Through Streets Broad and Narrow (28 page)

He talked at breakfast over a plate loaded with half a dozen fried eggs and seven or eight rashers of green Limerick bacon. He talked to de Burgh White with deference, to the women residents challengingly, to the men superficially and to Groarke intimately. Most of the time he confined his talk to “shop,” brainpicking, case notes, surgical techniques, laboratory reports. He asked advice judiciously, he excused his mistakes subtly; he threw out no ideas because he had too many and knew that they must be untrustworthy, since he could not even count on syringing an ear successfully.

He enjoyed most the twenty minutes after breakfast, when the meal was over and the morning's work had not yet begun, the consultants all at their homes and the junior students just setting out for the clinics. By this time the housemen and most of the residents would have left the comfortless linoleumed dining room, a maid would have brought in a fresh pot of Indian tea, “Strong enough to trot a mouse on,” and Groarke, with a fellow or two like McBurney or Walshe, and possibly one or two of the women, would be left, smoking, browsing the papers and listening to him.

He had the sense that they did not enjoy listening to him either at that hour in the morning when several of them, including himself, might have had a late call or a hangover, nor after lunch, nor in the evening; but still he talked out of an abundance of excitement and unaccustomed good-fellowship with himself. Maeve Blagger, he knew, took an especial exception to his flood of loquacity; she was the only one of whose hostility he was certain; but he did not care, being almost as fascinated by her inability to leave as she was herself. With the
exception of Groarke, the others gave him few leads; they did not pull his leg either; though occasionally, when he started talking about the war which had just started, they would rib him about Ireland's neutrality or ask him whether he was going to join the R.A.M.C. or the Navy or the Air Force.

It may have been that by his constant talking he was hoping to propitiate the injuries he had inflicted on the hospital in his paper and which Groarke assured him had been forgotten by no one; but certainly at the time it seemed to him that he talked only because he was happy in the sense of identity the work had given him.

He would undertake far more casualty duties than was necessary, taking afternoons, and night “on” for others whenever he could get them. He liked the smell of the slum people; their confidence in him, resignation, humility, the rich variety of their accidents and distempers.

They would erupt with boils, blanes, sebaceous cysts, maculopapular rashes, cheiropompholyx and varieties of eczema; collect lice, tapeworms, bed bugs, scabies and fleas, continued diarrhoea, enormous pustular tonsils, flaming conjunctivitis, galloping tuberculosis and heroic syphilis. They would stagger in with double pneumonia or warts; fall off lamp posts, get jammed under lifts and brewers' drays, scalped by machinery, gassed by geysers and half-drowned in canals or malting vats. They would achieve extraordinary dislocations under mysterious circumstances and suffer fabulous burns and scalds. While waiting they would be silent, only coughing, vomiting or groaning. When they came in they would be as reserved as customers in a bank, never swearing or exclaiming, never appearing to pray and usually doing exactly what they were asked to do.

It appeared to him sometimes that both he and they were taking part in a game of which each side knew only half the rules since those which obtained in the slums were denied to the hospital, whilst those of the hospital were Dutch to the slums. He believed in a dull unrealized way that in the slums they had an enormous, malign and poisonous machine which was an exact opposite to that centred in the hospital.

Somewhere in the heart of a tenement area, with hideous
mechanical tentacles, dredger-like buckets, trip wires, steam sprays, gas exhalers, molten metal belchers and bacterial disseminators, there was concealed in the darkness a consciousness calculating the likely movements of its victims. Against this, tended by himself, the nurses, housemen, and consultants, was set the hospital's machine, flooded with the brilliant bluish light of theatre lamps, sparkling laboratory equipment, anaesthetic meters and X-ray units.

He could no more explain to them the workings of this mechanical nexus and his own relationship to it than they could define, for him, their connection with and dependence upon their own arbiter.

In those early weeks when he was on night duty he would often find his bed undone. Returning from some casualty call at two or three in the morning he would find his mattress stripped of everything, sometimes even the mattress itself missing, and the windows giving onto the hospital courtyard wide open.

