“Close one,” Trent mouths, or perhaps he is shouting and I am deaf. He jumps up and picks up the stretcher, and moves on into the main square, temporarily also the Hell of Shattered Men. Aline (irrelevant Aline, of the welcoming hips and the uncertain courage, whom I miss desperately at this moment but who mysteriously turns into Elisabeth Soames the last time I saw her, back in Cricklewood Cove, before she is occluded by a dying soldier from Paxton) would be annoyed by this description, because some of the corpses and near-corpses and dear Christ ought-to-be corpses here are female. The old lady/insurgent/average woman who wanted us to go has been transformed into a dead thing made of rags and bone.
There’s a burning smell, and a creaking, and I realise there’s a truck on fire—no, two, but one of them is already a furnace. A big guy brushes past me, some journo who has surprisingly dropped his camera and is making for the flames. There’s screaming from that direction, but then there’s screaming everywhere. The journo is yelling at his crew to give a hand here, you arseholes, and suddenly they get the idea, and there’s a kind of news strike while they risk their lives for someone else’s instead of for hard copy. Most of them look scared and a bit embarrassed about this, and finally the big guy has to be hauled away because the trucks are about to explode. They explode, but hardly anyone pays any attention. The journos all stand and stare at the people they have saved from death, completely unsure about what to do with them now.
Tobemory Trent weaves through Golgotha not like someone who has just been almost blown up, but like a man come home to a terrible but familiar monstrosity. He whips open his pack and does something brutal and necessary and a man shrieks and then says “Thank you,” but then he can’t stop saying it and it becomes a long burble thankyou-thankyou-thankoo-ankooankooankoo. Trent hits him in the head to knock him out, because drugs are precious and the guy’s head isn’t in any danger.
Somehow there are other stretchermen here among the pools of human juice, all long-limbed and grave and carrying, as we are, packs of bandages and basic splints and other things unmentionable to dispense relief. One of them is down, must have arrived just before us, a kid named Bobby Shank. I’ve seen him eating a few times, kinda waved, gotten a nod in return. Bobby Shank has a hole in the front of his head, but there is very little blood and he is still alive. That happens. On TV, if you get shot in the head, you die. Out here, sometimes you survive. Sometimes you even have a life afterwards. Bobby Shank is on his own stretcher, and his front man is strapping up a guy with a minor head wound so he can take Bobby’s place at the back and carry him out. I look away. Bobby Shank will escape, but he will not be okay. Not unless a miracle happens, and the reason they’re called miracles is that they don’t. I glance over at Trent, who sees what I see and shakes his head to tell me I am right. And then he tells me to stop being a fucking tourist, and concentrate. He does not say it like he hates me, but more as if I’ve passed a test.
Somehow, the stretchermen collectively and individually knew that this was a place where they would be needed, and they split up and came here by a variety of avenues so as to minimise their own casualties and maximise their per capita efficacy. It is not relevant to any of them—nor even to me, because I’m here and we are doing this thing and we aren’t leaving until it is done—that some tomfool a few kilometres away behind our fortifications has started bombarding this place while we are still in it. They will deal with that arsehole in due time and full measure. His sheets will be sewn with burrowing mites and his trousers seeded with fire ants. Unto him shall be dealt schoolboy pranks and humiliating revenges, and he shall count his hours a curse until such time as we relent, and by these signs the officers and men of this army of fools shall know this gospel: Do not meddle with the stretchermen, for they are mad, and shall serve you according to a madman’s lights.
We give aid without hesitation, and do not discriminate. Everyone in this un-war treats all wounded. This has been agreed for ages, so sometimes I am working on men who scream in Xhosa or Russian. I put my fingers into a set of surgical gloves and then into a second set on Trent’s instructions (“Some of these bastards have diseases other germs are scared of, man”) and then I put my fingers into new and strange artificial orifices and chase rubbery arterial tissue down inside men’s limbs and drag it back while Trent sutures and shouts that he isn’t a fucking doctor, he’s just a medic and we need to carry this guy out and we can’t because there’s no time; carry one out, lose four more, triage and triage again. We have dispensed relief for an hour, and I have aged one quarter of a lifetime, when thunder opens up and everything goes not white or black or even grey but blue: a dark, oceanic blue, and I do not get shot, but something else instead.
