The Lost Souls' Reunion (14 page)

I cleaned the bed and took the soaking pyjamas off. They were not his because his body was too big for them, even in his wasted state. Long ankles stared mournfully at me, long wrists, one curled unnaturally, held by what could have been a proud, fine hand used to work. Now the nails were ragged and uncared for, the dirt underneath them grey. He hid his twisted arm like a secret, using a strength in him where pride once stood. The striped top and pale blue bottoms of the new pyjamas bore the nametags of men who had not known this man and had been smaller than him in life. Fitting the pyjama top over the twisted arm brought a grunt from him. No other sound. Margaret came back as I was dressing his feet in socks that did not match or fit, but would keep out the cold. His feet had been bare and blue up to this.

‘He won't do anything for you. Never talks, this one.'

I had not yet seen his eyes.

The day was long and the work was hard and by the early evening when I was free to go I was glad that my walk home was downhill.

*   *   *

When I came in the door that night Myrna and Carmel were sitting at the table.

‘How was the place?' Myrna's eyes did not leave me.

‘I don't know. I just washed the beds and the floors and the walls, the toilet bowls and the dishes and the old lads and then I came home. I know it's clean anyway.'

I drank warm sweet tea which brought me back to myself and away from the man dressed in things not his own. I had remembered my own days and life spent in cast-offs.

The doorlatch lifted and Eddie stepped in out of the cold.

‘Should I have knocked?' he asked, catching sight of my face.

‘Might as well walk in,' I said. ‘Might as well make the place your own, the furniture's yours anyway.'

Carmel and Eddie said they were going for a walk, as they said every night, as they did every night. I sliced bread and buttered it and moved into the chair beside the fire to chew it.

Myrna came and sat in the chair opposite. She said nothing to me or I to her for a long time. Though it was still early she stood to go to bed. I raised my head and she saw what she wanted to see in my eyes.

‘We might go for a walk of our own,' she suggested. ‘I would like to walk on the shore. I have not walked on a shoreline for a long time.'

*   *   *

We walked to the beach down the thick, brambled way and on to the grey stones and then on the grey sand that smoothed the path between stones and sea. Myrna walked slower than time passes.

It was a warm evening on the edges between winter and spring. The sky was thick with the rain that had not yet fallen. The air was expectant. Myrna turned me away from her, towards a dark pewter sea.

‘Look – all can be seen here, not like in London. There is always a building in the way. When I was a girl I lived by a lake that was as big as a sea to my eyes. I thought I would never want to leave it and I had to. I travelled the whole world and I never found the same vastness or space that I had found in that one place.'

‘Would you never have gone back?' I asked.

‘By the time I got there it would have been somewhere else.'

Though the sky grew darker still, Myrna sat, so slowly the youth in me wished to push her down.

‘We'd better go back,' I suggested. ‘You don't want to get wet.'

But the truth was I did not want find my way up the brambled laneway to the house in the darkness. The light came on in the kitchen of the house by Noreen's ghost hand, an answer to the growing night.

‘No, let's not go back just yet,' Myrna said. ‘The rain can wait and the darkness is a friend, Sive. We'll come to no harm in it.'

‘I'm glad you think so,' I sat beside her. ‘I can't get used to the noises it makes – and the shapes it makes.'

The wind shaved the waves on to the shore and swept what it had gathered in spray over us.

‘Now,' Myrna smiled. ‘That's a freshness I haven't felt since I was a girl.'

She put a finger to her face and lifted a salt-water pearl to her lips.

‘How was your work today?'

‘The same as my cleaning work at home yesterday,' I said, watching the sea.

Even in twilight the white-capped waves were visible and could be heard calling to each other. Myrna gathered her skirt about her.

‘It took me a long time to sit down and I suppose it will take me a long time to stand. Can you help me?'

I placed the crook of my arm under her shoulder and bent my knees to take what was left of her weight. I lifted her easily.

‘Professionally done,' Myrna raised an eyebrow and looked at me as I put her on her feet.