He would climb out onto the stage of the fire escape, descend the three storeys to the concrete and retrieve the blankets, pillows and mattress, re-make his bed and climb into it. He would fall asleep at once and sleep on until the night sister again summoned him. On his return he would find not only that his bed had again been stripped that this time all his clothes, books and other possessions had been thrown out so that to restore order he would have to make two or three trips down the fire escape.

He visited the rooms of the other residents; McBurney, fast asleep, would turn over at the going on of the light, say, “Christ” and then turn over again. Smyllie, a long-headed Sinn Feiner: “What do you want, Blaydon?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, get out then.”

In Groarke's room: “Mike, did you hear anyone pass your door?”

“Hell, no.”

“I went down to a Brought in Dead and all my bloody bedclothes had been chucked out of the window.”

“It'd be Smyllie.”

“It's happened twice tonight.”

“It'll happen again; buy a padlock.”

“I have but it's been unscrewed.”

“Get a bigger one.”

He wondered if the night sister wakened some other person first to warn him, but she was too removed and dignified to question. He suspected everyone in turn, searching at mealtimes and in the evening's drinking session for the most manifest hostility, the questioner who might reveal the greatest interest in his mood and response. In the end he decided to sit it out and say nothing to anyone, believing that whoever was responsible would ultimately grow tired of his assumed nonchalance. The atmosphere built up slowly. He talked as much as ever and stood his rounds of porter in the evenings to those who were on call. He started to carve his name on the table of the residents' sitting-room, amongst those of contemporaries and predecessors, young, aging, senile or long dead, but grew bored and gave up at the “
L
” of Blaydon so that the only record of his apprenticeship was, “1939, J. BL,” sandwiched between “O'SHAUGHNESSY, '78” and “P. MOORE, 1910.”

He was given false calls. One night he was awakened at about twelve thirty and made his way through the long corridors to the O.P. Theatre. Screwed up beneath one of the red blankets a woman lay screaming on a trolley. Her face, tiny and misshapen with the screams, was as red as the blanket; a purple vein spanning the depth of her forehead filled as she called on Mary, Joseph and the saints for the pain that was in her. He could find no one on duty, no signs of an ambulance porter or of the night sister. “For God's sake, Doctor,” she shouted, “it's me bladder.”

He tried to quieten her but she shouted louder than ever. He shouted himself through her screams. “When did this come on?”

“Holy Mary, I'll burst.”

“How old are you? When was your last period?”

“Jesus! Won't you help me? Get a doctor!”

“I am a doctor, now wait there a minute while I get someone.”

“Examine me, for God's sake!—Take a look at me belly. I've passed no water—”

She screamed louder and longer than before.

“I can't look at you till I have someone else.”

“Oh, the pain!”

“Wait now, please.”

“Get a cat'eter.”

“Then you've had this happen before?”

But she would not answer, only shrieking and screwing herself up in her agony. He tried to pull down the blanket from beneath her chin, but her hands flew to the edge of it, and he was seized with a sudden guilt, imagined her believing he was about to assault her, seeing himself disgraced when she complained against him. He ran to Groarke's room and told him. Groarke put on a dressing-gown. “You should get de Burgh White.”

“I can't possibly, not again; I've had him out six times already this week. He thinks I'm the biggest fool in residence.”

“What age is she?”

“I haven't the faintest idea, she could be twenty or she could be fifty. She's got a shawl on and she's making so much noise that you can't see her face properly.”

When they got there the trolley was empty and the night sister doing her rounds.

John asked where the case was and the sister said, “What case?”

“The urinary retention.”

“There's no such case, Mr. Blaydon.”

“But you called me.”

“I did not.”

“But, damnit, I was down here five minutes ago, she was on the trolley.”

“Perhaps you're sleeping badly, Mr. Blaydon? There's been no case in the last hour, has there, Nurse?”

