by Caroline Lea
‘But Angus –’
‘I won’t let him anywhere near you.’
She shudders, then nods. ‘You won’t leave me?’
I kiss her hot cheek. ‘I promise. I won’t leave you.’
We wait until the whistle sounds in the camp, watching the troops of men marching down towards the quarry. They move like shadows through the mist, over the hill and out of sight. At this distance, it is impossible to tell one man from another: any of those grey spectres could be Angus, with the baton and gun tucked into his belt. And any of them could be Cesare. They all look insubstantial in the morning gloom – like the rumours of ghosts that have always haunted these islands, like the tales of the curses, brought to life.
As soon as they are over the breast of the hill, we begin walking down to the camp, my arm across Con’s shoulders, supporting her as we move, holding her close, feeling the wrench of her coughing echoing through her body and into mine.
When we pass through the gates of the camp, the guard takes one look at us and stands aside. I suppose, emerging from the mist, we must have spooked him. Or perhaps he’s heard stories from the islanders.
I knock lightly on the door of Major Bates’s hut, then knock again, the wood bruising my knuckles. When the door doesn’t budge, I kick it open, bundling Con inside.
Major Bates looks up sharply from his desk. ‘What the devil –?’
‘She’s ill,’ I say.
‘Well, why are you bringing her to me? Take her to the hospital in Kirkwall, for Heaven’s sake.’
‘I can’t. We . . . She’s too weak for the boat journey,’ I say, and the lie sounds convincing. ‘So I thought she could stay in the hospital here.’
‘With the men? Are you mad? This is a prisoner-of-war camp, not a public infirmary.’
‘Oh, but . . .’ How can I convince this man? His face is closed. He has already dismissed us, is desperate to return to the papers piled up on his desk.
‘Please,’ I say. ‘I can stay with her –’
‘Two of you staying in the camp now? Did you not hear what I said? No, it’s Kirkwall for you.’ He picks up his pen, frowns, looks down at the scribbled figures in front of him.
‘I’m a nurse,’ I say. ‘At least I was, for a time, in Kirkwall. And I can help here. I know you’ve a need of nurses.’
‘We have a girl who comes across from Kirkwall –’
‘Bess Croy. I’ve seen her. That is, I’ve noticed her walking to the camp. But she can’t work here all the time, and you’ll not be able to get many other young women from Kirkwall to come to this island. And it’s a large camp – if the men grow ill. I could . . .’ He is scowling, but I carry on: ‘I could stay in the camp, as a nurse, until Con recovers and then I . . . or we could both help in the infirmary.’
He puts down his pen. ‘You’re both nurses?’
I nod. It isn’t true, but Con is a fast learner. All I need is for her to stay quiet now, not to contradict me. I squeeze her hand, hard, until she nods. Her cheeks burn; her eyes are bright with fever.
‘She’ll have to be kept curtained off from the men while she’s ill. We don’t want an outbreak and . . . well, for modesty’s sake. And you’ll have to work hard. We’ve a fair number of injuries from the quarry.’
I nod. ‘Thank you.’
He’s already looking back at his papers. ‘Go on with you, then. Nurse Croy will set you up.’
Bess Croy’s eyes widen at the sight of us, and although she sets up a bed behind a curtain for Con, and fetches the sulfa tablets, her movements are skittish, as though she expects one of us to lash out. When we are changing the sheets, her hand accidentally brushes against mine; she recoils.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ she gasps, rubbing her skin, as if I’ve burned her.
After Con is asleep, I help Bess to empty the prisoners’ bedpans, fetch them glasses of water, rebandage a sprained wrist and change a dressing on a crushed foot. Gradually, she grows less jumpy, and at lunchtime, she fetches two bowls of soup from the mess hut and wordlessly passes me one. She eats quickly, watching me, like a nervous bird.
‘Thank you,’ I say, after I’ve soaked up the last drops of soup with the bread. Then I continue rolling bandages. It is satisfying to start with a snarled mess of fabric and finish with neat white rolls.
