Fallen (27 page)

‘I don't trust you.'

‘What on earth makes you think I'm yours, to trust or not? Why does it even matter to you where I go?'

‘That man is a stranger.'

‘Stop the car, Con. Let me out.' I reached for the door handle. We were moving slowly. I'd get out whether he stopped or not. With a sudden
bang!
the car lurched, and stuttered to a halt. My forehead burned. Hot noise and air rushed in on me, as though I'd been encased in ice 'til now. The world burst in on me, sharp and painfully clear. ‘What happened?'

Con was already out there, stooping over the car. ‘Puncture. The damned tyre's gone.'

I got out too, surprised by the tremor in my legs. ‘I thought we'd been shot.'

He looked towards the road, then back at the food. ‘So close. We won't be able to carry all this. We can't just leave it.'

He strode off towards the mouth of the lane. I checked the eggs in the back of the car. Most of them had survived intact. A piece of paper had fallen to the floor.
Allow the bearer
… it was the Judge's letter. I picked it up and put it in my own pocket as Con came trotting back. ‘You're cut,' he said.

‘Am I?' The hand I put to my stinging forehead came away sticky and red. ‘Is that blood?'

He came back for a closer look. ‘Have you a handkerchief?'

I turned my head away. ‘I doubt there's a hankie left in the whole entire city.'

Hand on my chin, he turned my face back towards him. ‘Let me see that.'

‘It's nothing.'

‘Let me see.' His blunt fingers pressed the bone around my eye socket. ‘Does that hurt?' He prodded again. Pain shot through my scalp and behind my eyes. I winced.

‘There's glass in it. It needs cleaning. And stitches.'

I pulled away from him and walked towards the road. ‘Someone will stop.'

It was a woman who stopped, in a tourer. Vivienne Dockery, she said her name was. A crude red cross was painted on the sides and back of her car. She insisted I sit quietly and wait, holding a square of clean linen to the cut on my forehead, while she bossed a pair of soldiers into helping Con load the milk churns into the deep luggage compartment, and slid the boxes of eggs on to the back seat herself. It was quite a sight: she was one of the shortest, roundest women I'd ever seen. She came from a farm in Kilkenny, she told me as we drove away, up for the Spring Show when the trouble started. Con said he'd follow us on foot. I didn't care if I never saw him again.

Inside the hospital, Miss Dockery settled me on a chair in a crowded corridor. ‘Wait there.'

The wall at my back was cold. The tiled floor was stained. People traipsed past, peered into my face, then away. It was clear they were intent on finding relatives or neighbours, hoping the things they'd heard would prove to be wrong.

A skinny boy lay flat on a bed in a small room across the corridor. A sheet covered him from the waist down. A large bloodstained bandage strapped his ribs. His eyes were half open, his breathing rough. A woman sat beside him and watched his bandaged chest rise and fall, rise and fall.

Miss Dockery came back and brought me to a treatment room. Two beds contained silent forms that could have been asleep or dead. The bright eyes of an old man with a bloodied head peered at me from a third. He gave me a smile and a wink.

‘I'll find a nurse,' Miss Dockery said, and left again.

‘Grand out,' the old man said. ‘A great day.'

I didn't see what was so great about it. ‘You're hurt.'

‘Only a scratch,' he said. ‘A proud mark. You'll have one too.' He nodded at my forehead. ‘A souvenir. Stirring times.'

‘Nonsense.' A nurse came in on brisk feet. ‘Don't be
frightening her.' She threw a quick, professional glance over my face. ‘You'll be grand, once we get the bits out. Stay still, now.'

She patted my forehead with gauze soaked in a vivid yellow ointment, making me wince. She said to hold a towel under the wound and keep my eyes shut tight while she poured fluid over it. Then she lifted slivers of glass from under the skin with a tweezers. When all the glass was out, she stitched the skin together with a needle and thread. ‘Like a hem. You could do it yourself only for where it is.'

Tears I couldn't help rolled down my face.

‘What are you crying for? There's plenty worse off than you. You won't be scarred. Not badly.'

‘I thought I'd been shot.'

