Chapter Thirty-Nine
Thirty-nine
The boy in bed four was dying. Slowly, quietly, and yet we heard sobs.
They belonged to the boy from bed eleven, an amputee.
His right foot – I remember that, because Iso had drawn it.
For two weeks, it had been a reliable tableau: the boy from bed eleven sitting beside the boy in bed four, his right leg resting on a stool, the stump at the end a smudge of white.
‘He’s lucky,’ I remember saying to Iso as she sat and sketched, one study after another, bits and pieces of the whole.
She frowned but didn’t look up from her sketchbook, and I thought she needed me to explain.
‘To lose a foot,’ I said, ‘and nothing more.’
I think about the boy from bed eleven. How he sat by the boy in bed four every waking moment.
We’d shoo him back to his own bed when it came time to wash his friend or change the sheets.
But there was one time I let him stay, and I saw the way he followed the movement of my flannel as it stroked the skin of his friend’s body.
He showed no fascination with the boy’s funnel chest and the way it collected water, like a pond, or the long ragged scar from some battle before the one that had brought him to us.
He had seen them before, I realised. When I wiped over a mole in the hollow between hip and groin, the boy from bed eleven bit his quivering lip.
He’d kissed that mole in some filthy dugout or in a wood or below the beams of an abandoned barn when no one else was around.
And he knew, as I knew, that he never would again.
Iso used pencil and the page filled with hands – the small hands of the boy in bed four and the larger hands of his friend. They were disembodied and disconnected; she was trying to get them right.
Hands, Iso told me, are the most honest part of the body.
They’ll contradict what we say and they’ll say what we can’t.
She loved to draw them and she admitted to sometimes feeling awkward when she became aware of what she was capturing.
Two hands in proximity, she said once, can reveal an intimacy that wants to stay hidden.
I watched as she drew the boy from bed eleven with the boy in bed four. I watched her turn the page of her sketchbook, the hand she’d been working on unfinished, like a fingerless glove. She started fresh, drawing quickly, the larger hand cradling the small.
I looked towards bed four and saw that the boy from bed eleven had taken his friend’s hand.
I watched as he bowed his head and touched his lips to his friend’s inert fingers.
I remembered then that Helen and I had been called friends, just as we called these boys friends.
Such an ambiguous word, dishonest and true at the same time.
I looked back at Iso’s sketchbook and there they were – the small hand in the larger, lips against fingers.
But already it was abandoned and she was starting again, her eyes darting back and forth between page and subject, her pencil frantic.
The soft touch of lips on fingers was gone.
Iso was drawing an open mouth and teeth biting.
It took me a second to realise, and then I turned.
The small hand was dripping blood and the lover was licking it.
I became part of the tableau, my hand among theirs, separating them.
The boy from bed eleven could not wake his friend and he sobbed into my belly.
Later, I asked Iso for the sketch: the love bite, I called it.
She didn’t have it, and I assumed she’d torn it up.
But sometimes I wonder if it ever existed.
I do have one of the other drawings. It’s in the Red Cross box – the boy from bed eleven with his leg propped up, the small hand of his friend held tenderly in his own.
How lucky that boy was, I think bitterly, to lose a foot and nothing more.