One day I saw Mr Black press money into Peter’s hand and Peter refuse it.
‘I was told if I was caught again bringing things in I would be sent out. Now I can’t risk it. I’ll give you one of mine,’ he said, trying to placate the grimacing Black whose good hand clenched the wheelchair and whose twisted mouth spat back, ‘That cunt Mauritius says I can have no more ciggies till I take my chance at the fucking tombola. I’ve won six Virgin Marys in a row and they’re not even good-looking ones. I can’t go another day without me fags, Peter – I’m gumming. I’m dying I am! I’m a forty a day man. What can I do on three smokes a day? I might as well smoke them with me arse.’
Peter shook his head and carried on out the door.
‘I’m sorry. She said she’d take my room off me and give it to Ted. She checks my pockets and my drawers and lockers to make sure I’m not sneaking the things in. She says…’
‘Ah, she says, she says, my hairy hole! Are you scared of an old dry cunt like her? I’m not. If I had me legs I’d be out of here.’
‘Well, you don’t,’ Peter lost patience. ‘You’ve only one and I have both. The walk into town is my only outing. Without that I might as well be dead.’
‘Ah y’are anyway!’ Black sighed. ‘Give us a bit of your chocolate then. Or a sucky sweet.’
‘You’re allowed neither. You’re diabetic for God’s sake.’
‘And if I had one of my needles now I’d jab it in your arse instead of me own,’ Black roared at the fast-departing Peter. ‘What use have you for legs? You run round in circles with them. If I was a fitter man I’d be gone from here. Not hiding scared like you ye…’
I came up to Black and put my hands on his wheelchair handles to take him into the dayroom.
‘What’re you at? Leave me where I am!’
‘What do you smoke?’ I asked.
There was a short silence, then an urgent request for Players, untipped, as many boxes as I could manage.
The next day three of the men found their way to asking for a box of Liquorice Allsorts, tobacco and papers and the Racing Post.
I did not go to town myself for the requests, because word would get out that the black one, as I was called, was bringing stuff to the men up above in the home. Sister Mauritius would have heard in turn. I got Eddie to go in once a week and get it. The men hid everything like prisoners of war.
The downturn in demand for tombola tickets on St Michael’s ward was noted, but could not be pinned on anything. The discovery of chocolate in the sluice cisterns, caused the plumber some consternation. Alcohol supplies were delivered to the locker of Ted Leyland, who took them gladly, being partial to the odd drop of Powers whiskey. Mr Black organized it with him.
‘She’s such a lick arse to you, Ted, she’d fire one of us out quick as look at us, but she’ll never search your locker and if she did she’d only say “naughty, naughty, now” and pour it down her own throat, lush that she is.’
So it was that the spirits of the men in St Michael’s ward lifted for no reason at all. When Sister Saviour was asked about this by matron and Joe, she smiled and said, ‘Spring does it. They know they’re going to get a nice spring cleaning, too. It’s the time of year for it.’
Joe and I went to bed with aching backs after one week of buffing already polished floors, cleaning clean beds and bathrooms and disinfecting the sluice room, on the floor of which you could already have eaten a four-course dinner.
I didn’t mind the work. I didn’t mind the bad pay. I didn’t even mind the pointless cleaning. St Manis, a place where most had it taken away, had given me purpose, most of it contained in blue-black eyes that watched and called me all day long.
* * *
You are here now, Thomas, opposite me, fixing me with a shared look. You are my Beloved and I am yours. You called me and I answered because I could do little else but come to you.
How did you come to love me? I asked you once. There was something in my eyes so much a part of a different world. An old and lived soul in a young body. Yours an unlived soul in an old body.
You could not die once your heart found the way to beat strong and sure again. But it was agony for you, an old man in a crippled form with his eyes on a girl-woman. You knew the girl-woman called Sive had found a way into you and you did not know that I could do this because love called me too.
We answered that which was unanswered in each other. I reached for the kindness that was buried within you; you reached for the warmth buried in me. No other had seen that in us.
And the day came in St Manis when Joe O’Reilly was poorly and Sister Saviour said, ‘You’ll have to do the baths today!’
You watched me fill the bath with lukewarm, safe water with which to soap you down and you wished instead that my hands knew your body in the lover’s sense.
‘Please, make it hot,’ you said. ‘I have had enough of these tepid hospital baths.’
I turned off the cold water.
The night before you had called to me because you did not know I could answer. You reached for me in the dreams you did not know I entered.
‘Unless you come I will die.’
Over and over you whispered it until you fell asleep with the makings of a dream on your lips.
‘Unless you come I will die in my own despair,’ your dreaming self told mine.
‘Unless you come my heart will howl all this night at the moon and persecute these broken shells of being, strewn in careless beds around me, into ordered early graves. Why was I born so many years before you?
‘I have drunk wine older than you, slept with and beside women who saw fifty years of living you have not seen, lived through times as a grown man your mother has not even seen. Yet I have this wanting of you that will not listen to the body I am in. I want you with this twisted, battered body and this emptiness behind my left eye. I want to kiss you with my crooked mouth that feels only half of your imagined lips.
