Chapter Nineteen
Nineteen
His letter is still unopened. It is lying on the kitchen table beside a cup of coffee, my third or fourth. It is cold, they have all gone cold. I touch the edge of the envelope and realise I have been waiting for it all this time. Find me, I’d said, at the end.
I don’t pick it up. I don’t open it. I haven’t remembered it all and I need to wait a bit longer.
Waiting. I am not good at waiting, and I am reminded of Bill.
I search the Red Cross box. I know it’s there, another letter. One I kept from that time. They could bring salve or sorrow. We longed for them but dreaded what they might say.
Between July and November 1916, I became lost to myself. We all remember that time, no matter how we lived it. It tested us and each of us was altered, for better or worse. Mostly worse.
It is the numbers we talk about now, numbers too big to comprehend. But the detail is missing. We are missing: Iso, Alison and me. Hugo is missing, the boys on the German ward are missing. Bill is missing.
It was worse than anything we could have imagined. The particulars were always kept from us, but we’d been told to prepare for a push. Supplies were stockpiled and leave was cancelled and we knew there would be more boys disgorged from trains than we had so far seen. Still, we were not prepared.
The trains and ambulances seemed never to rest. They belched out bodies and we picked over them like vultures, looking for signs of life or of inevitable death. I remember the first but not the last of the dead boys still breathing.
‘Leave him,’ someone shouted.
I bent to the boy on the stretcher and put my lips against his bloodied ear. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I breathed with barely a sound. I was too ashamed to be heard.
After that they were all, somehow, Bill.
It had been weeks since his last letter and my brother lay on every stretcher.
I ignored the fact they did not have freckles, that their hair was blond or brown, their skin olive or as dark as night.
Bill? I would ask, and some of them would say, Yes, I am Bill, and I would stay with them and we would talk like siblings until I was reprimanded and moved on.
When I slept, which was never for long, I dreamed of the German ward.
Bill was the boy in bed four and I was never allowed to care for him.
They would keep me from him. Sometimes it was Alison, sometimes Hugo.
Bitte, I’d hear Bill say, and his eyes would find me and his arm would reach out.
I would go to him and be pushed back. Bitte, he would say again and I would go to him and be pushed back.
In waking, the German ward was my only respite.
In waking, Bill’s broken body would not end up there.
I would not need to hear his lungs fill with blood.
I would not need to pretend there was a chance when there wasn’t.
I would not be the one to deny him release, or administer mercy.
In waking, all the patients were German and I would not be pushed back or moved on.
I offered to do double shifts on the German ward instead of the extra shifts on British wards, but I was refused.
Iso walked with me along Isolation Road, holding my arm as if we were sisters, to ensure I did not stumble from fatigue. She’d woken me from a sleep that needed ten hours but was given four, then she’d peeled off my uniform and helped me dress in another.
How long had it been since I’d slept for more than four hours?
I couldn’t say. Those months are like a broken plate – I’ve kept all the pieces with the intention of repair, but even now I’m not sure what goes where.
There is the journal. There are a few drawings that Iso made.
And there is the letter, the one I hoped for and dreaded.
In the journal I’ve written, He rubbed at my earlobe and suddenly it hurt. Exquisitely, it hurt. It is a fragment but now I am remembering it whole.
‘Carnage,’ I said.
I was in the storeroom, changing my bloodied apron.
Eight hours of triage on open ground outside St John’s.
They kept coming and there was no room in the hospital.
A half-hour to rest. Is that what I did?
I sat with my head in my hands and someone brought me coffee, black with plenty of sugar so I could go on to my next shift.
Hugo walked in and that’s all I could say, over and over.
‘Carnage.’
He licked his thumb. ‘You have blood…’
But he didn’t finish. He just brought his hand towards my face and began to rub at my earlobe.
I began to tell him about the unending delivery of broken bodies coming from the Somme, though I knew he didn’t want to hear it, that he could hardly bear the telling.
It was selfish but necessary. I could feel nothing more than a vague pulling on my ear so I kept speaking; I couldn’t stop.
He was so close and I knew he could feel the breath of my words on his face, that he could smell their foulness.
I’d had no time to bathe and black coffee was my mouthwash, its bitterness sweetened but it was not enough.
The trains had come through the day and into the night, ambulances going back and forth to the station, filling with stretchers, then emptying, filling, then emptying.
‘Where do they keep all those stretchers,’ I said, and he did not answer, but he continued to rub and I began to feel the lobe of my ear between his thumb and finger and I was afraid he would stop, so I kept talking.
‘How can they not run out?’ I said, and without pause I asked another question, then another.
I kept talking and he kept rubbing my ear and it began to hurt and I felt the pain as pleasure and I hoped the blood had stained so he would continue rubbing, so that he would not stop.
‘How do they not run out of bandages?’ I asked, because I really wanted to know and I imagined a factory of women, row after row, tearing up cloth and rolling, rolling, rolling.
‘All those boys,’ I whispered, as if it were a secret, ‘how do they not run out?’ I thought he might know, and I asked it again and again.
But he just shook his head and kept rubbing until the pleasure of the pain was just pain and I stopped talking.
He stopped rubbing but his thumb and finger remained where they were. It was a strange embrace and we held it for hours, it seems, though it could only have been seconds.
He stepped back, quite suddenly, letting me go. He blinked like someone waking.
‘Carnage,’ he said. ‘It comes from the Latin for flesh.’