The Pull of the Stars(4)

I crouched now to put my hand under the sheet and check the man’s neck for a pulse. Nothing.

This weird malady. It took months for the flu to defeat some patients, sneaking up on them by way of pneumoniac complications, battling for every inch of territory. Others succumbed to it in a matter of hours. Had this poor fellow been a stoic who’d denied his aches, fever, and cough until he’d found all at once, out in the street, that he couldn’t walk, couldn’t speak, could only whoop out his lifeblood all over Nurse Cavanagh? Or had he felt all right this morning even as the storm had been gathering inside him?

The other day an ambulance driver told me an awful story: He and his team had motored off in response to a phone call from a young woman (in perfect health herself, she said, but one of her fellow lodgers seemed very ill and the other two not well), and when the ambulance arrived, they found four bodies.

I realised that Nurse Cavanagh hadn’t felt able to leave this passage outside Admitting even to fetch help in case someone tripped over the corpse. I remembered being a junior, the paralysing fear that by following one rule, you’d break another.

I’ll find some orderlies to carry him down to the mortuary, I promised her. Go and get yourself a cup of tea.

Nurse Cavanagh managed to nod. She asked, Shouldn’t you have a mask on?

I went down with flu last month.

So did I, but…

Well, then. (I tried to sound kind rather than irritated.) One can’t catch it twice.

Nurse Cavanagh only blinked uncertainly, a rabbit frozen on a railway line.

I went down the corridor and put my head into the orderlies’ room.

A knot of smokers in crumpled round caps and in white to the knees, like butchers. The waft made me long for a Woodbine. (Matron broke all her nurses of the filthy habit, but once in a while I relapsed.) Excuse me, there’s a dead man at Admitting.

The one with the metal half-face snorted wetly. Come to the wrong place, then, hasn’t he?

Nichols, that’s who the orderly was—Noseless Nichols. (A ghastly phrase, but such tricks helped me remember names.) The copper mask that covered what had been his nose and left cheek was thin, enamelled, unnervingly lifelike, with the bluish tint of a shaved jaw and a real moustache soldered on.

The man beside him, the one with the trembling hands, was O’Shea—Shaky O’Shea.

The third man, Groyne, sighed. Another soul gone to his account!

These three had all been stretcher-bearers. They’d enlisted together, the story went, but only O’Shea and Nichols had been sent up the line. Equipment shortages at the front were so awful that when bearers ran out of stretchers, they had to drag the wounded along on coats or even webs of wire. Groyne had been lucky enough to be posted to a military hospital and was never sent within earshot of the cannon; he’d come back quite unmarked, a letter returned to sender. They were all mates still, but Groyne was the one of the threesome I couldn’t help but dislike.

Anonymous at Admitting, we’ll call him, Groyne intoned. Gone beyond the veil. Off to join the great majority.

The orderly had a bottomless supply of clever euphemisms for the great leveller. Turned up her toes, Groyne might say when a patient died, or hopped the twig, or counting worms.

Something else I held against him was that he fancied himself a singer. Goodbye-ee, he crooned lugubriously now, goodbye-ee…

Nichols’s nasal, echoey voice joined in on the second line: Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eye-ee.

I set my teeth. Despite the fact that we nurses had years of training—a theory diploma from the technical school as well as a practical one from the hospital and a third in an area of specialty—the orderlies liked to talk down to us, as if feminine weakness made us need their help. But it always paid to be civil, so I asked, Could two of you possibly bring Anonymous below when you have a moment?

O’Shea told me, Anything for you, Nurse Power.

Groyne reached towards the overflowing brass ashtray, stubbed out his fag, and put it in his breast pocket for later, singing on.

Don’t cry-ee, don’t sigh-ee,

There’s a silver lining in the sky-ee.

Bonsoir, old thing, cheerio, chin chin,

Napoo, toodle-oo, goodbye-ee.



I said, Thanks ever so, gentlemen.

Heading for the stairs, I found I was a little dizzy; I hadn’t eaten anything yet today.

Down into the basement, then, not right towards the mortuary but left to the temporary canteen that had been set up off the kitchen. Our ground-floor dining rooms had been commandeered as flu wards, so now staff meals were dished up in a windowless square that smelled of furniture polish, porridge, anxiety.

Even with doctors and nurses having to muddle in together in this ad hoc canteen, there were so few of us still on our feet and reporting for duty that the breakfast queue was short. People leaned against the walls, wolfing down something egg-coloured with an obscure kind of sausage. Roughly half were wearing masks, I noticed, the ones who hadn’t had the grippe yet or (like Nurse Cavanagh) who were too rattled to do without the sense of protection offered by that fragile layer of gauze.

Twenty hours’ work on four hours’ sleep!

That from a girlish voice behind me. I recognised her as one of this year’s crop of probies; being new to full-time ward work, probationers lacked our stamina.

They’re bedding patients down on the floor now, a doctor grumbled. I call that unhygienic.