‘It’s nice to have company,’ she says, although she still looks wary and skittish. She picks up the bowls and turns away, then stops. Without looking at me, she says, ‘How do you live here?’
‘Pardon?’
She still has her back to me. ‘On this island. It’s so . . . It frightens me. All the stories. But you live here. How?’
‘Oh . . . they’re just stories and –’ I almost give her a sarcastic answer, the sort of thing Con might say in response to this question. Easy enough to live on a cursed island when you’re cursed yourself.
But Bess turns to me, and her face is so young, so guileless. And she is still holding my soup bowl. And her hands were gentle before, when she changed the men’s bandages. She deserves honesty.
‘We were frightened,’ I say, ‘at first. But the island isn’t a bad place. And Kirkwall . . .’ I spread my hands, then smooth the bandage I’ve just rolled, add it to the pile. ‘After everything that happened and –’
‘I understand why you wanted to leave, after everything . . .’ she says. ‘I never believed him, you know. Some people did, but I never trusted him.’
My breath feels tight in my chest. I want her to stop talking, in case Con is listening. I want her to stop talking, so that I can push away the sudden memory of the dark bruises on Con’s neck. The sand scrapes on her back. The way that, for weeks afterwards, whenever she’d reached for anything – a glass of water, a blanket or my hand – her fingers had trembled.
But Bess isn’t looking at my face. She’s staring at her soup bowl as she continues: ‘So I understand why you wanted to leave, especially after . . . your parents.’
Stop it! I think. Stop it, stop it! My mind fills with the sound of the scouring wind, with the empty sea which echoed our cries back to us.
‘But why come here?’ Bess asks.
I swallow, collect my thoughts. I make my voice steady. ‘Would you leave Orkney?’ I ask quietly.
She shakes her head. ‘Never.’
‘Even if your family had disappeared? All of them?’
Her eyes are round, and I see how this could sound like a threat or a curse, even though I meant nothing of the sort.
‘Especially not then,’ she whispers.
I set down the bandages and smooth an imaginary crumb from my skirt, then look down at the floor, counting my breaths until I can trust my voice.
‘Well, there, you see. We couldn’t leave. I thought about going south after the war started. And again, after our parents . . . went. I wanted to join the Wrens. But . . . Con wanted to stay. She blamed herself. Because . . .’ I close my eyes, remembering our parents pushing their boat out, away from Con on the shore, remembering her pacing, waiting for them to come back; remembering the dark weeks that followed, when I hardly saw Con because she felt too guilty to look at me; remembering the night when she stayed out so late that I fell asleep waiting for her; remembering the bruises on her neck, remembering the way she’d seemed terrified of every man; remembering how everyone had stared at her, the whispers, that she’d wanted to hide herself from everyone – she’d begged me to live somewhere alone, just the two of us. And I’d known she’d meant away from men and, particularly, away from him.
When I open my eyes, Bess is blurred. She passes me a handkerchief and I wipe my cheeks. I watch the movement in her throat as she swallows.
‘And now it’s all followed us. All the trouble has followed us here, and more besides. Perhaps we are cursed after all.’ I give a quick laugh. ‘Or this place is.’ It doesn’t sound as light as I’d intended it to. I give a tight smile, which she returns. And I notice her looking at my hands. I clench them into fists to hide the tremor.
<
br /> ‘Are you frightened?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ she whispers.
‘Me too,’ I say.
And behind us, behind the curtain, Con sleeps, her breath bubbling on each exhalation.
Bess nods towards the sound. ‘You can go and sit with her, if you want. You look tired. When did you last sleep properly?’
‘I honestly can’t remember.’
‘I’ll finish rolling those bandages.’
I pause, blinking back the sudden heat behind my eyes at this kindness.
‘Thank you,’ I say.
In my dream I’m swimming with Con and our parents – even though my father could never swim very well. My arms cut through the water; my body is borne upwards as I float and call to our mother.
‘There’s something I want to tell you,’ I shout.
