“No, you’re right,” he said. “I was attacked.”
“Was it that fellow that was helping you? I know him, he’s a drunken bowsy.”
“No, I don’t think it was him. In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“He wouldn’t be able to, anyway, that fellow.”
He closed his eyes briefly. “My hand is paining very badly,” he said. “Will you telephone for me, will you ring nine-nine-nine?”
She hesitated. She was no longer afraid, now, only impatient and put out, but still, she was a woman and therefore, as he guessed, could not be entirely unsympathetic. “There’s a box down at the corner,” she said. “Have you pennies?”
He gave her the coins, and waited, watching her walk down to Baggot Street, wobbling a little on her high heels, and step into the lighted phone booth. The pain in his hand made him grind his teeth. He was worried that he might faint. Presently the girl came back. “They’re sending the ambulance,” she said. “You’re to stay here.”
He leaned his back against the railings and she began to move away. “Will you wait with me?” he said. He suddenly felt very sorry for himself, but at a remove, as if he were not himself but some suffering creature that had come crawling to him for help, as he had come to the girl. “Please? I’ll pay you-here.” He reached his right hand fumblingly under the right flap of his jacket, and managed this time to find his wallet, which amazingly was there, untouched. He held it open to her. “There’s a five-pound note in there,” he said. “Take it.”
She looked at him and narrowed her eyes. “Give us a fag,” she said. “I don’t want your money.”
He got out his packet of Gold Flake and turned so that she could reach into his pocket and find his lighter. When they had lit up he asked her name. “Teri,” she said. “With one r and an i. ”
“Teri,” he said. “That’s nice.” The first lungful of smoke made his head swim.
“It’s Philomena, really,” she said. “Teri is my professional name. What about you?”
“John,” he said without hesitation.
She gave him another narrow-eyed look. “No, it’s not,” she said.
He was about to protest, but her expression stopped him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s David. Really it is.”
“David. That’s a good name. Not Dave, or Davy?”
“No. Just David.”
They heard a siren starting up in the distance.
“I’d have let you into my room,” Teri said, “only my fellow might have arrived in on top of us.”
“Your fellow?”
She shrugged. “You know.”
He was astonished all at once to feel his eyes prickle with tears. “I wish you’d take that fiver,” he said, with sorrowful fervor. “It’s only a way of saying thanks.”
She considered him for a moment, and her eyes hardened. “Saying thanks to the whore with the heart of gold, eh?” she said, sounding all at once far older than her years. Way down at the end of the long avenue a flashing blue light appeared. “Here’s your ambulance.”
She turned and walked away, her heels clicking.
His hand throbbed.
And then there was the strangeness of being in hospital, where everything was familiar and at the same time topsy-turvy. The ambulance brought him to the Holy Family-of course, where else, given the grotesqueness of all that was happening? His place of work was in the basement but they put him upstairs, in the new wing, in a big ward with thirty or more beds in it. He had been treated first in Emergency by an Indian intern whom he knew from seeing about the place, a whimsical fellow with a high-pitched laugh and remarkably beautiful slender hands that were the color of cocoa on the backs and brick pink in the palms. “Oh dear oh dear,” the Indian said when he saw the wound, “what happened to you, my friend?”
He did not know what to answer. There had been two of them, the fellow in the windcheater and the one who had come up behind him and hit him expertly behind the right ear with something solid but pliant-a cosh, he supposed, if there really were such a thing outside of gangster pictures. He had been unconscious when they lopped off the ring finger of his left hand, not with a knife but with some kind of metal shears, for the skin at the knuckle was bruised and the bone had been crushed and severed rather than cut clean through. The Indian injected a shot of morphine and cleaned up the wound; then he was taken into the operating theater, where he was given local anesthetic. The surgeon, a red-faced fellow by the name of Hodnett, trimmed back the stub of bone and pulled the skin forward in a flap and sewed it along the rim of the palm, all the while discussing with the anesthetist the Royal St. George regatta due to take place the following Sunday in Dun Laoghaire. Sinclair was offered no sympathy, the fact that he was himself a Holy Family man precluding it, apparently. At the end Hodnett had leaned over him and said, “Someone certainly doesn’t like you, Sinclair my lad,” and laughed grimly and departed with his surgeon’s slouch, whistling.
Upstairs, he slept, thanks to exhaustion and the effects of the morphine. He woke at four, and that was when the pain went to work on him in earnest. His heavily bandaged hand was suspended in a sling attached to a metal stand, so that he had to lie on his back with his left arm lifted straight before him as if he had been felled and left frozen in the act of delivering a martial salute. Pain was a dark giant that seized him wordlessly and pummeled him, slowly, methodically, monotonously. Never before in his life, he realized, had he known what it was to concentrate, to the exclusion of all else, on one particular, relentless thing. The noises that the other patients made, the moans and mutterings, the fluttery sighs, came to him as if from somewhere high above him, on another level of existence. He and the giant were at the bottom of what might be a deep ravine, a secret cleft cut into the ordinary landscape of the world, and it seemed there was to be no getting free.
Yet at dawn the pain abated somewhat, or perhaps it was just that the light of day gave him more strength of spirit to cope with it. The night nurse had largely ignored him and his pleas for painkillers. Her successor on the morning shift was a bright-faced girl whom he had danced with at a staff party the previous Christmas; he could not recall her name, but thought the other nurses called her Bunny. She remembered him, and with his morning tea gave him clandestinely a large purple capsule, even the name of which she would not divulge-“The ward sister would have my hide!”-but which she assured him would do the trick, and winked, and went off, swinging her hips.
Quirke arrived first thing, accompanied by the detective, Hackett. It was all very awkward. Sinclair, blissfully groggy after taking the purple pill, was reminded of the time when he was at the Quaker school in Waterford and contracted mumps and his parents came to visit him. They were led into the infirmary by the form master, a nice man with the apt name of Bland. Sinclair’s mother had thrown herself onto the bed and wept, of course, but his father had kept himself at a safe distance, saying that his “doctors”-as if there had been a team of them, grave men with beards and white coats-had cautioned him not to approach too near to the patient for fear of consequences that he did not specify but that would be, it was understood, very serious indeed.
Quirke sat on a metal chair beside the night locker while Inspector Hackett loitered at the foot of the bed with one hand in a pocket of his trousers and the other hovering pensively near his blue-shadowed chin. Sinclair described what little he remembered of the attack, and the two men nodded. Quirke, for all his questions and commiserations, seemed distracted. “Was it the fellow on the phone?” he asked.
Sinclair knew who it was he meant. “No,” he said, “he had an educated voice-this one was just a thug.”
Hackett spoke up. “What fellow on the phone was that?”
“Someone called him at work the other day,” Quirke said, still sounding distracted.
“And?”
“Called me a Jewboy,” Sinclair said drily, “told me to keep my Jew nose out of other people’s business or I’d get it cut off. At least they settled for a finger.”
This brought a silence; then Hackett said, “The fellow that waylaid you in the lane, this thuggish fellow, what did he look like?”
“I don’t know-ordinary. In his twenties, thin face.”
