Angel (23 page)

Jim offered to help me install my shower.

Well, I am now officially in charge of Cas X-ray. Chris left last Friday after a little party organised by Sister Cas, who in the old days would have been weepy and crotchety, but kept up a cheerful face because she confidently hopes to follow Chris’s example next year. Constantin (a chef at Romano’s restaurant) is still very keen on her. When Chris announced that a Happy Event was on the way, the little gaggle of technicians and sisters gooed and gushed, squeaked and giggled. Luckily a couple of multiple emergencies broke the party up, and we all went back to our work.

I have a new technician to take my place-older and more experienced than me, but engaged to be married to a senior resident, so perfectly happy to be the middleman. Her name is Ann Smith and she’s facing a long engagement because Dr. Alan Smith (no name change necessary!) has to sort out his career preferences before they can tie the knot. But why me for the charge position?

“Your work is excellent, Miss Purcell,” said Sister Agatha to me as I stood at attention in front of her desk. “I have decided to replace Miss Hamilton with you because you are efficient, very well organised, and you can think on your feet-an essential for good casualty work.”

“Yes, Sister, thank you Sister,” I said automatically. “Unless-” and she paused ominously.

“Unless what, Sister?” I asked.

“Unless you are planning to be married, Miss Purcell.” I couldn’t help it, I grinned. “No, Sister, I can assure you that I am not planning to be married.”

“Excellent, excellent!” And she actually smiled. “You may go, Miss Purcell.”

It makes a difference to be in charge. Chris was a very good technician, but ran the place in a way I thought could be improved. Now I can do what I likeprovided that neither Matron nor Sister Agatha objects.

What it does mean is that I now commence work at six in the morning, have the junior between eight and four, and Ann from ten onward in my old slot. I don’t think Ann was too pleased about that, but hard cack. If her hours mean that she will see less of her Alan, she’ll just have to lump it. See what a position of power does? I’ve turned into an unsympathetic bitch.

I overheard a wonderful little conversation between Matron and the General Medical Superintendent shortly after six this morning. God knows what the Super was doing in at such an hour, but Matron, of course, hasn’t got the words “off duty” in her vocabulary.

“I would never have believed it of Dr. Bloodworthy,” she said stiffly just outside my door.

Now what has Dr. Bloodworthy been up to? He is a pathologist whose specialty is blood-isn’t it odd how people with suggestive names espouse them completely? Like Lord Brain the neurologist.

“It’s flaming hysterical!” replied the Super, clearly in fits of laughter. “Maybe it will teach all those old chooks in the Sisters’ dining room to mind their own business for a change.”

“Sir,” said Matron in tones producing instantaneous icicles on all my equipment, “as I remember it, there were just as many old chooks in the Doctors’

dining room. I believe, in fact, that Mr. NasebyMorton actually managed to lay an egg, which you put on your spoon and ran with all the way downstairs.”

There was a moment of silence, then the Super spoke. “One of these days, Matron, I am going to have the last word! And when I do, I will not be an old chook! I will be cock of the walk! Good day to you, ma’am.”

Ooooooaa! And poop to birthdays. I went to Bronte tonight.

Wednesday, November 23rd, 1960

I saw Duncan today. Professor Sjogren is over from Sweden, and gave a lecture on hypothermic techniques for contending with vascular anomalies in the brain.

All of Queens above the domestic level wanted to go, but our 228

lecture theatre only holds five hundred, so the competition for a seat was fierce.

The old Swede is a great neurosurgeon with a worldwide reputation in pioneering this idea of freezing the patient to slow down heart and circulation before going in to clip the aneurysm or close the shunt or whatever. As technician in charge of Cas X-ray, I rated a seat, found myself wedged between Sister Cas and none other than Mr. Duncan Forsythe. Oh, it was agony! We couldn’t help but be in bodily contact, and my whole right side burned for hours after. He acknowledged me with a curt nod but no smile, then stared at the podium throughout when he wasn’t chatting to Mr. NasebyMorton on his other side.

Sister Tesoriero, who runs Kids’ Bones, was on Sister Cas’s far side, and they were having their usual scrap. “I really work,” Marie O’Callaghan was saying, “whereas you ward charges are pure decoration. You run around peeing in the H.M.O.s’ pockets and giving them tomato sandwiches for their cuppa instead of the peanut butter the rest of the poor mortals get.”

