The Pull of the Stars(43)

I wondered about the orphanage that Bridie had grown up in and about what she’d said of an unwelcomed baby such as the one Honor White was expecting, that it would go into the pipe. A rather extraordinary young woman, this Bridie Sweeney. Such zest and vim. Where had she learnt all she seemed to understand? No comb of her own; a single stolen visit to a cinema. Had she ever been in a motorcar, I wondered, or listened to a gramophone?

“Faith of Our Fathers” tolled from the church behind, drowning out the singing boy. The stained glass glimmered with candlelight. A notice on the door under the heading Allhallowtide said, During of this time of crisis, TWO special masses will be offered each evening at six and ten to entreat divine protection.

That jogged my memory—tomorrow was a holy day, so I supposed I should attend the vigil mass. But I didn’t have it in me; I was dead on my feet.

That flip phrase made me wince. My aching awareness of every muscle was so entirely unlike the blankness of death. I should be glad to have sore feet and a back that grumbled and fingers that stung at the tips.

Finally a passenger tram stopped; it was full but I pressed onto it with the others. People glared at us for crowding them further and some squirmed away in case we were contagious.

On the top deck I stood holding on to the balcony rail. The same small notice had been pasted to the floor every two feet, I saw: SPIT SPREADS DEATH. One of them was already marked, derisively, with a spatter of smoky brown.

Strangers’ bodies weighed against mine. I pictured trams grinding along their lines across Dublin like blood through veins. We all live in an unwalled city, that was it. I saw lines scored across the map of Ireland; carved all over the globe. Train tracks, roads, shipping channels, a web of human traffic that connected all nations into one great suffering body.

A light in a druggist’s window below us illuminated a handwritten apology: Have Run Out of Carbolic. Passing shopfronts and houses, I glimpsed hollowed-out turnips with penny candles that wavered with flame. I was happy that the old beat of festivity still sounded. On Halloween when Tim and I were small, we had barmbrack, the moist fruit bread, toasted at the fire and buttered till the raisins shone. I always hoped to get the lucky ring in my slice, but I never did. My stomach growled now. How long it had been since that bowl of stew this afternoon.

I wondered what Bridie got to eat with the boarders at the motherhouse.

The tram rattled on, past a dark maze of streets where many of my patients lived—rickety stairways, toppling walls, filthy courts, red brick browned by coal smoke; smashed fanlights over doors were eyes put out. A Negro man sat slumped against a wall.

No, a white man, metamorphosed. Red to brown to blue to black. This poor fellow was at the end of that terrible rainbow. Had anyone run to a telephone exchange to ring for an ambulance? But the tram trundled past before I could make a note of the street.

Nothing I could do now. I tried to put him out of my mind.

Alighting at my stop, I caught a whiff from a communal kitchen for the needy. Corned beef, cabbage? Rather nasty, but it made me even hungrier for my supper.

John Brown’s baby has a pimple on his arse, a drunk sang.

John Brown’s baby has a pimple on his arse,

John Brown’s baby has a pimple on his arse,

And the poor child can’t sit down.



In the alley I found my cycle locked safely. I drew up the sides of my skirt in preparation, knotting the tapes for safety.

Light blinded me. A high-pitched call: All right there?

Two of the Women’s Patrol shone their beams all the way to the back wall. To ensure my protection or, put another way, to check if I was reeling drunk or up to no good with a soldier.

I snapped, Perfectly all right.

Very well, carry on.

I wheeled my cycle up the alley, towards the street.

A bell sounded in the factory ahead. Munitionettes began spilling out, calling to each other, their fingers dyed so yellow I could see it by streetlight; were these women from Ita Noonan’s Canary Crew? One of them coughed whoopingly, laughed, coughed again as I pedaled past.

At the top of my lane, boys skittered by in motley gear—a bright scarf around a forehead, a checkered tie worn over the nose, men’s jackets on backwards, the smallest boy wearing the paper face of a ghost. I only wished they had shoes on their knobbly feet. It surprised me that they’d been let out to go house to house at such a time; I’d have thought all doors would be shut. I tried to remember what it was the old ones used to sprinkle on us children at Halloween in the part of the country where Tim and I had grown up.

A tall boy blared at me. His bugle was dented, scarred with solder, plating all worn away at the mouthpiece. Was his father a returned veteran, perhaps? Or a dead one, of course, his bugle sent home in his place. Or perhaps I was being sentimental, and the boy had won it off another in a bet.

The younger lads clashed saucepan lids. Apples and nuts, missus!

The miniature ghost cried, Go on, would you ever have an old apple or a nut for the party?

He sounded drunk to me. (Quite plausible, since many people believed alcohol could keep the flu at bay.) I dug into my purse for a halfpenny even though he’d called me missus instead of miss.

He blew me a phantom kiss over his shoulder.

Clearly to a child I looked well past thirty. I thought of Delia Garrett calling me spinster. Nursing was like being under a spell: you went in very young and came out older than any span of years could make you.