It hadn't been a real question, and she wasn't listening to my answer. She was cleaning up, wiping surfaces and throwing strips of bandage into a steel receptacle. Instruments clattered into a dish and were set aside.

I tugged my hair down to cover the bandage and came out of the treatment room with a throbbing head. Some new disaster had occurred while I'd been in there. The corridor was packed with people weeping. The bed the boy had occupied had a white-faced woman in it now, staring at nothing.

I ran up to visit Eva. There was no one around, so I went into the room and sat beside the high, narrow bed. There was a deep furrow between her eyebrows, her hair greying where it began its sweep across her face. A sweetish whiff on her breath. She opened her eyes.

‘Darling Katie. I knew you'd come.' There was silt in her words, gravel in her throat. Her clammy hand found mine. I lifted it to my forehead and held it there so she couldn't see my face or read what I'd seen in her.

‘How are you feeling?'

Her eyes dropped. It was a thing she'd always done, broken eye contact to look inward and assess how she felt, to consider the full weight of a question before she answered. Questions like, was it worth it, do you love him, what was it like? Mother used to accuse her of evasion, but it was part of her character. Everything she did was considered, reflective, calm – like her. She and Liam had more in common than Liam and I did, really. Is that why I loved her? No. I loved her calm, good-natured, steady self. If I lost her, what would be left?

‘Not well.' She struggled to lift herself. Her shoulders rose from the pillows, but her head lagged behind, too heavy for her neck. I put an arm across her back and lifted her. She weighed nothing. I could support her easily with just one hand while I adjusted the pillows behind her.

‘Is that better?'

Her skin looked slack, wrong. I didn't understand how so much could have changed so quickly and without warning. Her hair was lank and dispirited, its colour faded. Her collar-bones loomed sharp at the base of her neck, where the tendons were in stark relief. I held her hand. My mind brimmed with memory. All the words I couldn't say to her, everything I couldn't tell her and never would, tumbled from my mind and skittered across the polished floor.

She drifted in and out of sleep. Nurses came to check on her and change her bedding. I sponged her face and hands, fluffed up her pillows. Stroked the soft skin of her cheek with the back of my own hand – my skin rough next to the papery delicacy of hers. I sat back and watched her breathe.

A woman cried out somewhere on the ward, a single piercing shriek. A rush of feet, soothing voices, then it was quiet again. A little bit later, Gwen Townsend came in. She didn't seem surprised to see me. ‘How are we in here?'

She checked Eva's pulse, watched her breathe. ‘She's
peaceful, anyway.' She lifted a strand of hair away from Eva's forehead with a tenderness that frightened me. When she said I had to leave, I didn't argue.

I reported to the volunteers' station to see if there was anything I could do. The nurse there asked about the bandage at my forehead. ‘It's nothing,' I said, quoting Con. ‘A superficial cut.'

‘Still and all.'

Vivienne Dockery came over to ask how I was. Then she spoke to the nurse. ‘The College of Science have dressings. I've to collect them, but I don't know where it is. They said I should have someone with me in the car, in any case.'

‘I'll go,' I said.

‘Are you well enough?'

‘Yes.'

‘Do you know your way around?'

‘Of course I do.' At last I'd something to offer. ‘It's not far to the college.'

‘All right, then.'

We went out the back way, down a corridor where people lay on mattresses on the floor. At the gate a girl aged about twelve was lurking, an eager look to her narrow face. ‘Messages, missus?' she asked.

I stopped and sized her up. ‘Could you get to Herbert Park?'

She looked hungry. She could easily run off with whatever money I gave her. She stood proud and looked me straight in the face. ‘For sure.'

I gave her Isabel's address and asked her to tell them I was helping out at the hospital and intended to stay there. I gave her a thruppenny bit. She fingered its brass edges. ‘Anythin' else, miss, you'll find me here later.'

‘Enterprising,' Vivienne said, when the child had gone.

‘I probably shouldn't have encouraged her. She'd be better off going home.'

‘There's a few of us in it, so.'

The light was turning. A breeze made me shiver, but it was welcome after the heat of the last few days. I pulled on the St John's cuff Fitz had given me, tugged it over the sleeve of my blouse, to just above my elbow, and got into the car beside her.

