Ian Slater - WW III

“My God,” said the other Canadian. “Are there any ships left in that convoy?”

“I’ve no idea. Ours is not to reason why. All right, enough chatter. To work.” She paused. “Oh, one more thing. After you scrub up, be sure not to use your hands to maintain your balance. It’s the natural thing to do aboard ship and it’s very unhygienic.”

As they undressed the wounded Englishman, Lana carefully avoided looking anywhere else but at the man’s face. It was the first shock she was to receive that night. He looked so young as to be no more than fifteen or sixteen — never mind that the ID tags said he was nineteen. There was no allergy code on the tags.

As they cut away the young sailor’s oil- and water-sodden blue shirt, woolen sweater, and trousers, careful not to touch the raw lumps of mangled bone and flesh that had been his hands, the strong smell of oil persisted, and Lana, bending down, sniffing unselfconsciously like a bloodhound over a corpse, discovered that the oil smell seemed to be coming from his hair, and made a note of it. Elizabeth smelled it, too. “They start that bone saw up in there, they could have a fire.”

Sometimes Elizabeth’s callousness — or was it simply forth-rightness or insensitivity? — shocked the other nurses, but after Jay La Roche, it rarely bothered Lana. What did bother her in the OR was the surgeon’s knife severing the tendons. She passed out and ended up with what Elizabeth called a “king-sized lump” on her forehead, which, Matron pronounced, was “La Roche’s own silly fault.”

When she had revived enough for two of the other nurses to walk her out of the theater, Matron had assailed her with the comment, “You almost struck the surgeon! How many times do I have to tell you? If you’re going to pass out, please do so away from the table.”

“Will the boy live?” Lana asked later.

“He’s young,” someone said.

Yes, thought Lana, praying for him as fervently as she had once prayed for herself in her war with Jay. Oh, Lord, she asked as outside, the Atlantic gale howled unabated about the lighted ship, let him live.

in the clear, cold dawn, blue-white bergs calved by the land ice of the Greenland mass and floating south beyond Cape Farewell into the Labrador Current now approached Newfoundland with ominous majesty, towers of purest white as the sun climbed higher above a dark blue sea and against the aquamarine sky. The chop of the previous night had now abated over the Grand Banks, and the Bahama Queen sliced through the big swells as if the urgent nocturnal activity just hours before had never happened — as if, thought Lana, the world were at peace.

She was sitting in the intensive care unit referred to as the “deluxe suite,” which it had been in its prewar days. The intravenous drip was regular, William Spence’s heartbeat a little weak, but all other vital signs were indicating the nineteen-year-old had pulled through the double amputation. “The young mend fast,” the surgeon had said, his scalpel indicating the severed hands, which, unknown to the ship’s crew, would soon be dumped over the side with the other parts and garbage. “Healthy tissue,” the surgeon had proclaimed, as one might refer to a horse worth buying. “If we’d gotten to him earlier — still, lucky to be alive.”

“Lucky”—Lana wasn’t so sure about that. Maybe one’s future was written in the stars and we called it luck, but she still harbored the conviction that you made your own luck. But if so, had it been preordained that her marriage was to be a disaster? Was God then darkness as well as light? If so, why had she prayed so fervently for this young Englishman’s life? Did she really believe? she wondered, or was she a fair-weather believer? Had her prayer accomplished anything or was prayer simply another way of so channeling, so concentrating your psychic energy that you did more than you normally would to help the situation to a successful conclusion? Especially when a young life hung by a thread.

As she watched the pristine beauty of the icebergs and the vastness of the sea, she thought of her brother Ray, who, their mother had written, was now entering yet another series of plastic surgery operations, and she realized that though she’d been unable to help her brother in the purposeless and directionless vacuum following her marriage, the young English sailor had become for her a kind of surrogate for her wanting to help, to do something, anything, and an escape from her personal ordeal, a chance to look after another victim of cruel circumstance, alone as she had been alone.

She took a lemon-glycerol swab from the kidney basin and gently daubed his lips. He was conscious now, mumbling what must have been a dozen questions, his eyes opening for a fraction of a second, then closing, the mumbling ceasing, replaced by a guttural, rumbling snore.

Elizabeth offered to sit with the wounded man to give Lana a break, but Lana said she’d stay on, and besides, there were more than enough nurses for the fifty-three cases now aboard.

“All right, honey,” said Elizabeth, “but don’t you go getting attached, hear? You know what happens.”

“Elizabeth,” smiled Lana, “you can rest easy on my account. Besides,” she said sardonically, “I’m a married woman, remember?”

“That’s what I mean,” said Elizabeth in her usual forthright tone.

“He’s just a boy,” Lana replied.

“And you’ve got a soft streak in you a mile wide,” said Elizabeth. “You’re not his mama. You start with that and you’ll be all burned-out ‘fore Christmas.”

Lana smiled, touched as always by Elizabeth’s concern. “How come you know all about it, Miss Ryan?” she asked Elizabeth with mock formality.

Elizabeth looked down at her friend. “You always X-ray people?”

“Not if I can help it,” Lana replied good-naturedly. “I just think this is the case of the pot calling the kettle—”

They cracked up, both laughing at the appropriateness, or was it the inappropriateness, of the cliche, Lana dropping her head against Elizabeth’s stomach, still giggling. There was a sharp tapping noise on one of the glazed windows of the deluxe suite that looked out on the gigantic berg. Outside on the promenade deck, glaring at them through the glass with ill-concealed annoyance, was Matron. She was obviously saying something sharp to them, but the double glazing made it impossible to hear. Matron’s voice coming out from the red face in a series of barklike sounds was quickly whipped away by the wind, her blue cape ballooning, quivering violently about her in the stiff Atlantic wind. Both Lana and Elizabeth tried their best to look properly contrite, but Elizabeth, a look of abject apology on her face, murmured, “Watch out you don’t take off, you silly old bitch.” That did it — they both doubled up laughing. The blue balloon was now moving down the deck against the roll of the ship, heading for the nearest door.

“I’m gone,” said Elizabeth.

“Elizabeth!” Lana shouted. “Don’t you leave—”

“Your shift, honey. I’m just visiting.”

A minute later the whirlwind came in, hair wild. “If there’s one thing I will not tolerate, Miss Brentwood, it’s flagrant disregard for a patient’s well-being.”

“We were only sharing a joke, Matron.”

“A joke? So you think war’s a joke?”

Lana simply refused to be baited. “Excuse me,” she said, and moved to check the IV drip.

“A joke!” repeated Matron, louder this time. The drip was a little slow and Lana unscrewed the clamp a touch.

“I fail to see—” began Matron, but then the PA system crackled to life. A man’s voice.