Chapter Forty-Two
Forty-two
The other patients were disturbed by the boy who lay in bed four.
By his blinded eyes, by his gasping and frothing, by his purple skin and the blistered craters that covered his cheeks, neck and hands.
By what they imagined was beneath the sheet.
He was a nightmare and they all looked away.
Those who could kept their own pain quiet, and I was grateful.
‘What is wrong with him?’ Hugo asked when he’d been delivered by the Redcaps. He scanned the patient notes.
‘Gas poisoning,’ I said. ‘Something new.’
He looked up from the notes.
‘They call it mustard gas,’ I said, ‘because of the smell.’
‘Mustard?’
‘Some think it smells like garlic or onions. But most say mustard.’
‘You have seen others?’
‘There are plenty in 24 General. Only a few are this bad.’
Hugo moved closer to the boy in bed four and I wondered if he felt like retching, as I had when the smell was new.
‘What are we doing for him?’
I shook my head.
‘What is being done on the English ward?’
‘Nothing that would help him.’
‘Are there more?’ He looked around the ward.
‘Not here, and there’s not likely to be. He did this to himself.’
Hugo didn’t understand.
‘He was careless,’ I said. ‘This…’ I gestured towards the bed but didn’t know how to describe the body that lay in it. My lip curled. ‘This was meant for one of ours.’
Ours, I said. Distinguishing between him and me. Swallows and swifts. Even as I said it I was sorry, but I didn’t stop. I turned Hugo into a Hun because I’d been on a British ward full of this abomination and no one to blame. My anger needed something to attach to.
‘It’s German,’ I said, holding his gaze as if I wanted him to explain.
Hugo read the boy’s notes more carefully, then examined him. He noted his purple skin and the blisters that covered his face and hands. He lifted the sheet, and flinched.
I watched Hugo’s face become complicated.
Disbelief. Concern. Anger. Despair. Over the past week, I’d seen these same emotions play across every face that encountered the worst of this poison.
I’d wondered at it – these boys were no more damaged than those torn apart by bullets and bombs, but the damage seemed more offensive.
The weapon more evil. The way it could breach a gas mask and seep into a person, through their eyes and skin, when no enemy was near.
The way it ate them up, slowly. It’s not fair, I’d said aloud, to no one in particular, and someone laughed. Is any of it? they’d replied.
‘How many?’ Hugo asked.
‘Thousands,’ I said, and I let him imagine they were all like the boy in bed four.
‘Thousands,’ he repeated.
I could feel him struggling with it, but it wasn’t enough.
‘It’s why they’re all looking away,’ I said, gesturing the length of the ward. ‘They’re ashamed.’
His head dropped, just enough. ‘What have we become?’ he whispered.
Evil has no nationality. I knew that then as well as I know it now, but I did not put my hand on Hugo’s arm and tell him this was not his doing; that he was the kindest man I’d ever known; that this boy was as much a victim as any other.
I was too angry.
‘Good question,’ I said, and I walked away, leaving him with the boy in bed four.
Each shift I expected the boy to be gone. I expected bed four to be empty or to see the shape of a new boy under clean sheets. Each shift I was disappointed, and as the hours passed I would become agitated with the guilt of his suffering.
We were alone, Hugo and I, but a sister was on the roster and so we kept a distance between us, even when she failed to show up.
It was Alison who eventually walked onto the ward, but she did not fill the kettle for tea and her cape stayed on. She informed us that the sister who should have turned up an hour before was now confined to bed, along with a third of her nursing staff.
‘I am needed in three other places so you will be on your own through the night.’
‘And when will this night shift end?’ I said, exaggerating fatigue and annoyance. It pleased Alison to think I did not care to spend all night with the German.
‘Hours after the sun has risen, I suspect.’ She waited a moment for me to reply, to protest, but I knew better. ‘It is unfortunate, but necessary,’ she continued. ‘I will ask someone to bring you breakfast.’
She went to the desk and read the patient notes. It had been two days since she was last there and some of the notes fell short of her expectations.
‘Dr Henning,’ she called. ‘Please enlighten me as to the status of our patients.’
He went to her, and together they did a round.
‘He’s still alive, then?’ she said when they arrived at bed four.
‘Yes,’ said Hugo. ‘He is still alive.’
Alison shook her head. ‘Dear god.’
‘What treatments are being tried next door?’
‘Oxygen therapy mostly, but it won’t do him much good.
