Chapter Twenty-One
The boy in bed four sounded like a blocked drain.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ I asked Alison.
‘Shell splinters – lungs, stomach, bowel,’ she said, without looking up from her desk.
I went to the bedside and peered at his face.
It was pale and covered in freckles. Like Bill, I thought, automatically, as you do when a feature of one you love is suddenly there in front of you.
On its own, it meant very little. But I made the mistake of taking an inventory: full lips, like Bill; red hair, like Bill – not quite the colour of carrots, though that never stopped the barbs.
And suddenly I knew something about the boy in bed four: that he’d been teased, a little or a lot.
‘Filthy Hun,’ I whispered as I put my hand against his cheek, the way I’d put my hand against Bill’s when he was small and easily hurt.
The boy in bed four was hot, his breath short and bubbling.
His lips, Bill’s lips, were pale, a little blue and very dry.
Did he have a sister? I wondered. I imagined her as a nurse on the other side of no-man’s-land.
A blue dress similar to mine, a white apron, a red cross, a few words of English.
She was looking into the face of a British boy with freckles and wondering if her brother was alive or dead or somewhere between the two.
I wanted her to know he was being looked after, that he wasn’t alone.
I wanted her to care for Bill like he was her own.
I took the tin of Vaseline I kept in the pocket of my apron and smeared a little on the boy’s lips. I kissed him on the forehead.
It had been more than a month since I’d heard from Bill.
‘What’s the treatment?’ I asked Alison.
She was watching me from her desk, her eyebrows motionless.
‘Vaseline on chapped lips,’ she said. ‘And nothing more.’
My hand rested on the boy’s shoulder and I had an impulse to remove it. To obey. When had that begun? I wondered. I’d always resisted compliance. I thought of Bill and kept my hand where it was. ‘Will he recover?’
‘No.’
She ignored the transgression and returned her attention to her notes. She would record the Vaseline but not the hand on the shoulder, and not the kiss on his forehead.
Hugo said Alison’s notes were so meticulous that any nurse or doctor could walk onto the German ward and know everything they needed to know. It impressed him. But I realised, then, how much she left out of the official record. Denial or blind eye, I was never sure.
The boy in bed four was struggling.
‘When will he die?’ I asked.
‘Today, if he’s lucky.’
Her note taking continued and I thought she didn’t care.
‘We did this,’ I said.
‘Yes, we did. But they started it.’
‘That’s a child’s excuse. Surely we’re better than that.’
Her note taking stopped and she looked up, just enough for me to see her raised brows, like a schoolmistress: must I explain everything, they seemed to say. ‘What do you think children are doing when they fight in the playground and later lay blame?’
I shook my head.
‘Practising,’ she said. ‘We are not better than that.’
The boy in bed four did not die that day, or the next. On his third day on the ward I ran out of Vaseline, but still, he persisted. At the end of my shift I sat by his bed.
‘Your shift is over,’ said Alison. ‘You should go.’
‘I know.’
‘But you’re not going to.’
‘No.’
‘He’s not your brother, Tilda.’
‘I know that.’
Her brows weren’t convinced. ‘As you insist on staying, I will take advantage. Will you stay until the Hun and sister arrive?’
‘Of course.’
‘Good, I have a meeting this evening, which is likely to be tedious and argumentative. Staffing and rosters. This ward is high on my agenda and low on everyone else’s so I need to sharpen my tongue.’
‘Do you use a file?’
‘Of sorts.’ She reached into the bottom drawer of the desk and pulled out the small flask she kept there. ‘I used to fill it with Bushmills, now it’s just any old barbed-wire spirit.’
‘Rough.’
‘Very. But it wakes me up.’
‘Initially.’
‘I’m careful with the dosage.’
Alison left and the ward was quiet, though memory can cast a veil over anything that does not matter and it’s more likely that men called out and moaned and cried. I hope I didn’t ignore them, but all I recall is being beside the boy in bed four and talking to him about Bill.
‘He never wanted to hurt anyone, not even those who hurt him.’
I washed his face.
‘He always did the cooking and the mending. They should have given him a wooden spoon instead of a gun.’
I combed his hair and parted it on the side that Bill preferred.
‘You’d like Bill, everyone does. And he’d like you. He could never bring himself to hate anyone, which is why he didn’t want to come here. But they made him. They humiliated him.’
