The Lost Souls' Reunion (15 page)

Once the Colonel got an unlit cigarette and ate it and I laughed to see him spitting it out and brushing it off his jumper. And he taught me, by looking sad and long and with both eyes and saying, ‘I don't understand.'

I understood then that to light his cigarette and hold it for him was as much a part of my job as wiping his old bottom. With my new eyes I saw the men's unbroken spirits rise out of their broken bodies to greet me.

*   *   *

The carers watched me with suspicion, even Sister Saviour, but since I got my cleaning work done before attending to other tasks she would not admonish me. Out of the carers came the fear of living their own lives; hiding behind ones already lived, they did not understand that the men needed looking after, because they needed looking after themselves.

I had been there a while before I asked of the one who never spoke, who sat in the end cubicle without looking up.

‘This one never talks,' Joe said on the day Sister Saviour asked him to show me the correct way to turn hospital corners. We were making the bed, which I had cleaned on my first day. The man was asleep in his wheelchair.

‘Don't bother trying to move him, leave him to me. He's a big lad, even with what's left of him. He won't try, that's what's wrong with him. He's younger than he looks, took a stroke at seventy.'

‘And his name?' I asked.

Thomas Cave.

My memory called out to me, but I could not place the name. The flesh of Thomas Cave had already begun to rot before his heart stopped. His thick shock of white hair matted and stained yellow with room smoke, where they left the men to spend their waking hours with nothing but each other to look at.

‘We don't go in for the beauty treatments,' Joe said when I reached out to touch the hair. ‘Don't go feeling sorry for him.'

He raised his head at my touch. I had not thought of what I had done, it had just seemed natural to do it. He put his eyes on me. No one had looked at this man; he looked at no one. He ate his meals with his good hand and he slept or stared into space.

As I took my hand away from him, Thomas Cave raised his head further and looked at me. I saw that he would frighten and awe those who truly saw him. I saw blue-black sapphire eyes and I saw that their piercing nature had not changed, in all that had happened.

Joe piled on lists of rules and instructions that held the men to their conditions and the staff to their routines and I stared at Thomas Cave and he at me.

I felt death in the look, not the creeping nature of it but the fierce battle that raged with it. Everyone was dying in this place including the no-marks that ran it. Everyone was running away from dying, or cowed in the face of it.

This man's eyes said he was different. This man's eyes said he was the only one who welcomed death. So it laughed at him and took others who should not have gone before him.

And he felt my knowing of this. All changed for me and for him. Once he had looked at me he would not stop seeing.

His eyes told me that he had been powerful. His rage was the kind that had turned in on him and had eaten him slowly. In this place he had no option but to kill himself that way. There were no dark corners or sharp implements, no independent movements.

‘I have watched men wrapped in sheets in early morning,' his eyes said. ‘And I have wished it was me wrapped in whiteness and gone into it. Have mercy on me, bring me to an end.'

A need grew to put miles between myself and the smell and sight of that man who I knew now to be the photographer from Sergio's Café. He did not know me as anything other than one who had taken the time to look.

The pull to come back the next day was even stronger. He took my sleep from me and his eyes followed me home to where Myrna watched and asked me what the days had brought to me.

‘The photographer, the one from the café years ago. You told me to watch for when he came through my door. I came through his. He's there and you would not recognize him. His eyes won't leave me alone. He's fighting all around him.'

Myrna looked out at the day sky disappearing into night.

‘Thomas Cave. He will come through your door. The cards say it.'

‘If you saw him you would see how impossible it is.'

‘What happens in the darkness? Where will it bring us? We do not know. This is the time of day the old know best. The unknown is creeping in. The old have a harder fight than anyone. They have to let go of life. They are the ones to voyage to the unknown. You have only seen the ending of the old before. Now you are also sensing their beginning, my beginning. It's upon me too.'

‘But you are not like them' I told her sharply. ‘You are free to come and go.'

