Fallen (22 page)

‘He's my brother. It's his leg. He's not strong.' The soldier hesitated, looking from us to his brother, then back out the door. Heavy footsteps ran down the road. ‘There's a field dressing in his pack.'

He patted the top of the man's head and left. I didn't understand how he did that, how he walked away from shelter, shrugging his pack into place, adjusting the rifle in his hands, breaking into a run.

‘Oh, dear.' Dote looked at the injured soldier moaning in the nest I'd made for him, his arms crossed on his tunic, his legs bent to the side. A dark stain spread above the knee of his trousers. ‘What are we to do with him?'

Hubie said, ‘Get the scissors, Katie. You'd better do this, your hands are better than mine.' He took the young man's pack and opened it, looking for the dressing. He asked Dote for clean rags and told me to cut the soldier's trouser leg longways, so we'd see the wound. I was afraid I'd cut skin by mistake, but soon a pale, hairy leg was laid bare, a knitted sock gartered at the knee, a jagged wound in the thigh, surprisingly black and mucky, with blood seeping from it. The soldier cursed when Hubie tried to pull out some threads that were stuck to its edges. He was only a boy, I could see now.

‘We'll have to get him proper attention.'

‘Should we try to clean it?' Dote asked.

‘We could do more harm than good.' Hubie's voice changed when he spoke to the boy. ‘Are you hurt anywhere else, mate?'

‘Bellyache.'

‘Right.' Hubie told me to wrap the field dressing around the thigh, as tight as I could. He took a stub of pencil from the young man's pack and had me wind the end of the bandage around and hold it to slow the blood while he sent Dote for pins. When all of that was done, I worked the boy's garter free of his sock and pulled it up over the bandage, to be sure.

‘Good idea.' Hubie stood and went towards the door.

‘You're not going outside?' Dote said.

‘There's an ambulance,' he said. ‘And the shooting seems to have stopped.'

‘Wait for me,' I said, but he didn't.

I went after him, out to where he stood in the shelter of the steps, craning for a view of Mount Street Bridge.

On the far side of the canal the crowd of spectators had grown. To the right, a soldier sat against a tree, facing away from the fighting. His cap was gone. Blood ran down his face. There was a spill of khaki further up, at the mouth of the bridge: men strewn in the road, as though someone had flung them down from a height. Only their groans could be heard, and then came shouts from across the water. ‘They've stopped the fight! There are women on the bridge!'

I stood out from the shadow of the steps for a better view. Men carried forms on stretchers in the direction of Paddy Dun's Hospital. Two girls carried water from man to man.

Hubie pulled me back. ‘Careful.'

‘They've stopped firing. We could help.'

As we watched, two ambulances began to creep closer to the bridge, and then a third came into view at the bend in the road on our side of the water. It stopped, maybe two hundred yards away, and made a turn, so that its back end faced us.

‘Could we carry him up to them? Or as far as the hospital, if they won't take him?' I was calculating the distance in my mind. I wasn't thinking about Hubie 'til I saw the fury in his eyes. Everything stopped. Of course we couldn't carry the boy all that way. I wasn't strong enough. He only had one usable hand.

I stared him down. ‘Dote could help.'

Dote told May to stay in the back hall, minding Paschal. We got the soldier ready to carry, twisting the corners of the blanket he lay on and gathering him into a kind of hammock, with Dote at one shoulder. I had the other. Hubie, his good hand bunching the blanket at the man's swaddled feet, directed us out, around the tricky corner at the door, trying not to knock him, across the gravel and on to the road – just as the shooting started again, louder and fiercer than before.

We stopped at the gate, trying to gauge the risk. I could still see one of the water-jug girls and some nurses on the bridge. ‘They'll be hurt.'

‘Oh!' There was horror on Dote's face at the sight of the carnage. She paused, gathered herself together, and we continued.

Leaving the pavement for the road was like stepping off a quay on to a boat, precarious balance, black depths waiting below. The skin of the canal puckered and sent darts of reflected light into my eyes. We made our awkward way towards the ambulance. The drill of shots had us flinching, even as we moved away from them. The shocking sound of men weeping. A black pit of space opened inside my head, ready for me to fall into it and disappear. I crouched over our bundle and watched the ground pass beneath. My shoes appeared and disappeared down there, as remote as though attached to someone else's feet. My ears were lungs, straining and loud. I told myself to keep going.
As if you're not afraid
.

