The Barracks

  Hours later a nurse was urging her back to consciousness.

  “Wake up! You must wake up. It’s time you were awake! Wake up, Mrs Reegan! Wake up!”

  She moaned, some unconscious protest stuttered on her lips, she tried to sink back.

  The nurse increased her exertions, “Wake up! You must wake up out of that, Mrs Reegan! Wake up out of that,” and slapping at her face.

  She had to wake. Pain tore away the drugs and sleep. She moaned and cried as it engulfed her whole consciousness.

  They had laid her on her side, her arm was in a sling and rested on a pillow, the bandages about her were saturated with blood.

  “I can’t stand it. Something … Give me something,” she tried to moan.

  The nurses left to bring back the ward sister. Together they examined the bandages and the tube that had been inserted at the completion of the operation.

  “No. I don’t think there’s need to report,” she heard the sister say and passed into a delirious state of semi-consciousness as they repacked the saturated dressing and replaced the breast bandage firmly again. They propped her up and put a pillow at the bottom of the bed so that she could push against it with her feet. She moaned for relief and was given morphia but it didn’t make much difference for long. She moaned and cried. How on earth was she to stand this mangled body. The idea of pain had always terrified her, and now she felt nothing else.

  She must escape. If she could get an overdose of drugs that’d sink her into a night of unfeeling, she didn’t fear or care about death. “Oh, please God, send something,” she prayed. “Send anything, anything that’ll change this. Get me out of this hell.”

  Or if some one would only blow her brains out, she thought violently; or that the pain would get bad enough to break her.

  Nobody would do anything. She could be sure of that. Another four hours would have to go by before they’d even give her more morphia. She’d just have to lie and suffer and wait.

  But, Jesus Christ, she couldn’t just lie there suffering and doing nothing, she’d have to try and do something, this wouldn’t go on for ever, she knew from her nursing days that’d be a lot less in twenty-four hours, and in forty-eight it’d be almost gone, twenty-four hours wasn’t long, it was only a day, and a day was very little in a lifetime.

  The main thing was to try and distract or occupy her mind with something, if she could only do that she’d hardly feel much at all. She’d read or heard somewhere that to try and say thirteen times tables was a good trick to take your mind off your pain. They’d taught you far as twelve at school, these’d come easy, but you have to concentrate like hell to make up thirteen times, and it’d take your mind off whatever was happening to you. She ground her teeth. She could feel her heart beating against the bandages. Slow, slow, slow; each pulse rising to explode behind her forehead; going on till it would stop. She’d have to try and say thirteen times tables. Her body was on fire. She couldn’t stand this as she was. She’d have to try and pass the time somehow.

  “Thirteen ones are thirteen,” she could have screamed as she counted out in her mind, and it was no use, she’d be better to fall back and just suffer; but that’s only the first time, she persuaded herself; go on, you must go on. What are thirteen twos? Double the three and the one—go on: it’s twenty-six, isn’t it?

  “Thirteen ones are thirteen.

  “Thirteen twos are twenty-six.

  “Thirteen threes are ….”

  Go on, what are thirteen threes? I was never much good at figures, : because you’re no good at figures is all the more reason for you to go on with them, you’re unlikely to ever get to the end of the table, in fact they’ll occupy you for the rest of your life if you want, and isn’t that the most anyone could possibly hope for, it’d be awful to come to a successful end of something and be still suffering. So go on, Elizabeth; go on! Thirteen threes are what?

  No, I’ll not go on, I can’t, she faltered. She was reduced to a few stone of agonized flesh and she’d be better just to lie there and be that and be no more. These tables were all a game and they hadn’t managed to pass very much unfelt time for her. How much time had gone? Nine or was it seven or was it ten, it was definitely no more than ten heart-beats? A heart-beat was a second. Ten seconds had gone, six times that in a minute, 360 in an hour and an awful lot more in a day and still an awful lot more in a lifetime. She ground her teeth again and wept. She couldn’t stand it, they must have mangled her whole body. She’d have to play some sort of games or pray or something, her state was too terrible to be just it. Oh, but if she could just get her hands now on an overdose of drugs or a loaded gun it’d solve everything, it’d solve everything as far as she was concerned, but she’d get her hands on neither weapon nor drug tonight.

  “O God, if you relieve me of this pain I’ll serve you with the rest of my life,” she turned desperately to the last of all resorts.

  She had never served God much, she had served herself all her life, but weren’t the people who were serving God serving their lives too, there was a notion that nobody went to heaven or hell except they wanted to, she’d read it in a newspaper. Did it matter much? Did anything matter much? The one thing that mattered was for her to get shut of this body of hers by any way at all.

