His head was resting on his shoulder, William later said. The two were best friends, their bedrooms pointing at each other over the street. But the angle, it looked like someone else’s head was asleep on Mr. Warren’s shoulder.
Was there blood? Martin asked.
No. There was butter, though. On his mouth.
The police had come and spoken to Mr. Craigie (who the boys believed would likely be placed before a firing squad, an idea that excited them), then the police spoke to the boys themselves. It was decided between the boys that Clark would no longer be allowed to play with them. He was bad luck. An ambulance came and took Mr. Warren away.
He was broken in two like a stick, said William.
Martin knew why there hadn’t been any blood. It was because the body was made of a soft solid like the middle of a sponge cake, and the body’s skin was only the dry outer layer, slightly tougher from touching the air. Blood was a lie, though, blood he had no faith in. If it were true, why didn’t everyone look like balloons full of water, bulging at the bottom? The whole idea of the body being a container for organs and liquids was beyond ridicule, and was clearly something instigated by adults to get something they wanted out of children. There was the bogeyman to keep you from bothering them after eight o’clock at night, and blood (invoked as a punishment for climbing trees or playing with knives) was the same type of thing, although Martin wasn’t sure what the benefit was to the adults. Some people had even spoken of blue blood, which made everything even more unlikely.
These beliefs obviously began to trouble Martin’s father, who took him to see a doctor named Gorda. Martin’s friends were all afraid of Dr. Gorda, because he had hair on his ears and practised mostly on animals, but Martin had no choice. His father had selected the good doctor to help his son over this problem of blood and guts.
The doctor, a man as old as any Martin had ever seen, took their coats in the dusty front hall (there had never been a Mrs. Gorda, hence a number of rumours about the animal doctor had flourished), and the three of them went into a room with a fireplace. It smelled bad, like old empty bottles, and they couldn’t see much of anything until Dr. Gorda switched on a lamp. There were framed diagrams on the wall, and a little table with crinkled butcher’s paper laid on it. The old man reached for something on the mantel, saying, Let’s start with this. It was a jar, and inside it was half a leather satchel floating in milky water, and inside the satchel was a bundle of pale grapes or tiny yellow plums, Martin couldn’t tell. He noticed also that the satchel had a hand.
Oh my god, his father said.
Martin tried to run out of the room, but the doctor had him by the scruff and pushed his face toward the glass. We’re trying to answer your question, boy.
You’ve cut it open, Martin said. You could have put anything in it.
It was a baby. Just a little baby. Dr. Gorda pointed at things and said their names. The poached egg in the middle was supposed to be a lung. The little ball of clay a heart. Pancreas and spleen, he said. There were noodles coming from the baby’s head, and coral beside its split nose. Its eyelid was closed, but it was almost see-through. It was an excellent model, Martin thought, no longer afraid. In fact, it was fascinating that someone had made such a thing. Little white wisps were coming out of it. The doctor put it on a table and Martin sat with it, now mesmerized, staring at it while Dr. Gorda and his father smoked cigars. Next, the doctor showed Martin pictures. He pushed his fingers into Martin’s skin, saying that the things in the pictures were under his skin.
This under here looks like this, he said, showing Martin a fogged round grey thing in the book. A stomach, said the picture. And this — poking Martin in the back — the kidney looks like this.
The bit about kidneys Martin happened to know wasn’t true. He’d seen them in butcher shops — they came from pigs. Dr. Gorda tugged at his pantswaist and pointed. And that … he turned to another page … is this.
The doctor was pointing to a picture of a cooked sausage lying on a piece of stained cheesecloth. Martin wondered if Dr. Gorda believed that these things were inside his own body. As a doctor, he might have. Like priests believed in God. Martin said, I must have been wrong.
Dr. Gorda clapped him on the back. That’s a good boy.
The room had filled with smoke. His father was standing with his back to the jar and the books, and there was a blue cloud around his head. As they put on their coats, Martin started to laugh, but stopped because laughing was what had gotten him there in the first place.
