by Anna Hope
‘Why are you here then?’
She turned. On the other side of her sat an older, ill-thriven woman with greasy hair like rags. A red mark stained the side of her cheek. She had a small table in front of her and appeared to be sorting coloured beads into different piles: red, yellow, green.
‘I smashed a window,’ said Ella. ‘Why’re you?’
‘I took a gill of ammonia.’ The woman spoke in a thin and listless way. ‘I felt like someone else.’
I felt like someone else. It made a sort of sense.
‘Who’ve you got?’ the woman said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Outside? To ask for you? I’ve got my girls. My girls’ll come and get me soon.’
Ella shrugged.
‘Careful then.’ The woman left off what she was doing and leant closer, her breath foul. ‘You don’t want to go in with the gawbers. You only go out feet first. If no one comes for you, they put you in the ground in a hole with five others. No name. And that’s where they kill them. They kill the babbies in there.’
The woman’s eyes had changed; they were glassy and dead now, like the fish at James St Market when they’d been left out too long.
The chair beside Clem was still empty, and Ella stood and crossed swiftly towards it. ‘Can I sit here?’
Clem looked up, eyes distant, then, ‘If you like,’ she said, before turning back to her book.
Ella watched her read a moment, then, ‘I went downstairs,’ she said.
Clem didn’t respond.
‘They put me in a room with a window, there were—’
‘Two holes in the door.’ Clem put a finger to her place and looked up. ‘I know. You weren’t there for very long though, were you?’
‘A day and a night.’ Ella bridled.
‘Yes, well. Like I said. Not very long.’
Clem looked away again. As she lifted her hand to turn a page, Ella caught a glimpse of her wrist, where red marks, like scratches, crosshatched her skin. As though she felt her watching, Clem pulled down her sleeve and covered them up.
Later in the afternoon, the doctor appeared, and a stillness came over the room at his entrance, the chelping chorus of women quietening to a low, anxious hum. He spoke to the nurses, extending his finger every so often to point at one or two of the women, What about her? he seemed to be saying, or her? And the nurses would nod and smile or shake their heads and say something back.
He began moving around the patients then, asking them brief questions, feeling their necks, noting things down in his book. When he reached their side of the room, he spoke to Clem. ‘Reading again, Miss Church?’
Clem nodded as a small red flush clambered up the side of her neck.
‘Be careful.’ The doctor wagged his finger. ‘Or one day you might never come out of those books.’
Clem seemed about to say something back, but his gaze moved quickly on to Ella. ‘Miss Fay.’ The man frowned. ‘I hope you’re feeling calmer now.’
Ella’s heart was drumming, but she copied the way Clem sat, putting her hands in a quiet fold in her lap, sitting a little straighter in her chair.
He eyed her for a long moment, then, ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Very good.’ He scratched out some notes and pocketed the book. ‘Time for a little music, I think,’ and he moved to the piano, where he seated himself with his back to the room and lifted the lid.
Music came, gentle at first, pooling out from the instrument and lapping at where they sat. Then the doors to the ward opened and two male attendants appeared: short and stocky, poured tight into their jackets. They were the men who had brought her here.
‘Who are they?’ She turned to Clem, whose head was up; she was watching them too.
‘They’ve come to take people to the chronic ward.’
‘Who goes in there?’
Clem shrugged, but there was a new tightness to her voice. ‘We don’t know till they go.’
On the other side of the room Old Germany, her hair still in bunches, rose from her seat, making her way with determined steps to the middle of the floor. At first Ella thought that she was offering herself up to be taken, but then the old lady closed her eyes and began to sway, hands fluttering like two small birds at her chest. She was dancing. Dancing to the piano.
The men were making their way towards where they were sitting. Ella’s stomach clenched, but they passed her by, heading instead to a small woman with short-cropped hair, sitting shrunken in her chair with her face screwed tight. The music from the piano grew in volume. The men bent down, and the woman began to cry, softly, calling for her mother as she was hauled from her chair.