  She’d been brought up in the fear of God but what remained most powerful in the memory was the church services, always beautiful, especially in Holy Week; witnessed so often in the same unchanging pattern that they didn’t come in broken recollections but flowed before the mind with the calm and grace and reassurance of all ritual, a nameless priest in black and white moving between the Stations of the Cross with a breviary, the altar boys in scarlet and white and the lights of the candles they carried glowing on the young faces, a small crowd beneath the gallery in one of those eternal March twilights. That was her religion. Certain phrases: thirty pieces of silver, the lakeshore of Galilee evoked events in the life of Christ. The soul went before the Judgement Seat as dramatically after death as it did in the awful scarlet and gold and black of the pictures on the walls in every house, as concretely as the remains went across the bridge to the graveyard in a motor hearse. Though it had never much to do with their lives, except the observances they had to keep: if they kept these their afterlife was as surely provided for as toil and marriage and care and a little luck would provide for the one here on earth. Everything was laid out and certain, no one needed to ask questions, and there was nothing to offer to anyone who stumbled outside its magic circle.

  It was little use to Elizabeth as she lay racked with pain. She couldn’t pray. I believe, O God. Help my unbelief, rose to her lips and sounded as dishonest as something intended to be overheard, she’d never made it part of her life, it was not in her own voice she spoke. The childhood terror of hell came back and she was afraid but she could not adapt herself to living now in its presence. She’d have to try to go on as she had come to live, without fear or hope or despair, there was a passing moment in life.

  “O Jesus Christ, get me out of this fix. I can’t stand it. God blast it! Blast it! Blast it,” broke from her lips but it was nothing but wretched cries against her suffering.

  She put her free hand to the railing of the bed, it was iron and cold as ice in her hand. If she could knock herself out against that iron railing, if she could manage to do that it would all be marvellously over.

  She had been through as much pain as this before. She had tried to knock herself unconscious against bed and wall before, and those nights had passed, they seemed nothing now. What she was suffering now would soon seem nothing too, she thought; though it did her no good, it was only this intolerable present that mattered. A nurse heard her cry and came to the bed.

  “How do you feel, Mrs Reegan?”

  “I can’t stand it much more,” she breathed. “Can you not give me something?”

  “Try and bear it a little while more. It’ll be better that way and when I give you something it may put you to sleep. You’ll try a
nother while, won’t you?”

  The voice was kind and Elizabeth tried to smile her old smile. She’d try to stick it out: and she had to smile again with bitter self-knowledge when the nurse had gone: she’d been seduced far more often throughout her life by goodness than by any evil, and now it was no different. She should have made such a nuisance of herself that they’d have to give her something—to get some relief was the one thing she craved.

  Soon, soon it’d be over, it couldn’t go on like this, and the next time she called they did give her morphia. It dulled the pain a little. Her night’d crawl towards morning by these four-hour stages, from dose of morphia to dose of morphia. The visitors arrived and left, the trolleys came with supper, the night staff relieved the day, the lights went out and the roar of traffic from the city never ceased, eased perhaps for a while in the small hours, and resumed with more fever than ever before the morning.

  The hours went, without complications. The tube in the breast was rotated and eased somewhat in the afternoon of this next day. Her suffering grew much less. The tube was removed altogether the day afterwards, the real pain was all over. The breast was dressed each day, the tube opening touched with antiseptic till it began to heal, the alternate sutures removed on the tenth day, and the remainder two days later. She had to be helped with her food and washing and clothes and hair these first days and she had to do arm exercises. Whenever she thought she was getting more than her share of the lash she had only to think back on the pit of suffering out of which she had just come for everything to be treasured and alive again. By the tenth day she could touch the back of her head with her hand and she had hours of happiness such as she never remembered.

  The white sprouts of the potato seed forced their way through the earth about the barracks, grew leaves and green as they got the light, and the slender cabbage plants held their heads in the air. Most of the turf was cut and not firm enough to be handled. There was no rush. When the turf firmed their days would be a constant rush. Now they could sow beans and lettuce and parsley in little raked squares, and talk. A young pig that Mullins had been given as a bribe to keep his eyes shut to some stealing of timber he had noticed from the woods was much in those conversations.

  He kept him in a shed that used hold old rubbish and his bicycle. He’d got a cartload of green rushes for bedding and levied buckets of skim milk each day from the creamery carts passing through the village; later in the year he’d get windfall apples to sweeten the bacon, he said; and he’d kill him in November.

  Sometimes they talked about cancer and Elizabeth, they knew she had come through the operation, they expected a letter, and she’d be home. As always, the children sprinkled rushes and wild flowers on the doorstep for Our Lady’s Eve and kicked away their boots to go barefoot, it was May.

  The turf dried. Mullins and Brennan switched their patrols of the imagination to the bog, where Reegan already slaved. He had hired several banks and day labourers to do the cutting but he’d have to save the turf himself if he was to make much profit. He’d sell it in the town and if it went lucky it’d more than pay for Elizabeth and he’d be able to leave the police. He didn’t want to have to go to the city to open and shut swing doors in some ice-cream parlour to supplement what pension he’d get. He’d buy a small farm and work how he liked for himself. With what he had saved and the gratuity he was owed he should be able to do this if the turf paid for Elizabeth: he wasn’t staying in the police till he was blind and weak at sixty, no matter what came or went, was the one thing he was certain of.

