‘Just before I blacked out. He talked.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said—’
A woman pulls the olive green curtain along the U-shaped rod. She wears a blue woollen jumper with an image of a kookaburra resting on a branch beside a gum leaf. She wears dark green slacks the colour of the gum leaf on the jumper. Her hair is red and she’s pale, late fifties maybe. She’s looking at my eyes the second she pulls back the curtain. She carries a clipboard. She swings the curtain back for privacy.
‘How’s our brave young soldier?’ she asks.
She has an Irish accent. I’ve never in person heard a woman speak with an Irish accent.
‘He’s doing good,’ Slim says.
‘Well, let’s have a look at that dressing,’ she says.
I love her Irish accent. I want to go to Ireland right now with this woman and lie in rich green grass by a cliff’s edge and eat boiled potatoes with salt and butter and pepper and speak with an Irish accent about how anything is possible for thirteen-year-old boys with Irish accents.
‘My name is Caroline Brennan,’ she says. ‘And you must be brave Eli, the young man who lost his special finger.’
‘How did you know it was special?’
‘Well, the right forefinger is always special,’ she says. ‘It’s the one you use to point at the stars. It’s the one you use to point out the girl in your class photo who you secretly love. It’s the one you use to read a really long word in your favourite book. It’s the one you use to pick your nose and scratch your arse, right?’
Dr Brennan says the surgeons upstairs couldn’t do much about my missing finger. She says modern reattachment surgeries in teenagers are roughly seventy to eighty per cent successful but these complex reattachments rely heavily on one key element: a fucking finger to stick back on. After twelve or so hours without replantation of the amputated finger, that seventy to eighty per cent success rate bottoms out to ‘Sorry, you poor rotten son of a smack dealer.’ Sometimes, she says, finger replantations often cause more problems than they’re worth, especially when the lone severed finger is an index or pinkie finger, but this just sounds to me like saying to a starving man floating out at sea on a plank of wood, ‘Look, it’s probably a good thing you don’t have a leg of ham with you because it probably would make you constipated.’
Amputations like mine, she says, at the base of the finger, are more complex still, and even if my teenage runaway finger suddenly emerged on a bucket of ice, it is unlikely nerve function would recover enough to make the finger anything more useful than something I could shove into a bed of hot coals as a neat party trick.
‘Now hold out your tall man,’ she says, twiddling her middle finger.
I hold up my tall man.
‘Now shove him up your nostril,’ she says.
She sticks her own middle finger in her nostril, raising her eyebrows.
Slim beams. I follow suit, shove that tall man up my nose.
‘See,’ Dr Brennan says. ‘There ain’t nothing that forefinger could do that tall man can’t, you hear me, young Eli? The tall man can just go deeper.’
I nod, smiling.
She carefully unwraps the dressing around my fingerless knuckle and the air on the exposed flesh makes me wince. I sneak a look at it and turn immediately away with the image of a bald white knuckle bone exposed in flesh, like one of my back teeth lodged inside a pork sausage.
‘It’s healing well,’ she says.
‘How long will he be in for, Doc,’ Slim asks.
‘I’d like to keep him here two or three more days at least,’ she says. ‘Just monitor him for infection in the early stages.’
She gives the wound a new dressing. She turns to Slim.
‘Can I speak to Eli alone, please?’ she says.
Slim nods. He stands, his old bones cracking as he rises. He coughs twice, a chesty, nasty, wheezy cough like he’s got a hissing rhinoceros beetle lodged in his larynx.
‘You had that cough seen to?’ Dr Brennan asks.
‘Nah,’ Slim says.
‘Why not?’ she replies.
‘Because one of you bright quacks might do something silly like stop me from dyin’,’ he says. He gives me a wink as he passes Dr Brennan.
‘Has Eli got a place to go?’ Dr Brennan asks.
‘He’s going to his dad’s house,’ Slim says.
Dr Brennan shoots a look at me.
‘Is that okay with you?’ she asks.
Slim watches for my response.
I nod. And he nods too.
He