Martin Sloane (16 page)

“You think I didn’t love you,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter what you felt anymore. I want to know about the rest of it.”

“The rest is gone,” he said, and he shrugged. “I have to go now.”

“Go where.”

“Where I live. Iona Road.”

“I know that,” I said bitterly and waved him away. “Go,” I said, and he moved off down a path between trees.

VI.

DIARY, 1963. 10" X 6" X 4" BOX CONSTRUCTION. WOOD AND GLASS WITH FABRIC, CARDBOARD, FIBREGLASS. ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO. A BLUE CURTAIN, PULLED BACK BY MEANS OF TWO DOWELS PROTRUDING FROM THE TOP OF THE CONSTRUCTION, REVEALS A LIFE-SIZE HAND HOLDING DOWN THE TOP OF A MINIATURE CIGAR BOX WITH ITS INDEX FINGER. ENLARGED NEWSPAPER AD DISPLAYING DEPARTURE TIMES OF S.S. ST. LOUIS ON EXTERIOR BACK OF BOX, WITH MIRROR-IMAGE SIGNATURE.

WILLIAM HAD A CRICKET IN HIS HAND, BUT HE WAS
refusing to show it to anyone. They were all standing on Iona Road; Devon was there too, and a boy named Clark they were trying out. This was outside the Beatons’ (number 74), and Martin knew to ignore William when he was like this, but Devon and Clark were red in the face from shouting at him. Down the road, outside number 16, Mr. Warren — the mouse-faced lawyer — opened his front gate and pulled it to. He got into his car. It started quietly; it was a car they said in the ads was the quietest car on the road (Chrysler advertised their Saloon cars the same way — smooth motoring, quiet motoring). Mr. Warren began driving toward Drumcondra Hill and when he came to the little roundabout at Iona Road and Iona Park, they saw his head dip down. Later, the police said Mr. Warren had dropped a piece of toast. The car slid into the roundabout, very slow, and at that moment the cricket jumped in William’s hand and he dropped it. It whirred like a sycamore key and landed in the grass as a car belonging to a Mr. Craigie (number 43, Lindsay Street) struck Mr. Warren’s car on the driver’s side. All four of the boys saw Mr. Warren’s body jump across the other seat, and his head popped out the window on the other side just before the car rolled over, trapping him by the neck. It was very still as the car lay there on its side in the grass circle, the only sound being Mr. Warren’s feet kicking against the passenger door. He thumped five or six times, then stopped. The crash had sounded to the boys like someone stepping on a paper cup.

William and Devon and Clark rushed to the circle as Mr. Craigie stepped from his car and righted his glasses on his nose. Martin watched the four of them push the car back on its thin wheels, but he didn’t look at what was going on in the grass circle.

His head was resting on his shoulder, William later said. The two were best friends, their bedrooms pointing at each other over the street. But the angle, it looked like someone else’s head was asleep on Mr. Warren’s shoulder.

Was there blood? Martin asked.

No. There was butter, though. On his mouth.

The police had come and spoken to Mr. Craigie (who the boys believed would likely be placed before a firing squad, an idea that excited them), then the police spoke to the boys themselves. It was decided between the boys that Clark would no longer be allowed to play with them. He was bad luck. An ambulance came and took Mr. Warren away.

He was broken in two like a stick, said William.

Martin knew why there hadn’t been any blood. It was because the body was made of a soft solid like the middle of a sponge cake, and the body’s skin was only the dry outer layer, slightly tougher from touching the air. Blood was a lie, though, blood he had no faith in. If it were true, why didn’t everyone look like balloons full of water, bulging at the bottom? The whole idea of the body being a container for organs and liquids was beyond ridicule, and was clearly something instigated by adults to get something they wanted out of children. There was the bogeyman to keep you from bothering them after eight o’clock at night, and blood (invoked as a punishment for climbing trees or playing with knives) was the same type of thing, although Martin wasn’t sure what the benefit was to the adults. Some people had even spoken of blue blood, which made everything even more unlikely.

These beliefs obviously began to trouble Martin’s father, who took him to see a doctor named Gorda. Martin’s friends were all afraid of Dr. Gorda, because he had hair on his ears and practised mostly on animals, but Martin had no choice. His father had selected the good doctor to help his son over this problem of blood and guts.

