Читать книгу The Camp Whore - Francois Smith - Страница 4

He is lying with his back to her; his head is turned towards the drab, dead still curtains at the window. In the dimness she sees just a profile from behind: the ear a dark fold on the equally dark hunk of his head. If there was light, she thought, his ear would be transparent, rosy and fine-veined against the glare, the skin peeling perhaps along its wing-like curve. This is what she has been trained to do, to see light and life. That is her purpose here. But in the gloom everything is upended. Or perhaps exactly as it should be.

She pulls her gaze away to the shoulder protruding from the sheet and the arm lying limp on the blanket, the pyjama sleeve pushed up against the limb. The hand hangs over the hip, facing the front, out of sight, but the arm, the bit that shows, is thinner than she’d expected. What had she expected? Can she remember any of it?

She glances at Hurst standing next to her; he is staring intently and blankly at the patient on the bed. There is no escape, she has to look. At the soft creases of the cotton sleeve pilling at the elbow, the petal-like collar curving around the thin stem of the neck.

And again at the ear.

She does not feel surprised. Thus spake fate. The moment she set foot on these shores she sensed, within this vast unknown an ancient familiarity, that something – someone – somewhere, behind a façade, a door, a fence, was awaiting her. And now it was as if that realisation had led her eyes directly to the ear. That is what she noticed before anything else, the ear. That notch, like the incision a farmer makes on the ear of a sheep. And where you’d expect the soft fold of the lobe, the curve fell rudely to the neck.

That is her mark.

Her tongue sticks to her palate, loosens with a smacking sound. She turns to the door that has clicked shut behind them. She takes a deep breath, holds it a while before unevenly exhaling. How did I end up here? she wonders.

This is how it happened: she’d stood in front of the door, in front of that dark unyielding surface that is now behind them with its edge against the doorframe. She’d stood in front of that reflecting surface, the tiny varnish cracks like the retina of an eye, the smell of polished wood in her nostrils, her breath against that unforgiving surface, with eyes that she tried to tear away from the white label in the metal holder – the name that she cannot utter.

Major Hurst stood behind her, and she turned around, her face to one side so that he wouldn’t see her shock, her fingertips pressed against the wood. Hurst had spoken, but what had he said? With one hand he gently pushed her aside, and with the other opened the door. Then she followed him into the dusk, the back of his smoothly ironed uniform between her and the man in the bed.

That is how it happened.

It is deathly quiet in the room. There is only silence. Until Hurst speaks. He’d stepped forward before he began to speak. He said the name of the man on the bed. The name she can’t bring herself to say. And at the mere mention of that name, she feels herself seized, shaken, as if caught in a whirlwind – and hurled down at a litter of tents on the godforsaken Free State veld.

“Sister Nell?”

What? It is Hurst who has spoken. Here, right in front of her.

This is where she is, with Major Arthur Hurst in the Seale-Hayne hospital in Devon. This is where she has to be, nowhere else; she must harness her will to remain present, here, in this moment. They are in the private rooms of one of the king’s officers. No, not the king’s – one of her own. Peering from behind Major Hurst, she can see most of the bed. The tips of two feet under a sheet. She blinks her eyes in an attempt to focus. The feet under the sheet give a nervous twitch.

Sixteen years ago she had lain like this in a twilight cave, waiting, lying and watching the shadow slowly shift across the mouth of the cave, lying and waiting and waiting and waiting for something inside her to calm down.