“Ssssh!” I hissed. “I’m sitting next to you-knowwho!”

Sister Cas merely smirked, but Sister Tesoriero took a horrified look and shut up. Her darling Mr. Forsythe, chief of Kids’ Bones, might not approve of eating tomato sandwiches if he realised that the rest of the poor mortals got peanut butter. He was so nice.

For a while I debated whether I could clap my hand to my mouth and bolt pretending I was sick on the

stomach, but as we were in the very centre of the long wooden bench, I’d earn more attention than I would if I just endured it.

I don’t think I heard a word of the lecture, and the second it was over I was up and ready to join the mass exodus. He’d leave with Mr. NasebyMorton by the far aisle, thank God. But he didn’t. He followed me, with the chief of cardiac surgery following him to continue their chat. Then he put his hands on either side of my waist, the idiot! Isn’t he aware that half the feminine eyes in any crowd are riveted on him? The touch was a caress, not a squeeze, and it all came back in a rush, those big, well-cared-for hands that could crunch through bone in one swoop yet were so reverent as they roamed my skin, so shiversome. My head spun, I staggered. Which was the best thing I could have done, looking back on it now. He could keep his hands there, steady me, even turn me so that he could see my face.

“Thank you, thank you, sir!” I gasped, broke free and bolted to the Sisters Cas and Tesoriero, well ahead of me.

“What was that all about?” Sister Cas asked as I reach them.

“I tripped,” I said, “and Mr. Forsythe caught me.” “Half your luck!”

sighed Sister Tesoriero.

Half my luck, nothing. The bastard did it deliberately to see how I reacted, and I bloody obliged him.

Sister Cas, who knows me much better, simply looked thoughtful. What was wrong with my face?

Thursday, December 1st, 1960 Incredible to think that 1960 is almost over.

Last year at this time I was still at Ryde Hospital, had just completed my exams, hadn’t yet seen the Royal Queens booth at Sydney Tech, let alone contemplated working there. Didn’t know Pappy, didn’t know about Mrs.

Delvecchio Schwartz or The House. Didn’t know that my angel puss existed.

Ignorance is bliss, they say, but I do not believe that. Ignorance is a trap which leads people to make the wrong decisions. Harold and Duncan notwithstanding, I am so glad that when I emerged from my chrysalis, I became a big, handsome Bogong moth, not a frail butterfly.

If it’s been a fairly decent sort of a day, I’m home by four or half-past.

Today being only middling, I knocked off a bit after five, and so walked home with Pappy, who has just finished her exams. She thinks she scraped a pass, and I’m sure she has. There are never enough nurses, thanks to the grinding discipline, the hard labour and the obligation to live in a nurses’ home. It’s the last worries me the most; after all, as a nurses’ aide she’s been subjected to even more stringent discipline because aides are the lowest of the low. But how will Pappy manage to live in a weeny room if she’s at a hospital with a big home, or share a weeny room if she’s at a hospital less well endowed?

“You’ll keep your room at The House,” I said as we strode out.

“No, I can’t afford to,” she said, “and quite honestly, dear Harriet, I’m not sure that I want to.”

Oh, what is happening? Toby saying he’s going, now Pappy! I’m going to be left with Jim, Bob, Klaus and Harold. And two new tenants, one of whom will live next door to me. Without those floor-to-ceiling books, I’ll hear everything when I’m in bed-there is a sealedoff door between us with Victorian panels in it as thin as plywood. That sounds so selfish, and I suppose it is selfish, but no Pappy doesn’t bear thinking of. God rot Professor Ezra Marsupial! When she killed his child, she killed something in herself that has nothing to do with foetuses.

“I think you should try to make the effort to keep a bolt-hole in The House,”

I said as we crossed Oxford Street. “For one thing, you’ll never be able to take a twentieth of your books with you, and for another, you’re too old for all that jolly, giggly sort of communal life. Pappy, they’re babies!”

Oh, what an unfortunate slip of the tongue! She ignored it.

“I shall probably be able to rent something halfway between a shed and a cottage at Stockton,” she said. “I’ll keep my books in it, and spend my days off there.”

I only heard “Stockton”. “Stockton?” I gasped.

“Yes, I’m applying to go psychiatric nursing at Stockton,” she said.

