The Barracks

by John McGahern

  The five days she was there proved too many. She had to follow instructions, take medicines, stay in bed late, do none of the tasks that had become her life in the house. She was living and sitting there and it was going on without her. The policemen’s wives were constantly in. She had no life whatever then, just chit and chat, skidding along this social surface. She knew she must have cancer. Moments, when she’d suddenly grow conscious that she must be only sitting here and waiting, she’d be seized with terror that it would all end like this, a mere interruption of these banalities and nothing more.

  The nights were worse, when she was awake with Reegan and could discuss nothing. Oh, if she could only discuss the operation she was about to face and discover what they both felt! And if they got that far together they might be able to go back to the beginning and unravel something out. There never had been even any real discussion, not to speak of understanding, and while each of them alone was nothing there might be no knowing what both of them might find together. No, she could not even begin when they were awake, silence lay between them like a knife; and he was slaving at the turf-banks these days as well as doing his police work, and was mostly asleep, no sound but some aboriginal muttering rising now and then to his lips, the same that would rise to hers out of the black mysteries of her own sleep.

  So it continued till she went, they did not even make simple sexual contact because his hands would come against the bandages. Few were waiting at the town station that morning she went. A cold wind blew down the tracks but the little red-brick building, old and rather pretty, had last year’s holiday posters and narcissi and daffodils tossing between the bare rods of the fuchsias in the beds.

  “It’s cold for April,” she shivered, her eyes resting on the features they knew too well to experience any more.

  “It’s better to have it now than a bad summer,” clicked as automatically out as if she had put a coin in a slot.

  “But if we could have it both ways!” the words forced other words.

  “That’d be perfect,” it continued, “but with the weather this country has we’re lucky to get it any way at all.”

  “There’s not many travelling,” she looked about her after a silence.

  “No. Never in the morning. We’re lucky not to be on the three twenty-five. It’s like a cattle train these days and them all for the night-boat,” he said.

  “There’ll be soon nobody left in the country,” she murmured what was being said everywhere.

  A signalman crossed the tracks with a white hoop, and Reegan took his watch out of the little pocket that kept his beads.

  “Another few minutes,” he said. “It’s due in four minutes.”

  “Is it going well, the watch?” she asked very quietly.

  “It hasn’t broken for four years.”

  “And it’s very old, isn’t it?”

  “More than twice my age. There are no parts for it any more. It costs a fortune if it breaks. It was bought in New York. My father gave it to me when I joined the police. Elgin,” he read off the white face with its numerals and hands of blue steel. She had these details before and she asked as she asked more than once before, “Will you keep it?”

  “For my time,” he laughed as he always did. “Willie can do what he likes with it when it comes to his turn.”

  The diesel in the distance turned to a powerful roar as it came closer, the signalman exchanged the white hoop for what seemed an identical hoop with the driver, it must be some safety device. Reegan put her cases on the rack and they sat facing each other at one of the windows of an almost empty carriage.

  The train pulled out of the station. Trees, fields, houses, telegraph-poles jerking on wires, thorn hedges, cattle, sheep, men, women, horses and sows with their litters started to move across the calm glass; a piece of platform was held still for three minutes at every wayside station and for ten at Mullingar.

  She had cancer, she was going for a serious operation, and it was so frighteningly ordinary. The best years of her life were spent and all she’d managed to do was reach this moment in this train. “Trees, fields, houses, telegraph-poles, Elizabeth Reegan, cattle, horses, sheep,” throbbed in her head to the train’s rhythm as they flashed past. They seemed so unimportant, she and Reegan and people; after a struggle of a lifetime they managed to get in a train or some place, “Trees, fields, houses, Elizabeth Reegan”, beating like madness in their heads as the train beat on to its terminus.

