Pat Barker - Noonday

She was just leaving the ward when Sister Wilkinson caught up with her. “Would you mind taking this down to the laundry?”

“This” was a trolley loaded with soiled sheets. His sheets, probably. She could’ve said: ’Course I bloody well mind, I’m off duty. Still, it paid to stay on the right side of the sisters — and Wilkie was nicer than most.

So she took the trolley and began trundling it along the main corridor. Like a lot of the trolleys, it had a mind of its own and would keep veering to the left. Like a bloody wrestling match, sometimes. So she lurched and swayed along, the roses in her hat bobbing, thinking how nice it would be to put her feet up when she got home, have half an hour on the bed…At least, though, she could take the lift — you were allowed to, if you had a trolley.

She hated the basement: so dark, gloomy and deserted, though not, of course, the laundry: that was the same hellhole of hissing steam and clanking buckets she remembered from the home. As she pushed the swing doors open and pulled the trolley through, she was breathing in smells of soap and disinfectant, her eyes were watering — horrible stuff, that disinfectant — and she was remembering the girl whose waters had broken all over the damp floor. And they’d made her mop it up. Had they? Now she come to think of it, she wasn’t sure. She didn’t always remember things right, on account of Albert.

“Can I help you?”

The supervisor, drying her red, wet hands on a towel. Friendly words, but not a friendly tone, no, not at all. Bertha pushed the trolley in her direction and turned, wordlessly, away. Outside, in the corridor, she stopped to consider. No conveniently empty trolley to take back to the ward, so she was going to have to face the stairs. And she was feeling a bit peculiar, the way she sometimes did when Albert was on his way. Perhaps she could chance the lift? No, better not. She started to walk the length of the corridor towards the staircase at the far end. No windows, no natural light, the strip light overhead kept flickering, keeping time with the pulsing in her head. She had a headache starting — always one-sided, her headaches. The throbbing turned to muttering, low, at first, but getting louder. She must be passing the morgue. Normally, she’d have said: Sorry, love, not working. But not today. After a second’s hesitation, standing outside the door, she pushed it open and walked in.

A barred window set high in the opposite wall let in a grudging light, but enough to see three figures, draped in white sheets, and lying stretched out on slabs like huge dead fish. A fan churned up the heavy, lifeless air. The muttering had stopped, probably because he’d heard the door open, but then it started again. It was coming from the nearest slab.

As she walked towards him, she saw the sheet wasn’t quite long enough to cover him. He’d grown tall, her boy. Reaching out, she touched the thick yellow soles of his feet. Her fingertips, rasping over hard skin, found no lingering warmth, but farther up, in the folds of his groin, he was warm still. At last, standing by his head, but with no recollection of getting there, she pulled back the sheet and looked into his face. Smiling a little, she waited for his eyes to open, for the moment when he’d know her again, and say it, say that word: Mam.

“And what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

A man in a white coat, Adam’s apple jerking in his throat. Dumbly, she stared, then forced herself to say something, anything. Laundry, she managed to get out at last. She’d been sent to fetch clean laundry.

“Well, you won’t find any in here. The laundry’s back there.”

She could tell he didn’t believe her. Dropping the sheet, she said, “I thought he moved.”

“Moved? Good God, woman, are you mad?” Then, when she didn’t answer: “Where do you work?”

“I’m a ward maid.”

Shouldn’t’ve said that. Now he’d report her to matron and she’d get the sack. There’d been several complaints about her work, already — she was on borrowed time here. She started to edge past him, hardly breathing till she reached the door. He didn’t try to follow her or ask any more questions, just stood and watched her go. As the door closed behind her, she looked back, seeing his accusing face narrow to a crack and finally disappear.

She stood for a minute, gasping for breath. The lift? No, she’d be seen, she was in enough trouble already. Instead, she walked in the other direction, turned right along a side corridor and out through the double doors at the end. There was a ramp leading up to a yard in which the mortuary vans turned, but it was a steep climb. She had to keep stopping to get her breath.

“You all right, love?” one of the drivers asked.

She nodded and, not wanting to attract any more attention, took shelter behind a parked van. Well, that’s me job down the drain, she thought. But perhaps not; he hadn’t asked for her name. Nah, but they’d know who she was. She wasn’t exactly easy to miss. What the hell was she supposed to do now? If she lost the job, she’d be depending on the seances, and it wasn’t enough. Would’ve been if she got her fair share of the house, but she didn’t. Blood-sucking bastards. No, the only way she was going to make money was to go back to the ports, and give them what they wanted: spirits they could see and touch. More cheesecloth up her fanny. Whatever they’d done to her insides that time, it had left a bloody big hole. Which was…convenient. She mightn’t have been much use giving birth to the living, but my God she was a dab hand giving birth to the dead.

All this time, while she was worrying about money and paying the rent, she’d been feeling the soles of his feet, how hard and cold they were, and, at the same time, seeing that purple, howling, convulsed dwarf, whose long, delicate fingers had clawed the air. That’s it. When you come right down to it, what else matters? Oh, my boy. My poor, poor boy.

The raids came thick and fast, all night, every night. Paul had more or less made up his mind he was going to die and this acceptance freed him from fear and moral scruple. Nothing quite like the proximity of death to make you feel entitled to grab anything that’s going. What he wanted, though, was not easily got. He didn’t want casual sex, still less commercial sex; he wanted precisely what he couldn’t have. The girls he’d kissed and fumbled when he was a boy, the excitement of those first encounters, back home, before he left for London.

Gemma, especially — he thought a lot about her. Buying fish and chips from Sweaty Betty’s, newspaper dark with grease and vinegar, kissing her good night on her doorstep, tasting salt on her lips, pushing her not-entirely-reluctant fingers down onto his groin, then her dad throwing open the bedroom window and demanding to know what sort of time they thought this was. Slinking away, after a final, clumsy kiss, exhilarated, sticky and ashamed.

Living, as he now did, in one room with a gas ring and a bathroom down the stairs, it was easy to feel like a student again. Everything: his clothes, his towels, even, for all he knew, his hair and skin smelled of oil paint and turps. Every morning, when he came off duty, he made himself a cup of tea and went to look out of the window at the sunlit street. The houses had a dazed look, as if buildings, no less than people, could marvel at another day of life. But then — unless he was so tired he really had to sleep — he started work, and he worked most of the day. Sleep was for later, for the afternoon, when the light was changing.

On one particularly fine morning, he opened the window and leaned out into the street. No bombs had fallen here last night, so no clouds of billowing black smoke marred the flawless beauty of this day. And there, in one of the houses opposite, was a girl. She was looking out into the street, exactly as he was doing, chafing her bare arms against the morning chill. As she leaned farther out, he realized she was almost naked, no more than a skimpy camisole half covering her breasts. He felt a delight in looking at her that was both sensual and innocent, and then she turned in his direction and he saw that it was Sandra Jobling. At the same moment, she recognized him. He expected her to withdraw in confusion, but instead, to his amazement, she leaned even farther out, raised her arm and waved.