All the letters home were stilted, the efforts mostly of men who had never expected to be far enough away from home and their loved ones to have to put pen to paper. And besides, the censors read everything, and you never knew who the censors were. So most men kept themselves polite and aloof, successfully resisting the temptation to pour out their miseries and their frustrations. And most men wrote home regularly, the way children do who are sentenced to a boarding school they loathe; where happiness and busyness are, the urge to communicate with loved ones far away diminishes very quickly.
‘Will that do?’ asked Matt anxiously.
‘I think so. I’ll put it straight into an envelope now and give it to Sis before lunch… Mrs. Ursula Sawyer… What’s the address, Matt?’
‘Ninety-seven Fingleton Street, Drummoyne.’
Luce came strolling down the verandah and flopped into a nearby cane chair. ‘Well, if it isn’t little Lord Fauntleroy about his good deeds!’ he said provocatively.
‘If you sit in that chair wearing nothing but shorts you’ll be striped like a convict,’ said Michael, slipping Matt’s letter into his pocket.
‘Oh, bugger the stripes!’
‘Keep it clean and keep it down, Luce,’ said Matt, gesturing accurately toward the open louvers of Sister Langtry’s office.
‘Hold on a tick, Mike! I’ve got a letter for Matt’s wife you can post along with that one,’ Luce said, too softly for any but the three of them to hear. ‘Like me to read it? Dear madam, did you know your husband’s as blind as a bat?’
Matt was out of the chair too quickly for restraint, but Michael placed himself between the frantic blind man and his tormentor, and held Matt firmly. ‘It’s all right, mate! He’s just being nasty. Calm down, now! It’s all right, I tell you! He couldn’t do that even if he wanted to. The censors would catch it.’
Luce watched, enjoying the spectacle, and made no attempt to draw up his legs when he realized Michael had decided to put Matt with the others at the table. But rather than make an issue of it, Michael chose to guide Matt around the outflung legs, and so departed in peace.
After they were gone, Matt to the table and Michael into the ward, Luce got up and went to the verandah railing, leaning on it, his head cocked to hear the murmur of Michael’s and Sister Langtry’s voices through the open window; though his position and pose indicated that he was not listening should the inhabitants of the office look his way, he was still within earshot. Then the office door closed, all was silent again. Luce slipped past the card-players and went into the ward.
He found Michael in the dayroom buttering bread. Fresh crusty bread was the only culinary thrill, and a recent one at that, which Base Fifteen had to offer its inmates. Patients and staff alike consumed vast quantities of the bread at every opportunity, for it was excellent. By nine o’clock in the evening and the last cup of tea of the day, there was never any of the fairly generous daily ration left.
The dayroom was not a kitchen, simply a food repository and utensil cleaning/storing area. It had a rough counter and cupboard unit running under one louvered opening and along the wall between it and the sluice room next door. There was a sink beneath the window, and a spirit stove on the counter some distance away from the sink. It lacked any sort of device to keep food cold, but there was a wire-mesh meat safe hanging on a rope from the roof joists and dangling in lazy turns like a Chinese lantern.
Tucked in the far corner of the bench was a small spirit-fired sterilizer in which Sister Langtry boiled up her hypodermic equipment and what few instruments she was ever likely to need, in the unlikely event of ever needing them at all. As a matter of good practice she kept two syringes, hypodermic needles, suture needles, a pair of suture needle holders, mosquito forceps and straight forceps permanently sterile in case a patient injured himself, required sedation by injection in a hurry, or was attacked, or attempted suicide. When ward X had first been opened there was heated debate as to whether its patients might be permitted to keep their razors, belts and other potential instruments of destruction, and whether kitchen knives should be kept under lock and key. But in the end it was admitted to be impractical, and only once had a patient availed himself of a suicide tool, luckily unsuccessfully. Violence of one patient toward others had never been sufficiently premeditated to review the decision, for patients who could not be managed under Base Fifteen’s conditions did not remain there.
After dark the dayroom was alive with cockroaches; not all the hygiene in the world could eliminate them, for they flew in from outside, crawled up through the drain, dropped from the thatched roof, almost popped into existence out of nothing. If a man saw one he killed it, but there were always others to take its place. Neil was in the habit of organizing a full-scale hunt once a week, in which every man except Matt was expected to bag at least twenty cockroaches, and that probably kept the cockroach population down to something tolerable. However, the dreary little room was always very clean and tidy, so the pickings for scavengers of any kind were scant.
Luce stood in the doorway watching Michael for a few moments, then reached into the pocket of his shorts, withdrew his makings, and began rolling a cigarette. Though Michael was five inches shorter than Luce’s six feet two, they looked well matched, each shirtless, broad in chest, wide in shoulders, and flat-bellied.
Turning his head toward the left, Luce saw that the door to Sister Langtry’s office opposite the dayroom was firmly closed.
‘I never manage to get under your skin, do I?’ he asked Michael, tobacco tin back in his pocket and both hands lazily rolling a cylinder out of the shreds he had plucked from it; a little sheet of rice paper dangled from his bottom lip, and fluttered as he talked.
When Michael didn’t bother to answer, he repeated it in a tone calculated to make anyone jump: ‘I never manage to get under your skin, do I?’
Michael didn’t jump, but he did answer. ‘Why should you want to?’ he asked.
‘Because I like getting under people’s skins! I like making people squirm. It breaks the God-awful monotony.’
‘You’d do better to occupy yourself being pleasant and useful.’ The way Michael said it, there was a vicious bite to it; he still felt Matt’s distress.
The half-made cigarette fell unheeded to the floor, the rice paper flew away as he spat it out; Luce crossed the dayroom in one bound and grasped Michael hard about the upper arm, swinging him roughly around.
‘Who do you think you are? Don’t you dare patronize me!’
‘That sounds like something you had to spout in a play,’ said Michael, looking steadily up into Luce’s face.
For perhaps a minute they didn’t move, simply stared at each other.
Then Luce’s hand relaxed, but instead of falling away it cupped itself around Michael’s biceps, its fingers caressing the angry marks which were beginning to flare up under the skin he had gripped so hard.
‘There’s something in you, our Michael, isn’t there?’ Luce whispered. ‘Sister’s darling little blue-eyed boy and all, there’s something in you she wouldn’t like one bit. But I know what it is, and I know what to do about it.’
The voice was insidious, almost hypnotic, and the hand slipped down Michael’s forearm, over his fist, gently forcing him to drop the butter knife. Neither man so much as took breath. Then as Luce’s head came closer, Michael’s lips parted, he hissed an intake of air between clenched teeth, and his eyes blazed into life.
They heard the noise simultaneously, and turned. Sister Langtry was standing in the doorway.
Luce’s hand dropped from Michael’s casually, not too quickly or guiltily, then with the action completed he moved naturally one pace away.
