Waring did not even look at his assistant after the operation. He thanked the Sister with his pretence of Old World politeness, and then gave Daud a long, curious look. ‘Aha! I see we have a new bod here,’ he cried, advancing towards Daud and cleaning his pince-nez. ‘Where is it you come from, son? India or Pakistan? The Dark Continent! Having a lot of trouble out there you chaps, aren’t you?’ He left the theatre closely followed by the Egyptian, whose career was certainly in ruins, and on whose head was the blood of the young Abubakar, one of his people.
Daud wondered if it was time for a tea break. With Solomon on duty, that was always a hazardous manoeuvre. He loved nothing better than to flush out orderlies and assorted ancillaries from the rest room. He took his overshoes off and strolled into the theatre corridor in search of adventure. He glanced into the reception area, wondering as he did so whether there was any chance that Catherine might be sitting there, waiting to hand over a patient. He found a pretty student standing by a patient’s trolley, holding his hand and speaking softly to him. Leaning against the opposite wall, and watching her with an unnervingly blank stare, was the tall, dark-haired porter with the Zapata moustache. His name was Michael but everybody called him Mick because he was a porter. He was well-known as a gourmandizer of pretty young students, and Daud imagined that he achieved his nefarious purposes by first hypnotising his victims with his blank stare and then eating them.
The nurse looked up gratefully at Daud, and so she should with Mick taking up station beside her like that, but he beat a quick retreat before she tried to hand the patient over to him. He saw Dickie Bird coming out of one of the theatres and strolled back to the wash-up, knowing a dirty trolley would soon be on its way out.
The list cases finished at five. By then Daud was close to tears with boredom. He knew that if he made his presence known, he would end up cleaning the theatres while everybody went off duty. Dear Colonel Alexander, Let me congratulate you, first of all, on your appointment to chair the enquiry into the noxious smells that have troubled the estate by the abbatoir. In these days of hardship, I can only envy you your good fortune. I am sure you will make a first-rate job of it. They did not name you after the conqueror for nothing.
The Most Sterile Majesty, the Enlightened Solomon, he chanted. Once again I pick up thoughts and groans to commune with your wise nature. You know the esteem in which I hold you, and I beg that you will not dismiss my little plea because it seems a touch disrespectful. Why do I always work in the disposal corridor when you are at the helm? Can’t you see what it’s doing to me? Can’t you see how the boredom is getting to me? It is time, it seems to me, that the duties of a theatre orderly were clearly defined. My contract states that I will carry out general theatre duties, assist in the anaesthetic room, clean and maintain instruments and equipment, and shave patients in the pubes if nobody else wants to do it. May I respectfully submit that the way you are treating me is tantamount to slave labour? You will concede, Wisdom Incarnate, that this is nothing short of barbaric exploitation. Is this what I sacrificed my education for? What do you take me for? A monkey? I look forward to hearing from you.
When he next heard from Solomon, it was to be told to clean the theatre, a duty he performed with resignation. He contented himself with writing obscene letters to his erstwhile hero. Solomon offered him a lift home as they left together at nine. In the car, he told him of his experiences as a tank sergeant during the war. Daud could hardly believe his good fortune. This was yet another piece of evidence, unlooked for but most welcome, to confirm his general theory of a gifted killer race that roamed the globe, slaughtering wherever it went. It had to be admitted that they had slaughtered with impressive efficiency and a degree of moral economy. It did not surprise him that Solomon saw nothing to be ashamed of, for example, in spending his youth sitting in a metal can dismembering people. It was not as if he took pleasure in it, or did it too successfully, or ran amok and carved up the vanquished as well. He did what nature had created him to do. Daud shivered slightly as he discerned the beginnings of a staggering revelation. It was not that war made people ruthless and cruel. It was ruthless and cruel people that made war. Was it possible that the race needed to feel and hear the gurglings of its dying victims in order to be at its most creative and alive? Like vampires? Was that why the nation was going to the dogs, getting so badly hammered in cricket and generally turning into a bunch of effete wankers? He offered Solomon a drink, hoping to delay him long enough to pop the question at him, but Solomon smiled his thanks and refused. ‘My children are at home alone,’ he said. ‘Another time perhaps.’