The doctor, a man as old as any Martin had ever seen, took their coats in the dusty front hall (there had never been a Mrs. Gorda, hence a number of rumours about the animal doctor had flourished), and the three of them went into a room with a fireplace. It smelled bad, like old empty bottles, and they couldn’t see much of anything until Dr. Gorda switched on a lamp. There were framed diagrams on the wall, and a little table with crinkled butcher’s paper laid on it. The old man reached for something on the mantel, saying, Let’s start with this. It was a jar, and inside it was half a leather satchel floating in milky water, and inside the satchel was a bundle of pale grapes or tiny yellow plums, Martin couldn’t tell. He noticed also that the satchel had a hand.

Oh my god, his father said.

Martin tried to run out of the room, but the doctor had him by the scruff and pushed his face toward the glass. We’re trying to answer your question, boy.

You’ve cut it open, Martin said. You could have put anything in it.

It was a baby. Just a little baby. Dr. Gorda pointed at things and said their names. The poached egg in the middle was supposed to be a lung. The little ball of clay a heart. Pancreas and spleen, he said. There were noodles coming from the baby’s head, and coral beside its split nose. Its eyelid was closed, but it was almost see-through. It was an excellent model, Martin thought, no longer afraid. In fact, it was fascinating that someone had made such a thing. Little white wisps were coming out of it. The doctor put it on a table and Martin sat with it, now mesmerized, staring at it while Dr. Gorda and his father smoked cigars. Next, the doctor showed Martin pictures. He pushed his fingers into Martin’s skin, saying that the things in the pictures were
under
his skin.

This under here looks like this, he said, showing Martin a fogged round grey thing in the book. A stomach, said the picture. And this — poking Martin in the back — the kidney looks like this.

The bit about kidneys Martin happened to know wasn’t true. He’d seen them in butcher shops — they came from pigs. Dr. Gorda tugged at his pantswaist and pointed. And that … he turned to another page … is this.

The doctor was pointing to a picture of a cooked sausage lying on a piece of stained cheesecloth. Martin wondered if Dr. Gorda believed that these things were inside his own body. As a doctor, he might have. Like priests believed in God. Martin said, I must have been wrong.

Dr. Gorda clapped him on the back. That’s a good boy.

The room had filled with smoke. His father was standing with his back to the jar and the books, and there was a blue cloud around his head. As they put on their coats, Martin started to laugh, but stopped because laughing was what had gotten him there in the first place.

There would be no further challenges to his beliefs about the body until he was a couple of years older. Then, at the age of nine, Martin succumbed to tuberculosis. At the time, it was believed to be carried by pigeons, which were now hunted down in all corners of the city. The sickness started innocently enough, with a light rattling cough and a mild fever, but progressed quickly to breathlessness and a wracking cough that produced a filmy phlegm speckled with blood. Soon he was unable to stand under his own power and they brought him to Temple, the children’s hospital on Temple Street. He remembered the hospital because sometimes he and William would walk in the back and feed the pigs in the stalls behind, or offer to polish the horses’ bridles with Brasso, which put up a scent that made them light-headed. The pigs were Martin’s favourites, though, and the largest of the swine had moustaches that would brush against their palms when they fed them bread and apple cores.

The hospital was full of children and nuns; nurses in their ghostly white costumes swept back and forth against the blue-and-burgundy parquet floors. His mother and father waved to him in the corridor and then someone opened a door behind them and they flashed to shadow. The nurse put a needle in his arm.

He lay in a hard, thin bed. He was frightened and tired, but sleep was no respite from fear. He might be awakened by a sound from the ward, an oddly echoing sound that could resolve into a scream or a moan or, once, to his own sobbing. Other times, one or another of the medical staff would awaken him by taking his pulse (and then his hand would seem very far away to him), or by the sting of a syringe being put into his arm. An older boy, one from school who usually bothered him by following him home and calling his name, appeared on the ceiling early one morning before the sun came up. Once Martin had seen him, the boy walked down the air to the floor and started walking toward him, beating a stick against the metal posts at the ends of the beds. But before he got to Martin’s bed, he changed his mind and instead stood at a distance intoning Maaaartinnnn Maaaartinnnn in a high voice. Then he turned and walked though a child asleep in her bed, and a sidetable, and then out through the wall.

