the passage. Dizzy? I wondered. Along with the red face, that could mean dehydration. I reminded myself to check how much of her beef tea she’d managed to drink.
I felt a twinge in my side as Ita Noonan leaned harder. Any nurse who denied having a bit of a bad back after a few years on the job was a liar, though any nurse who griped about it had a poor chance of staying the course.
Once I had her sitting down on the lavatory, I left the stall and waited for the tinkle. Surely even when her mind was wandering, her body would remember what to do?
What a peculiar job nursing was. Strangers to our patients but—by necessity—on the most intimate terms for a while. Then unlikely ever to see them again.
I heard a rip of newsprint and the soft friction as Ita Noonan wiped herself.
I went back in. There now.
I pulled down her rucked nightdress to cover the winding rivers of veins on her one bloated leg in its elastic stocking and her skinny one in ordinary black.
Ita Noonan’s eyes in the mirror were vague as I washed her hands. Come here till I tell you, she murmured hoarsely.
Mm?
Acting the maggot something fierce.
I wondered who she could be thinking of.
Back in the ward, I got Ita Noonan into bed with the blankets pulled up to her chest. I wrapped a shawl around her shoulders, but she scraped it off. The lidded cup still felt half full as I set it to her lips. Drink up, Mrs. Noonan, it’ll do you good.
She slurped it.
Two breakfast trays sat side by side on the ward sister’s tiny desk, protruding over its edges. (My desk today.) I checked the kitchen’s paper slips and gave Delia Garrett her plate.
A wail went up when she lifted the tin lid. Not rice pudding and stewed apple again!
No caviar today, then?
That won half a smile.
And here’s yours, Mrs. Noonan…
If I could persuade her to take something, it might bolster her strength a little. I straightened her legs, the huge, swollen one (very carefully) and the ordinary one. I set the tray down in her lap. And some lovely hot tea, if you prefer that to the beef?
Though I could tell the tea was lukewarm already, and far from lovely; given the price of tea leaves these days, the cooks had to brew it as transparent as dishwater.
Ita Noonan leaned towards me and confided in a ragged whisper, The boss man’s out with the rossies.
Really?
She might be thinking of Mr. Noonan, I supposed. Though boss man seemed an odd epithet for a fellow pushing a barrel organ around town to support a sick wife and seven children. Was there almost a relish in delirium, I wondered, at getting to say exactly what floated through one’s head?
Delia Garrett leaned out of bed to ogle Ita Noonan’s tilted plate. Why can’t I have a fry-up?
Nothing fatty or salty, remember, because of your blood pressure.
She snorted at that.
I perched on Ita Noonan’s cot—there was no room to fit a chair between this one and the next—and cut one of the sausages into small bites. What would Sister Finnigan say if she could see me break her rule about sitting on a bed? She was gliding about upstairs, too busy catching babies to tell me the thousand things I needed to know and had never thought to ask.
Look, lovely scrambled eggs.
I put a forkful of the nasty yellow stuff—obviously powdered—to Ita Noonan’s lips.
She let it in. Once she realised this was a fork I was setting in her hand, she gripped it and went to work. Wheezing a little, pausing to strain for breath between bites.
I found my eyes brooding over the empty cot in the middle. The nail on which Eileen Devine’s chart had hung was loose, I remembered. I stood up now to ease it out of the wall. I pulled on the chain of my watch and weighed the warm metal disk in my palm. Turning away so neither woman would notice what I was doing, I set the point of the nail to my watch’s shiny back and scratched an only slightly misshapen full moon among the other marks, this one for the late Eileen Devine.
I’d formed this habit the first time a patient died on me. Swollen-eyed, at twenty-one, I’d needed to record what had happened in some private way. A newborn’s prospects were always uncertain, but in this hospital we prided ourselves on losing as few