Cold Eye of Heaven, The (30 page)

He likes the curly nurse. She makes funny faces and sometimes when she's on night duty she tells them a story. Once in the middle of the night her and another nurse taught him and Buddy how to dance. The nurses were whispering and laughing in the glass room and he could hear the radio music and they couldn't sleep so Buddy shouted out, ‘Nurse, I'm burstin!'

And then he shouted out, ‘Nurse, I'm burstin too!'

And the two nurses came out and said they were a right pair of chancers. They'd left the glass door open behind them and the music was louder and Buddy started wriggling his arms and he said, ‘Hey what's that music, nurse? What's that music?'

The curly nurse said, ‘That's only the great Glen Miller.' And then the other nurse started dancing around wagging her hands and the two boys copied her and then they stood up on their beds and now they were tall enough to dance with the nurses, twirling them under their arms. After a few minutes the curly nurse lifted him off the bed and they danced all around, all the way down the ward. Then they danced out the door. And they danced down the corridor and she dipped him and lifted him and swang his legs around one side of her body and then back the other and she da da dahed into his ear and he couldn't stop laughing for a while and then he did stop laughing and just felt the walls going round and round and up and down with the music, and the biscuity smell of her
black curly hair bursting out from under her white hat and the sound of his breathing and her voice in his ear, singing.

The clatter of rain on the tin roof wakes him up and the first thing he notices is that Buddy is gone. It's night-time but he can still see through the dark by the small blobs of red from the nightlights and the yellow light coming out from the glass room, that Buddy is gone. He sits up in the bed and peeps down towards the door of the ward; the shape of the bent head in the glass room means that tonight the boss nurse is in charge. He tries to see the locker on the far side of Buddy's bed. Buddy keeps all sorts of things in his locker; tin boxes mostly – of marbles, of pencil butts, of soldiers, and there's more than a dozen Dinky cars in there and a red London bus as well.

He lies for a minute and tries to remember if Buddy came back from his X-ray. He was supposed to come back for his tea. But he can't remember now what day it is – if it was a boiled egg tea or a square cheese tea or a Sunday bun tea. He slides out of bed, the soles of his feet make a slap on the floor and he waits to see if the boss nurse has heard him. But she's still writing stuff in her book. He looks around the ward at the shapes of the sleeping bodies. He looks at all the Christmas things hanging up; tinsel twirled through the bars on the beds and the picture of Santy on the wall and the paper chains that him and Buddy made to go between their two beds. And now he's standing at Buddy's bed. The locker is open and there's a smell of cleaning stuff off it and all the tins are gone and the cars and the red bus too. All that's left is the mattress rolled up at the top.

‘Where's Buddy?' he asks the boy on the other side, shaking him awake.

‘What?'

‘Where's Buddy gone?'

‘How do I know? Lemealone.'

‘Where's Buddy?' he asks the boy across the ward, shoving his shoulder to wake him up.

The boy pulls himself up on his elbow, rubs one of his sticky-out ears and shakes his head slowly.

He goes to the window at the end of the ward and looks up at the big blackout curtain. He gives a jump and tries to grab onto a corner but he's too small to reach it. So he gets a chair and staggers with it across the room. Then he climbs up on the chair and pulls a gap in the side of the curtain and pulls and tugs until thumbtacks start to pop out. He climbs again and now he's on the window cill. It's the wrong window; he knows that. But the window for Cork is on the other side of the ward and it's too near the nurse in her glass room. This is the window where you see nothing only the tin roof and you can't even see it that well now because all the other windows of the hospital are blacked out. The rain has stopped and he looks for the night sky. But he can't see it either. He can't see the street and he can't see Buddy. He can't see anything. The dark is too dark.

‘Buddy's gone,' he says to Gran.

‘Well, he must have gone home so,' Gran says.

But he knows by her face that's not true.

‘He went in the middle of the night.'

‘Are you sure? Maybe you were asleep.'