Are do if lake come to say? asked the doctor.

Martin twisted his head away and felt a sharpness in the inside nook of his elbow.

Wander in harm’s sleep, said the doctor to a nurse.

Yes, she said, and then leaned down to Martin. Matter? Motion liffey come.

He fell asleep. In the middle of the night, he woke and sat up. A glow was coming from each of the beds, and he got up and walked through the ward. The light came from the middle of the bodies in those beds — and he noticed also from his own — and he saw that this light illumined the insides of things. Shadows curved away from skin, globules of pink matter throbbed and shuddered. There seemed to be a grey mass twisting through everything. The children’s ward, he saw now, was nothing less than a living larder filled with many tiny red clay hearts and poached-egg lungs. Two kidneys each (the same number as pigs— that wrought an unpleasant connection), miles of involuted tubing, wet brains white as chalk all bound up like rope, all of it pink and damp and giving off light.

Somehow he returned to his bed, and time began to pass again, milling days and nights out of itself. Soon he began to hear church bells, but he couldn’t raise himself enough to look out at the grey Dublin stone. One night, the boy in the bed beside him started groaning and crying, but then Martin drifted off again and the sound fell past him. The next morning, the boy’s bed was empty. A girl across the aisle from him said, He’s gone.

He’s lucky, Martin said.

The girl was one of the older ones. She tilted her head at him. The boy is dead.

No, Martin said, he’s gone home.

He was inside his mum once, she said, like she was reciting a nursery rhyme, and lived in a house. Everything is inside something else, even the air. But now that boy’s in a box and he’s in the ground. A worm will eat his eyes, and a bird will eat the worm, and then he’ll be able to see his mum from the sky.

Later Martin asked if he was going to go into a box.

I don’t think so, said the doctor, and laughed.

I want to be fed to the pigs, he said, and his mother’s eyes went round. I don’t want to be inside a bird.

The boy was dead. Then a girl died, and another, the one from across the aisle. They took her away and she had only one shoe on, a black one — he could see it under the blanket, and her other foot was bare and dark-coloured like a black currant lozenge. The missing shoe was still under the bed across the way. Church shoes. It was wasteful to leave one behind.

What do you say, Theresa? His sister was standing beside the bed, holding their mother’s hand. Theresa’s mouth was covered with a handkerchief.

I hope you come home soon.

I’m almost better, he said, but his sister was looking away at some of the other children in the ward. Three have died.

You might still, she said, sniffling.

Theresa! their mother said.

But I haven’t. He wanted to reassure her, but she was distracted. A couple of her friends were here, too.

Do you have something for your brother? their mother said. Theresa gave him a box with a wooden puzzle in it. She’d earlier put one of the pieces in her pocket, and later, she would drop it in the street. Their mother closed her hand over his. We’ll all be home as a family again soon. You’ll see. Then later, a nurse came by.

You have some nice colour, she said.

A few days later, he could see the weather was changing. He could see the steeple of a church, the Abbey over on Frederick Street. The Dublin winter giving way to a brighter light. It was nearing the end of April. Sometime soon, the boys would begin to gather at the edge of the Royal Canal, dipping their fishing lines in, or jumping right into the cold, black water. It was only fifteen feet across when it went under Phibsborough Road, and slow moving, but once or twice a year a boy would drown and his body would turn up floating by the cattle yard down by the Liffey, or would be fished out near Sir Rogerson’s Quay. William told Martin he’d once seen a boy holding on to a leash float past under the bridge at Drumcondra Hill. He was face down, William said, but once when he told the story, the boy was face up and his eyes were white and there was a dead dog at the end of the leash.

Lying in his bed in the Temple Street Children’s Hospital, Martin didn’t care what happened to careless boys out at the Royal Canal, he just wanted to
get
there, get out there and bake under the sun, with the water like a sheet of glass at his feet. Such imaginings were possible now: that morning, he’d been told his parents would collect him to take him home that afternoon. A vein in the crook of his elbow was black from needles. He’d convinced the nurse with the hair on her nose not to prick him that morning. I’m much better, he’d told her, and she’d taken pity.