  She was going weak, and it was the stuffy heat of the carriage, she told herself. She must try and talk. She must try and ask Reegan something. She must break this even drumming of, “Trees, fields, houses, Elizabeth Reegan”, to the beat of the train. She’d collapse or go crazy if she couldn’t stop it soon, she’d have to try and start a conversation, she’d ask, “Have we many more miles to go?” and it would be a beginning. “Have we many more miles to go?” she asked and he answered. From Westland Row they got a taxi to the hospital. She knew every inch of this squalid station and the street outside: the Cumberland and Gros-venor hotels, the dingy bed-and-breakfasts, the metal bridge, and the notice above the entrance at the traffic lights.

  How the lights of this city used to glow in the night when the little boat train taking her back to London after Christmas came in and out of the countryside and winter dark. The putting-on of overcoats and the taking of cases off the racks and the scramble across the platform to get on the train that went the last eight miles out to the boat. Always girls weeping, as she had wept the first time too, hard to know you cannot hide for ever in the womb and the home, you have to get out to face the world.

  Often she had wanted to lie down at dawn and die on this platform after the night-ride across England and Wales, the crossing from Holyhead, the fight off the boat through the Customs at Dun Laoghaire, the fight for the seats on the train for here, carriaged home those 23rd of December nights like cattle.

  Suddenly, she’d remember she was going home. She could lie in bed late in the mornings, she hadn’t to tramp from bed to bed on the wards for three whole weeks more. The ones she loved and hadn’t seen for a year would be waiting with a hired car and shy, lighted faces outside the red-brick station, coloured bulbs in the Christmas tree and whiskey on the porter’s breath, and they’d lift her off the train and take her home.

  They’d be shy at first, thinking she must grow grand and away from them in a great city like London, and she making things more awkward still by telling them what they could not believe—that she was growing more and more the simple human being that had been forced to leave them the first day.

  The sheer ecstasy of laying out the presents on the deal table in the lamplight. She’d have spent every penny of money and imagination and now was the hour of indulgence, the blessed ecstasy of giving and being accepted in love, tears lighting her eyes as she watched their faces while they stripped away the festival paper, patterned with red berries and the green, spiked leaves of the holly. Every gift was wrapped in yards of paper so that their imaginations would have chance to make a glory out of the poor thing she had brought, she had gone without things for herself to bring these presents, gone without for weeks before Christmas. And she would do it again. She would do it again and again and again.

  Soon they’d force her to sit to her meal and they’d even remembered the dishes she used like best as a child. Now was their turn. They had her present. She gave sharp cries as she tore away the twine and paper, “What is it? What can it be?” and it was there and she was breathing, “Oh, it is too much and so lovely”, as she lifted the shining bracelet and they gathered about to gloat over her happiness.

  They were a big family and she was young then, and full of life, which is the only youth, and far rarer than beauty. They’d sit together about the blazing pile of ash on the hearth and she’d make them go over every scrap of local news. She’d tell them about London. They’d laugh much. The whiskey and sherry bottles that were kept for Occasions would be brought out of hiding and someo
ne would sing: because Elizabeth was home.

  What did it matter that it had all slowly broken up and separation had come before even the first death? It didn’t matter, she must affirm that—it made no difference! Only her happiness mattered. She’d been given all that much happiness and she wanted to praise and give thanks.

  She was not really going in a common taxi to a common death. She had a rich life, and she could remember. She’d suffer a thousand anythings for one such Christmas again.

  She reached over and took Reegan’s hand, her face alive with joy, and he held it uneasily. He couldn’t understand. She was at the gates of the hospital and the defeated woman that had faced him in the train was gone. He was uneasy and couldn’t understand.

  The hospital was in its own grounds, trees partly shutting it away from the city; a new state hospital, modern and American, several rectangles of flat roofs in geometric design, the walls more glass than concrete.

  They didn’t notice much as they paid the taxi and asked the way with their cases to the reception desk. Elizabeth’s name was checked on the list of admittances for the day and they were sent to wait in a kind of hall or corridor facing four official doors. A few little groups already waited there about their own patient, all lonely-looking and humble and watching. The doors opened and people in white coats came out to call their names off a file in their turn.

