Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-two
Hugo had become my anchor and now I was adrift. I’d fallen short and so had he, and there was no desire to discuss all the ways we’d disappointed. We circled each other, like stray dogs. Hostile and cautious but still wanting.
When we are close I breathe him in, I wrote in the journal. He is the taste my tongue longs for.
Alison called me over to where she and Hugo were doing their best to stop a bleed.
I stood beside him and waited for instruction, but without a word he took up my hand and placed it where it would do the most good. He pushed down and I felt his fingertips urging mine.
‘Keep the pressure,’ he said, and I could smell his breath and the odour of his body and clothes.
It was pungent, I wrote. Like perfume, it had notes: the smell of old costumes that have soaked up the sweat of too many performances, carbolic soap, blood, the tang of vomit. I remember him now whenever I smell damp leather or fermenting fruit.
I can’t recall if the boy who was bleeding lived or died. All I remember is that my hand was no longer needed and I was dismissed.
The details are important, Helen had said, and so I’d noted Hugo’s smell, but all I have of the boy is his bleeding.
I suddenly thought I was recording the wrong things.
That by recording Hugo I had lost sight of the rest. Though that, surely, had been the point.
By recording Hugo I could forget all those dead boys. Real and imagined.
But who will remember them if not me? I thought.
I began to fill the journal with last moments.
I began with Helen’s.
She took a breath and let it go and there was silence when there shouldn’t have been.
What I remembered, what I wrote about all those years later, was the panic I’d suddenly felt.
I hadn’t been paying attention to that breath that was her last. I had been looking away, when I should have been watching her mouth, the way her lips still moved around the air that passed between them, the way her eyelids flickered.
I never saw the final rise of her chest and I didn’t feel her fingers relax around mine.
I was looking away and fiddling with something or other – who knows what and who cares.
No more, her girl said, and I turned. Maude’s hand was in her mother’s and her eyes were on her mother’s face.
No more, she said, and I can’t say who it was for or what she meant, but Maude never wasted words.
It might have been for her mother, for me, for her sister, who waited beyond the curtain.
Or it might have been for herself, for Maude, whose eyes remained dry as they always had.
No more, she said, and she kissed her mother’s hand then passed it to me.
She closed my fingers around Helen’s and the detail I remember now is that they were already cold.
The boys in bed four and ten and seven and nineteen were barely details, and those who died only sometimes mattered.
But they all should have mattered. I imagined Bill dying every kind of death and with each version I invented someone holding his hand and crying over him.
Each death should remind us of a life, I wrote, and I wonder now if I’d overheard it or was told it – by a chaplain perhaps: someone in the business of marking death.
It’s what I came to think and I think it still, but thinking and feeling are not the same thing.
For a while during that time I caught every last breath that occurred on one of my shifts.
Day or night I would find a way to be by the bedside, my hand resting on some part of them.
I would pay attention to the rhythm of their breath, their colour, their odour.
I would recite the details under my breath in order to recall them.
‘Are you praying?’ Alison said once, incredulous.
‘Of course not,’ I replied.
At the first opportunity I would write the details in a notebook I kept in my pocket, then later I would transcribe them into the journal. It was a ritual I created, I think now, to replace the desire that had been keeping that war at bay.
I told myself I wanted to record the death in that place like Iso recorded the life.
But the more I recorded the less I seemed to care.
When I bowed my head I was acting. When a patient died I could not force a single tear.
The dead stopped being boys and became no more than body parts, bed numbers and nationalities: British, Australian, Indian, French, Portuguese, New Zealander, South African, Canadian. German. Swift. Swallow.