by Claire North
Chapter 52
If you think medicine is poor now, Sister Ellis, fifteen years ago it was mediocre. Oh, we had the confidence of gods – our microscopes and our mercury pills, our tinctures of opium and our exciting, newly sterilised tools! But this war has given us so many tens of thousands of men to practise our craft on; an opportunity to hone our butchery. It is perhaps ironic that it is still so much easier to invent poisoned gas than it is to treat it. Our capacity for destruction always runs ahead of our willingness to invest in the well-being of others.
In a way I suppose I should be grateful to whoever it was who pulled the bullet out of my chest and stitched me back together again. The scar is truly magnificent – I think he must have used sailor’s rope to do the stitching – and the pain when I move in certain ways is remarkable. However, I think he sterilised his instruments and the environment, adopting what was for then a somewhat new-fangled approach to these things, because I neither died of sepsis within a week, nor woke a dribbling wreck, my mind obliterated by the surgeon’s fever.
Instead, I surfaced some three or four days later on a ship.
At first, I assumed that the rocking of my world was simply the consequence of having been shot, and perhaps of having died in the process. The urge to vomit somewhat decreased my conviction that I was dead, but even then I couldn’t be sure that this wasn’t a side effect of massive quantities of opium or ether, to numb the pain.
When I did vomit, into a bowl that had been helpfully left beneath my bed, it was the single most extraordinarily painful thing I have ever experienced, nearly ripping out my stitches and leaving me a howling, sobbing wreck on the cabin floor.
This provoked some attention. A door, which I now noted with some interest had a porthole in it, was opened, and in with the stench of salt came a man dressed in waxed coat and leather shoes. He looked at me for a moment without much in the way of sympathy, then turned back to the gloom whence he’d come and called out some words in French, which I was too befuddled to catch.
Only now did it occur to me that perhaps I was neither dead nor on land, but had been captured at last by the French authorities, finally indulging their long-held desire for a truth-speaker, and that as Ritte had done before, I was to be chained up in some forgotten room and made to pronounce upon the enemies of the Republic. Then another man entered, wearing a cream smoking jacket and sporting a flat straw hat held beneath his chin with a length of string. His shoulders were too big for his chest, his legs too small for his torso, his eyes small in an almost spherical face, his lips drooping and generous, his skin the colour of a winter moon. He looked at me, tutted once, nodded once, and said in a clipped, English accent, “Ah yes well yes hum better feed him yes,” and walked away.
Thought slows.
It slows down.
During the terror of the chase, I had no time to deal with the pros and cons of being alive, dead, captured or free. Every second was its own explosion of certainty. Every moment was a negotiation with eternity.
Alone, locked in a cabin on a boat in what I presumed was the middle of the Atlantic, I had time to contemplate my predicament, and the only conclusion I could reach was that it was a disaster.
Sometimes I slept.
Sometimes I called out for drugs to take away the pain.
Sometimes they came.
Sometimes they didn’t.
Sometimes I fed myself.
Sometimes they fed me.
One night, the sea was so rough I thought we would drown. Rolling from one wall of the cabin to another in a wretched tangle of sheet and cot, I wondered what had happened to Colette Maury, my travel companion on that return voyage to Liverpool, and if she’d found love and comfort in America. I wondered where Margot was, and hammered my fist against the door on those few occasions when the tossing of the ship brought me to easy hammering distance; but no one else seemed concerned, and the next morning even I was grateful to be alive as the fresh breeze billowed in through the open slats of the window.
I played a hundred possibilities through my mind, a thousand scenarios, trying to pick apart any outcome from this situation that wasn’t a calamity, and found none. I invented and discarded stratagems and ruses, and they were all so quickly and apparently useless that I was in fact a very quiet patient, having nothing to say to my captors that I hadn’t already said a thousand times to myself. They didn’t need to be cruel or violent to subdue me. My own dread was perfectly up to the task of making me, by the time we reached Liverpool, an entirely docile and dreary customer.
Only one thought, one hope stuck with me: perhaps Margot had escaped.
I wished Langa was near, knew that this Atlantic voyage put him weeks behind me, longed to know the truth of my captor’s hearts. More than ever, his absence felt like a sense cut off, a blindness when I most needed to see. How poor I was at dealing with people on their own terms.
In Liverpool I was carried by stretcher off the boat to a train by four silent, busy guards. There was no attempt to hide me, no effort to restrain me or commands to keep my mouth shut. The tear in my side made running an impossibility; putting up a fuss seemed only an invitation to greater pain. At the station, kindly women smiled and wished me a speedy recovery, and men with neat ties nodded a gesture of mutual support and goodwill as they scurried past, grateful that they were not suffering from whatever malady assailed me. I didn’t respond to any of it, but sometimes my guards would tip a hat in acknowledgement, concerned kin.
