Fallen (23 page)

‘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
tsk
ed 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.

I went out to the yard. A close, oppressive darkness had fallen while I was trudging up and down the halls pushing linen baskets. Fitz and Christy sat side by side staring straight ahead, not speaking, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Each had a mug of tea in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Curls of steam and smoke rose unnoticed from their fists. ‘I hope you're not going out again,' I said. ‘You look worn out.'

‘One or two more go-arounds, then we'll call it a night,' Fitz said. They told me the battle was over at Mount Street Bridge. It was too soon to say how many had died there, how many had been injured. There was still sporadic fighting towards the docks and the river. They were gathering in the last of the afternoon's wounded, the less serious cases, the ones that had been able to wait.

‘I'd say you'd be safe enough to go back,' Fitz said.

Christy shook his head. ‘There's a curfew.' He drained his mug of tea and dropped the butt of his cigarette into it. ‘And snipers.'

‘Do you know if things are bad in Cabra?' I asked. ‘Or Rutland Square?'

‘No news is good news.' Fitz put on his cap and adjusted
it. ‘We'll give you a lift back around the corner, if you like. We're headed that way.'

I was glad of it. The thought of crossing even that short, familiar distance alone and in the dark filled me with dread, after the horrors of the day. And I was uneasy about having stayed away so long. I hoped they were all safe and sound, and that they hadn't worried about me. I wondered about my own family, on the other side of the city, but Christy said there wasn't a hope in hell of getting across the river, unless I'd a submarine in my pocket.

There were soldiers at the east end of Percy Place. I asked Christy to let me out at the lane. I'd slip around the back and avoid questions. Fitz said he'd watch 'til I'd got in the back garden door. He walked me to the corner and gave me a black St John's badge stitched to a cuff. ‘If you have to go out again – take this. Use it if you run into trouble. Say you've been helping us. It's no more than the truth.'

A large cloud covered most of the half moon. The lane was a narrow well of darkness 'til my eyes adjusted to the inky light. I held my left hand to the wall and felt my way along the cool bumpy brick, an angled corner, the neighbours' garden door, then Dote's. I waved to Fitz, even though I could barely see him, and put my thumb to the smooth metal saddle of the latch, my foot at last to the path. I closed the garden door and rested my forehead on the wood for a second, gathering my strength for the last short stretch of ground I had to cover. I moved as quietly as I could, barely breathing. With nightfall, the garden was treacherous, the path longer than it should be, shadows larger, darker, closer. Ahead of me a square of light came from the kitchen window. A figure crossed it. Hubie. The darkness thinned as I got closer. Giddy with relief, I dodged the hard corner of the bench and knocked on the glass, no need for the key.

He leaned on a broom, an astonishing sight, and gave me
a long look, in no hurry to let me in. One side of his mouth lifted.

‘Are the others in bed?' I asked, when he opened the door.

‘They went to your friend in Herbert Park. The ambulance men said they'd be safe there. May's nerves were bad. Dote was in quite a state as well.'

‘You let them go alone?'

‘I did not; I went with them. Then they sent me back again. They were worried about what would happen if you came back and found no one here. Your peace of mind, apparently, matters more than the safety of a crotchety, disposable nephew.'

‘Proper order.' To hide the embarrassment I actually felt, I went to the dresser for a cup. ‘I'm parched.'

‘Mind you, I think it was Paschal they were really concerned about. He hid.'

‘Or the house.' I turned back into the dim light from the single lamp he'd left burning on the table.

‘Or all three. Have you been at the hospital since?'

‘I have.' It was a mistake to come back here. I didn't want to have to explain why my hair was coming loose or why my blouse was crumpled when I took off my coat and folded it over the back of a chair. He made no comment, as if he knew I'd reached my limit. I took the cup to the sink and filled it, looking out. A burst of shots I didn't bother to remark on seemed to drive the last clouds away towards the sea. A sliver of moon hung in a cluster of stars directly overhead. The garden turned silvery-blue. The cold clean water soothed my mouth and dusty throat.

‘There were soldiers here, but they left a while back. They couldn't get a clear line of fire. All the windows at the front of the house are broken, as you can see.' He gestured towards the far window, which had a lacy appearance, more hole than stitch. ‘I've been sweeping up the glass.'

I took the dust-pan out from the curtained shelf under the sink and hunkered down so he could sweep the shards of glass and ordinary dirt on to it. ‘How soon do you think Dote and May will come back?'

‘Not before morning, with the curfew. I'm surprised you got through. Then again, I'm not. You seem to do what you want.'

I was taken aback. Was that how I appeared to him?

He hooked his damaged hand around the shaft of the broom and took the dust-pan from me, brought it to the door and went outside to empty it. When he came back, a sliver of moonlight spilled into the house around his feet. He shut the door. I didn't know whether to mock or applaud his work. It amazed me, that people would always try to clean up a mess, mend broken furniture, replace shattered glass, as if the wild forces of the world weren't out there waiting to break in again and smash it all to pieces.

He put his hand into one of May's plant pots. ‘It's bone-dry.'

I filled the little watering jug and went over to him, my eyes so tired they played tricks on me in the shifting light. His empty knuckles on the soil looked as though the fingers were still there, rooted deep, out of sight. I gave him the jug. He watered the plant, then went around moistening the roots of others, as I'd often seen May do.

When he finished, we sat at the kitchen table in candlelight. I told him about Eva, and my worry. His sympathy made me uneasy. I'd avoided the topic of his family, not knowing how he'd react if his fiancée's name, or his brother's, came up. I gathered my courage and told him I'd heard the story from Dote, and I was sorry.

He shrugged. ‘Far worse if I'd married her, and discovered her true colours later. She did me a favour.' He raised his injured arm. ‘After this, I'd have gone back and settled into a subordinate position in the family business, something of a
charity case and grateful for it. I'd always be the damaged second son.'