‘I learned today,' I said, with a little pride. ‘From Sister Saviour. It stops your back straining when you lift the men.'

‘I have been lifted in such a way in the place I was kept,' Myrna said. ‘On and off potties like I was a battery hen laying eggs. “Come on then,” the nurse would say. “We haven't got all day for you to do your business.” “You have,” I said. “If you don't want to see my business done somewhere you don't want it done.”'

Myrna picked her way carefully over the same stones that Carmel's feet had skimmed over on a day gone by.

‘Now, Sive,' Myrna squeezed my arm. ‘You are in the same work as I have been in for many years, making men more comfortable.'

‘The men up there can hardly get out of bed, much less think about the other.'

‘You have not done the other with anyone have you?'

‘Once,' I said. I pushed the men who climbed over my thoughts and memory away. ‘They make sure they get what they pay for.'

‘They do,' Myrna agreed. ‘No matter what way you make them happy, you earn what they give you. In this St Manis Home you will not have to do anything to the men you don't want to do. I promise you that. But you want to do your job well, Sive?'

I nodded.

‘Then listen to me. This is for all of your life and especially the life that is with you today. Look beyond what is broken. There is always something whole. See where the mends can be made in the broken. Find what is whole and true.'

‘How do I do that? I don't want to be giving it to the men. I want that behind me.'

‘Do you think that is all I gave the men I went with?' Myrna asked me, the setting sun now two flames in her dark eyes.

‘I don't know. I only know I did it once and that was enough.'

‘There are ways of doing things that make sure you give nothing of yourself. I gave the men nothing but themselves to be happy with.'

‘How?'

Myrna did not answer until we had stopped at the end of the laneway and gathered breath and strength for the walk up it.

‘You are turning into the wind, Sive, make good with it.'

‘Make good with what?'

‘With all you have and with all that's coming.'

‘What sort of…'

She put a finger to my lips and turned to the sea again.

The sun was going down on the horizon, in Myrna's eyes it fell until it disappeared and left nothing but blankness.

‘No more tonight. Your curiosity is a good tool,' Myrna smiled. ‘I am also curious to know what we can do with the same bread and eggs we had for breakfast.'

‘The same as we did with them the night before,' I sighed. ‘I would love chips now.'

‘I would love anchovy paste on rye bread,' Myrna fantasized. ‘And apple juice. I could eat a tub of ice cream. They make good ice cream here, so Eddie tells me. But it comes in vanilla or not at all.'

We went on trading food longings and by the time I put a hand to the latch of the kitchen door, the darkness had grown around me and I had not been afraid. It was the first opportunity to grow used to the night that now makes me so welcome as I do it.

18
∼
This One Never Talks

J
OE
O'R
EILLY
took up where Margaret had left off in the telling of tales. Joe wore his hair long and uncombed with sandals on his feet no matter what the weather. His grubby T-shirts bore loving slogans of the sixties, which had all grown stale.

When Joe was alone with me little was said, but when he and Margaret were together they bickered with a childishness the outside world would not tolerate.

It did not take me long to realize that all the staff who had rooms in the home were as tied as the ones they tended. Each one had plans to leave, Joe O'Reilly wished to go back to London where he had trained as a nurse.

‘You've been going for fifteen years,' Margaret would gibe.

‘And what about your famous trip to America?' he would lash back. ‘Let us know when you have the ticket, Margaret. Sure we'll make a banner for you and give you a little send off. Then we'll all wait around to welcome you when you sneak back on the next plane.'

Each called the other a live-in, as if their arrangements were temporary. This was what they fought over when we had lunch, the same lunch as the men ate. Food with no love in it. They were birds pecking at each other for the crumbs of my attention. For I was the thing that tight worlds are starved off, novelty. Then my newness wore off and I became part of the walls and the day and part of all that was endured in this place. I became known for my silence in St Manis just as I had been known for it elsewhere.