  At daybreak he was out of bed to cycle the two miles to the bog, he’d work in a kind of frenzy there till eight, and rush back to shave and change into his uniform, gulp the breakfast the children would have prepared, to be in the dayroom to call the roll at nine.

  Mrs Casey cooked their dinner all these days. Casey had his meal with them in the kitchen and was much loved by the children. He never forgot to pay them some attention, he was light and gay, and didn’t oppress them with the sense that he was being slowly crucified by time and care, as many did.

  They had to go to the bog every evening after school. The work was monotonous and tiresome, continual stooping to lift the sods off the ground into windrows and clamps, but not heavy, a child could do as much as a man. It was a novelty first, Reegan incited them with sweets and odd bottles of lemonade or an orange, but it was soon too much. They’d hear shouts of other children playing as they lifted dreary sod after sod. The mud matted in the hair of their legs and it was painful to rub it clean with hard sedge, standing to their knees in water to let it soften. Sometimes one of the little girls’d scream when the yellow of a frog’s belly flashed before their eyes, leaping from under a sod they had moved; with terror they saw the black leeches crawl on the mud; they sucked blood, the old people said. They were left with no energy to face into their lessons and got into trouble in school the next day. Their faces began to shut, a mask on the weariness and bitterness, they laughed little, and started to grow twisted as the roots of a tree between rocks.

  Reegan saw nothing. All he saw was turf saved and the money that’d give him the freedom he craved. He drove them with the same passion that drove himself, without thinking that it might not be to them the road to the vision of sky and sun that he saw. Their faces shut. When they laughed it was with the bright metal of observant people, not with their hearts, and mostly they watched, nothing but watch.

  Reegan drove himself mercilessly, working every chance he got during the day, and grew more greedy and careless, taking risks every new week that he would not have taken the week before, even though he knew Quirke was prowling.

  Late one night he wrote to Elizabeth, his greatcoat was over the back of the chair, his peaked cap on the table where he wrote. He had worked all day at the turf and he had just finished a patrol to see that the pubs were closed. The children, and Brennan in the dayroom, were asleep. He paused several times as he wrote: to put his hand to his forehead and to gaze wearily at his face in the sideboard mirror. He had nothing to say to Elizabeth. He hoped she’d be home soon and then he had the pages to fill with gossip. He felt no connection with what he wrote, it was his duty—with the turf and potatoes and the money that’d get him out of the police he was connected, and they could bring him to violent life and excitement, but this letter didn’t rouse anything, except his dislike of intimacy, and when it was finished the quiet conscience of having done his duty.

  A letter arrived a week later from Elizabeth. She told him not to come to see her, she was happy and recovered, she’d be home by the end of June. It’d be silly to make the long journey to Dublin when she’d be so soon home, she said.

  He took her at her word, and wrote two more laborious letters, nights he was barely able to keep his head from sliding down to the notepaper on the table. The strain of the work had him physically jaded and no end was in sight. When the clamps dried he’d have to cart them out to the road with borrowed donkeys. The lorries would take them from there to the town. He forced himself on and on, he could always find energy, so fierce this passion to get money and his freedom that it drove him like a whiplash. Only in the drawn sag of his face when he relaxed over his supper at the end of the rosary did the strain show, and in the increasing risks he took. He spent little time at his police work. He had gone lucky so far but it was unlikely to continue so for ever.

  The potato stalks were a green sway of leaves in the garden, flecked with their tiny blossoms, blue of Kerr’s Pinks, white of Arran Banners, red of Champions. June was nearly ended, in a week Elizabeth would be home, the children have holidays from school. Thunder showers and evenings when the midges swarmed out of the sycamores and the edges of a few potato leaves burned black with blight warned them it was time to spray.

  On a Saturday Reegan told the children to put the spraying barrel out in the garden, fill it with water from the river, steep the bluestone he had left ready, and he’d spray when he got back off patrol.

  They had
to roll the wooden barrel, stand it on its end to work it through the gate at the lavatory. Half-way across they placed it at the foot of the ridges, where the wild part of the garden ran down to the ash trees and the river. They tramped a pass through the wild meadow and the nettles and briars between the trees to get with their buckets to the water. Through meal bags thrown across the mouth of the barrel and secured with twine they strained the water to catch grass-seed and leaves and dirt that could clog the machine. Then they tied the bag of bluestone to a pole and set it to steep and put down a pot of water to boil so that Reegan could melt the washing soda when he came home.

  He was late, and changed out of his uniform as soon as he’d eaten, melted the soda, and hurried out to the waiting barrel without making his report or signing the books.

  The bluestone had melted, the solution blue-green of the sea on a cloudy day, and as he spilled the washing soda in it changed to a miracle of rich turquoise, white foam boiling to the top and clinging to the pole with which he whirled the mixture round the sides of the barrel. Then he rested the knapsack sprayer on the edge of the barrel, took a small delf jug to fill the can, and strapped it on his shoulders to spray, its copper covered under the blue coats of its years.

  Brennan came out from b.o. duty in the dayroom and leaned over the netting-wire.