  Elizabeth was strained and tense by the time the formalities were finished. The last she had to do was check in her things at the desk and get a receipt. A porter was waiting to take her to her ward. She had to say good-bye to Reegan.

  “Is there anything else, Elizabeth?” he asked. She watched his face and coat and hands with the swollen veins. She was quiet with fear. She might never see his greying hair again, the two deep lines over the forehead, the steel blue eyes, the scar on the upper lip, the short throat, the gaberdine coat he wore, the veins swollen on the back of his hands. She might never even see this corridor where they were standing. She

  might never get out alive. When she took leave of his lips she might be moving into death.

  “I’ll tell the children,” he said when she didn’t speak.

  “Buy them something. Say I sent it back,” she managed.

  “That’s all right. There’s nothing else, is there?”

  “No. Not that I can think. There’s nothing else.”

  “Don’t worry, Elizabeth. All you have to do is get well soon. Some Thursday we’ll come up on the excursion ticket, the four of us. We’ll all write before then. We’ll ring the day of the operation.…”

  He saw her wince. He was conscious of the porter waiting. “There’s nothing more so?” he puzzled for the last time. “Good-bye, Elizabeth, everything will be all right,” and they kissed in the stiff public way of hospital farewells, as bad actors would.

  She could say nothing. He came with her to the lift, let go her hand at the entrance, the porter pressing one of the lighted buttons for the door to slide between them.

  When the door had shut and the lift rose he lingered, pervaded by that sense of vague melancholy that can be as powerfully evoked by the singing of Good-bye to the White Horse Inn as by a real departure. Their lives were flowing apart and she was alone and he was alone and it was somehow sad and weepycreepy.

  Through one of the glass doors he saw a pair of patients in dressing-gowns and slippers talking at a radiator. One was drawing for the other on his bandaged throat what must have been the incisions the surgeon had made. Then the other started to trace another pattern across his stomach, making great slashes with his fingers. One had cancer of the throat, the other stomach cancer, Reegan deduced. He watched the white bandages on the throat in morbid fascination: that man would choke to death one of these days! And the really lunatic part of this dumb show was that they were both as excited as blazes, working hand and lip as if they were trying to make up for ages of silence. It was quite enough to shake him out of his mood of melancholy and send him on his way.

  He walked quick as he could, down the tree-bordered avenue, past the little lodge at the gates with the two round lamps on the piers that came on at night, and got on the first bus to the Pillar.

  He had something to eat in O’Connell Street, bought three fountain pencils with the inscription Present from Dublin as he had promised Elizabeth, and then loitered about the streets with the fascination of country people for faces, the thousands of faces that poured past, not one that he knew; strange to understand that they were all subdued and absorbed in their own lives, that such constant friction of bodies didn’t cause them to strangle each other or copulate in mass.

  He got tired tramping and standing about, his feet not used to the asphalt, but he had hours to kill before his train went. In this city he’d been trained, in the Depot in the Phoenix Park, and he inquired the numbers of the buses for there and got on one.

  Findlater’s Church, Dorset Street, Phibsboro, St Peter’s Church, the Cattle Market; and as the bus went, the rows of plane trees seemed to run the length of the Circular Road to the Wellington rising out of the Park and join branches about its base there.

  The Depot was behind its railing. A group of recruits were drilling under the clock on the square and it hadn’t even changed its black hands. Two policemen stood with their thumbs hooked in their tunic pockets outside the guardhouse, coming lazily to attention to salute the cars that went in and out. Reegan watched and listened greedily, the bellowed commands, the even stamping of the boots, the buttons flashing when they wheeled, his life at twenty echoed there.