‘How old are your children?’ Daud asked. It was a random question but one never knew what it might yield.
‘Nine and thirteen,’ Solomon said, grinning in the dark but none the less changing gear in preparation for leaving. ‘I don’t like to leave them alone any longer than I have to. They’re quite used to it but . . .’
Daud waited, unable to save Solomon from the misery of having to complete what he had started to say, and unwilling to stop him in case he should misunderstand.
‘Their mother died about seven years ago,’ Solomon said.
‘I’m sorry,’ Daud replied, shamed by his own frivolity.
7
He queued up with the other ancillary staff outside the accounts office. When it pleased her to do so, the Wages Clerk opened the door and admitted them. Her name was Mrs Coop, and it was obvious from the tone of her address that she felt nothing but contempt for the people she served. She turned the smallest query from one of them into an excuse for a merciless, wheezing interrogation. Cigarettes had ruined her chest. Daud took his wage packet without looking at it. Mrs Coop rapped on the counter behind which she stood and summoned Daud back with a hooked index finger. He grinned at her and turned to continue on his way.
‘You!’ she called, and the cramped accounts office fell silent. Every week somebody fell victim to Mrs Coop’s particular disdain and this week it was to be him. He checked over what had just happened to see if he had done anything wrong. He was reluctant to upset the old bag. She found breathing so difficult that usually he watched her with fascinated horror as she took deep, whistling breaths before gasping out a phrase or two. Often he found himself so absorbed in this primeval struggle for life that her laboriously crafted words failed to register. ‘Can’t you read?’ gasped Mrs Coop, her finger tapping the sign on the counter. It asked all staff to check their wages before leaving the office.
Her white hair was hennaed and tortoiseshell spectacles swung on a cord round her neck. Daud looked at her wasted old face, then dutifully checked his wages. ‘It’s never wrong, Mrs Coop,’ he said, thinking to flatter the old woman and add a few days to her life.
‘Well, next time make sure you check it. I don’t want you running back in here in the middle of the week complaining that your wages aren’t right,’ she called out, struggling with each word individually, as if it had required a particular effort to bring it out into the world. The last syllable reached him after he had gone through the door, and was standing outside the office, on the brink of going out of earshot.
‘Stupid cow!’ said a woman’s voice in the queue. ‘She’ll kill herself with them horrible fags.’
‘I wish she’d just get on with it,’ growled a beefy, balding man in blue overalls, grinning to acknowledge the deliberate ambiguity of his exhortation. Daud looked at him with interest. Could this man have led charges across strange and blood-stained terrains, cut railway tracks into mountain-sides and brought order to warring peoples? The man caught Daud’s glance and gave him the imperial smile. ‘I wouldn’t let her talk to me like that if I were you,’ he said, grinning and looking at faces in the queue to signal that this was a send-up. ‘I bet if you were back in the jungle, you’d have just chucked her in a pot, wouldn’t you?’
‘What?’ he asked, momentarily taken aback by this brazen assault.
‘Ha ha, I was only pulling your leg, mate,’ the g
rinning man said, pretending to hush down the titters of the rest of the queue.
‘Pulling my leg?’ Daud said. ‘You ignorant fat man! You wouldn’t know my leg from your arsehole, you penis sucker.’
‘Now you just wait a minute,’ the man shouted, trying to raise his voice above the gleeful hoots of the women in the line.
‘Shit-eater,’ Daud called out, even though he felt that honour was already satisfied.
‘Come back here and say that,’ the man yelled.
Daud waved two fingers at him and beat a tactical retreat. He was pleased with himself as he strolled to lunch, and neither the meal nor the thought of the man could diminish the euphoria of the handsome pay-packet in his pocket. He saw Catherine ahead of him on the great, curving stairway, descending towards the main hospital entrance. ‘Hello,’ he said, hurrying to her and touching her on the shoulder. She looked round, and her face changed with a slow smile.
