people sleeping in air-raid shelters, swaddled and anonymous. The soundtrack of restive breathing, ruptured snores, shifting bodies was inflated by muted hissings and rumblings in the building’s own decaying metabolism. And also, Merrily felt, by slivers of tension in the sour sickness-smelling air.
‘He’s in a side ward here,’ Cullen whispered. ‘We’ve always had him in a side ward.’
‘What’s his… his condition?’
‘Chronic emphysema: lungs full of fluid. Been coming on for years – he’s been in four times. This time he knows he’s not going out.’
‘And he isn’t… ready. Right?’
Cullen breathed scornfully down her nose. ‘Earlier tonight he sent for his wife.’
Merrily looked for some significance in this. ‘She’s not here with him now?’
‘No, we sent her home. Jesus!’
A metal-shaded lamp burned bleakly on a table at the entrance to the side ward, across which an extra plastic-covered screen had been erected.
‘There’s an evil in this man.’ Sister Cullen began sliding the screen away. ‘Brace yourself.’
Merrily said, ‘I don’t understand. What do you…?’
And then she did understand. It was Deliverance business.
Huw Owen had stressed:
Directing them to the prayer known as
Binding yourself with light Huw had said; this was what it was about. A sealing of the portals, old Christian magic, Huw had said.
But she hadn’t even thought of that. She’d made no preparations at all, simply dashed out of the house like a junior doctor on call. Because that was all it was – a routine ministering to the dying, a stand-in job, no one else available. Nobody had mentioned…
… it had simply never occurred to her that the hospital had been given her name as a trained Deliverance minister. It never occurred to her that this was what she now was. Who had directed them? The Bishop’s office? The Bishop himself?
I’ve been set up, she thought, angry – and afraid that, whatever needed to be done, she wouldn’t be up to it.
There were two iron beds in the side ward, one empty; in the other, Mr Denzil Joy.
His eyes were slits, unmoving under a sweat-sheened and sallow forehead. His hair was black, an unnatural black for a man in his sixties. A dying man dyeing, she thought absurdly.
Two pale green tubes came down his nostrils and looped away over his cheeks, like a cartoon smile.
‘Oxygen,’ Cullen explained in a whisper.
‘Is he asleep?’
‘In and out of it.’
‘Can he speak?’
Trying to understand what she was doing here, looking hard at him, wondering what she was missing.
‘With difficulty,’ Cullen said.
‘Should I sit with him a while?’
‘Fetch you a Bible, shall I?’
‘Let’s… let’s just leave that a moment.’ Knowing how ominous a black, leathered Bible could appear to the patient at such times, wishing she’d brought her blue and white paperback version. And still unclear about what they wanted from her here.
There was a vinyl-covered chair next to the bed, and she sat down. Denzil Joy wore a white surgical smock thing; one of his arms was out in view, fingers curved over the coverlet. She put her own hand over it, and almost recoiled. It was warm and damp, slimy somehow, reptilian. A small, nervous smile tweaked at Cullen’s lips.
In the moment Merrily touched Denzil Joy, it seemed a certain scent arose. The kind of odour you could almost see curling through the air, so that it entered your nostrils as if directed there. At first sweet and faintly oily.
Then Merrily gasped and took in a sickening mouthful and, to her shame, had to get up and leave the room, a hand over her mouth.
The other hand, not the one which had touched Denzil Joy.
One of the patients on the ward was calling out, ‘Nurse!’ as loudly as a farmer summoning a sheepdog over a six-acre field.
At the door Merrily gulped in the stale hospital air as if it was ozone.
‘Dr Taylor found a good description for it.’ Eileen Cullen was standing beside the metal lamp, smiling grimly. ‘Although
She padded down the ward towards the man calling out, one hand raised, forefinger of the other to her lips. As soon as she’d gone, the plump middle-aged nurse appeared from the shadows, put her mouth up to Merrily’s ear.
‘I’ll tell you what that is, Reverend. It’s the smell of evil.’
‘Huh?’
‘He can turn it on. Don’t look at me like that. Maybe it’s automatic, when his blood temperature rises. It comes to the same thing. Did you feel him enter you?’
‘What?’
‘We can’t talk here.’ She took Merrily’s arm, pulled her away and into a small room lit by a strip light, with sinks and bags of waste. She shut the door. The disinfectant smell here, in comparison with that in the side ward, was like honeysuckle on a summer evening.
‘I’m a strong woman,’ the nurse said, ‘thirty years in the job. Everything nasty a person can throw off, I’ve seen it and smelled it and touched it.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘No, you can’t, my girl.’ The nurse pushed up a sleeve. ‘You have no idea. Look at that, now.’ Livid bruising around the wrist, like she’d been handcuffed.
‘What happened was: Mr Joy, he asked for a bottle – to urinate in, you know? And then he called me back and he said he was having… trouble getting it in. Well, some of them, they say that as a matter of course, and you have a laugh and you go away and come back brandishing the biggest pair of forceps you can find. But Denzil Joy was a very sick man and he seemed distressed, so I did try to help.’ She pulled down her sleeve again. ‘You see where that got me.’
‘Oh.’
‘Grip like a monkey-wrench, my dear. Thought I’d never get fooled again. You understand now why we wanted a male priest?’
‘Nurse Protheroe. Sandra.’
‘Sandra, this is a dying man, OK? He knows he’s dying. He’s afraid. He’s looking for… comfort, I suppose.