THUS to hospital, and smells of the Evangelist’s study and the cellar at the Lubitsch house. Detergent and linen and elastic and powder and bleach and women working. Less convivial, also blood and sickness and effluvia unnamed but familiar and bad. None of these, currently, leaking from me. I open one eye and survey the dismal situation, and find it fairly good, and then very good, as a mechanical angel above me (almost enough to renew the faith I lost to the Evangelist’s wood-beamed ceiling, this) pumps morphine into my veins. Gosh. Morphine is way cool.
My medical chart is something of a legend. The patient history is very nearly funny. The first person to be assailed by trouser-dwelling fire ants was me. The first person to discover that the gentle waters of the River Kanneh were home to a peculiarly belligerent kind of stinging weed was me. I was, by sheer misfortune, also the first person to be infected with an influenza imported from home on a bundle of letters. From there it got positively comedic: the rabid cat incident. I am a byword for misadventure and bizarre injury.
My present ills are a consequence of having been blown up, sadly by my own side. I say “sadly” because the friendly-fire aspect of the injury means that it cannot be fast-tracked or treated or even properly acknowledged, and there will be no citations, no promotions and emphatically no compassionate leave, because all this would involve the attribution of blame and the acceptance that what happened was erroneous and not in some way gloriously and brilliantly brave and strategically sound. Since our side has just blown up not only me, but also a supply train and half of a friendly local township, this cannot be permitted, and I am officially here owing to an accidental weapons discharge, which is usually code for “Idiot shot himself in the arse while cleaning his gun.” In my case, of course, the piece of shrapnel in my arm argues that it was some other idiot who accidentally discharged his gun, several miles away, but no one is able to acknowledge that or they’ll get fired, or (unlikely but seemingly not unthinkable) fired upon.
On the upside, the shell which exploded down the road from me was not made of uranium, and therefore the small raggedy chunk of it currently occupying space between my bicep and the bone of my upper arm is neither toxic (beyond being coated in airborne viruses and soil and dust and all the other crap it picked up between the point of detonation and its arrival in me) nor radioactive to any apppreciable degree.
Thus, while I have now visited the Hell of Friendly Shrapnel, I have not been shunted into the Hell of Heavy Metal Poisoning or the Hell of Internal Burns or the Slow Hell of Military-Grade Carcinoma That No One Will Talk About. I can expect to live and return to service in the Elective Theatre, where I will no doubt experience further time in the compounded, fractal hells which are the state of being there, namely the hells of Grit Up My Arse, Sandmite Bites, Endless Boredom and Constant Fear, We Have No Idea What We’re Doing Here and Baked Bean Muesli for Breakfast, this last being the inexplicable gift of the hell wardens known as Supply. Given that this is me we’re talking about, I will not get shot, but I will get diseases, snakebites, sunstroke, skin-bloating due to rain, skin-cracking due to sun, toxic shock due to overapplication of skin remedies leading to bowel disorders, rashes and infected blisters. War is not hell. War is a chocolate box selection, an after-Christmas Best of compilation of hells. It occurs to
me as I reach the end of this line of reasoning that morphine is wonderful stuff and I would like some more, and I press the little clicker which I know from previous adventures sometimes dispenses it, but nothing happens. Apparently my injury is not serious, or perhaps accidental discharge victims are treated with a sternness appropriate to their stupidity. It’s not as if I’ve been (headshaking and tutting from the ladies of the cake bake) shot.