It was not all bad. The work with the men offered me their grateful appreciation. Since Myrna had spoken with me I had looked at them differently. I saw Young Brian's passion for any kind of motor vehicle – the home's ambulance, the cars of visitors. Young Brian would watch them all from the dayroom window. Put his hands to the glass and Mauritius would catch him and cry, ‘Brian Justice, paw prints! Leave the glass alone!'

Young Brian would sit, like a trained bear and bring his big hands on to his lap and stare out at the cars as they came and went. I took him by the hand one day and brought him to the ambulance. He put his hands on it as if it were a jewel. I took the keys from my pocket and Young Brian sat in the ambulance and put his hands on the wheel and adjusted the mirrors and ran his hands along the dashboard. He looked, smiled at the road ahead and his heart took a trip down it.

‘What are you at?' Margaret poked her head out the side door. ‘Your lunch is ready.'

I didn't eat it and from that moment Young Brian and I used my break times to sit in the ambulance.

‘He used to be an ambulance driver,' Joe O'Reilly told me, like I didn't know.

In Mr Black, with a temper to match, I saw a man who had once drawn women to him. Loved too many and left too many and then no one was left to love him. His anger was against himself and the foolishness of his belief that he would die as fit as he had lived. Diabetes had cut a man who acted half his age in two by taking one of his legs. A stroke left him in a wheelchair.

With Mr Black I flirted with the fine fit man lurking in the corners of his eyes and the life was brought into him in those moments when he responded.

‘You do my heart good, Sive, what's left of it.'

Dennis, the former priest, was one I never warmed to. His wheelchair rammed my ankles once too often to take the too profuse apologies offered. If he thought he could make you run, he tried to. It was all he had left to do in the way of ordering about. His whining was his anger turned rotten and it piped out of him in tortured ways. No sleep and less waking.

I managed him by seeing things he needed before he saw himself, by offering a clean shirt, new towel, fresh socks before he asked. It did not make him ask less.

Ted Leyland believed Sister Mauritius to be the finest of women. I did not try to dissuade him from his belief because he was the finest of men. He was courteous to all of us. When he saw me coming he would open doors, tucking his stick under it so it would not shut.

‘Off to Mass.' He would say. ‘Off to walk.'

He would fill his days with trips to here and there. Never out the gates. Ted told me his wife had loved flowers. Each week I found a small bunch, homes are full of them, and put them on his window sill. At night he would close his eyes after looking at them.

Peter, too well to be housed in a home, was one who did walk out the gates, though Sister Mauritius did not encourage it.

‘She doesn't like us to stay fit,' he whispered to me with a wink.

He walked to Scarna every day and sat with the fishermen and counted boats and boxes of fish and came back smelling of it. Sister Saviour would give out with a smile, ‘You smell like a kipper, Peter, or is it cod? No wonder, all the cod you give me.'

He was Sister Saviour's favourite. She could not help having one because she loved a man who could help himself. Peter helped to clear away dishes and stripped his own bed.

‘Wouldn't it be nice, Sive,' he would say, ‘if we could have a nice party? I used to love them. Even at Christmas we don't have a proper one, with proper drinks and women. Too bad those days are done.'

Peter was well enough to stay in the town, but the home rules were bed by eight. So he abided, out of having nowhere else to go.

I kept it in my mind to give him his party. Sister Saviour and I made sure he got overcoats if they came in and warm hats and gloves from the stock of dead men's things that were regularly delivered to us by charities.

‘Make sure that Peter doesn't get these,' Sister Mauritius told Saviour. ‘It'll only encourage him.'

‘It will,' Sister Saviour agreed and passed them on to him straight away. She never disagreed with her matron in anything but her actions.

Liamy the vegetable's only voluntary action was pulling on a cigarette, I discovered as I gave the old senile Colonel his in the dayroom. Liamy smacked his gums together loudly, over and over and eventually I heard what he was saying.

‘Would you like a try?'

He gummed the cigarette with delight and coughed and spluttered and smacked some more and the Colonel shouted ‘Hut Hut Hut!' because he wanted it back so.