Old Germany’s movements were larger now, limbs lifting and falling, lifting and falling, turning on the spot.
The men came back, and the nurses pointed to the spinner. The men lifted her, and she yelped like an animal, twisting to be free: ‘They’lltekemestomachapart. There’sapartitionthere. That’sit. Where they get in. That’s where the spirits get in.’
Raw fear flashed in the woman’s eyes as she was carried past.
The music finished when the men were gone, the sound of it still trailing in the air as a thin spatter of handclaps came from the top of the room.
‘Thank you, Doctor.’ It was the Irish nurse. ‘That was gorgeous. Wasn’t it just gorgeous, everybody?’
‘Chopin,’ said Clem under her breath, shooting the woman a murderous look. ‘“Raindrop”. Not that you’d know.’
The doctor stood, gathered his music, then gave the room a funny little bow. Somewhere in the distance a clock struck three. Ella looked down. Deep marks gouged her palm where her fingernails had dug into the skin. How long had she been here for? She looked up and around the room: at Clem, deep in her book; at women plucking at themselves, women staring into space.
Panic sent its dark root deep inside her.
John
THE WEATHER CHANGED – rain slamming in off the moors and pelting the windows so there was no outside work to be done, not even the digging of graves, and they were shut up in the day room with the dark-painted walls that swallowed the light.
He stayed in his corner, as far away from the others as he could get. In this long, thin day room there was a rule: the far-gone ones were wheeled in each morning and set in one half, where they stayed for the rest of the day. Ruins of men, faces eaten by disease, many of whom did not know their own names. As the day wore on, the smell in the room thickened: sweat and tobacco, and the heavy linger of those who could not look after themselves. It made your eyes smart. Clagged up the back of your throat.
There was a line in the middle of the floor, invisible, but stronger than any painted in tar, and those on John’s side would not cross it, not even if a billiard ball had fallen from the table and rolled away. On this side, stretching from the middle fireplace, were the rest of them. Not so bad as the others, perhaps, but that was not saying much. There was the old soldier who talked only of the Pashtun and spent hours attempting to blacken his boots to be ready for battle. A toothless old-timer named Foreshaw, of whom it was said he had been in there since the place opened, almost thirty years ago, and that he had once drunk the blood of a sheep. A scattering of Irishmen, one of whom, by the slant of his accent, could only have been from the same side of Mayo as John himself. And though John did not know the man from before, he knew the brokenness on his face, the restless eyes – as though the world were a trap ready to spring upon you – had seen it on too many faces to count. And on most of them too, the same bafflement, as though unable to understand that this was where they had ended up.
He did not look at any of them if he could help it, not on either side of the room, staying in his corner by the canary instead. It was darker here, quieter. He always tucked a bit of bread from breakfast in his pocket for the bird. Close to where he sat was a shelf of books, some old newspapers, a worn-out billiard table, a few cues with no tips, and a piano that no one ever really touched.
John turned the pages o
f the papers; they were days old, and the leaves were crispy, but it was something to do, even if there was nothing there he wished to know about: old football matches, Ireland, a Fenian murder not five miles from where he grew up. He knew the family name. He pushed the paper away.
‘Tell us again, Dan.’ John looked up, saw Joe Sutcliffe speaking. He was a new one in there, young and skinny with a tremble on him like a sapling in a high wind. ‘Tell us about the running girl.’
‘Oh, she was a beauty all right.’ Dan was standing in the middle of the room, feet planted wide, holding forth to a small clutch of men. ‘She came towards us so fast I thought she might fly. Long hair like snakes around her head. First thing I thought was she was a Spanish dona. Or an Irish queen. Isn’t that right, John lad?’
John said nothing; they didn’t need stoking from him.
As the day wore on and the weather did not lift, the men played cards, hunched over the folding table in the middle of the room, betting for tobacco, or matches, or both. The assistants turned a blind eye as Dan shuffled and dealt the stained old deck, the cards rifling from his fingers. From where he sat, John saw what the others did not: saw the cards tucked up Dan’s sleeves, ready to be brought out for a royal flush.