Out on the road, my skin prickled, as though eyes were on me. We were surrounded by houses, with no shortage of parapets and chimneys to conceal gunmen. The air was heavy with smoke and popping sounds. I asked Vivienne what was so special about the dressings we were to collect. She said sphagnum moss was absorbent, and with the shortage of cotton because of the war, the dressings were in demand everywhere.

We pulled up outside the gates of the college and told the porter what we'd come for. He handed us over to a woman with a list who was directing the loading and unloading of boxes into cars and vans. ‘That's your lot, I'm afraid,' she said, when the back seat was loaded. ‘We have to ration them. Lucky we had them at all.'

On the short journey back to Baggot Street, Vivienne stopped the car. ‘What's this?'

A woman sat on a step with her apron over her head, wailing. Vivienne got out to speak to her. When the apron was coaxed away from her face, we saw a black eye and a split nostril trailing coagulated blood.

‘Squash into the front with Katie, here,' Vivienne said. ‘What happened to you?'

‘Bertie, bad cess to him. Why can't they shoot the likes of him?'

I breathed through my mouth. The woman stank of stale drink, and she cursed that waster Bertie the whole way – I was glad we didn't have far to go.

After we'd unloaded our cargo of woman and boxes at the back door of the hospital, Vivienne asked me to direct her to Butt Bridge, where there was a clearing station. I wondered what time it was, but all the clocks we passed had stopped. The light was fading, but whether it was night falling or the pall of smoke dragging a premature blanket up over the city, I couldn't say. There was a lot of military traffic, but Vivienne's painted red crosses got us by.

‘I'm going out to France myself,' Vivienne was saying. ‘With the ambulance corps. I'm due to leave next week.' She slowed for a last turn. We both said
Oh!
at the same time. In front of us, on the far side of the river – my side of the river – the city was ablaze.

The flames made a weird kind of light, bright and dark at once. A horde of fiery ghosts, thousands of slaughtered soldiers from the Front, come home to vent their fury. They thrashed their limbs about, struggled with the window-frames, strained to break free, fell back and shoved fiery fists across the streets to rattle the roofs with flaming fingers, their breath black with rage. The river was oily and orange, its surface a canvas of wavering, hot colours. My throat burned. My skin and eyes were dry, inflammable as paper.

After getting permission at the checkpoint, we drove along the quays to Butt Bridge. A gunboat was moored on the seaward side, towering over a barge. At the clearing station, people sat or lay on the pavement, waiting to be taken to hospital. A doctor moved among them, deciding who had most need and where best to send them. Eventually he came to inspect the back seat of Vivienne's car. He looked us over too. ‘Can you handle this?' he asked, indicating a pallid man in a torn shirt who lay on a plank with his knees bent, a hand cupped over his right eye.

‘What's wrong with him?'

‘His eye. Move your hand, there, and show them.'

The man lifted his hand. A piece of metal jutted from his eye. There was a dark ooze running down his face. I felt sick.

‘Can you take him to the Eye and Ear?'

Vivienne looked at me.

‘Yes,' I said, meaning I knew where it was.

‘He needs extreme care,' the doctor said. ‘You'll have to drive slowly. And keep him calm.' Two privates lifted the plank and stowed the man across Vivienne's back seat. The plank snagged on the leather. It barely fit inside the width of the car.

Aside to us, the doctor said the man would likely lose the eye in any case. I sat in beside Vivienne, but looked back over the seat at the man. Imagine losing an eye. Imagine being sighted one minute, blind the next.

Vivienne leaned over the steering wheel to see her way. A fraction of moon gave occasional light, shifting through cloud or smoke as we drove away from the checkpoint. I had to switch between telling her where to turn and talking any old rubbish to the groaning man. About the weather. About my daft brother running away with a theatre troupe like a twelve-year-old following a circus. I quickly ran out of things to say.

The moon came and went, what there was of one, through drifts of cloud. We made our slow and careful way. No one shot at us. At Adelaide Road, our charge was carried off on his plank.

‘Your seat's destroyed,' I said to Vivienne, but she didn't seem to care.

‘Come on,' she said. ‘There's more where he came from.'