‘He went in the middle of the night and his things are gone except for his cars and his red London bus that are all washed and clean out in the playroom.'

‘But sure he might have left them for the other kids to play with.'

He knows by her face.

‘Buddy's gone,' he says and starts crying.

He wakes up in a different bed. A bed as big as a field. It has a thick quilt with all different green shapes that makes a funny noise when he moves. It's Gran's bed. There's a pair of Granda Bill's trousers over the chair, and Gran's net for her hair is on the dressing table.

‘What's he doing that with his eyes for?' somebody says and he sees a little boy standing at the end of the bed.

‘Who are you?' he asks the boy.

‘Who are you?' the little boy asks back.

And now there's a woman standing behind the little boy. The woman is wearing a blue coat. Gran comes in behind them and says, ‘Ah, there he is, awake at last. Well – look who's come all the way up to see you.'

‘All the way up from down the country?' he asks.

‘That's right,' the woman in the blue coat says and then starts to cry.

‘What's wrong with her?' he asks Gran and Gran gives him a look.

He turns in the bed, the way the ginger boy used to do, and presses his face into Gran's long sausage pillow.

‘Ah, he's a bit shy,' Gran says, ‘he's bound to make a bit strange at first.'

He presses his face harder into the pillow and he can get Gran's flowery smell now and Granda Bill's snuffy smell and even though his eyes are shut and squashed into the pillow, he can still see the shape of the people at the end of the bed. He counts the shapes, then he lifts his face and looks at them for a second just to be sure; the woman in her blue coat, the little boy in his cap.

‘Where's the man?' he says, ‘is he gone fishing?'

The woman stops crying. ‘He has to work,' she says.

He puts his face back in the pillow again. And he can't work it out because when he closes his eyes into the pillow the woman is holding something up in her arms. But when he looks back into the room, her arms are just folded.

He feels himself shrink into the pillow. He opens his mouth and sounds come out but they don't shape into words. His face is lying against something white and smooth and for a minute he thinks it might be the pillow or it might be the woman's skin but it's too cold and too hard to be either. And the smell. The smell of dust and piss. The sound. The gentle sound of water.

*

The sound of gentle water. He sees now that he's on a river; a basket at one side of him, a cloth spread out on the bank. Coloured jewels and feathery knick-knacks across it. He holds a long bendy stick in one hand. A rod. That's what it is. A rod in one hand, a wire in the other like the string of a bow. He's wearing rubber boots that come up to his thigh; boots that he recognizes from a box in an attic: his father's boots. He takes a step down and the water, cool through the rubber, licks around his ankles, over his shins. He feels himself sway, yet his feet are held firm. He knows nothing of where he is or why he is here. In a river. Fishing. Yet his mind seems to know what to do. His mind is sharp. He can follow the course of each thought; strong, swift, all encompassing. Out over a glittering river he watches it loop, flick and cut. The precise glint of it, against an audience of thick dark river trees. He can feel his body sway again; side to side, back, forward. A dizziness spreads through his legs, arms, chest and throat. His heart burns and swells. Yet his feet remain solid and wedged into the bed of the river. It is sunset or maybe sunrise but either way he notices a soft reddish hue is beginning to spill into the sky, fall over the trees, along the bank, down into the river. He is alone. Alone on the river bank. A man, a boy, a child, a baby, a man again, all at once.

He sends his command like a fly to the target. He sends it again, and again it returns. Each time it comes back to him he feels a moment of futile joy.

Christine Dwyer Hickey
is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. Twice winner of the Listowel Writers' Week short story competition, she was also a prize-winner in the prestigious
Observer
/Penguin short story competition. Her bestselling novel
Tatty
was chosen as one of the 50 Irish Books of the Decade, longlisted for the Orange Prize and shortlisted for the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year Award, for which her novel
The Dancer
was also shortlisted. Her most recent bestseller,
Last Train from Liguria
, was nominated for the Prix Européen de Littérature. She lives in Dublin.

The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of the Irish Arts Council in the writing of this book.