Occasionally, after much cajoling, John would join in for a brief hand or two. While they played, they smoked. They smoked as if they were paid to do it; they ripped the old well-thumbed books to shreds to use as papers. They smoked their tobacco packets down to the last crumb and then they traded for more.
On Thursday, the doctor visited the ward, making his way around the patients, and then, when he had done with touching necks and taking pulses, came back over to John’s corner of the room. ‘Dark old spot you’ve chosen here.’ The man thrust his hands in his pockets, staring out at the rain splaying itself against the window. He looked at John sideways. ‘What’s the name again?’
‘Mulligan.’
‘Mulligan. Ah. Yes. I remember now. Do you like music, Mr Mulligan?’
‘Well enough.’
‘Well enough.’ He gave a smile. ‘Well. That will do for me.’ He sat himself at the piano, pausing with his fingers above the keys before lowering his hands to play.
As the music began, many of the men turned their heads towards it. A stillness seemed to come over the far-gone ones on the other side of the room. The card players put down their cards and leant back in their chairs.
John closed his eyes. Behind them was a road, curving through hills.
Morning.
Rain stopping. Clouds shifting and the sun sliding free. The gorse singing yellow after the rains.
He breathed in the scent of the wide sky, the road. And when the music came to a stop, he stayed where he was, eyes shut, wrapped in the feel of it still.
‘Are you feeling all right, Mr Mulligan?’
He opened his eyes. No road. Only the end of all roads. Only this room, and these men. Only the doctor, sitting in his seat before the piano, looking over at him, a small smile about his face.
‘Schubert,’ the doctor murmured. ‘Impromptu, G flat major. It often has a similar effect on me.’
By Friday evening, though the rain was still lashing against the windows, the mood in the day room lifted, because tonight, as every Friday, there would be a dance. Two hours in the ballroom, and those that had behaved during the week and not cheeked the staff and eaten all their food and could stand on their own two feet and put one in front of the other and keep their hands to themselves were allowed to go.
By half past six the usual commotion had started up. The men on John’s side disappeared off to the washrooms, and when they came back they had scrubbed faces and hair spat on and smoothed down. You could taste their excitement, thick and sticky, filling the air and leaving room for little else. It disturbed the far-gone ones on the other side, who got restless in their chairs and moaned and shouted out. John sat himself in the corner and took small, shallow breaths, trying not to let it in; it was a terrible dangerous contagion, hope.
Someone came up behind him, rubbing his cheek on his, and John jumped back, lifting his hand, ready to strike.
‘Whoa there,’ Dan laughed as he moved around to John’s front. ‘You all right there, lad? It’s only a bit o’ cheek. Smooth as a baby’s arse that.’ He took John’s knuckles and rubbed them against his skin. ‘Took the best part of half an hour: Riley’s bristles. You could melt them to make iron.’ His eyes were glittering. He smelt of soap.
‘Will she be there, Dan? The running girl?’ It was Joe Sutcliffe speaking, sidling shyly up to the pair of them. ‘Will she be there then?’
‘Aye, lad. Reckon she might. You ever danced the lancers, John?’ Dan clapped his hands together, banging out a rhythm with his heel on the floor. Several of the men laughed and began clapping along, and Dan was off, scooping up Sutcliffe and hauling him at a racketing pace around the billiard table, until one of the attendants had to grapple him to a stop. ‘Any more of that, Mr Riley, and you’ll be given the long sleeves.’
By a quarter to six they were all lined up, pushing and jostling for space like schoolboys, holding their palms out for the attendants to check. Old Foreshaw was there, standing proud, a smart blue tie tight at his chin. Dan beside him, with Sutcliffe on the other side, the young man’s eyes popping with excitement, elbows sharp, hands jiggling in his pockets. ‘Not coming then, mio Capitane?’ Dan yelled over.
John made a gesture: no. Dan knew he never went.