‘Not much further than they do. These old bones give me only death to consider. I have no lasting home but a grave and even then I do not know where that will be.'

Myrna did not hide behind the words. She looked at me. I saw eyes that had already lost their shine. She was putting her life into me and I would take it because that is what had always been done.

I had complained of living, resenting the burden she had brought me in herself and all the while this old, grey, twisted woman was quietly giving me her soul with a smile.

‘I would never ask you to leave here,' I said softly.

‘No. And death will want me just the same.'

‘But this man is different, death does not want him, he wants death. It won't come to him.'

‘Then he has something else to live for.'

Myrna ended the conversation by bending over the fire to begin its lighting. ‘And one of those things is walking through your door and I will be here to witness it.'

Later that night she came back to the words as if we had never left them.

‘The place where you are now,' Myrna said. ‘The old of St Manis journey in an alone way. That is the only way to leave the unknown and come to the known. You will learn a lot from them when you have the heart to.'

*   *   *

When the night happened, still I did not sleep. In the late evening of the following day my eyes were heavy. Carmel spoke of the wild flowers, which would come soon to Killeaden headland and the hum that would be heard from the hungrily feeding bees.

Myrna smiled and said, ‘It is good to be in a country place for spring again.'

I did not answer, I had no knowledge of spring in the country. I did not know then that all can be mended by spring. Night brought me the first dreams of Thomas Cave.

I thought I had woken, but sleep had taken me further on and deeper to a place that felt like waking. I stared at my wall, at the shadows and longing cast on it. Then he came to me with what he had been. I watched my bare wall and listened to the life of the one who never talked. The movement of time and people with it had been all around him. He shared in none of the tragedy and none of the celebration. It had not touched him. He had watched too much and many to risk doing the same.

And I knew Myrna was right. It was not the end that he searched for, but a beginning.

So I found myself the following day, walking the hill before dawn, heavy with the need for sleep and peace and an end to all new knowing for a while. But I was not to be granted such luxury.

I worked that day away from him, though his thoughts screamed. My head was bursting with his one single demand.

‘Can you give an enema?' Nurse Joe O'Reilly asked me over dry biscuits and strong tea. ‘You're not a nurse unless you can give an enema.'

He talked the tools of his nursing trade. He talked circles around his frustration and softened its edges for a while.

I asked him of Thomas Cave.

‘You'd think he couldn't talk, but he can,' Joe O'Reilly advised. ‘No, he's choosing not to talk that one, anything to be difficult, like them all in here.'

After hours of the same – Thomas Cave screaming help for my ears alone – it stopped as suddenly as it had begun. He sat, still and silent, reeling in the hour of his lost death, alone.

Don't go near him, Joe O'Reilly advised. Don't go too close is the first rule of a good nurse. There's only trouble in that. But I had to go near. I sat on the edge of his bed.

Come closer, he pleaded. I leaned towards him.

‘I stayed silent a long time too,' I told him. ‘You must speak words. I know you have them.'

‘Bring me something tomorrow,' he whispered in his real voice.

It went deep and dug a permanent path with its gravel tones. He was the first man to find that way and he did it with a voice that scraped and rubbed against the softness in me.

19 ∼ Thomas Lives Again

T
HOMAS
C
AVE
found his way to a dream place. He woke with a start and a scream.

The night attendant rushed to him before the other sleepers were wakened and he found Thomas Cave shivering, wet and stinking. The attendant wrenched him out of the bed and put him back in his chair with a blanket and left the bed to the day staff.

But the night was to give him no more nightmares. He had the first pleasant dream since he had woken up from a great blackness many months before and found his body twisted and cold. When you have not moved much in a long time your blood stills and turns to coldness.

In the dream his blood was honey-warm and flowing.

Thomas woke, but he kept his eyes closed and cherished the warmth and did not wish to open them and face the grey surroundings.