‘Why talk of kisses, why dream of them when I do not even have the legs to bring me to you! If I had legs that could bring me to you I would go now and meet with you in your place as I once was and could be again, if I could only have you.
‘Listen to this tired old rant!’ you told yourself. You told yourself that a woman such as me would not only spurn but also mock you with the savage unknowing of the young who do not imagine youth has an end.
‘Still, I want you, Sive!’ you called. ‘Still I say why do you not come to me? Why do you leave me each night to go out into the other world, abandoning me in this one, which smells only of my and other men’s inching death? Why do you remain young when I wish you to be old, embittered, pounded and lost like me so I could prove to you it is not your youth that I desire but you and what is in you!
‘You are a witch and I wish to know your magic. Yet in all this love of you there is a torment that says I will never know you.
‘A curse on my empty life and emptier end.
‘A curse on all the life you will live without me.
‘I do not mean that, Beloved, but love for you is torturing me into continued life, if only to watch you. Torturing me into death as an end to the watching. Torturing me into the nowhere between the two.’
* * *
I sat awake listening to your dream words. The strength of your plea caught me and made me afraid, Beloved, afraid and full with anticipation for our new knowing of each other. You had called to me in dreams and I had found dreams to answer with. I could answer as I wished to answer.
I walked the hill road of Pass If You Can quickly that morning, as if it were not a steep climb but a short step. My eyes glittered and my strength was at its height, I knew you were only moments away.
But when I went to the cloakroom, Margaret was waiting to trap me with words and eyes.
I had to stop and speak to her. I knew I had to be patient and I knew suddenly that the moment when we would be away from everyone would be a long while in coming. I had expected just to walk up to you and say I had
listened and would answer.
In her talk I found patience and I clung to it, knowing as long as you and I were tied to St Manis we must be apart for more moments than we were together.
When the breakfast was served and cleared, when the beds were made, when the floor was swept, washed and buffed, when Sister Saviour had gone to her morning meeting with Sister Mauritius, I wheeled your chair into the sterile, white coldness and began to fill the bath for you.
The steam shrouded us, clouded the glaring tiles and chrome out of their unkindness.
‘You’ll have to help me,’ I said. ‘I cannot lift you alone.’
When you stood with my support you were crouched and bent and shaking. Still you towered over me.
‘I was six foot six before.’
You spoke aloud for only the second time since I had known you, using your crumpled mouth. The words were perfect and laid in the gravel tones that had caused me to catch my breath the first time. I knew that Joe O’Reilly had been right, you had chosen silence.
You were thin and wasted. Though your shoulder bones had no meat they were wider than my entire body. I remembered the days when they had meat on them, the days of Sergio’s Café.
‘A big man can fight small ones even when he is only half himself,’ I said aloud.
You smiled at that.
Your broken body gave me strength and purpose. I would make you well. I soaped the tired folds; I soaped the grey away and found living skin underneath and heat underneath the cold.
I took in the nakedness of you and then you took in mine under the clothes I wore.
I took off clothes not as I had done for the unseen eyes of my Soho time. I took them off with shyness and with pride, for I knew what I had to offer you was worth taking and I knew that I had pride in giving it.
The water opened you up and you felt the long ago warmth again flood into the frozen parts of you.
The sight of my young body before your old brokenness brought tears hotter than the water. I did not wipe away those tears for in each one was the ice that had held you to your frozen self.
I sat on the side of the bath and took those tears on my breast that I gave to your mouth and you sucked the comfort out of me and you drank your own tears. You felt your groin-blood pulse and pound against your thinned vein walls and gasped, so afraid it would gush out of you and over me.
But I knew what it was and was not afraid, I felt your blood join mine and I felt your heat and I felt my own and I took the new hardness until it found a way.
Then I placed my lips on yours and whispered into your crooked mouth with hot pearls of breath that moistened your throat with hope and possibility.
‘We will be together.’
We held each other and we waited for the coldness to come before we let go.
* * *
That is how it was the first time. The first of Thomas’s feeling, brought back into legs that tingled with anger at the long non-use and the lateness of love’s arrival. Each time more, more feeling.
Other men, too, improved with kind hands.
Sister Mauritius’s eyebrows knitted. Our job was not to improve the men, but to offer them a place in which to end their days. Fewer men were dying. How was she supposed to account to the Board of Governors for the fact that no beds ever became vacant when they constantly reminded her of the length of the waiting list?
‘Too much care,’ said Sister Mauritius, ‘is wasteful of the time and energy of those who run the home. No,’ she told a silent Sister Saviour, ‘we give too much care already and it must be stopped.’
At this point Sister Saviour, who put her life into working hard and had loved nursing above nunning, felt her faith slide away. She left the meeting concealing her intentions and Sister Saviour had rarely concealed anything in her brisk and upright existence.
