The Barracks (14 page)

They'd be shy at first, thinking she must grow grand and away from them in a great city like London, and she making things more awkward still by telling them what they could not believe—that she was growing more and more the simple human being that had been forced to leave them the first day.

The sheer ecstasy of laying out the presents on the deal table in the lamplight. She'd have spent every penny of money and imagination and now was the hour of indulgence, the blessed ecstasy of giving and being accepted in love, tears lighting her eyes as she watched their faces while they stripped away the festival paper, patterned with red berries and the green, spiked leaves of the holly. Every gift was wrapped in yards of paper so that their imaginations would have chance to make a glory out of the poor thing she had brought, she had gone without things for herself to bring these presents, gone without for weeks before Christmas. And she would do it again. She would do it again and again and again.

Soon they'd force her to sit to her meal and they'd even remembered the dishes she used like best as a child. Now was their turn. They had her present. She gave sharp cries as she tore away the twine and paper, “What is it? What can it be?” and it was there and she was breathing, “Oh, it is too much and so lovely”, as she lifted the shining bracelet and they gathered about to gloat over her happiness.

They were a big family and she was young then, and full of life, which is the only youth, and far rarer than beauty. They'd sit together about the blazing pile of ash on the hearth and she'd make them go over every scrap of local news. She'd tell them about London. They'd laugh much. The whiskey and sherry bottles that were kept for Occasions
would be brought out of hiding and someone would sing: because Elizabeth was home.

What did it matter that it had all slowly broken up and separation had come before even the first death? It didn't matter, she must affirm that—it made no difference! Only her happiness mattered. She'd been given all that much happiness and she wanted to praise and give thanks.

She was not really going in a common taxi to a common death. She had a rich life, and she could remember. She'd suffer a thousand anythings for one such Christmas again.

She reached over and took Reegan's hand, her face alive with joy, and he held it uneasily. He couldn't understand. She was at the gates of the hospital and the defeated woman that had faced him in the train was gone. He was uneasy and couldn't understand.

The hospital was in its own grounds, trees partly shutting it away from the city; a new state hospital, modern and American, several rectangles of flat roofs in geometric design, the walls more glass than concrete.

They didn't notice much as they paid the taxi and asked the way with their cases to the reception desk. Elizabeth's name was checked on the list of admittances for the day and they were sent to wait in a kind of hall or corridor facing four official doors. A few little groups already waited there about their own patient, all lonely-looking and humble and watching. The doors opened and people in white coats came out to call their names off a file in their turn.

Elizabeth was strained and tense by the time the formalities
were finished. The last she had to do was check in her things at the desk and get a receipt. A porter was waiting to take her to her ward. She had to say good-bye to Reegan.

“Is there anything else, Elizabeth?” he asked. She watched his face and coat and hands with the swollen veins. She was quiet with fear. She might never see his greying hair again, the two deep lines over the forehead, the steel blue eyes, the scar on the upper lip, the short throat, the gaberdine coat he wore, the veins swollen on the back of his hands. She might never even see this corridor where they were standing. She

might never get out alive. When she took leave of his lips she might be moving into death.

“I'll tell the children,” he said when she didn't speak.

“Buy them something. Say I sent it back,” she managed.

“That's all right. There's nothing else, is there?”

“No. Not that I can think. There's nothing else.”

“Don't worry, Elizabeth. All you have to do is get well soon. Some Thursday we'll come up on the excursion ticket, the four of us. We'll all write before then. We'll ring the day of the operation.…”

He saw her wince. He was conscious of the porter waiting. “There's nothing more so?” he puzzled for the last time. “Good-bye, Elizabeth, everything will be all right,” and they kissed in the stiff public way of hospital farewells, as bad actors would.

She could say nothing. He came with her to the lift, let go her hand at the entrance, the porter pressing one of the lighted buttons for the door to slide between them.

When the door had shut and the lift rose he lingered, pervaded by that sense of vague melancholy that can be as powerfully evoked by the singing of
Good-bye to the White
Horse Inn
as by a real departure. Their lives were flowing apart and she was alone and he was alone and it was somehow sad and weepycreepy.

Through one of the glass doors he saw a pair of patients in dressing-gowns and slippers talking at a radiator. One was drawing for the other on his bandaged throat what must have been the incisions the surgeon had made. Then the other started to trace another pattern across his stomach, making great slashes with his fingers. One had cancer of the throat, the other stomach cancer, Reegan deduced. He watched the white bandages on the throat in morbid fascination: that man would choke to death one of these days! And the really lunatic part of this dumb show was that they were both as excited as blazes, working hand and lip as if they were trying to make up for ages of silence. It was quite enough to shake him out of his mood of melancholy and send him on his way.

He walked quick as he could, down the tree-bordered avenue, past the little lodge at the gates with the two round lamps on the piers that came on at night, and got on the first bus to the Pillar.

He had something to eat in O'Connell Street, bought three fountain pencils with the inscription
Present from
Dublin
as he had promised Elizabeth, and then loitered about the streets with the fascination of country people for faces, the thousands of faces that poured past, not one that he knew; strange to understand that they were all subdued and absorbed in their own lives, that such constant friction of bodies didn't cause them to strangle each other or copulate in mass.

He got tired tramping and standing about, his feet not used to the asphalt, but he had hours to kill before his train went. In this city he'd been trained, in the Depot in the Phoenix Park, and he inquired the numbers of the buses for there and got on one.

Findlater's Church, Dorset Street, Phibsboro, St Peter's Church, the Cattle Market; and as the bus went, the rows of plane trees seemed to run the length of the Circular Road to the Wellington rising out of the Park and join branches about its base there.