‘Good,’ crowed Dan, clapping the backs of the men on either side. ‘You stay here with the rest of the meshigeners. We don’t want you spoiling our chances, do we, lads?’ He took Sutcliffe under one of his arms and knuckled his scalp.
Then they were gone, their voices fading down the corridor and the air empty and hanging. John the only man left on his side. It was like this every Friday. The other men jiggled and gibbered a bit, and then settled back to whatever sort of nothing they were doing before.
He stood, going to the window to look out, but only his face came back to him, blurred and shadowed in dark and rain. The ballroom. He had gone there once, when he didn’t know what was what. A vast space with eight fires roaring and a band up on the stage. And women. That had been a surprise.
Was the running girl there then? Or was she downstairs? She’d have to have been put there after a stunt like that. He had been downstairs himself – a long white corridor and rooms off it, tiny cells the size of a man, only a blanket and a bucket inside, and a lone high window, impossible to reach.
He felt it again, standing there, the soaring that had filled him when he saw her run and the ashy bitter feeling when she fell. The furious face she had, the swollen eyes. She was no beauty, but a fierce, frightened girl.
But she had been right, at least, not to take his hand. He was not the man to help her. He would only have pulled her further into the bog.
He went over to the canary’s cage, calling to the bird with a low clucking sound, fiddling in his waistcoat pocket for a piece of bread, breaking it into crumbs and then holding them to the thin space between the bars. The bird hopped over and nipped from his hand. He felt the scratch of its beak, brief against his fingertip. The bird’s black eye was bright, but there was something listless about him. He hadn’t heard him sing for days.
Charles
AS THE MUSICIANS filed out of the mess room, Charles hurried to catch up with Goffin. ‘Well done,’ he said, as he came alongside him. ‘You made a fine fist of that!’
‘Oh. Thank you! Was it really all right?’
‘Rather,’ Charles averred.
In truth, Goffin’s playing had been a little strident on the top notes and had squeaked terribly on the national anthem at the end of the night, but on the whole the chap had done a good job.
‘Well – thanks,’ Goffin gave him a flash of that sweet smile, ‘for giving me the chance, I mean. It’s an honour to play with a musician as talented as yourself.’
Charles gave a brief shr
ug – nothing to it – but the compliment bloomed in his chest as he and Goffin walked in companionable silence across the grass towards the Barracks. ‘So, how are you finding it? This old place, I mean? Been keeping you busy, have they?’
‘Just a bit.’ Goffin grinned, holding the door open for Charles. ‘They’re a good bunch though. Although the weather’s a little … bleak.’ He grimaced as he shut the door behind him and they began to climb the stairs.
‘Ah, the moors! Not what you’re used to?’
‘Not so much.’
‘Well, I’m glad you’re settling in. Lucky to have you, I say.’
They had reached their respective doors now. ‘Well,’ said Charles, ‘see you tomorrow then.’
Once inside his room, Charles put down his violin and music case and slid his post on to the desk. His head felt pleasantly warm and muzzy – it was always like this after the dances: a sort of glad tiredness that came from long playing, from the companionship of the other players. After the last patient had left the ballroom, there was always a late meal laid waiting in the attendants’ mess room: bread and cheese and jugs of ale, and although he could easily have requested a cold supper to be put out for him in the assistant medical officers’ dining room, Charles always preferred to take beer and break bread with the men. He was not much of a drinker, but a glass or two of ale was always a pleasant way to round off the evening’s work.
He shed his jacket, unlaced his bow tie and unplucked his cufflinks; he always made an effort with his dress on a Friday night and expected his players to do the same.
The week, which had started so badly, had ended rather well; his leadership of the band seemed to be progressing favourably, and the musicians seemed happy enough. Since the meeting with Superintendent Soames he had been careful, working harder at his ordinary duties so he might carve out the time to play for the patients, and the programme already seemed to be bearing fruit – the other day, for instance, he had been playing the Schubert G flat when Mulligan, an Irish chronic, had brought his chair forward to listen. When Charles had finished playing, there was a look on the man’s face that was … well, beyond words really.