There would be no further challenges to his beliefs about the body until he was a couple of years older. Then, at the age of nine, Martin succumbed to tuberculosis. At the time, it was believed to be carried by pigeons, which were now hunted down in all corners of the city. The sickness started innocently enough, with a light rattling cough and a mild fever, but progressed quickly to breathlessness and a wracking cough that produced a filmy phlegm speckled with blood. Soon he was unable to stand under his own power and they brought him to Temple, the children’s hospital on Temple Street. He remembered the hospital because sometimes he and William would walk in the back and feed the pigs in the stalls behind, or offer to polish the horses’ bridles with Brasso, which put up a scent that made them light-headed. The pigs were Martin’s favourites, though, and the largest of the swine had moustaches that would brush against their palms when they fed them bread and apple cores.
The hospital was full of children and nuns; nurses in their ghostly white costumes swept back and forth against the blue-and-burgundy parquet floors. His mother and father waved to him in the corridor and then someone opened a door behind them and they flashed to shadow. The nurse put a needle in his arm.
He lay in a hard, thin bed. He was frightened and tired, but sleep was no respite from fear. He might be awakened by a sound from the ward, an oddly echoing sound that could resolve into a scream or a moan or, once, to his own sobbing. Other times, one or another of the medical staff would awaken him by taking his pulse (and then his hand would seem very far away to him), or by the sting of a syringe being put into his arm. An older boy, one from school who usually bothered him by following him home and calling his name, appeared on the ceiling early one morning before the sun came up. Once Martin had seen him, the boy walked down the air to the floor and started walking toward him, beating a stick against the metal posts at the ends of the beds. But before he got to Martin’s bed, he changed his mind and instead stood at a distance intoning Maaaartinnnn Maaaartinnnn in a high voice. Then he turned and walked though a child asleep in her bed, and a sidetable, and then out through the wall.
Are do if lake come to say? asked the doctor.
Martin twisted his head away and felt a sharpness in the inside nook of his elbow.
Wander in harm’s sleep, said the doctor to a nurse.
Yes, she said, and then leaned down to Martin. Matter? Motion liffey come.
He fell asleep. In the middle of the night, he woke and sat up. A glow was coming from each of the beds, and he got up and walked through the ward. The light came from the middle of the bodies in those beds — and he noticed also from his own — and he saw that this light illumined the insides of things. Shadows curved away from skin, globules of pink matter throbbed and shuddered. There seemed to be a grey mass twisting through everything. The children’s ward, he saw now, was nothing less than a living larder filled with many tiny red clay hearts and poached-egg lungs. Two kidneys each (the same number as pigs— that wrought an unpleasant connection), miles of involuted tubing, wet brains white as chalk all bound up like rope, all of it pink and damp and giving off light.
Somehow he returned to his bed, and time began to pass again, milling days and nights out of itself. Soon he began to hear church bells, but he couldn’t raise himself enough to look out at the grey Dublin stone. One night, the boy in the bed beside him started groaning and crying, but then Martin drifted off again and the sound fell past him. The next morning, the boy’s bed was empty. A
girl across the aisle from him said, He’s gone.
He’s lucky, Martin said.
The girl was one of the older ones. She tilted her head at him. The boy is dead.
No, Martin said, he’s gone home.
He was inside his mum once, she said, like she was reciting a nursery rhyme, and lived in a house. Everything is inside something else, even the air. But now that boy’s in a box and he’s in the ground. A worm will eat his eyes, and a bird will eat the worm, and then he’ll be able to see his mum from the sky.
Later Martin asked if he was going to go into a box.
I don’t think so, said the doctor, and laughed.
I want to be fed to the pigs, he said, and his mother’s eyes went round. I don’t want to be inside a bird.
The boy was dead. Then a girl died, and another, the one from across the aisle. They took her away and she had only one shoe on, a black one — he could see it under the blanket, and her other foot was bare and dark-coloured like a black currant lozenge. The missing shoe was still under the bed across the way. Church shoes. It was wasteful to leave one behind.