She turns and smiles at me – her face an older version of mine, of Con’s. She is warmth and safety and I know I must reach her, must catch her before she swims away. But she turns and, like a seal diving, she disappears into the dark undertow. When I reach out, my fingers grasp her hair. I pull, although I know I must be hurting her. I tug her hair free of the water, filled with a fierce longing to touch her face, to tell her everything that has happened.
I lift my hands into the light and see only a mass of seaweed, which dissolves. A wordless cry echoes in my ears and I know that the voice is my mother’s and that somewhere she is in pain. Somewhere she is screaming.
I wake with a sob and it takes me a moment to locate myself. I’m not in the bothy – the room is too warm, the bed too small. Then I remember: The infirmary.
I’ve fallen asleep curled up next to Con, both of us crammed into her single bed. And the noise that has dragged me from my dream is Angus MacLeod’s shouting. I’d know his voice anywhere.
‘Where are they? Are they here?’
I’m instantly wide awake, my muscles tensed. The curtain is pulled around the bed, so he won’t be able to see us from the door, but he could easily pull it back.
I hear Bess’s voice. ‘I don’t know who you mean.’
‘Those girls, the twins. Have they been here?’
A pause. ‘I’m sure I haven’t seen them. It’s just injured men in here,’ Bess says, and her voice is smooth as she lies.
I wait, my breath held, my body wrapped tightly around Con’s. She stirs in her sleep but doesn’t wake. Her skin is still hot, but perhaps cooler than earlier.
I hear Angus say, ‘I hope you’re not fibbing to me, miss.’
‘And I hope you’re not threatening me. Or Major Bates will be hearing about it. I’ll be telling him that you’re coming in here, disturbing the men who are trying to sleep and recover. Now,’ her voice wobbles, ‘I’ve work to do, if you don’t mind.’
And I hear her footsteps tapping towards the door, followed by his slower, heavier tread, then the sound of the door opening, and her saying, ‘Don’t be disturbing us again.’
The door shuts behind Angus and I wait.
Bess’s tense face appears around the curtain. I smile at her. ‘Thank you,’ I whisper. ‘Thank you.’
She gives a curt nod and taps away.
I lay my cheek on Con’s hot chest and listen to her steady breath, where the wheeze, it seems, has faded. And I put my hand on my own chest and pray for the rhythm of her heart to fall into time with mine.
Over the next weeks, Con improves, and life descends into a steady pattern, with few alterations. The nurses rise in the morning with the whistle and don’t go to bed until nearly midnight. All tasks outside the camp, such as feeding the chickens, or Bess’s visits to her family in Kirkwall, have to fit around the demands of the infirmary. The work is unrelenting: washing wounds and changing sheets; fetching food and water; administering pills and powders. We are all exhausted – Bess and I, along with another young nurse from Kirkwall, Anne, who says very little and sometimes cries because she is scared of rumours she has heard: that the prisoners may try to hurt her, or that the Germans will be trying to invade, or that everyone who lives on this island will go to an early grave through some misadventure. Anne’s terrors are endless, it seems, but her fear makes Bess braver with me and more conversational, I think.
For six days, Bess manages to keep Angus MacLeod from knowing that Con and I are there, and then, when he discovers the truth, she is as good as her word, and tells Major Bates that he is a menace and must be kept away from the infirmary.
‘The prisoners say he beats them,’ she whispers to me.
I nod, remembering Cesare’s bruises. I wonder where he is now. I like to imagine him in Major Bates’s office, still, surrounded by paperwork. Warm and safe.
Sometimes I look out of the infirmary window at the morning reveille, the men standing to be counted, swaying, half asleep. I fold sheets as I stare out at the lines and lines of brown-uniformed prisoners, trying to see him. But through the grimy window, they all look like the same man: thin and stooped and broken. Hunger is ageing them, bowing their shoulders, making them shuffle and stumble. When they first arrived, Con and I used to hear snatches of songs that they would sing together, but now I hear only the shouts of the guards.
Con’s fever fades and she begins to eat again. She is wary of Bess at first, but gradually, she thaws. She begins to return Bess’s cautious smiles; she thanks her for the bread, the stew, the water.