His lungs are burned beyond healing, you can hear that.
He is as swollen and disfigured on the inside as he is on the outside.
He cannot live. All they are doing for men like him is keeping them comfortable.
’ Her jaw clenched. Comfortable was not the right word.
We all had our battlefronts in that place. They were the rules we were expected to abide by and the oaths we took. For Hugo, they also included a lifetime of commandments. He’d always thought the line was clearly drawn; that the oath, the rule, the commandment was noble. First, do no harm.
I thought differently. The line was conditional and always open to interpretation. I had no oath to answer to and was better equipped for crossing it. As the night lengthened the boy could not be made comfortable.
I drew up the syringe. I put it in a kidney dish and placed it on the boy’s locker. I arranged the privacy screens then went to the bedside.
The syringe felt cold. I wrote that in the journal and now it feels like memory.
But I can’t recall if it was one of those syringes with metal rings for the fingers, or just a flared lip for the fingers to grasp.
I didn’t write it down and of course it doesn’t matter, but it’s one of those details I get stuck on.
The syringe felt cold and I have to imagine how I held it.
I waste my time trying to remember something that doesn’t matter because it stops me thinking about what does.
I uncovered the boy’s arm and tucked it under my own so the soft underside was exposed. I tied the rubber tubing above the elbow and tapped for a vein. I took up the syringe. I’d done it before.
Then Hugo was there.
Even now I feel the mixture of anger and fear. I find my body responding, bending around the memory of that boy like I bent over his bed all those years ago. It was as if I was shielding him from a predator, though it was me with the syringe in my hand.
‘Look away,’ I said. Not turning.
I felt him move forward and I spun to face him.
‘You should be attending to others,’ I said.
But he didn’t go. He just stared at me and I stared back. We were sizing each other up. I threw the first punch.
‘What is so precious about this boy’s life, Hugo? He is in hell. What do you think you are preserving by keeping him here?’
‘I’m a doctor, Tilda.’
‘That isn’t an answer, it’s a convenient excuse.’
‘I can’t let you.’
‘I’m not asking your permission.’
He took a step towards me and I stood taller. I squared my shoulders, I threw another punch.
‘What if it was me in this bed, what would you do?’
He stopped.
‘You are a man, Hugo, before you are a doctor. The obligations are sometimes different. If you do nothing, you might think you are satisfying an oath but are you really doing no harm?’
He said nothing, but he took another step and I positioned myself between him and the boy. I stood as tall as Hugo and I felt my strength. If the boy had opened his eyes he may well have seen an angel.
‘The rules are sometimes unfair, Hugo, they’re oblivious to suffering. To his suffering. Can’t you see that? If we don’t break them, we become complicit in a horror.’
He took another step and I wondered how I might fight him.
He held out his hand, and I hated him.
I was strong, but he was stronger, and I was no angel. I gave up the syringe.
I’m not sure, even now, what changed his mind.
It might have been my words, though in truth, I wasn’t as articulate as I now suggest. Even if I was, words are inadequate when so much experience exists as sensation and image and sound.
As taste and smell. We could smell the boy in bed four.
And we could taste him with every breath we took. He was rotting.
What if it was me? I’d asked him.
Hugo held the syringe up to the light to check the dose. I expected him to purge the excess, but he didn’t.
I looked at the clock on the wall. It was 3.52am. In eight minutes it would be 4am. Zero four hundred hours. I imagined a clock striking, four bells for the boy in bed four. A herald.
Hugo began to shake. For a whole minute he shook. His hand held the syringe and I held him. My chest against his back, my arms around his torso, my cheek in the curve between his neck and shoulder. I whispered all the reasons why, and the shaking subsided.
‘Do not let me go,’ he said.
He picked up the boy’s arm, as I had done. He secured it under his own. The vein was ready and he slid the needle in, released the tubing, then slowly depressed the plunger.
He removed the needle and put the empty syringe back in the kidney dish.
Again I want to describe it. Metal rings or no metal rings, I want to linger on this detail because the boy, who had struggled for days, kept struggling.
His heart continued to beat and his lungs continued to crave.
They dragged in what little air they could, each breath a scream, and the ground I’d stood so surely on felt fragile.
Time stretched like toffee and I thought we would never move through it. Hugo continued to hold the boy’s arm and I continued to hold Hugo.
Eventually, the boy’s heart fluttered and his breath failed.
Seven minutes. It is nothing now.
Time of death was 3.59am.