The Pull of the Stars(7)

The tight-sheeted cot between her and Ita Noonan was a reproach, a tomb blocking my path. I called up Eileen Devine’s drooping face; she’d kept her dentures in a glass by her bed. (Every baby seemed to cost these inner-city women a handful of teeth.) How she’d loved the hot bath I’d drawn her two days ago—the first she’d ever had, she’d told me in a whisper. Luxury!

I wished I could wheel Eileen Devine’s empty cot out onto the landing to make a bit of room, but people would only bump into it. Also, I had no doubt we’d be getting another pregnant grippe case to fill it soon.

Eileen Devine’s chart from the wall behind the bed was gone already, presumably tucked into the corner cabinet under October 31. (We filed by date of discharge, which sometimes meant death.) If I’d been the one to write the concluding line in the regulation tiny lettering that filled both sides of her sheet, I’d have been tempted to put Worn down to the bone. Mother of five by the age of twenty-four, an underfed daughter of underfed generations, white as paper, red-rimmed eyes, flat bosom, fallen arches, twig limbs with veins that were tangles of blue twine. Eileen Devine had walked along a cliff edge all her adult life, and this flu had only tipped her over.

Always on their feet, these Dublin mothers, scrimping and dishing up for their misters and chisellers, living off the scraps left on plates and gallons of weak black tea. The slums in which they somehow managed to stay alive were as pertinent as pulse or respiratory rate, it seemed to me, but only medical observations were permitted on a chart. So instead of poverty, I’d write malnourishment or debility. As code for too many pregnancies, I might put anaemia, heart strain, bad back, brittle bones, varicose veins, low spirits, incontinence, fistula, torn cervix, or uterine prolapse. There was a saying I’d heard from several patients that struck a chill into my bones: She doesn’t love him unless she gives him twelve. In other countries, women might take discreet measures to avoid this, but in Ireland, such things were not only illegal but unmentionable.

Concentrate, Julia. I said the phrase in my head to scare myself: Acting ward sister.

Let Eileen Devine go; I had to bend all my efforts to the living now.

One always checked the sickest patient first, so I went around the skeletal frame of Eileen Devine’s empty cot and took down the chart on the left. Good morning, Mrs. Noonan.

The mother of seven didn’t stir. Ita Noonan had been wheeled in six days ago without the grippe’s characteristic cough, but feverish; head, back, and joints as sore as if she’d been knocked down by a bus, she’d said. That was when she could still speak coherently.

She’d told us all about her job at the shell-filling factory, where her fingers had been yellowed by handling the TNT. She’d return to it as soon as she was over this flu, despite what she referred to lightly as her gammy leg. (The right was swollen to twice the width of the left since her last birth; it was hard and chill, the skin chalky and nonpitting. Ita Noonan was supposed to stay off it—keep it elevated, in fact—but sure how could she do that during the working day?) Once she was delivered in January, she’d return to the shell factory again for the grand wages and the cheap meals too; she’d have her eldest girl bring the baby in for feeds, she assured us. Mr. Noonan had been jobless ever since the lockout, when the bosses had broken the workers’ union; he’d tried to join the British army but was turned away for having a hernia (even though his pal with a withered arm had kept his jacket on and been accepted), so he went around with a barrel organ now. Ita Noonan chafed to know how her kids were getting on; visitors weren’t allowed in because of the influenza, and her husband wasn’t one for writing. Oh, she was full of chat and jokes and strong views too; she went off on a rant about the Rising in ’16, how her Canary Girl crew—all loyal to His Majesty—hadn’t missed a day and had filled eight hundred shells that week.

But yesterday her breathing had turned noisier and her temperature had swooped up, jumbling her mind. Despite Sister Luke giving her high doses of aspirin, she’d spiked a fever twice last night, I read, hitting 103.7 and then 104.9.

I tried to slip the thermometer under Ita Noonan’s tongue without waking her, but she roused, so I yanked it out before her remaining teeth could clamp together. Every nurse made that mistake once, had a patient spitting glass and mercury.

The woman blinked her pale blue eyes as if she’d never seen this room before, and writhed against the tapes binding the hot poultice to her chest. The shawl slid off her head; her thin hair cropped inches from the scalp stood up, the prickles of a hedgehog.

It’s Nurse Power, Mrs. Noonan. I see you’ve had a haircut.

Delia Garrett muttered, Sister Luke put it in a paper bag.

Some of the older nurses maintained that cutting a fever patient’s hair had a cooling effect and that if you cut it, it would grow back after, whereas if it fell out on its own, as often happened with this flu, it’d never return. Superstition, but I didn’t think it worth a quarrel with the night nurse.

Delia Garrett touched her fingertips to her own elegant head and said, If it never comes back and the poor creature’s left as bald as an egg, I suppose she can have a hairpiece made of it.

Let me just take your temperature, Mrs. Noonan.

I loosened the collar of the woman’s nightdress. A thermometer under the arm needed two minutes rather than one and gave a reading one degree lower, but at least there was no risk of the patient biting the glass. On a chain Ita Noonan wore a tin crucifix, I noticed, no bigger than the top joint of my finger. People were all for holy things these days—talismans against terror. I tucked the thermometer into her humid armpit. There we go.