Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-three
‘Mutter?’ said the boy in bed four. He was chubby with childhood and flushed with acne.
His face was a palette of pink and purple and Alison was washing it, as she had done every day since he’d arrived.
He was younger than most, the youngest we’d ever had, and I noticed a disturbance in Hugo every time he looked at him.
I wanted to tell him I understood, but I didn’t know how.
‘Mutter?’ the boy said again. And I heard the break in his voice.
He would live, Alison had said, when he came on the ward.
He should have been in a school room, or a playground.
He should have been pretending to be a soldier instead of carrying a gun.
Alison had joked that his acne was worse than his injuries.
‘Filthy little Hun,’ she’d said. ‘He’s been squeezing the spots and now they’re infected. ’
‘Mutter?’ he said and Alison shushed him.
‘Shh shh shh.’
She lathered up the cloth once more and the leathery scent of carbolic soap filled the air.
He would live, she’d said, and she was usually right, prided herself on it, so the privacy screens confused me. ‘I think we’ll need tea,’ I said to Iso, who’d come onto the ward intending to sit by bedsides. She went to make it.
‘Sepsis,’ Hugo said when I asked, and the word caught on something sharp in his throat. I reached out to touch him but he turned away.
Then I heard Alison crying. The abrupt drawing in of breath over and over. ‘Filthy Hun,’ I heard her say, and then her voice was cracking. ‘Filthy little Hun.’
I moved the screens aside and saw Alison with the boy’s hand in hers. She didn’t let go when I stood beside her, she just kept on with Filthy little Hun, her body shuddering with every intake of breath. I covered her hand with both of mine and made a mental note of the detail.
His hand in hers, her hands in mine, I later wrote.
But the detail didn’t help. I felt nothing for the boy and nothing for Alison.
‘No more,’ I said.
In the journal I wrote, I have nothing left.
Then page after page I wrote, Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
The numbness that plagued my body had slipped inevitably into my mind.