“There's nothing in the book, Sister, since eleven P.M.”

Groarke looked at the speaker and then at John. Later he said, “It was that nurse, wasn't it? The probationer?”

“I don't know.”

“Well it was, she was killing herself laughing with me.”

“She wasn't laughing with
me
,” said John. “Are they all in it, then?”

“What do you think?”

“What had I better do?”

“Nothing.”

“D'you think they'll keep it up the whole time I'm in residence?”

Groarke said. “Probably.”

Someone had pinned a map of France and the Low Countries above the mantelpiece of the sitting-room and flagged it with Swastikas and Union Jacks. The B.B.C. news bulletins were switched on regularly and Smyllie moved the pins with satisfaction as the Swastikas swept through Belgium and overran Lord Gort's defences between the northern end of the Maginot Line and the Channel ports.

At odd hours of the day the residents gathered there on the battered armchairs beneath the rows of old photographs of the hospital's staff from 1890 onwards to listen to the bulletins, but no one discussed them very much. John liked to get hold of Groarke and ask him whether he thought France would fall, and if so whether the Germans would invade England. Groarke would get excited about this; they would work one another up into lugubrious prophecies and then as suddenly start to laugh. They laughed at the thought of the War Cabinet fleeing in cruisers to Ottawa whence speeches would be relayed to the English, telling them to hold out at all costs; they laughed at the Home Guard wheeling tree trunks across the roads and at the thought of clouds of gas enveloping the club men in the West End of London.

“But what'll we do, Mike, if it's all over before we qualify?”

“Work for the Germans.”

“Would you, seriously?”

Groarke would then give his imitation of a Nazi doctor in charge of a laboratory doing experiments on Jews. He did this with great conviction, silently, making his mouth straight and his neck bulge over his collar. A vein came up between his eyes,
which themselves grew bloodshot as he twirled the valves of imaginary presses, flicked the switches of elaborate machinery, rolled back his cuffs to do a titration of Jewish spinal fluid or a living autopsy of a pancreas. Occasionally he would gesture to an underling to wheel in another case or send out the remains of the previous one to the crematorium; but the scene always ended in mime with Groarke being presented by his Führer with the Iron Cross first class, and the Nobel Prize. He imitated the sound of the Führer's kiss on his cheeks as he bowed his head, then straightened himself, gave the Fascist salute, retreated three paces, saluted again, turned about and left the room.

The other residents objected to this pantomine; they discerned in it, as did John, something derogatory to themselves, to Ireland and to Medicine. Groarke, sensing this unease on his return to the room, would then drink two or three more bottles of Guinness and start discussing the role of the Free State Army in the war or giving accounts of imaginary interviews he had had with Dr. Christian Luthmann, the Nazi press attaché to the German Consulate in Merrion Road.

“Last night,” he would say, “I sold him a map of Dublin's A.R.P. System and the exact location of the anti-aircraft battery in the Vico Road, the only one in Ireland.”

He would suggest that Fergus Cloate, who had joined the R.A.M.C. and been given the rank of major as a surgical specialist, had taken a small transmitter with him by means of which he was relaying information directly to Luthmann.

He would talk about German parachutists landing by moonlight in Phoenix Park and tell Bethelgert that the days of the Kosher slaughter house in the Ring Road were numbered.

John encouraged him in this kind of conversation; egging him on by pretending to be offended, by voicing the sullen and unspoken reactions of the other residents. Sometimes he would get Groarke really angry by suggesting that he was not joking at all, that he had the smell of true treachery about him; and when this happened Groarke would shut up tight and go out to drink on his own or to work up his textbooks in his room.

The next day John would apologize and Groarke would say, “It's yourself you're offending, not me. We know, the two of
us, what's there inside of us, but that doesn't make us the friend of ourselves or anybody else.”

John said, “You don't understand me, Mike. I've grown to hate Ireland as much as I love Dymphna, not more.”

“More.”

“If she'd settle,” said John, “I could love it all, everything.”