When she slid around the fly-curtain and tiptoed into the corridor everything did seem to be quiet; too quiet, perhaps, as if the place brooded. There was something missing and something added which together gave the ward an alien lack of welcome. After a few seconds she realized what the differences were: no sounds of sleeping breathing, but a thin beam of light and a soft murmur of voices from under Neil’s door. Only Matt’s and Nugget’s mosquito nets were tucked in.
At Nugget’s bed she moved around the screen so softly he could not have heard her, but his eyes she saw were open, gleaming faintly.
‘Have you managed to be sick yet?’ she asked, after a check of the bowl’s interior beneath its cloth showed nothing.
‘Yes, Sis. A while ago. Mike gave me a new bowl.’ He sounded thin and lost and distant.
‘Feeling better?’
‘Much.’
She was busy for a while taking pulse and temperature and blood pressure, entering them with the aid of her torch on the chart clipped to the bottom of his cot.
‘Could you drink a cup of tea if I made you one?’
‘Could I ever!’ A little strength began to creep into his voice at the very thought. ‘Me mouth’s like the bottom of a cocky’s cage.’
She smiled at him and went away, into the dayroom. No one prepared tea as she did, with the enormous ease and economy of an endless practice which stretched back through innumerable dayrooms to her weepy probationer days. If one of the men did it there was always some sort of tiny accident, tea leaves spilled or the freshness boiled out of the water or the pot insufficiently warmed, but when she did it, it was perfect. In less time than seemed possible she was back beside Nugget’s bed with a steaming mug in her hand. She put it down on the locker and helped him to sit up, then drew a chair alongside and remained with him while he drank thirstily, blowing on the surface of the liquid impatiently to cool it, and taking quick, minute sips like a bird.
‘You know, Sis,’ he said, pausing, ‘while the pain is there I think that as long as I live I’m never going to forget what it’s like—you know, I could describe it with lots of words the way I can my ordinary headaches. Then the minute it goes away I can’t for the life of me remember what it was like, and the only word I can find to describe it is “awful”.’
She smiled. ‘That’s a characteristic of our brains, Nugget. The more painful a memory is, the quicker we lose the key to unlock it. It’s healthy and right to forget something so shattering. No matter how hard we try, we can never conjure up any kind of experience with its original sharpness. We ought not even want to try, though that’s human nature. Just don’t try too hard and too often—that’s how you get yourself into a muddle. Forget the pain. It’s gone! Isn’t that the most important thing?’
‘My oath it is!’ said Nugget fervently.
‘More tea?’
‘No, thanks, Sis. That was the grouse.’
‘Then slide your legs off the bed and I’ll help you up. You’ll sleep like a baby if I change you and the bed.’
While he sat shivering on the chair she stripped and remade his bed, then helped him clothe his skinny shanks in fresh pajamas. After which she tucked him in securely, gave him a last smile and shut him inside his mosquito net.
A quick check of Matt revealed him lying in a most unusual abandon, mouth slackly open and something suspiciously like a snore issuing from it. His chest was bare. But he slept she thought so deeply that there didn’t seem to be any point in disturbing him. Her nose wrinkled, she stiffened in shock; there was a definite smell of liquor about him!
For a moment she stood regarding the empty beds with a frown between her brows, then in sudden decision turned and walked quickly to Neil’s door. She didn’t bother to tap on it, and she was speaking even as she entered.
‘Look, chaps, I hate to have to act like Matron, but fair’s fair, you know!’
Neil was sitting on the bed, Benedict on the chair, both slack-shouldered. Two bottles of Johnnie Walker, one empty and one just about full, stood on the table.
‘You idiots!’ she snapped. ‘Do you want to get us all court-martialled? Where did that come from?’
‘The good colonel,’ said Neil, working hard at speaking distinctly.
Her lips thinned. ‘If he had no more sense than to give it to you, Neil, you ought to have had more sense than to take it! Where are Luce and Michael?’
Neil thought about that deeply, and finally said, with many pauses, ‘Mike went for a shower. No fun at a party. Luce wasn’t in here—went to bed. Huffy.’
‘Luce is not in bed, and he’s not in the ward.’
‘Then I’ll find him for you, Sis,’ Neil said, struggling to get off the bed. ‘I won’t be long, Ben, I’ve got to find Luce for Sis. Sis wants Luce. I don’t want Luce, but Sis does. Beats me why. I think I’m going to puke first, though.’
‘If you puke in here I’ll rub your nose in it!’ she said fiercely. ‘And stay where you are! The state you’re in you couldn’t even find yourself! Oh, I could murder the lot of you!’ Her temper began to die, a trace of fondness crept into her exasperation. ‘Now will you be good chaps and clear the evidence of debauchery away? It’s past one in the morning!’
6
After a thorough check of the verandah failed to locate either Luce or Michael, Sister Langtry marched across to the bathhouse like a soldier, chin up, shoulders back, still simmering. What on earth had possessed them to carry on like that? There wasn’t even a full moon! Just as well X was down at the other end of the compound, right away from any of the other inhabited wards. She was so busy fuming that she ran into the clothesline the men had rigged up so they could do their own washing, and floundered amid towels, shirts, trousers, shorts. Damn them! It was a measure of the degree of her annoyance that she didn’t even see the funny side of her collision with the clothesline, simply got it together again and marched on.
The squat bulk of the bathhouse loomed straight ahead. It had a wooden door which opened into one very large room, a barn-like place with showers along one wall and basins along the opposite wall, and a few laundry tubs at the back. There were no partitions or stalls, nowhere for a man to hide. The floor sloped to a drain in its middle, and was perpetually wet on the shower side of the room.
During the night a low-watt light bulb in the ceiling burned continually, but these days the bathhouse rarely saw visitors after dark, since the men of X showered and shaved in the morning and the latrine was in a separate, far less substantial building.
Coming in from the moonless night outside, Sister Langtry had no difficulty in seeing. The whole incredible scene was lit up for her like players on the stage for their audience. A shower, forgotten, still trickling its small curtain of water; Michael in the far corner, naked and wet, staring mesmerized at Luce; and Luce, naked, smiling, erect, standing some five feet away from Michael.
Neither of them noticed her in the doorway; she had a panicked sensation of déjà vu, and saw the scene as some sort of bizarre variation on that other scene in the dayroom. For a moment she stood paralyzed, then suddenly knew that this was something she couldn’t handle on her own, didn’t have the knowledge or the understanding to handle. So she turned and ran for the ward, running as she had never run in her life before, up the steps, in through the door near Michael’s bed, up the ward.
When she burst into Neil’s cubicle he and Benedict still seemed to be exactly as she had left them; had so little time passed? No, something had changed. The whisky bottles and the glasses had gone. God damn them, they were drunk! Everyone must be drunk!
‘The bathhouse!’ she managed to say. ‘Oh, quick!’
Neil seemed to sober, or at least he got to his feet and moving more quickly than she would have believed possible, and Benedict didn’t seem too bad either. She herded them out like sheep and got them through the ward, down the steps, across the compound toward the bathhouse. Neil tangled himself in the clothesline and fell, but she didn’t wait, just grabbed the hapless Benedict by the arm and hustled him along.