What do you say, Theresa? His sister was standing beside the bed, holding their mother’s hand. Theresa’s mouth was covered with a handkerchief.
I hope you come home soon.
I’m almost better, he said, but his sister was looking away at some of the other children in the ward. Three have died.
You might still, she said, sniffling.
Theresa! their mother said.
But I haven’t. He wanted to reassure her, but she was distracted. A couple of her friends were here, too.
Do you have something for your brother? their mother said. Theresa gave him a box with a wooden puzzle in it. She’d earlier put one of the pieces in her pocket, and later, she would drop it in the street. Their mother closed her hand over his. We’ll all be home as a family again soon. You’ll see. Then later, a nurse came by.
You have some nice colour, she said.
A few days later, he could see the weather was changing. He could see the steeple of a church, the Abbey over on Frederick Street. The Dublin winter giving way to a brighter light. It was nearing the end of April. Sometime soon, the boys would begin to gather at the edge of the Royal Canal, dipping their fishing lines in, or jumping right into the cold, black water. It was only fifteen feet across when it went under Phibsborough Road, and slow moving, but once or twice a year a boy would drown and his body would turn up floating by the cattle yard down by the Liffey, or would be fished out near Sir Rogerson’s Quay. William told Martin he’d once seen a boy holding on to a leash float past under the bridge at Drumcondra Hill. He was face down, William said, but once when he told the story, the boy was face up and his eyes were white and there was a dead dog at the end of the leash.
Lying in his bed in the Temple Street Children’s Hospital, Martin didn’t care what happened to careless boys out at the Royal Canal, he just wanted to get there, get out there and bake under the sun, with the water like a sheet of glass at his feet. Such imaginings were possible now: that morning, he’d been told his parents would collect him to take him home that afternoon. A vein in the crook of his elbow was black from needles. He’d convinced the nurse with the hair on her nose not to prick him that morning. I’m much better, he’d told her, and she’d taken pity.
It seemed as if all the children were getting better at the same time. The last two nights had been fairly quiet, no crying, no rasping coughs. It was as if the weather were changing within the ward as well. It put him into such a good mood that he offered the girl in the bed beside him a candy from his tin. (She had appeared there after the boy who died.) Her name was Nuala. She was from Clontarf, but her father said this was the best hospital in the city and she was to come here to get cured. She said the girl with the black shoes had come from her school.
What was her name? Martin asked.
Elizabeth, said Nuala. She was going to be the first girl reporter for the Irish Times.
It was sad she died.
Yes. It runs in her family. Her father coughed blood and died in a bed they set up in the front room. Her mother hasn’t been well ever since, and now Lizzie. Nuala clucked her tongue and Martin heard the candy tick against her back teeth. His stomach hurt, like he was going to have diarrhea. If he had died, would his mother die? Would his father?
She must have died from something different than her father, he said hopefully.
No. I think it was the same thing. Blood in the lungs.
That scares me, he said.
You’re better, though. You escaped this time.
Yes.
They sat silently in their beds. He could see her out of the corner of his eye watching him, her head tilted in concern. One day, she’ll be a good mom, Martin thought. She was older by a few years. There was a small rise under her shirt.
Would you like me to come give you a cuddle? she asked.
No, he said hurriedly. I’m going home today.
But she slipped the covers back from her bed and padded over to him, pulled his covers away from his body. She was much larger than him. I can see you need someone to take care of you, she said. And anyway, the nurses aren’t coming with lunch for another fifteen minutes.
She angled the pillow so she could lean back and pulled his head down onto her shoulder. Her nice-smelling gown was warm and fuzzy — her parents had brought it from home and insisted that she be able to wear it at night rather than the hospital-issue gowns. He slowly let his weight fall onto her shoulder and she shook her head so her hair covered his face. He knew some of the other children were watching them and his body was stiff against hers. Theresa was sometimes nice to him like this, but she hadn’t been lately. When he was getting sick, she’d stopped being kind to him. Nuala was younger than Theresa, but the older-girl warmth, the smell of a girl’s skin, comforted him. He began to doze off. Some time later, while he was sleeping, she slipped his head onto the pillow and left the bed.