  “The poor humpers!” he muttered and it didn’t take it long to turn to the frustration of his own situation. Ever since he’d come up against the fact that life just doesn’t hand you out things because you happen to want them, he’d carried a grudge. He’d never understand that it’s an extremely limited bastard as far as satisfaction goes: and he saw the fault in the strip of green and gold with the white between flying over the Depot, symbolizing the institution of Eire now as it had done as good for his dream once, and this drilling square turning out men to keep its peace in the blue uniform that he’d have to wear when the train took him out of the city and home.

  The tests found Elizabeth worn and anaemic, her heart had weakened, she had to be given blood transfusions and let rest. The day before the operation the anaesthetist introduced himself to make his examination, and late in the evening the chaplain came to hear her confession.

  She confessed to a usual rigmarole of sins already confessed and forgiven in her past life. She didn’t love or hate enough, she thought, to commit them any more; she hadn’t envy as she hadn’t desire enough left; and who was she to curse! She only got more and more frightened as the days went. She had failed and despaired and given up so many times in the last months, and good God, how little she trusted! She had neither words nor formulas to parrot out the catalogue of this state, and how could something so much the living state of herself be state of sin? She seemed to have grown into it rather than fallen from anything away, she could not be sorry. She met the priest’s gaze with a gaze as steady as his own: he was a man too, he knew nothing more than she knew, and if she couldn’t find words for herself in her loneliness how could they be got out of a double confusion; and words, she knew, didn’t profoundly matter anyhow; nor did human understanding, because it understood nothing.

  She met him face to face and assured him that she had nothing on her mind, she was grateful for his solicitude, but she had absolutely no worries. He seemed to dislike her gaze as steady and sure as his own. He told her peevishly that she had no need to be grateful for what was his duty. She bent her eyes. He may not have had an easy day, she thought: she heard the words of absolution, and he was gone to another bed.

  He was gone. The aluminium of a trolley shone under the blaze of the electric lights beside the sterilizing room. She heard a low moan, a rattle of a newspaper, what sounded like a buckle rang against one of the beds, the rubber foot-soles of a nurse padded d
own the ward, some one laughed. The walls were the green of a rock sweet she’d been crazy about as a child: from the heart of the city the traffic roared, a great sea of noise. She muffled a sob. Tomorrow morning the anaesthetist would put her into a sleep she might never come out of. Oh, if she could clutch and suck every physical thing around her into her being, so that they’d never be parted; she couldn’t let go of these things, it was inconceivable that she could die!

  A nurse came to her bed, a black-haired country girl, who said, “We’re giving you something that’ll let you have a good night’s rest, Mrs Reegan. We must have you in good shape for tomorrow,” and she was at last able to smile and wonder whether the tablets were blessed seconal or sonerzol as she fell asleep.

  She was screened off the next morning and a nurse, gowned and masked and with a sterile trolley by, began to prepare her skin for the operation. Both armpits were shaved; the area of both breasts, the arms to the wrists and belly to below the navel were washed, painted with iodine, and covered with a sterile towel. She stiffened with fear as the screens were pulled about the bed and then fear itself was displaced by the loathsome shame of having to expose her body to be handled and shaved and washed.

  This nurse at her bedside felt no disgust or shame, she tried to tell herself; she had long become practised and indifferent, it was just another job in her day she could do well, as it had been the same once for Elizabeth in her days on the wards in London.

  So why should she be shamed because it was her own body this time—was she shamed when this same body was excreted by her mother or when it had strutted in the rouge of its youth? No, if she wasn’t shamed then, neither could she be now, she had to accept all or nothing, she couldn’t go away with the pretty bits and turn up her nose at the rest, and why should any one be shamed by anything if they weren’t shamed by everything! They helped her into an open-back gown. She put on white theatre socks and cap and was covered with a theatre pack, dressed as if for some old rite, horribly unreal, and then she was given atropine. The drug went quickly to her head: she began to laugh and talk; everything was bathed in a light of loveliness and wonder as the porter, with the nurse at her side, wheeled her out of the ward and down the corridors towards the theatre.