We came to a woman huddled over the still form of a man
with twisted legs. I was looking at the ruin of a face, a jagged hole where a cheek should be, the flap of a chin sagging down the length of a bloodied neck. The woman knelt on her folded skirt and whispered a prayer where the dead man's ear should have been.

My shoulders and arms burned from the weight of that skinny young soldier. We half lifted, half dragged him along, bumping the ground; we couldn't help it. He screamed at us to
Stopit! Stopitforchristsssake
! We struggled into the scant shelter of a young tree to wait for the ambulance, now reversing towards us. There, in the tufted grass, was a bloody pulp of flesh and white feathers, a crush of webbed orange feet. The ruined white-and-black head of a swan spelled rotten luck for someone.

Just when I couldn't take another step, someone took the weight from me. My knees gave way and I stumbled, but caught myself before I fell. A man in a black St John Ambulance coat had the boy's shoulders. Another one took the feet from Hubie. Dote sat on the grass, panting, ignoring the dead bird. I rubbed the circulation back into my burning palms, my stinging fingers.

The St John's men lowered the injured boy to the ground. ‘Here we go, son. You'll be all right, we've got you now,' the first one said. ‘I'm Fitz.' His voice was like Dad's, low and steady. A voice I'd trust. ‘We'll get you on to a proper stretcher, Christy'll get it, we'll have you in the rig in no time.'

‘It's his leg that's hurt.' The boy looked light as a feather, lying there on the ground. Not a day over sixteen.

They lifted the boy, blanket and all, on to the stretcher. He grunted in pain. They carried the stretcher towards the open van. His arm shot out and grabbed mine as he passed. ‘Come with me.'

‘They're taking you to hospital,' I said. ‘You're safe now.'

‘Please.'

‘It's not allowed,' Christy said.

The boy squeezed my hand so hard the bones cracked. His knees came up, and his shoulders, so that they nearly dropped him. ‘Whoa, steady!' Christy glared, as if it was my fault.

The boy shivered. ‘Please.' His teeth chattered.

‘Well –' Fitz looked at Christy. ‘It's all of two minutes away.'

‘Get in, so,' Christy said.

‘Don't, Katie,' Hubie said.

‘Why not?'

He dropped his eyes. ‘You might not get back. The fighting might start up again.'

‘I'll be all right at the hospital. I know people there.'

Fitz and Christy lifted the boy into the back of the boxy-looking vehicle. I climbed in beside him, awkward in my skirt. They put the stretcher on a rough floor spread with a horse blanket. I hunkered down between the boy and a groaning bulldog of a man who never opened his eyes in the short, rattling journey to Baggot Street.

I took the boy's rough hand in mine. His grip was surprising, his knuckles big on callused fingers. I wondered what work he'd done before soldiering, who was waiting for him at home.

Liam wrote about the enemy being men just like him.
They bleed the same and weep and moan and die in no way different to the way that our own men moan, weep or die. The one sure thing is that it happens. You do your best not to believe the evidence of your own two eyes. It happens whether you believe it or whether you don't. The power of wishing counts for nothing here. I tell you, Katie, the world is not at all what we imagined
.

By the time we got to the hospital, the boy's teeth were clacking off each other.

‘Why does he shake like that?' I asked Fitz. ‘Is he having a fit?'

He didn't answer. I prised my fingers free. Released, my hand felt naked, unnaturally light. My knees creaked like an old woman's when I clambered out of the ambulance to let the men to do their work. The boy's pink-rimmed eyes followed me. Someone else, a nurse, applied pressure to the blood-soaked bandage at his thigh as the stretcher emerged into the hospital yard. Men in ordinary street clothes came to help carry the whey-faced bulldog of a man, who was still groaning.

Inside was bedlam. People crying. A woman with two children clinging to her skirt held the arm of a nurse and begged for something I couldn't hear. A reek of Jeyes fluid and sour sweat. People in medical clothes moved quickly through the halls, steering clear of reaching hands, their eyes blind to individuals.

