Dr Shivershev looked at me with raised eyebrows, then back at Emma Smith. ‘You think if I operate on her she will jump off the bed and go home tomorrow? If she’s not dead within the next day or so I’ll be surprised.’ And with that he left, his dressers and pupils scurrying behind him like an entourage of privileged rats.
Emma Smith was translucent, as if all her insides had emptied and now all that was left was an empty grey sack. I felt a strange tingling in my cheeks, and I thought I might be sick. For some reason I laughed, which made no sense. Mullens stared at me in horror, as if I were laughing at the death of the woman on the bed, but the truth was, I had realised the ridiculousness of it all, the waste of effort. It was pointless. Emma Smith was going to die and, if we were honest, we all knew there would be scores more like her. Our pathetic attempt to help her, if we were any help at all, felt as good as holding up a cup to catch a flood.
We were in the laundry room, changing our uniforms, when Mullens said, more to herself than to me, ‘Who’d do such a thing as that? Who would put a broom handle inside a woman? What a vicious thing.’
I didn’t say a word. I was consumed by the sense that something terrible was about to happen. I should have realised then that I wasn’t well, but too conscious of my last conversation with Matron, I waited until Mullens had left and then slapped my own cheek, hard, three times. For what was another dead woman? I had seen hundreds – what was one more?
Emma Smith had further inconvenienced us by leaving her insides all over the receiving room, so when Mullens returned we went to fetch Dykes, one of the ward maids. We called ward maids ‘scrubbers’, though it was wise not to do so within earshot of Matron. Dykes had been one of the hospital’s old, unqualified nurses, the very ones Matron Luckes’ radical new scheme had sought to get rid of. Most of the old nurses had duly left to go to the prison service or the workhouse infirmaries, but a few, like Dykes, had stayed and taken roles as ward maids. Dykes was also the woman to go to if you found yourself pregnant.
When we asked her to come, she screwed up her face and reluctantly agreed. She dragged her noisy old bucket behind her and the screech of it was unbearable to my ears. I genuinely could not bear it. I kept telling her to stop it, but she would make it quiet for only a few seconds, then go back to scraping it along the floor.
I began to see flashes: blobs and patches, ghosts of the blood left behind by Emma Smith. Spots and swirls appeared and disappeared. When I saw something from the corner of my eye, I would spin around and it would disappear, but when I closed my eyes and opened them again, more would come. I felt light-headed. I touched the back of my neck and it was wet. I panicked and thought I must be bleeding somehow, but it was only my own perspiration. And yet the hall wasn’t hot. There was something wrong with me. My heart thumped and my hands shook. When I closed my eyes, I saw only blood on the back of my eyelids. I slapped my face again as hard as I could.
Mullens gave me another look. This time she had the same expression Sister Park had had when she’d seen me collecting Aisling’s hairs. ‘Are you well, Sister Chapman?’ she asked suspiciously.
‘I’m tired, is all.’
The hall had rows of benches much like a church, except I’d never seen these empty. The sound of all the people talking was like a million squawking seagulls. The scraping of Dyke’s metal bucket was like the squealing of a pig who knew it was about to be slaughtered. I went to a wall to lean up against it, put a hand to my chest and felt what was like a tiny foot trying to break out.
A girl, fourteen at most, came towards me. ‘Nurse, won’t you look at my baby? He’s not right.’ She thrust the newborn in my face. ‘Will you tell me what’s wrong with him?’
The child was still covered in the white matter from its birth, fixed in a stiff arch and livid. It was dead and horribly malformed. I pushed the girl and her dead baby away from me. Dyke’s steel bucket was still screaming and I could only think of making her stop.
‘Will you stop! Stop it, Dykes!’
The hall fell quiet and every face turned to look at me, like a sea of china plates. Even Dyke’s mouth hung open.
A man on the bench nearest me, a syphilis sufferer with a false silver nose and bushy whiskers, stood up, took his cap off and said, ‘Nurse, won’t you take my seat?’
I pushed past him, through the hall, out of the front doors and onto the street.
I ran and ran, past stunned faces like streaks of oil in a blur. I ran all the way to the garden behind the crypt and hid there until my breathing calmed down.
I would not be the one left behind. In that moment, I knew I had to find another path. It would be uncomfortable, but I had to do it, because left to my own instinct, I would be the coward and retreat to the familiar. I would end up three feet from where I started. I would not live out my days around people like Emma Smith until I became one of them. I had to find my way out.
10
So I played the role of obedient wife and waited for my husband to return
