Sister Park also snored. I used to lie there and listen to her snuffling like a farm pig, dreading what horrors the next day would bring. When morning came, all I wanted to do was sleep. I didn’t know how I was going to last each day let alone the rest of my contract at the London. I had years ahead of me.
And then in came Emma Smith.
She was carried into the hospital between two dishevelled women who reeked of old booze, together with the usual fug of the unwashed and general dampness. The enquiry officer assumed they were drunk and tried to send them away. But he stepped aside when he saw the smeared trail of blood behind Emma.
The two women could only give scant details of what had happened to their friend. The older one with the bloated face of a drinker was the deputy at the doss house where Emma had been staying, and the younger girl with white hair had only known Emma for a few weeks but had been sharing her bed for convenience’s sake. Emma was in her forties, they thought, but age was hard to gauge in women like her. Her skin was like an old saddle, the bottom half of her face was collapsed and narrow for lack of teeth, and her reddish hair was thin and brittle. She was so bony that when we lifted her onto the bed she flew up in the air as if we were hoisting a sack of oat-chaff.
She’d been beaten. Her face was bruised and swollen and her ear was bleeding. The other two women huddled in the corner, like timid mice.
‘They jumped her on the corner of Osborn Street and Brick Lane,’ said the white-haired girl. ‘She said there was three, maybe four. They took her purse and all of ’em done her and then shoved a broom handle up her, she reckons.’
‘A broom handle?’
My cheeks burned as soon as I understood. I turned around to hide my face and saw Nurse Mullens smirking from under her freckles at my ignorance; clearly, I was the only virgin in the room. I told Mullens, who was more junior, to take the women out of the emergency room. She didn’t look so smug then. She hated taking instruction from me, but she had no choice.
Left alone with the bleeding woman, I attempted to peel back her clothing, which was rotten and crawling with lice. When I drew back her skirts, I saw a shawl looped around the top of her thighs; it was thick with blood. Once Mullens was back, I tried to pull the shawl away with my fingers while she stood by with clean bandages. We had not worked together much, which was obvious from the way we constantly bumped into one another and tried to do the same task. Aisling and I had been in synchronicity, moving in anticipation of the other, like swans, each instinctively knowing our place. We fitted together perfectly.
Mullens was as pretty as a painted porcelain doll: bright, vivacious and charming, with the small and obvious features of the type that turn men’s heads. Aisling had a fresh and open face, far superior to Mullens’ in my view, and pink lips that were always in a half-moon curve. By comparison, Mullens was a sugar-coated tart, with her lumps and bumps and bouncing auburn curls. I had never known what it was to be a pretty girl; my features were all in the right place but forgettable. As well as being pretty, Mullens was reliably stupid. She was easily distracted and always found the time to flirt with any man who so much as looked at a scalpel. I always imagined she was destined to have a life easier than mine, but on that I would be proved wrong.
When we had almost finished unwrapping the shawl from between the woman’s legs, the blood came flooding out faster. The trays either side of the bed filled and then started dripping onto the floor.
Emma Smith sat up, gasped, and in a last burst of consciousness grabbed my arm, staining the sleeve of my uniform with her bloody fingerprints. ‘Please, don’t. If it comes off, I will break apart,’ she said. She looked at me with wide eyes, then her fingers slipped, her eyeballs rolled back, and she fell back onto the bed.
I could only stare at the bright red marks on my sleeve, but Mullens was beginning to panic.
‘Where’s the bloody doctor?’ she said, desperate for him to come, as was I. ‘Sister Chapman, what shall we do?’
There was nothing we could do. Emma Smith had been ripped apart from front to back passage. Her stick-thin legs, yellowed and covered in bruises, hung at a horrifyingly unnatural angle.
Dr Shivershev finally arrived, much to our enormous relief. He was a good doctor, if cold, distant and impersonal. He wasted no regard on us mere nurses. Behind him, his three dressers stood alert, like trained gundogs, and behind them were his pupils, all smooth-faced, blinking eyes and flat haired. They peered around the one in front.
Dr Shivershev examined Emma Smith for no longer than two minutes and told us to make her comfortable and stem the bleeding as much as we could.
‘Aren’t we going to theatre?’ I asked.
Mullens stared at me. A nurse was meant to wait for
