John McGahern - The Barracks

Elizabeth was strained and tense by the time the formalities were finished. The last she had to do was check in her things at the desk and get a receipt. A porter was waiting to take her to her ward. She had to say good-bye to Reegan.

“Is there anything else, Elizabeth?” he asked. She watched his face and coat and hands with the swollen veins. She was quiet with fear. She might never see his greying hair again, the two deep lines over the forehead, the steel blue eyes, the scar on the upper lip, the short throat, the gaberdine coat he wore, the veins swollen on the back of his hands. She might never even see this corridor where they were standing. She

might never get out alive. When she took leave of his lips she might be moving into death.

“I’ll tell the children,” he said when she didn’t speak.

“Buy them something. Say I sent it back,” she managed.

“That’s all right. There’s nothing else, is there?”

“No. Not that I can think. There’s nothing else.”

“Don’t worry, Elizabeth. All you have to do is get well soon. Some Thursday we’ll come up on the excursion ticket, the four of us. We’ll all write before then. We’ll ring the day of the operation.…”

He saw her wince. He was conscious of the porter waiting. “There’s nothing more so?” he puzzled for the last time. “Good-bye, Elizabeth, everything will be all right,” and they kissed in the stiff public way of hospital farewells, as bad actors would.

She could say nothing. He came with her to the lift, let go her hand at the entrance, the porter pressing one of the lighted buttons for the door to slide between them.

When the door had shut and the lift rose he lingered, pervaded by that sense of vague melancholy that can be as powerfully evoked by the singing of Good-bye to the White Horse Inn as by a real departure. Their lives were flowing apart and she was alone and he was alone and it was somehow sad and weepycreepy.

Through one of the glass doors he saw a pair of patients in dressing-gowns and slippers talking at a radiator. One was drawing for the other on his bandaged throat what must have been the incisions the surgeon had made. Then the other started to trace another pattern across his stomach, making great slashes with his fingers. One had cancer of the throat, the other stomach cancer, Reegan deduced. He watched the white bandages on the throat in morbid fascination: that man would choke to death one of these days! And the really lunatic part of this dumb show was that they were both as excited as blazes, working hand and lip as if they were trying to make up for ages of silence. It was quite enough to shake him out of his mood of melancholy and send him on his way.

He walked quick as he could, down the tree-bordered avenue, past the little lodge at the gates with the two round lamps on the piers that came on at night, and got on the first bus to the Pillar.

He had something to eat in O’Connell Street, bought three fountain pencils with the inscription Present from Dublin as he had promised Elizabeth, and then loitered about the streets with the fascination of country people for faces, the thousands of faces that poured past, not one that he knew; strange to understand that they were all subdued and absorbed in their own lives, that such constant friction of bodies didn’t cause them to strangle each other or copulate in mass.

He got tired tramping and standing about, his feet not used to the asphalt, but he had hours to kill before his train went. In this city he’d been trained, in the Depot in the Phoenix Park, and he inquired the numbers of the buses for there and got on one.

Findlater’s Church, Dorset Street, Phibsboro, St Peter’s Church, the Cattle Market; and as the bus went, the rows of plane trees seemed to run the length of the Circular Road to the Wellington rising out of the Park and join branches about its base there.

The Depot was behind its railing. A group of recruits were drilling under the clock on the square and it hadn’t even changed its black hands. Two policemen stood with their thumbs hooked in their tunic pockets outside the guardhouse, coming lazily to attention to salute the cars that went in and out. Reegan watched and listened greedily, the bellowed commands, the even stamping of the boots, the buttons flashing when they wheeled, his life at twenty echoed there.

“The poor humpers!” he muttered and it didn’t take it long to turn to the frustration of his own situation. Ever since he’d come up against the fact that life just doesn’t hand you out things because you happen to want them, he’d carried a grudge. He’d never understand that it’s an extremely limited bastard as far as satisfaction goes: and he saw the fault in the strip of green and gold with the white between flying over the Depot, symbolizing the institution of Eire now as it had done as good for his dream once, and this drilling square turning out men to keep its peace in the blue uniform that he’d have to wear when the train took him out of the city and home.

The tests found Elizabeth worn and anaemic, her heart had weakened, she had to be given blood transfusions and let rest. The day before the operation the anaesthetist introduced himself to make his examination, and late in the evening the chaplain came to hear her confession.

She confessed to a usual rigmarole of sins already confessed and forgiven in her past life. She didn’t love or hate enough, she thought, to commit them any more; she hadn’t envy as she hadn’t desire enough left; and who was she to curse! She only got more and more frightened as the days went. She had failed and despaired and given up so many times in the last months, and good God, how little she trusted! She had neither words nor formulas to parrot out the catalogue of this state, and how could something so much the living state of herself be state of sin? She seemed to have grown into it rather than fallen from anything away, she could not be sorry. She met the priest’s gaze with a gaze as steady as his own: he was a man too, he knew nothing more than she knew, and if she couldn’t find words for herself in her loneliness how could they be got out of a double confusion; and words, she knew, didn’t profoundly matter anyhow; nor did human understanding, because it understood nothing.

She met him face to face and assured him that she had nothing on her mind, she was grateful for his solicitude, but she had absolutely no worries. He seemed to dislike her gaze as steady and sure as his own. He told her peevishly that she had no need to be grateful for what was his duty. She bent her eyes. He may not have had an easy day, she thought: she heard the words of absolution, and he was gone to another bed.

He was gone. The aluminium of a trolley shone under the blaze of the electric lights beside the sterilizing room. She heard a low moan, a rattle of a newspaper, what sounded like a buckle rang against one of the beds, the rubber foot-soles of a nurse padded down the ward, some one laughed. The walls were the green of a rock sweet she’d been crazy about as a child: from the heart of the city the traffic roared, a great sea of noise. She muffled a sob. Tomorrow morning the anaesthetist would put her into a sleep she might never come out of. Oh, if she could clutch and suck every physical thing around her into her being, so that they’d never be parted; she couldn’t let go of these things, it was inconceivable that she could die!

A nurse came to her bed, a black-haired country girl, who said, “We’re giving you something that’ll let you have a good night’s rest, Mrs Reegan. We must have you in good shape for tomorrow,” and she was at last able to smile and wonder whether the tablets were blessed seconal or sonerzol as she fell asleep.

She was screened off the next morning and a nurse, gowned and masked and with a sterile trolley by, began to prepare her skin for the operation. Both armpits were shaved; the area of both breasts, the arms to the wrists and belly to below the navel were washed, painted with iodine, and covered with a sterile towel. She stiffened with fear as the screens were pulled about the bed and then fear itself was displaced by the loathsome shame of having to expose her body to be handled and shaved and washed.