Her nursing had taught her to make men well. She took delight in the small progresses made in recent months. Her desire was that the broken senses of the men be restored. Pride first, she thought. The new girl gives them pride before care.
After thirty-five years nursing Sister Saviour had learned something new. The men were to be called by first names and to be asked if they wanted something before it was done to them. This was her resolve and she told both Joe and me.
It caused some interruption of routine, so she had us drop the latter part of the policy as soon as it began. But the signs were all of improvement. Pride made men well.
And Thomas, my Beloved, among them, became well and proud.
* * *
Sister Mauritius had no direct power to destroy the new wellness. She could hardly complain about it, but she knew she must do something. So she took to calling Margaret into the office, for talks.
The talks involved giving Margaret the best biscuits on the plate instead of no biscuit at all, and a few extra comforts. A new room with a window that opened. A record player of her own. So her eyes and ears could be employed to watch all of us on St Michael’s.
Joe O’Reilly was green-eyed too about recent developments.
‘You’re not a nurse,’ he reminded me. ‘Mine are the nursing jobs around here, yours should be the skivvy ones. What education have you to be doing this?’
‘You are right, Joe,’ I would say, and ask questions about how men should be handled and why. The home had worn him down. I did much to placate him by asking advice. It was Margaret now to worry about.
21 ∼ The Coming of Summer
THE BITE OF SPRING gave way to a relentless heat unknown to living memory.
We were not so isolated in our house now the town was drawn out on evening walks to meet us.
The days went on, growing into one another in their hot sameness and the people grew out of their pale selves into tanned faces and bodies. Couples, who had never shown care for each other in public, strolled arm in arm down evening lanes of birdsong. The café in the town of Scarna advertised: ‘Iced tea – an exotic from the Orient’. Cold cuts of meat and tomatoes, with potatoes drenched in salad cream were served instead of the usual hot steaming dinners that drove out the chill of coastal life. Life on the grey sea had turned blue and sparkled.
All around there were rolled sleeves and brown forearms and smiles unearthed.
The sea was fringed with the colourful tassels of bodies in little-used swimsuits. Those who had never swum before, swam that summer. In the heat, Myrna’s stiffness eased and her tongue with it. There was more talk in a short time than there had been in a long while of knowing her. As she spoke more, so I spoke more.
‘Myrna,’ I urged. ‘Tell me what you did with the men to make them happy.’
‘No.’
In the late evenings we were now able to leave the house and walk the laneway to the shoreline, even on to Killeaden headland.
‘I am with Thomas Cave,’ I said finally, when we rested there and drank the view that offered all the joyful, sparkling sea at once.
Myrna looked at the sea. ‘I knew that much.’
I stayed quiet then, with her, without words, until the sea had long since ceased to sparkle and the shadows of night and red gold of evening were growing on it. Then her own voice came again, gentle and strong.
‘I have been with men, but I have never stayed with men. I moved quickly through them because the call elsewhere was too great and I followed it. I could never stop these feet from moving once they had started, Sive. There was a world to see.’
‘When did you leave your home?’ I asked her.
‘Long before I was meant to.’
I was sorry to hear it and she said there was no need for that.
‘I would never have had the life I got if I had stayed. I would never have known half of what I came to know. All I saw, Sive! I could not regret that.’
I asked how she came to leave her home place.
‘War.’
What had happened to Myrna to make her known in Soho, so well known, I asked.
‘I was not well known, I was known on
ly to those who I wished or needed to know.’
‘Myrna,’ I laughed. ‘You were a legend.’
‘The nice thing about legends is they have so little basis in truth. The legend I was, or might have been, was most likely based on two or three women’s doings, and even then exaggerated. The world has no use for unremarkable stories.’
‘Can you tell me what you know about men?’ I asked again.
‘I can tell you that I do not have the secrets the women in Soho thought I had. I had only mirrors, Sive, plenty of them. Show the man who he is. Use mirrors that flatter as well as reveal, mind. They do not like to see all their flaws at once.’
‘You mean I have to get some mirrors?’ I was confused.
‘No child!’ Myrna threw back her head and let out an old woman’s cackle. ‘Let me tell you the story of the gypsy and the long road.’
* * *
The card of the Long Road falls between Myrna and me on this night, as it did back then when Myrna told me of it and the gypsy who gave it to her.
‘When I left my home, Sive, I was not much older than you were when we first met. That is part of the reason why I took you to my heart. You had a special nature as a child. I talked a lot more than you did. In fact I chattered from sun up to sun down. I talked with the whole of life and it talked back. My world was large, on a lakeside.
‘Then it was taken from me, by war. I walked alone out into the world. The story of how is for another day, this is a happy day, not the time for such a story. I fell in with gypsies because they did not ask me to go away when I followed their caravan out of a town and down the long road into life. I never thought to look back or examine the way in detail so I could return along it. I was walking into forever from what I had known.
‘Many of the Soho women thought I was mysterious when I would not say where I came from. The truth is I do not know, Sive. It was a place by the lake and I left it young.
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