Fitz found a chair, so I could sit beside the boy. I took his cool, slippery hand again. ‘I'm still here. I'll stay, as long as I'm let.' A slight pressure on my fingers was the only sign that he'd heard, or that he was aware of me at all.

A nurse began to unwrap the bandage. Blood spurted in a small arc, splashing my face. His eyes fluttered and closed. His grip on my hand relaxed. The nurse was joined by another, who cut his tunic with scissors. A doctor came. I was in the way. I'd never felt so useless in my life. How many hundreds of times had I walked past this hospital and never given proper thought to all that happened here, the world of pain and illness that turned in its own path, right next to mine. How careless I'd been.

In the distance, at the far end of a busy corridor, I saw Bartley's familiar gangly figure, the streak of white hair in a thicket of black falling across his forehead. I was surprised by a rush of relief. ‘Bartley!'

‘Katie?' He went white as paper. ‘Has something happened to Alanna?'

‘She's in Herbert Park, with Isabel. She's fine. Everyone's fine. How's Eva?'

‘She's upstairs.'

‘You moved her here? Why?' I looked around the overcrowded hallway. She must be bad, or they'd surely have left her where she was.

‘Last night.' He looked uncomfortable. ‘We wanted to keep a closer eye on her, and I'm glad we did. She needs paracentesis.'

I thought he'd said ‘Paraclete', imagined beating wings, tongues of flame. ‘What?'

‘It's a minor procedure, to drain the excess fluid. It's putting strain on her kidneys. She's having trouble breathing.' He lifted my sticky hand and held it between us, turning it over and back. ‘What's this, blood?'

‘I got caught up in fighting. At Mount Street.'

‘Were you on the bridge?'

‘No. I'm not that brave. I only helped carry someone out.'

‘Sounds brave to me. I'm glad you're safe.' He squeezed my fingers gently before releasing them.

We stood back against the wall to make room for a porter who pushed a creaking wheeled chair past us. The patient's eyes were closed. He looked to be in pain. One half of his head had been shaved; his skin was like puffy yellow wax.

A miasma of antiseptic smells and a taste of metal overwhelmed me of a sudden. My knees buckled. Bartley caught my elbow and stopped me falling. ‘Come with me.' He brought me to an empty common room, where a tea-urn stood on a scarred trestle table. ‘When's the last time you ate?' He made me wash my hands at a sink in the corner and put me in a chair while he fussed with the urn and a cup. ‘It's lukewarm, but better than nothing.' He added several spoons of sugar.

‘No sugar.'

‘You need it.' He watched me drink, refilled my cup.

My mind skittered across the bloody surfaces and blacknesses I'd seen today, insides turned out. The eminent men whose portraits lined the walls loomed, solid and indifferent to all I didn't want to hear. I dropped my head, looked at the shape my knees made under my stained skirt, a stain on my shoe. ‘Can I see Eva?'

Bartley led me down a corridor towards a flight of stairs. On the way he stopped to talk to a man who he introduced as Eva's surgeon.

‘Why are you not looking after her yourself?' I asked, when we'd moved on.

‘It's not allowed.'

‘But she'd prefer it.'

He looked back, over his shoulder. The trace of a smile crossed his face. ‘I wonder would she.'

‘She says you're the best surgeon there is.'

We'd reached a landing. He pushed open a swing door and held it for me.

‘She has to say that.' He looked pleased all the same. ‘It'd be unethical; my judgement would be compromised. Bad enough we've to do this on the ward, but everywhere's so busy' – he glanced up at the clock on the wall – ‘and I've to get back. I'll leave you with her. Don't stay long, Katie. You're not to tire her. And don't get in the way.'

He steered me into a side room, where Eva was, and introduced me to Gwen Townsend, the sister-in-charge. She made the chilliest of bows, folded her hands into the bib of her apron.

I crossed to stand between Eva and the window. I could see her better from here. She was flushed, and her face seemed puffy, but her eyes were bright. She gave me a weak, worried smile. ‘You and Bartley will be friends yet.'

‘Threat or promise?' I said, sitting into a chair beside her, turning my back on the nurse.

Sister Townsend went out and came back with a steel tray of instruments under a cover. She laid the instruments out with a pair of tongs, where Eva couldn't see them, while we waited for the surgeon. At last he came and busied himself at the sink.