‘Where’ve you been? I haven’t seen you for ages,’ she said.
‘What do you mean ages? Thirteen days . . . or something like that,’ he said, not wanting to be too exact.
‘Really? Is that all?’
‘You look . . . good,’ he said. ‘You look lovely,’ he added, laughing at his own caution. He saw a Thank you beginning to form on her lips, but she only mouthed the words. ‘You look somewhat pissed off though. Come to think of it, you seemed a bit pissed off the last time I saw you. This nursing isn’t such fun, is it?’
‘You’re determined to make me dislike nursing. I don’t feel pissed off,’ she said, in a voice that was cheerfully hinting that it did not wish to discuss the subject. ‘Where are you off to now?’
‘Peer Gynt Hall,’ he said, and went on to show off by explaining the name. She took him instead to the common room in the nurses’ home, saying she found the gloom of the hall depressing sometimes. He felt like an intruder as he followed her in, and stood close by her as she poured from the huge pot. The room was crowded with students, most of them in uniform. He saw Roger Churchill, a Barbadian Student Nurse from the psychiatric hospital. He was sitting sprawled out in front of the television, watching the immolation of the England cricket team. This was the second day of the Third Test, and England were having serious problems with Michael Holding’s bowling. Roger Churchill waved to Daud and then shouted out the score. They were nodding acquaintances but in this crowded room it had been necessary to show that they knew each other. Heads turned to look at Roger while he became absorbed again in the cricket. His middle name was Winston and in the one long conversation they had had together, he had made Daud green with envy by telling him that in Bridgetown he had often ridden on the same bus as Seymour Nurse. Later, Roger Winston Churchill was to be expelled from the psychiatric hospital after being discovered in a store cupboard with a teenaged female patient, soothing her shattered psyche in the time-honoured manner. But there was no hint of this as he lay sprawled in front of the television, shouting out the cricket score. The pause in the buzz of conversation was only momentary, and the murmur picked up again almost immediately, flowing round the oblivious Roger with effortless accommodation.
They sat under a chestnut tree in the garden that led off from the common room but was enclosed from the road by a hedge, and talked comfortably and easily together. She told him of the awfulness of the ward she was working in. He asked her if she would like to get away from the hospital regime and go out somewhere. A meal or the cinema? She said yes. Just like that! He said he would wait for her at the bus station, near the clock.
He hurried home after work, washed the clothes he was wearing, and then ironed them dry, rushing like a maniac, watching the steam rising off his trousers, fearful that the appliance would explode. With his clean clothes draped over chairs to air, he stood in the living room for some moments, gathering strength for the next task. Shouting obscenities and prayers as if he were once again at the Defence of Kut, fighting off the mad charges of the Imperial armies with his bare knuckles, he made a dash for the shower. He shouted down the disgust that he felt as his naked toes touched the slimy shower floor and scrubbed the smell of theatres from his body. When he had finished, he mopped the floor, sluicing the last obstinate bubbles on to the toilet area. The floor-boards were soft and spongy with rot, and swallowed the water gratefully. Karta called it Daud’s slum. A fair description, Daud thought, as he watched woodlice crawling along the margins of the floor.
He felt clean and dressed up as he waited at the bus station, and felt that everybody who walked past him knew what he was standing there for. He thought of walking towards her flat, but he was afraid of missing her. He passed the time by practising his opening words. You’re beautiful, he would say.