I dipped my fingers in the glass of water by his bed and held them to his lips. I tucked in his sheet then ran out of reasons to keep tending.
‘Did you ever come across him? You’d know him, if you met him. It would be like looking in a mirror. If you shot him, you’d be shooting yourself.’
Alison must have dropped by the YMCA hut and asked Iso to bring me a sandwich.
When she arrived I did not hear the door or notice the faint scent of rose.
Every sense was lost to memories of Bill and it was only when I paused in my conversation with the boy that I became aware of her. I didn’t look around.
Iso was silent in the way of someone trying to be silent. She moved slowly to avoid the tinkle of her satchel’s buckle being undone or the breath of a page being turned in her sketchbook. But I was attuned to the soft sounds of her drawing and I waited.
She began with pencil (light and almost undetectable) then switched to charcoal.
I could just discern the marks she was making, they sounded long and dense and I knew she was committing to some aspect of the scene.
The long line of the bed, perhaps, or my hair.
She would have it falling down my back and the thought made me check the bun that was straining the ties of my cap.
For a moment she was truly silent. Barely breathing. Waiting to be found out.
This is how I remember it.
I didn’t want her there. For once, I did not want to be observed. I tried to resume my conversation with the boy in bed four. ‘Have you ever been in love?’ I whispered so only he could hear.
Iso moved her charcoal over the page.
The boy in bed four struggled. I wrote that in the journal, but it’s a poor word for what he was going through. He couldn’t draw a breath and I recalled Helen. She had struggled at the end and I had sat with her as I sat with him.
The dying always reminded me of the dead.
Iso put her hand on my shoulder and offered me the sandwich. She didn’t say she’d been there for twenty minutes and she didn’t show me her sketch. I was grateful. I didn’t want to see it, in case the boy really did look like Bill. But also, in case the boy looked nothing like him.
Iso offered to stay until someone relieved me but I told her to go.
‘It’s bedpans and pulleys for the next hour and then Hugo will be delivered.’
The boy in bed four opened his eyes. They had barely been open the whole time I’d nursed him and I couldn’t have told you before that moment what colour they were.
I didn’t want them to be brown, but they were, not quite like Helen’s but just like Bill’s and for a moment that was who he was and I have a memory of him speaking, to reassure me, but how could that be?
There was so little breath in him: despite the rubber drains, his lacerated lungs were full of blood and pus.
I was holding his hand and I felt his cold fingers curl around mine.
I looked down and saw that his fingertips were lavender, like Helen’s had been.
If he’d been able, he would have squeezed, but he wasn’t.
He had nothing left, not even a frown to animate his forehead.
Just the painful push and pull of air. His eyes pleaded. The next exhalation sounded like Bitte.
I did the round. Bedpans and pulleys. Temperatures and dressings. Sips of water. I was back at bed four with a syringe in a kidney dish and three ampoules of morphia. He opened his eyes, Bill’s eyes. When Bill was little I’d have done anything to take away the hurt.
‘Bitte,’ he said.
It was clear, and it took all that he had.
That is how I remember it.
I broke the neck of each ampoule and filled the syringe.
I took his arm from under the blanket and rolled up his sleeve.
I rotated his wrist and exposed the soft white skin of a boy.
It was barely blemished by freckles and I wondered why he was teased so much.
I tied a rubber tube above his elbow and tapped for a vein, it would be quicker.
Alison had coached me, just in case. ‘Needs must,’ I said as I slid the needle in.
I released the tubing and pressed slowly on the plunger, so slowly, and I wondered how it would feel, a wave of morphia rolling in and washing everything smooth.
As the barrel emptied, his brown eyes fluttered closed.
I waited until the push and pull of air began to diminish.
I returned his arm to the warmth of the covers then leaned in and kissed his forehead.
I let my head rest in the hollow of the boy’s belly and closed my eyes. We used to sleep like this as children, Bill and I. Sometimes I would be the pillow, sometimes Bill. We would listen to the other’s body grumbling like most children listened to bedtime stories.
I know now that the body grumbles even when it no longer breathes.
Hugo woke me.
‘What have you done?’
I lifted my head and was surprised by his anger, then confused. His face was almost unrecognisable, a mix of disdain and fear that made me think of the first time I’d seen him, on his knees, a Redcap standing over him.
The boy was still. The rubber tube, the syringe and three empty ampoules were beside him on the bed. Our argument was fractured by the needs of the ward, but memory has stitched it together.