After a time he realized his movements were not his own. He squinted down, not wishing to disturb the girl kneeling at his feet which were placed in her lap, where she rubbed life into them.

He believed on that first day, when she had dressed him with a tenderness he had never felt, that she had come to release him, to give him the tools to die soon and without further suffering. But as the days went on he stopped calling and it was then that she sat on his bed and leaned closer to hear him, though he had thought never to speak again.

‘I stayed silent a long time too,' said the girl with the green cat eyes that he felt he had known and the cat walk. ‘You must speak words. I know you have them.'

‘Bring me something tomorrow,' he spoke with a voice grown hoarse and stale with non-use.

Now she knelt at his feet and she fixed the cat eyes on him and she said with a soft purr that stirred him, ‘I brought proper socks and a pair of slippers. They came with the last delivery of clothes. Your feet are like blocks of ice. At long last we have something in the way to fit your feet. Like canal barges they are. A man must keep warm to live.'

He cried silent and warm tears.

He had thought her to be death's sweet messenger and instead she brought a sweetness of life with her that was too tantalizing to taste. To make him swallow what he had not the courage to while young, now, when all was lost? Cruel life.

He saw not her but all that went with her, surrounded by figures too shadowed for him to determine. And the smell of her! Citrus fruits and fresh cut flowers. Her hips moved easily, like water, and would have moved more easily if it were not for their straining against the uniform, cut for another shape.

He could not have imagined a more beautiful woman and her beauty had come to wake him. She had not come to put a spirit to rest, but to move it restlessly in a body that had lost movement.

In that moment Thomas Cave was lost. Life had won.

*   *   *

This is how the wanderer that was Thomas Cave came to be stilled.

In the darkness of the boxroom Thomas Cave had studied the pattern of the curtains. In the course of his nonliving he tried to patch up the pieces of his memory that remained, but lost track of the time, as you do when you are faced with eternity.

He exhibited his past as a series of photographs, which he hung carefully in his mind. Photography was how he had made his living. He had no great love for it any longer, but it was how his imagination worked.

His imagination did not hide truth – many of his recollections were uncherished. Some were glimpses of lost times that could not be restored because there were no pictures, but undeveloped images. Out of the darkness came not even shadow but a suggestion of one that darted and danced away from him.

He could make out other pictures, but could put no story to them.

Grey, early morning and the bare shoulder of a woman dressing, the captured and fading coolness of an iced drink in draining heat, unknown arms holding a young child wriggling with expectancy. He was left with nothing more than a sense and an ache to know what had occurred in those times. He was left with the memories of a stranger.

There was one thing in the gathering of memories that Thomas Cave was certain of. These pictures were of the times of other people and not his own times. They were happenings that he had watched and did not belong to.

This did not stop Thomas Cave from wanting to retrieve all he could.

There were gaping holes now in the lost commonplace – where his knowledge of other languages used to be. Now they all merged into one confused tongue that he dare not speak. And that tongue, once also an educated palette, was half frozen. There was a twisted hand that had once curled naturally around the body of a camera and allowed him to survey the world of his choosing.

Thomas Cave now knew that all the choices were fate's prerogative. His own body, his own mind were not his. They belonged to the callous events of the moving world.

He was not a fool before this. The indeterminate nature of existence had not escaped him. It had simply never claimed him as victim. He had spent his life observing human experience – the edges of it that most eyes hid from: the movement of a recently severed hand removed for theft in the same crowded marketplace from which it had stolen; the clouded, fearful eyes of a gypsy girl put into a marriage at twelve; the silver spread of terraced rice fields and the colourful dots of humanity owned by the land.

Thomas Cave had seen and photographed life against every backdrop the world could present – mountain people, valley people, desert people, ice people, plains people and city people. And life had never come to him. He kept it at bay, as a series of journeys, tasks, darkrooms and published material. He had remained a stranger to all but the work. Now the lives of his subjects were the only ones he had known and their lives were denied to him.