And then, after two weeks, I hear laughter from behind the curtain and find Bess and Con rolling bandages. I watch them talking and try not to feel a stab of jealousy at their heads, close together, at their shared smiles over some story that I haven’t heard.
Con looks up and sees me; her face is bright. I haven’t seen her look so happy since before the Royal Elm. Or perhaps for longer. Perhaps I haven’t seen her so happy since before we decided to leave Kirkwall.
‘You look too thin, Dot,’ she declares. ‘It doesn’t suit you.’
I perch on the side of her bed. ‘You’re one to talk.’ I poke her collarbone.
‘My nurse hasn’t been feeding me properly.’ She grins.
‘My patient’s been running me off my feet.’ It feels good, this gentle barbing of each other. It feels like something from long ago.
After a pause, she says, ‘I want to stay in the hospital. As a nurse.’
I put my arms around her, and I feel, beneath the thin skin and the prominent bones, some of the old strength in the Con I remember from before we came here, as if she’s cast off that fragile, bitter armour and I can feel her returning to herself, opening up again, like an oyster revealing a pearl.
Cesare
Cesare thrusts his shovel into the rock of the quarry again and again, listening to the clang of spade on stone, but nothing quells his rage. It is three weeks since MacLeod made him return to the quarry, and although Cesare has been back into the office twice to help with some minor administrative tasks, Major Bates seems uncertain about allowing him to do paperwork. Cesare understands that MacLeod must have said something against him. When he asks about being allowed to go up to the bothy to finish the girls’ roof, the major shakes his head.
‘It’s been repaired. One of the guards did it. Besides, they’re not living there any more.’
‘Where are they going? Where are they living?’ The questions are out before he can stop himself.
Major Bates puts down his pen and frowns. ‘And why would I tell you that?’ His voice is hard, his face closed-off, and Cesare realizes that his reaction must somehow have confirmed one of the lies that MacLeod has told about him: that he is dangerous, perhaps, or unstable.
So Cesare presses his lips together and shrugs. This pretence of mute stupidity seems to reassure the major that he means no harm towards the girls, but Cesare is still sent to the quarry.
Day after day of exploding the rock face, digging out the stones, loading wheelbarrows of rubble, emptying them into a lorry. The vehicle, Cesare knows, will drive to the shore, where other Italians will tip the rubble into metal cages,
which are then dropped, using a crane, into the sea. The water swallows them and the exercise starts once more. It is repeated, again and again, day after bitter day. The sea never changes, the barrier never emerges. It is like dropping coins into a well.
The men laugh, at first, that their task is a joke. They watch the rocks vanishing into the sea, and one – a scholar from Venice – talks about Sisyphus, who had to push a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down again.
But after nearly two months of back-breaking work, unending hunger and exhaustion, there is nothing to laugh at. The men mutter to each other, just as when they’d arrived, that what they are being made to do is illegal: they shouldn’t be building enemy fortifications. The scholar from Venice, whose name is Domingo, has told them it’s against the Geneva Convention.
‘We should lay down our shovels and refuse to work for these pigs,’ Domingo says, when the men compare bruises. ‘They call us Fascist pigs, but they are the animals.’
In fact, very few of the men are Fascists, from what Cesare can tell. Some of them talk about Mussolini’s plan to make Italy great and strong, to recapture its glorious past. But most, like Cesare, have found themselves swept up in a whirlwind where they have no choice but to defend their families; where they have no choice but to label a stranger my enemy simply because he speaks a different language or calls a different country home.
And now they are far from the land they love, from the families they want to protect – these peaceable sons of farmers and shopworkers, bakers and teachers – and they have found that they aren’t treated as sons, brothers and young fathers. They are treated worse than horses or cattle or dogs. They are treated with less care than the machinery the men drive.
So, if the Geneva Convention says that the men’s work means they are aiding the enemy, who are they to argue?
Rumours of a rebellion begin to brew.
‘What would you do to him if you saw him in the street?’ Gino nods towards MacLeod, who is patrolling the south edge of the quarry, shouting and swinging his baton.