I could spend the night in the clinic they’d set aside for helpers to rest in.
I went upstairs to check on Eva. The door to her room was closed. A nurse came to my knock. ‘We’re sponging her down; I can’t let you in.’ She didn’t quite meet my eye. ‘She needs sleep. Come back tomorrow, if you can.’
Behind her I could see the bedclothes, folded over the bottom rail. Another nurse was helping Eva take off her nightdress. When it was lifted over her head and her arms were freed, her hands flopped to her side. When they rubbed her with a flannel, my sister mewed like a kitten.
I’d seen the cramped space that had been set aside for helpers – it was like the worst kind of overcrowded waiting room, with no hope of a train. I didn’t want to have to listen to one more word of prediction or opinion. We’d heard the worst of the fighting had calmed, and I wanted to breathe air that had no brine or disinfectant in it, to be outside, alone and quiet.