We travelled first class, which had never happened when I was in the government’s favour. At the station we were met by four more men, who crowded into a space barely fit for three at the back of a carriage that crawled its way through the low smoke of London to a house, not near Whitehall as I had thought, but on the edge of what I took to be Hammersmith. I could smell the sewage of the Thames and the detritus of thin, diluted shit it left behind when it flooded, see the green and yellow lines of algae the floodwaters had left at the highest marks when it burst its banks. Yet the suburb also boasted cleaner air than the centre of the city, grand terraces of white houses set in a line, from which children played in bright-buckled shoes and where the maids always had a clean apron to wear. High elm trees bent over the roads and railway tracks, and the grocer’s shop proudly displayed posters in the window of the pleasant day trips you might take from London to the flowery delights of Sydenham, Acton, Kew Gardens and leafy, breezy Epping.
I was put in a pale pink room containing a dovetail dresser, a gold-framed mirror, a wardrobe containing a single, stinking tweed coat and an old yellow pillow; a bed, a table to put water on, and a bucket to pee or puke in, depending which situation caught me out first. On the dresser was a pile of books, mostly creaking tomes of Dickens’s least loved works, or tales of misery in Manchester, where a single cough from a beloved character’s lips foretold nearly two hundred pages of inevitable, tedious decline.
Once a day, a doctor came to inspect my wound, a man younger than me, who was trying to cultivate a pair of old-fashioned whiskers and could manage little more than a spike of faded yellow hair on the tip of his chin. I recognised in him something of Albert’s way of things, for he was all for carbolic acid and wonderful new ways of stitching flesh together, and when I hoarsely muttered during his ministrations that I too was a physician, he burst into an ecstatic ramble on the wonders of toxins and the buzz around an element called radium and the wonderful properties of metals that glowed.
If he knew I was a prisoner, it was entirely secondary to him, though he never once gave his name, and the hearts of men were closed to me.
After five days, the doctor’s visits stopped, and he was replaced by a nurse who said nothing except “roll over” or “lift” or “sit”, and puppy-like I obeyed. Under her observation, I began to walk round the autumn garden, shivering and hobbling like a grey old man. I took dinner downstairs with two guards, instead of spoon-fed in my room; I was permitted very weak tea at breakfast and another cup at thr
ee in the afternoon, and ordered to inhale foul-smelling vapours from a steaming bowl every night, which I was assured was good for my healing and which I snappily replied was good for nothing except rousing my temper.
Only once did I attempt to explain to this woman, ice made flesh, that I was a doctor, which was met with the stiff reply, “And you’ve been very naughty too.”
That seemed to settle the matter. Men were doctors; children were naughty. I was definitely in the latter category.
For two and a half weeks this was my ritual, and I began to wonder what they were waiting for. Yet fear can only be at the forefront of your mind for so long, and while every bump in the night was enough to rouse me with a gasping start, the routine, however tedious, began to dominate my day.
All that ended just before the third week, when Albert came.
He arrived a little after dinner, and I was brought to him in the parlour, where he was already enjoying a cigar and a tumbler of whisky. The sight of him brought all the terrors of what was to come back to full, glorious life; his presence could only be the beginning of change, of the waited-for retribution that had been my promise.
Nevertheless, the scene was familiar – warm and welcoming – so I settled without complaint in the thickly padded chair opposite him, and took the whisky that was passed to me, and was not offered a cigar.
For a while we sat in this manner, he studying a landscape painting above the cold fireplace as if he had never before seen romanticised mist off badly painted fields. He smiled all this time, but didn’t meet my eye, and I studied him and waited like the child the nurse thought I was, for all that had to follow.
At last he said, as one who has already run through a conversation in his mind and sees now no point retreading it with another, “When they ask, answer simply and to the point. There is nothing they do not already know.”
I held the tumbler tight between both my hands, and waited for him to look at me.
He did not.
“When it is over, there will be a brief period of adjustment. I cannot promise it will be without pain. But I want you to know that it is for the best, and you will be well looked after.”
I do not know if he meant to terrify me with these words, or to comfort. When I feel kind, I sometimes think the latter. I do not feel kind very often, these days.
Then he said, “I have missed our conversations. I have brought you some papers to read. There is interesting work being done. We live in exciting times.”
I thought for a moment he might say something more.
His lips thinned, his fingers tapped once along the edge of the glass. Then he drained his glass down, stood in a single swoop, nodded once with his head towards me, his eyes towards the wall, and walked away without another sound.
The next day, the soldiers came for me.
Chapter 53
I didn’t know where they took me. I was blindfolded, and knew only that we walked a little, then rode in a carriage for a while, then walked a little more on smooth stone through a place that smelt of cold and damp. In the distance I heard a factory bell, and a man calling out what I thought were commands to a crew; but I couldn’t be sure. Sounds faded the further we walked, the colder the air became. I thought we were underground, or deep inside sealed tunnels that had not seen sunlight for a very long time.
Then they sat me down, and removed my blindfold, and the colonel was there, and Mrs Parr, and a man with thin grey hair and a beaked nose above an ocean pier of a chin, who watched everything and sometimes daubed at his neck with a handkerchief, though the room was cold, and sometimes checked his fob watch for the time, and contributed nothing else.
Langa, where are you? I need your truth now.
The colonel didn’t bother with accusations, or demand that I tell him everything.
Instead, he laid out my crimes clearly and concisely before me.
My relationship with Margot.
My relationship with the People’s Society.