The Depot was behind its railing. A group of recruits were drilling under the clock on the square and it hadn't even changed its black hands. Two policemen stood with their thumbs hooked in their tunic pockets outside the guardhouse,
coming lazily to attention to salute the cars that went in and out. Reegan watched and listened greedily, the bellowed commands, the even stamping of the boots, the buttons flashing when they wheeled, his life at twenty echoed there.

“The poor humpers!” he muttered and it didn't take it long to turn to the frustration of his own situation. Ever since he'd come up against the fact that life just doesn't hand you out things because you happen to want them, he'd carried a grudge. He'd never understand that it's an extremely limited bastard as far as satisfaction goes: and he
saw the fault in the strip of green and gold with the white between flying over the Depot, symbolizing the institution of Eire now as it had done as good for his dream once, and this drilling square turning out men to keep its peace in the blue uniform that he'd have to wear when the train took him out of the city and home.

The tests found Elizabeth worn and anaemic, her heart had weakened, she had to be given blood transfusions and let rest. The day before the operation the anaesthetist introduced
himself to make his examination, and late in the evening the chaplain came to hear her confession.

She confessed to a usual rigmarole of sins already confessed and forgiven in her past life. She didn't love or hate enough, she thought, to commit them any more; she hadn't envy as she hadn't desire enough left; and who was she to curse! She only got more and more frightened as the days went. She had failed and despaired and given up so many times in the last months, and good God, how little she trusted! She had neither words nor formulas to parrot out the catalogue of this state, and how could something so much the living state of herself be state of sin? She seemed to have grown into it rather than fallen from anything away, she could not be sorry. She met the priest's gaze with a gaze as steady as his own: he was a man too, he knew nothing more than she knew, and if she couldn't find words for herself in her loneliness how could they be got out of a double confusion; and words, she knew, didn't profoundly matter anyhow; nor did human understanding, because it understood nothing.

She met him face to face and assured him that she had nothing on her mind, she was grateful for his solicitude, but she had absolutely no worries. He seemed to dislike her gaze as steady and sure as his own. He told her peevishly that she had no need to be grateful for what was his duty. She bent her eyes. He may not have had an easy day, she thought: she heard the words of absolution, and he was gone to another bed.

He was gone. The aluminium of a trolley shone under the blaze of the electric lights beside the sterilizing room. She heard a low moan, a rattle of a newspaper, what sounded like a buckle rang against one of the beds, the rubber foot-soles of a nurse padded down the ward, some one laughed. The walls were the green of a rock sweet she'd been crazy about as a child: from the heart of the city the traffic roared, a great sea of noise. She muffled a sob. Tomorrow morning the anaesthetist would put her into a sleep she might never come out of. Oh, if she could clutch and suck every physical thing around her into her being, so that they'd never be parted; she couldn't let go of these things, it was inconceivable
that she could die!

A nurse came to her bed, a black-haired country girl, who said, “We're giving you something that'll let you have a good night's rest, Mrs Reegan. We must have you in good shape for tomorrow,” and she was at last able to smile and wonder whether the tablets were blessed seconal or sonerzol as she fell asleep.

She was screened off the next morning and a nurse, gowned and masked and with a sterile trolley by, began to prepare her skin for the operation. Both armpits were shaved; the area of both breasts, the arms to the wrists and belly to below the navel were washed, painted with iodine, and covered with a sterile towel. She stiffened with fear as the screens were pulled about the bed and then fear itself was displaced by the loathsome shame of having to expose her body to be handled and shaved and washed.

This nurse at her bedside felt no disgust or shame, she tried to tell herself; she had long become practised and indifferent, it was just another job in her day she could do well, as it had been the same once for Elizabeth in her days on the wards in London.

So why should she be shamed because it was her own body this time—was she shamed when this same body was excreted by her mother or when it had strutted in the rouge of its youth? No, if she wasn't shamed then, neither could she be now, she had to accept all or nothing, she couldn't
go away with the pretty bits and turn up her nose at the rest, and why should any one be shamed by anything if they weren't shamed by everything! They helped her into an open-back gown. She put on white theatre socks and cap and was covered with a theatre pack, dressed as if for some old rite, horribly unreal, and then she was given atropine. The drug went quickly to her head: she began to laugh and talk; everything was bathed in a light of loveliness and wonder as the porter, with the nurse at her side, wheeled her out of the ward and down the corridors towards the theatre.

Hours later a nurse was urging her back to consciousness.

“Wake up! You must wake up. It's time you were awake! Wake up, Mrs Reegan! Wake up!”

She moaned, some unconscious protest stuttered on her lips, she tried to sink back.

The nurse increased her exertions, “Wake up! You must wake up out of that, Mrs Reegan! Wake up out of that,” and slapping at her face.

She had to wake. Pain tore away the drugs and sleep. She moaned and cried as it engulfed her whole consciousness.

They had laid her on her side, her arm was in a sling and rested on a pillow, the bandages about her were saturated with blood.

“I can't stand it. Something … Give me something,” she tried to moan.

The nurses left to bring back the ward sister. Together they examined the bandages and the tube that had been inserted at the completion of the operation.

“No. I don't think there's need to report,” she heard the sister say and passed into a delirious state of semi-consciousness as they repacked the saturated dressing and replaced the breast bandage firmly again. They propped her up and put a pillow at the bottom of the bed so that she could push against it with her feet. She moaned for relief and was given morphia but it didn't make much difference for long. She moaned and cried. How on earth was she to stand this mangled body. The idea of pain had always terrified her, and now she felt nothing else.

She must escape. If she could get an overdose of drugs that'd sink her into a night of unfeeling, she didn't fear or care about death. “Oh, please God, send something,” she prayed. “Send anything, anything that'll change this. Get me out of this hell.”