There is a woman at my bedside. She appears to be a nurse of some description. Her badge—which is clean and white like everything else about her—reveals that her name is Leah. She is beautiful. She misses the vein three times. Normally she would go to the other arm at this point, but it is by the nature of my injury not available. I forbear from telling her that there are seventeen people of my close acquaintance in this war who would have hit the thing dead on first time, so often have they injected into themselves the freely available heroin to which about one in three of the rank and file is addicted, although “addiction” suggests that there’s something else they should be doing, and that is often far from clear. Are you addicted if there is simply no reason for you to do anything else? If you have not, since you took up heroin, had an occasion where it has interfered with your life? Or are you just fucked out of your mind and waiting to see what comes?
Despite being lousy with a needle (and this ought to be a hell all its own, but somehow isn’t) she is beautiful. I would let her stick pins in me almost anywhere, at any time.
“I would let you stick pins in me almost anywhere, at any time,” I assure her when she apologises. It comes out less sophisticated than I had hoped.
“Likewise,” she says distractedly, making another hole in my un-bandaged arm. I suspect it is starting to look like a bit of pointillisme, and this recalls to my mind the fact that monetary notes of various nations are often or possibly always created by pointillistes, for reasons I do not know, and I have the urge to go and find out.
“You’d let me poke you with a needle? That’s very nice. Only I don’t have a needle,” I respond helpfully, and she blushes and it occurs to me that our conversation could have a rather obvious sexual subtext.
“Oh gosh, this conversation has a rather obvious sexual subtext. Did you know banknotes were designed by pointillistes? I mention it because you seem to have some talent in that direction.” Someone is talking, and he sounds a great deal like me, but I wouldn’t say something that crass unless I was medicated, which of course I am, because they are taking the friendly shrapnel out of my arm in an hour, and I am full to the gills with happy juice.
Leah gives a little howl of fury and then a cry of alarm and I pass out, which I understand later is because she has done something unhelpful with the needle. When I wake, she’s still there, but the nervousness has gone from her. And it has taken with it the pain, or the original pain, although a new, dull ache has appeared and I have a hangover.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I hadn’t slept for forty hours.”
And she kisses me. It is not a sexual kiss, in the sense that she does not fling herself flat upon me and press herself against me and ravish my mouth with her slender, fascinating lips. It is however unquestionably and utterly an erotic kiss, above and beyond that I have lacked female company for seven months and can now, when I am not in agony, get turned on by the elegant lines of wooden chair legs and the sound of a floorboard sighing. It is erotic in the sense also that it is a thing of love, or the promise of love, or the offer of the possibility of love, and I am not aware of having done anything to deserve this. It is wonderful. And then it stops. She surveys the impact zone and seems pleased. I boggle at her (suavely, of course, not like a gaffed salmon being given the kiss of life by a mermaid, not at all), and she turns smartly and walks out. I fall asleep smiling, for the first time since I came to Addeh Katir.
“FUCKING fuckeroo hubabababafishwit fuckit!”
When I heard the door open, I hoped it might be a prelude to more acts of random affection. I kept my eyes closed, therefore, and languished in what I hoped was a subtle blend of need, manliness and puppy-like adorability. I was considering a small whiffling noise when my ear was assaulted by the first volley from this unwelcome substitute. It has pretty much kept going solidly until now, “fuckerang fuck-dammit,” and so on, etc., etc. I never met a less imaginative vulgarist. After a while it just becomes noise. If he was saying “poot” instead—for example, “pootity pooting pootbuckets pooting papootipoot”—it would mean as much, and be worth greater consideration. Ah well.
I deduce from the sound of squeaking wheels and plastic sheeting that they have partitioned the room in the name of decency. Very flash this, in the Elective Theatre. Such niceties normally go out of the window, from which I further deduce that it is his decency and not mine which is at issue. Not that he seems to be a saintly sort of fellow, having used the F-word non-stop for eight minutes. Very coarse. I decide to imagine that he is, in fact, saying “poot.”
“Poot you, poot you, poot everypooting pooter pootpootpoot motherpoot pootity pootastic aaapoot!”