My betrayals.
He put down names, places and dates, stretching back over three years. I was relieved that he had nothing from earlier.
He asked, “When did it begin?”
I said nothing.
He snapped, “Who are her confederates?”
I said nothing.
He barked, “How much does she know?”
I said nothing.
Mrs Parr stood, hands folded in front of her, no seat offered or asked for as she shivered inside her onion skirts, and for a moment I thought she might cry, and found the idea incredibly strange. She was the only person who met my eye apart from the colonel, and his gaze was not a conversation so much as a battering ram into my soul.
The interview can’t have taken more than an hour. At the end of it, the colonel slunk back into his chair, shaking his head, a disappointed parent who cannot believe the foolish, naïve truculence of a spoilt child.
“Very well,” he snapped. “We will move on.”
So saying, he left the room.
Mrs Parr remained, watching me. She watched as one of my captors came up behind me and, hauling me up by the scruff of the neck, proceeded to clamp on handcuffs. They hadn’t felt any need to before, and now every fantasy of physical pain I had ever imagined surfaced in a single, bowel-twisting surge of reality. Mrs Parr licked her lips, reading something of this perhaps in my face, and as the guards pulled me towards the door, she stepped forward suddenly, her shoulder nearly knocking against mine, and whispered in my ear: “I didn’t know.”
They pulled me away from her, and dragged me down another arctic, wet corridor of crudely carved stone.
We were not underground. Apart from the oil lanterns my captors carried, thin, high bolts of daylight were permitted to intrude, carrying with them the occasional squawk of a seagull, crash of wood on metal. I tried to count steps, paces, couldn’t work out why I bothered, and then I was in front of a long metal door like the gates to a factory, which were with great labour unbolted and slid back on a shriek of rust.
The sound of a man’s voice struck just before the smell.
The smell was an instant memory – the operating theatre at the London Hospital, ammonia, steel, leather and the thin, clear fluids that seep into a half-healing wound once the blood has stopped, forming crystal yellow scabs around broken skin.
The voice took a moment longer to place. A softness to the vowels through the babble, a bluntness to some of the consonants, a slight American roll to an R. Then the door was opened all the way, and I was pushed into the tall, round room where the man waited, and I knew him, and he was Hideo.
The ancient ways… the honour! The code! The… but actually the price of fish, the price of fish was so important…
Sometime would-be samurai, who was cursed for his arrogance and found his way to the railway lines of America, I recognised him by his left eye and something around the jaw. His right eye had been removed when they cut into his brain, leaving a hollowed-out, healed-over socket of smooth, shiny skin. The surgeon who had carved into his skull had used a metal plate to replace parts of the bone he had removed, riveting it in place with fat, gleaming bolts that stuck up around the rim like silver blisters. The rush of fluids into the rest of his facial cavities had distorted his jaw and cheeks, first extending them like the belching throat of a toad before draining away to leave collapsed wrinkles of cockerel flesh. He muttered and whispered incoherent sounds and words, sometimes in Japanese, sometimes in English. Sometimes a phrase burst through the nonsense, before vanishing again into gibberish.
“Came home late last night came home late…”
Then without warning his voice would curl up into a shriek, like a frightened animal, before dropping back down into that relentless conspiratorial whisper, before falling silent without a warning, before starting back up again in a sudden rush.
Straps across his chest and legs held him upright in the wheelchair in the middle of the room, but months of inactivity had caused his neck to re
duce to a tendon-laced arch drooping against the piping of his collar. Where his arms protruded from beneath his shirt, they were merely a surgeon’s skeleton draped in spider’s silk, not the limbs of a living, moving thing at all. His mouth rolled open and on a tray around him were pipes and tubes for pushing drink and liquid food between his twitching lips.
“Don’t like it don’t like it but have to do what you don’t like…”
And there it was.
Look a little closer, and even with Langa still crossing the Atlantic, even with my shadow so far away, I could catch a glimpse of it, the thing that everyone in the room had perhaps thought they’d seen out of the corner of their eye, but couldn’t quite name.
A shadow. The shape of a man, decapitated, flowing in and out of Hideo, darting, his movement broken and confused, into his body, then out of his body, flung back as if repulsed by magnetism, then trying again, and again, and again, pushing and tearing into his flesh. His shadow, in the room with him right now, clawing at him, pushing the truth onto his tongue, relentless, as trapped as he.
I looked at him in horror, too stunned to pay much attention as I was lowered onto a stool a foot in front of his chair. Having pushed me into my seat, my guards backed away quickly, pressing themselves to the edge of the room, as a man in an open lab coat revealing a gaudy red waistcoat beneath edged up behind Hideo and pushed a needle into the pockmarked, syringe-torn crook of his arm.
This done, he stepped back briskly, passing straight through Hideo’s dancing, twisting, writhing shadow without seeing what he did, but perhaps feeling it, for he too seemed to want to put as much distance between himself and the man in the chair as possible. He crossed the room to a table by the wall, and inserted a fresh wax cylinder into a phonograph. The long brass horn was swung towards me, the cylinder started turning, the man in the white coat bending down to blow away little trails of wax as the knife cut its recording.
