The Pull of the Stars(10)

Ita Noonan leaned towards me and confided in a ragged whisper, The boss man’s out with the rossies.

Really?

She might be thinking of Mr. Noonan, I supposed. Though boss man seemed an odd epithet for a fellow pushing a barrel organ around town to support a sick wife and seven children. Was there almost a relish in delirium, I wondered, at getting to say exactly what floated through one’s head?

Delia Garrett leaned out of bed to ogle Ita Noonan’s tilted plate. Why can’t I have a fry-up?

Nothing fatty or salty, remember, because of your blood pressure.

She snorted at that.

I perched on Ita Noonan’s cot—there was no room to fit a chair between this one and the next—and cut one of the sausages into small bites. What would Sister Finnigan say if she could see me break her rule about sitting on a bed? She was gliding about upstairs, too busy catching babies to tell me the thousand things I needed to know and had never thought to ask.

Look, lovely scrambled eggs.

I put a forkful of the nasty yellow stuff—obviously powdered—to Ita Noonan’s lips.

She let it in. Once she realised this was a fork I was setting in her hand, she gripped it and went to work. Wheezing a little, pausing to strain for breath between bites.

I found my eyes brooding over the empty cot in the middle. The nail on which Eileen Devine’s chart had hung was loose, I remembered. I stood up now to ease it out of the wall. I pulled on the chain of my watch and weighed the warm metal disk in my palm. Turning away so neither woman would notice what I was doing, I set the point of the nail to my watch’s shiny back and scratched an only slightly misshapen full moon among the other marks, this one for the late Eileen Devine.

I’d formed this habit the first time a patient died on me. Swollen-eyed, at twenty-one, I’d needed to record what had happened in some private way. A newborn’s prospects were always uncertain, but in this hospital we prided ourselves on losing as few mothers as possible, so there really weren’t that many circles marked on my watch. Most of them were from this autumn.

I replaced the nail in the wall. Back to work. Every ward had intervals of peace between rushes; the key was to snatch these opportunities to catch up. I boiled rubber gloves and nailbrushes in a bag in a saucepan. I crossed to the opposite wall and studied the contents of the shallow ward cupboard, acting competent, if not feeling it. All these years, I’d been expected to set my judgement aside and obey my ward sister; such an odd sensation, today, to have no one telling me what to do. A measure of excitement to it, but a choking feeling too. I went to fill in requisitions at the desk. Since the war, one never knew what would be in short supply, so all one could do was ask politely. I didn’t bother requesting cotton pads and swabs, as they’d disappeared for the duration. Some supplies had been back-ordered for weeks already, I found from Sister Finnigan’s list.

When I finished my slips I remembered I had no runner to deliver them, and I couldn’t leave this room. I swallowed down my anxiety and tucked them in my bib pocket for now.

Ita Noonan was staring off into the corner of the room, egg on her chin. Most of the cut-up sausage was still on her plate, but the whole one was gone. Could Delia Garrett have knelt on the vacant cot and stolen food off her neighbour’s plate?

Avoiding my eyes, the younger woman wore a faint smirk.

Well, one sausage—whatever it was made of these days—wouldn’t kill her, and Ita Noonan didn’t seem to want it.

The delirious woman skewed sideways all of a sudden, and her tray clattered down between her cot and the medicine cabinet. Tea spilled across the floor.

Mrs. Noonan! I stepped over the mess and studied the sheen across her scarlet cheeks; I could sense the sizzle of her skin. My thermometer was already in my hand. Pop this under your arm for me?

She didn’t respond, so I hoisted her wrist myself and tucked the thermometer into her armpit.

As I waited, I took out my watch and counted Ita Noonan’s noisy breaths and her pulse—no change. But the mercury had bumped up to 104.2. Fever did have power to burn off infection, though I hated to see Ita Noonan like this, sweat standing out along her intermittent hairline.

I stepped around her upturned breakfast to get ice from the counter, but the basin held only a puddle around a solitary half cube. So instead I filled a bowl with cold water and brought it over with a stack of clean cloths. I dipped them into the bowl one by one, squeezed them out, laid them over the back of her neck and on her forehead.

Ita Noonan twitched at the chill but smiled too, in instinctive politeness, more past me than at me. How I wished the woman still had wits enough to tell me what she needed. More aspirin might lower her temperature, but only a physician could order medicine for a patient; Dr. Prendergast was the one obstetrician on duty, and when was I likely to lay eyes on him this morning?

Now that I’d done all I could think of for Ita Noonan, I bent to pick up the tray and the plate. The handle was off the cup, in two pieces. I mopped up the puddle before someone could slip in it.

Shouldn’t you call someone to do that for you? Delia Garrett asked.

Oh, everyone’s swamped at the moment.

Technically, a spill came within the orderlies’ remit if one had no ward maid, probie, or junior nurse, but I knew better than to ask them. If one called those fellows in over a splash of tea, they might take offence and turn a deaf ear next time, when it was wall-to-wall gore.