She was right. My eyes were closed before she was out of sight. The last thing I noticed before my eyes closed was a poster on the wall. The ward had been decorated with BOAC posters to cheer everyone up. This one showed a girl in colourful clothes dancing a samba at the Carnival at Rio. It was where I would have rather been.
When I awoke, there was a Bible on the bedside cabinet. It wasn’t exactly the reading I’d had in mind. Maybe they were trying to tell me something.
PART TWO
Into the Blue
Chapter Nine
Am I blue?
Her name was Susan Haye, ‘Hay with an e’ . . . and within two days I was soft on her. She told me that men always get soft on their nurses, as long as they’re not other men. She was the first paid-up member of the Grey Mafia I had exchanged more than a dance with. In case you’re wondering, both their uniforms and berets are grey; there’s nothing more to the nickname than that. Mind you, whenever you see one walking towards you with a syringe big enough for an elephant in her tray, and two hefty male orderlies to hold you down, you are reminded of the phrase that bloke used a few years ago – ‘an offer you cannot refuse’.
In a ward that could take twenty there were only five others beside myself, and I think they all had the terminal trots. I only seemed to meet them hurrying to and from the bogs, and at night it wasn’t unusual for one of them to shit in his sleep. That resulted in the usual ring of white screens, ‘tut-tuts’, and the inevitable noisy morning blanket bath. Whatever they had I wanted none of it. Staff Nurse Susan told me not to worry – they were well past the infectious stage.
The food was good, but not as good as the paper bag of homemade ginger biscuits I found on my bed one afternoon: crisp on the outside but soft and peppery once you bit into them. I asked Saucy Susan (who was anything but, of course) where they’d come from, and she pretended not to know. I wanted them to be from her, but perhaps I had a secret admirer. Who knows? There’s a first time for everything.
There was a small, deep veranda at one end of the ward, and I was the only one who used it. It was too far from the bogs for the others. I sat there smoking gifted cigarettes because I’d run out of pipe tobacco, and sometimes I read the Bible for something to do. I loved the rolling language of the Book of Revelation, but it had a sad ending. Come to think of it, almost everything in the Bible has a sad ending: it’s a handbook for manic depressives, and I don’t know why so many folk are keen on it. There was room on the veranda for just two cane chairs; Susan came and sat in the other, lit a cigarette and we smoked in companionable silence. Smokers do that, you know. Smoking together is what the words companionable and silence were coined for.
Then I moaned, ‘A fag never lasts long enough.’ – I know that wouldn’t mean the same thing today, but I assure you that in 1953 we were only talking about cigarettes – ‘I miss my pipe.’
‘Was it stolen with your other things?’
‘No, I’ve only run out of tobacco.’
‘I smoked de Reszkes back home, but I learned to like Turkish cigarettes out here; now I smoke Abdullahs: would you like one?’
‘Thank you.’
Half a fag later she bent to pick up the Bible which I had dropped by the chair. ‘Would you like to come to church on Sunday?’
‘God’s not all that keen on me.’ The last time I had been to church was with Dolly, in Chelsea in 1947. We had gone home afterwards, and straight to bed. I’d often suspected that God has had it in for me since then.
‘God’s keen on everyone, silly.’
‘Going to church is like getting married. I only go to church with women I’m going to sleep with.’
She breathed out the last of the smoke from her cigarette, dropped it under a foot and extinguished it. Then she gave a low laugh. ‘Nice try, Charlie, but my boyfriend wouldn’t like it.’
‘Is he out here?’
‘Yes. He’s out in the blue; due back next week.’
It was the first time I’d really paid attention to that phrase. It means far away, out deep in the desert.
‘He’s a lucky man.’ They are the words we men use to signal that we won’t try it on again. Not until the next time, anyway.
‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I wonder about that . . .’ and sounded wistful. I added the only word that fitted: ‘Don’t.’
‘Time I went back to work.’
‘. . . I’ve bums to jab, and floors to sweep, and bedpans to wash before I sleep . . .’
‘That’s from a poem.’
‘Not quite,’ I said.
The next day when I came in from my afternoon smoke, and a slow perambulation around the outside of the hut, a two-ounce tin of RN Navy Cut tobacco was on my bed, along with three paperback books. Two were by an American I’d never read. It was that guy Mickey Spillane, and if the girls on the cover were anything to go by, I was going to enjoy them. The third was by a maniac named Charles Hoy Fort – The Book of the Damned. Things were looking up. I still have that last one.
The day before David Watson came to see me I woke up from my afternoon nap to find a woman standing alongside my bed. Her back was to me. It was a nice back. She was leaning out of