After lunch, his mother and father appeared, and they had his spring coat with them. They drew the curtain around as he put his real clothes on: the brown slacks, the white undershirt, the yellow turtleneck.
We’ll stop in for a chocolate at Goldman’s, said his father. His face was bright with happiness and he was wearing an excellent hat with a rim made of fur. Theresa is waiting in the hallway, said his mother. She’s looking forward to your homecoming.
The three of them got up to leave the ward and Martin felt like a king carried out on his dais. He turned and waved goodbye to Nuala, and she waved back. He had the sudden thought that maybe she had lied about her parents in Clontarf. Maybe the dead father and the bed-bound mother were hers, not the dead girl’s with the black shoes, and she was alone here. But then he went through the swinging doors and Nuala was out of sight, and he knew he would never see her again. Theresa joined him and their parents in the hall, and took Martin’s hand like she’d been told, and the four of them left the hospital triumphantly.
Outside, two men in black overalls loaded some pigs onto a truck.
The walk home swelled Martin’s heart. Lord, the sky! The big grey stones of the Mater Misericordia Hospital catching the late April sun! And the sun! So much of it, and so rare for this time of year. The cars went past tooting and the horses lowered their heads. He loved the horses even more than he normally loved them.
Hold still! said his mother, walking backwards to take a picture of them.
They went in to Goldman’s and Martin picked a chocolate with crisps and raisins in it, and Theresa had a block of nougat. Mrs. Goldman rubbed Martin’s cheek with her hand.
What a lamb!
Martin’s father wanted to make a detour into St. Joseph’s Church, to thank the Virgin.
Colin, their mother said, you’re not taking any child of mine into a church. Even to thank the Virgin.
He’s half a child of Christ, love. We shouldn’t push our luck now.
What if it’s the Christ h
alf got sick?
All the more reason to thank the Virgin for prayers answered.
They argued like this for a few moments; Martin and Theresa had been through these attempted detours many times. Their father still clung to his stray hope that he’d get the four of them into a church one day. As usual, they saw his shoulders slump a little and their parents walked back toward them.
Why don’t you make one of us Catholic and one of us Jewish? Theresa asked. Then there won’t be any more of this half and half business.
And which would you be, Theresa? asked her father.
I’d be Catholic and Martin would be Jewish. Then there’d be one of each, a Jewish boy, a Catholic girl, a Jewish mum, a Catholic dad.
I think not, said Adele. We don’t need to be divided against each other. Lord knows there’s enough trouble already. You can still thank God, Theresa, without praying to the Virgin.
But I like the Virgin. She has a pretty face.
There would be no more discussing it. They turned up the street and walked straight home, but Martin’s father said in his mind, Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death. Amen, and they all knew he was doing it because his lips were moving. Adele nudged him with her elbow and shook her head at him, but she was also smiling. That was the way of their family.
He stood at the gate of 77 Iona Road and looked up into his window and his heart felt like it was going to burst. His mother held the gate for him like he was the Prince of Wales and All That He Surveys. He turned and saw that William was standing in his window, waiting for Martin to go up and stand in his. They went into the house. Upstairs, Martin stood in his window and waved to William, and William saluted him, as if everyone had been told to treat Martin like he was royalty.
It was a day for returning to the things of life. Standing at the windows and recalling the views; counting the rooftops, the stop signs, the church spires. Martin took in the riches of his things: his books, his cast-iron double-decker bus, his cigar box full of keepsakes (for which he had designed an ingenious false bottom). He touched his bedspread, his walls, smelled the empty hamper, and it all rushed into him like the world swooping down into his body, like the world returning to him. He was well; he was not going to die. He was going to live.
Martin Sloane Page 13