“Jesus, Pappy, you can’t!” I cried, halting outside Vinnie’s Hospital. “Psych nursing is bad enough

everybody knows that the nurses and doctors are loonier than the patients, but Stockton is the dumping ground to end all dumping grounds! Out there in the sand dunes on the far side of the Hunter estuary, with all the aments, dements and biological nightmares-it’ll kill you!”

“I’m hoping it will heal me,” she said.

Yes, of course. It’s exactly what a Pappy would do. It’s so easy for Catholics, they can renounce the world, take the veil and enter a convent. But what can non-Catholics do? Answer: take the cap and go psych nursing at Stockton, a hundred miles to Newcastle and then catch the ferry to nowhere. She’s expiating her sins in the only way she knows.

“I understand completely,” I said, started walking again. Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz was lurking in the front hall when we came in, greeted us in the most peculiar way. “Oh, do I need the pair of youse!” she exclaimed, looked agitated and worried, then had to muffle a laugh.

The laugh calmed me immediately-Flo was all right, then. If something had happened to Flo, there would have been no laugh.

“Well?” I asked.

“It’s Harold,” said Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. “Can youse take a squizzy at him, Harriet?”

The last thing I wanted to do was to take a look at Harold, but this was definitely a medical request. In medical matters, I outrank Pappy in our landlady’s eyes.

“Of course. What’s the trouble?” I asked as we ascended.

Whereupon she clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle a guffaw, then waved the hand about and burst into a huge bellow of mirth. “I know it ain’t funny, princess, but Jeez, it is funny!” she said when she could. “The funniest thing I seen in years! Oh, Jeez, I can’t help meself! It’s fuh-fuh-funny!” And off she went again.

“Stop it, you old horror!” I snapped. “What’s wrong with Harold?”

“He can’t pee!” she yelled, in fits once more. “I beg your pardon?”

“He can’t pee! He-can’t-pee! Oh, Jeez, it’s funny!” Her mirth was so infectious that it was an effort to keep my face straight, but I managed. “Poor Harold. When did this happen?”

“I dunno, princess,” she said, wiping her eyes on her dress and revealing an amazing pair of pink bloomers almost down to her knees. “All I know is that he’s been hoggin’ the dunny lately. I thought it was the constipation-keeps it all bottled up, does Harold: Anyway, Jim and Bob complained, Klaus complained, and Toby just gallops down to the laundry dunny. I told Harold to take some Epsom salts or cascara or something, and he turned all huffy. It’s been goin’ on for days! This arvo he forgot to bolt the dunny door when he come in, so I barged in to give ‘im a piece of me mind.” The laughter threatened, she suppressed it heroically. “And there he was standin’ in front of the dunny, floggin’ his poor old dingus and cryin’ like his heart was broken. Took him ages to come clean-you

know what an old maid he is. He-can’t-pee!” Off she went into another convulsion.

I’d had enough of her. “Well, you can stand there howling your head off if you want, but I’m going to see Harold,” I said, and marched up to his room.

I’d never seen it before, of course. Like its owner it was drab, neat and utterly lacking in imagination. A silver-framed photo of an old and haughty woman with spite in her eyes stood on his fireplace mantel; on each side of it was a posy of flowers in matched little vases. So many books! Beau Geste. The Scarlet Pimpernel. The Prisoner o f Zenda. The Dam Busters. The Wooden Horse. The Count o f Monte Cristo. Tap Roots. These Old Shades. The Foxes o f Harrow. All the Hornblower novels. An extraordinary collection of derringdo, knights in shining armour and the kind of romantic fantasy I’d finished with by the time I was twelve.

I smiled at him and said a soft hello. The poor man was sitting hunched on the side of his single bed; when I spoke, he looked at me with pain-racked eyes.

Then when he realised who it was, the pain vanished, was replaced by outrage.

“You told her!” he shrieked at Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, who was standing in the doorway. “How could you tell her?”

“Harold, I work in a hospital, that’s why Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz told me.

I’m here to help you, so come on, no nonsense, please! You can’t manage to urinate, is that right?”

His face was twisted, his arms were clasped protectively across his belly, his back was bent like a bow, he trembled very finely, rocked back and forth. Then he nodded.

“How long has it been going on?” I asked. “Three weeks,” he whispered.

“Three weeks! Oh, Harold! Why didn’t you tell anybody? Why didn’t you see a doctor?”

In answer he wept, his dam broken, the tears sliding sparsely from beneath the bottom rim of his glasses like juice being squeezed from a dried lemon.