He had taken girls out before, and felt he ought to say something like that to them, something winning and flattering. Even when it was true, he had never been able to say it, had always fumbled and fudged and made a joke out of what he really wanted to say. These women had been foreigners like himself, most of them in England to learn English. They spoke to each other in a kind of minimal language, bending rules to suit their own grammars. It was easy to avoid having to say things to them. He had gone out with homesick German au pairs who had surprised him with their frankness, which he found little short of brutal. They told him openly that they just wanted to sleep with him, did not want any complications. There was a young Syrian midwife who clung to him in a way that was flattering at first but quickly became frightening. He had mistreated her shamefully to persuade her to leave him. He preferred not to remember how he had behaved with her. There had been an exceptionally kind and intelligent Swiss woman who was an assistant at the local grammar school, who tried to talk to him and communicate the beginning of the affection that was growing in her. He deflected her by pretending that her English was worse than it really was, and that he could not grasp the subtleties she intended. In due course they all went away and sometimes wrote him affectionate and adoring letters. The letters arose, he assumed, out of the desire to glamorise their sojourn in England with a fiction of the dark lover abandoned in the wastes of Albion.
Sometimes he wrote back, and invented without compunction. The Swiss assistant had brought out the best in him. For her he conjured picnics he had been invited to, boat rides on the river with two Polish students who were on a walking tour of the world, his arrest and incarceration by a bigoted, fascist and sadistic police. He even invented a family with whom he often went to eat, and who invited him to join them on High Days and Holy Days. This had gone down so well that she had returned the following summer with Suchard chocolates, two bottles of wine and a basketful of marshmallows for which he had a weakness. She stayed with him for two days, breaking her journey in the hope of meeting these wonderful people he had come to know. Unfortunately none of them was around. And they could not go to bed together because there was something wrong with him. Wrong? A meaningful glance at his astonished loins that had known nothing about this part of the plan. It had come to him all of a sudden that he did not want to sleep with this woman, could not be bothered with the labour of it, did not want to demean both of them with an act of spurious intimacy. So she had continued on her journey to New York or somewhere like that, baking him an enormous cake before she left. He never heard from her again, and never told her that she was beautiful although he often felt he ought to.
When Catherine arrived, she was hurrying. She saw Daud, smiled and slowed down. She looked slimmer and more glamorous out of her uniform. Her hair was pulled away from her face but a few strands had escaped and grazed her temples like a halo in the setting sun. Her skirt swished round her calves as she hurried to him. ‘You look beautiful,’ he said, astonishing himself with his boldness.
She grinned and shook her head, surprised by his abruptness. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That’s kind of you.’
This is easy, he thought. He had to be careful, of course, that he did not ruin a good thing by making it cloying. Or allow himself to seem too overwh
elmed that she was actually out with him. ‘You’re a bit late,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry. Everybody was going out tonight so I just had to wait my turn for the bathroom. They’re going to a big do in Dover at the Yacht Club . . . a barbecue and dance, for the county cricket team.’
‘The Yacht Club! Do you go there?’
‘I’ve been there once,’ she said. ‘Just for a drink.’ There had been the briefest of pauses and Daud waited for her to say more, but she glanced away, dropping the subject. He was disappointed that she moved in those circles, was part of that jolly world besotted with fantasies of glamour and fun. The doctors at work talked about such moneyed pleasures, and described their friends who were farmers or racing drivers or journalists, reported their witticisms and their drinking habits. Some of the nurses were allowed into this world too, and after paying the price of admission, became victims of their own fantasy of capturing a rich farmer or a deeply tanned airline pilot for a husband. But if she was part of that, he admonished himself, what was she doing with him? He acknowledged his own feelings of inadequacy, for if she knew that kind of excitement then she would find him dull.
‘You look very tired,’ she said.
‘It’s been a hard day,’ he said. ‘I spent the whole day patrolling the back corridor, washing instruments and putting dirty towels in linen bags.’
She was a little ahead of him, and she glanced over her shoulder. The sun was in her eyes and she squinted a little. When he said no more, she stepped off the pavement to have a good look at him, walking beside him. She looked him up and down once, and then she smiled.
‘How do you think I look?’ he asked, assuming that she was laughing at his clothes. He turned round slowly with his arms stretched out by his side, but he was too self-conscious to do a Karta twirl. ‘I took out my shark-skin, my leopard-skin, my sequins, my leathers, but I just could not make up my mind. So in the end I wore these rags.’
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