Much better. And the more often he shouts “poot” at the top of his voice, the less attractive he makes himself, no doubt, to a certain splendid, elusive woman with a weak spot for stoical men-at-arms. I fall asleep again, if not smiling, at least smug. It’s odd, though. He says these things without passion, as if he’s just sort of running through them like a shopping list. Sometimes they are loud and sometimes they are quiet. That’s all. I deduce that a bad thing has happened to this person, and I try not to get too close in case he is contagious.
They wheel him out in the morning, and he is still muttering. It is Bobby Shank. I feel like a total bastard. I also worry that there is a taxonomy of triage at work. Tomorrow they will bring in someone else, and he will scream, and then in the morning he will watch as they collect my still body and mark my chart with a big black X.
I worry about this until Nurse Leah comes back and smiles at me through the door, then steps through and blesses me with another brief, infuriating, mystifying kiss and slips away before I can call her to account.
LATER, a male nurse sits by my bed and explains that this is not common practice and that apparently I asked Leah to marry me in the recovery room and that whatever I said was so utterly brave and vulnerable that she wants very much to be asked out on a date. There is a merciless truth in anaesthesia, even more so than in wine. The nature of a man (or a woman) is exposed entirely by the astringent flood of Pentathol and its cousins. An actual date is probably impossible because we are in a war zone, and so she has written me a note, because she is aware that this will all sound silly, and is afraid to be there when I laugh at her or tell her I am already married. Would I like to have this note?
The nurse is called Egon Schlender. He is slim and disapproving and he comes from Gladdyston, and I do not know where that is and he does not tell me. He is protective and quite obviously he has been talked into this speech and he expects me to respond in a dishonourable way. I tell him I am not married. That there is no one waiting for me. That there is no lawful or social impediment to my making an honest woman of Nurse Leah, who is obviously his friend, but that I realise that the ravings of a post-operative idiot are not the basis for a sound marriage, which is a thing to be embarked upon solemnly and with due thought to the consequences and on the understanding that to love is an action, a verb, a thing of choice, and this can be promised and delivered where in love is a more tenuous and fragile thing which may come and go with the wind and the seasons.
I tell him that I really, really would like to take her out on a date, and that somehow it can be managed, and that yes, I would dearly love to see Nurse Leah’s note.
Egon Schlender’s face is very serious. He glances away behind me, thinking, and then he nods, and from his inner pocket he draws a small creamy envelope—by what arts this woman has stationery I do not know—and passes it to me. It smells of nothing so much as clean paper. There is no perfume on it, an
d I realise that this is because Nurse Leah wears none on the wards, even if she has any. She is constantly washing herself, constantly sterilising. The absence is her scent. Nurse Leah is the ambient smell of this place. But in the creases there must be a tiny whisper of her body, of the oils which are in her skin, of sweat. I snuffle it up, and just perhaps there is something there, a lingering mist of something floral, and of effort and care. Peach and latex.
The handwriting is small and neat. It is the handwriting of someone who does not consider themselves artistic, for whom clarity and purity of form are important. There are no frills, no extra strokes. The joins are fluid, but the letters are precisely separated by an instant’s hesitation. The ink is black. The pen was not a ballpoint, but a fountain pen, and it must be one which she keeps for correspondence with home, because it would never survive the harsh use of nursing, most especially not here, in the Elective Theatre.
You asked if I would marry you. I did not know then, and I do not know now, the answer to that question. I do not know you, which is one reason I want to go out on a date with you. Another is that I think if I don’t have some laughs I will probably stick a scalpel in the senior medical officer the next time he asks me to triage his patients for him. You should consider the risks involved, however; even the fact that I am writing this letter to a man I have never formally met, and who asked me to marry him with the drip still in his arm, would seem to imply that I have lost my grip on conventional behaviour. Since I am also fatigued, furious, insomniac and having fantasies of violence against a harmless old lecher who is only trying to do his best in an impossible situation, it seems possible that I may be developing a light stress-induced psychosis, which, though harmless in the long term, may make me an even worse romantic bet than a man who, according to his medical chart, has been burned, run over, repeatedly infected by local diseases, assaulted by a rabid cat and finally blown up by his own side.