The Undertow (30 page)

From a way off, he recognises the accent of the groundsman, Jackson; the posh voices are the student doctors’, pitched high with panic like the bunch of girls they are.

But the two of them are almost at the gate now. The main gate stands back, sunk on its hinges, as if it’s not often used. There’s a little side gate too, Will notices. Painted white with black hinges, latched shut. They rattle on towards the open gateway. He wonders vaguely why you’d leave the big gate wide open and latch the little one shut.

Then he sees why, but it’s too late. Too late to stop, too late to do anything but to drop his broomhandle, spin himself round to clutch at the bedhead and meet Cosimo’s startled eyes.

“Cattle grid!”

Cosimo can’t get the sense, but he gets the panic. He tries to pull
back, but it’s no help now. The front wheels drop down into the pit. The front legs jolt against the rung. The bed tips forward and in an instant, Will is flying, his stomach spinning and his only thought, this is going to be bad. Toffee tin and penknife and triangles of white dry bread and fragments of egg and sharp-tipped arrows and comics and string fly through the air. Sheets crumple into a heap. The mattress slumps, flops forward and exposes the supporting wire mesh underneath. Will lands half on the angled foot of the bed, half on the rails of the cattle grid. The bed jolts again as Cosimo slams into the wire mesh of the base.

Everything stops.

Will is looking down into the pit. It is deep with last year’s leaves. He can lift his head, but he can’t move his fingers. His arm is an explosion of pain. He knows that he has broken it. He lifts himself up on his good arm.

The bed looks like it has hit a mine. He rolls onto his back, his broken arm across his chest, heaving himself up on his good elbow. It hurts. Cosimo retrieves himself from under the bed, a dazed bundle. He has a cut on his forehead; another scar to add to the collection. For a moment they just look at each other. Cosimo touches his sore head. He looks very grave.

“You okay?” Will asks.

“I okay.”

He nods at Will’s limp arm. Will grimaces, shakes his head. The toffee tin and penknife are lying on the gravel at his feet. He shoves at them with his good foot: “You go on.”

Cosimo looks at him, doesn’t seem to understand.

“You take them,” Will says. He feels faint.

The men are close now. He can hear them calling breathlessly, their heavy running tread.

“Go on, get out of here,” Will says. The world has narrowed to a tunnel; it fizzes. He is done for; but Cosimo still has a chance. “Go on!”

Cosimo obligingly ducks down, picks up the toffee tin.

“Now run,” Will says.

Cosimo looks at the tin, then back at his friend.

“Please.” The pain is really bad. He’s going to black out. “Please, go.”

But Cosimo just squats down beside Will. He sets the tin aside, and reaches into the pocket of his flannel dressing gown. He takes out his cigarettes. He shakes them so that a couple of them stick out, nips one between his teeth, angles the packet towards Will.

Will looks at him for a moment. Then reaches for one unsteadily. His eyes blur.

They light up. Cosimo grabs a pillow and shoves it in under Will. Will lies back. “Thanks.”

They blow spools of smoke up towards the blue September sky. Will’s head gets clearer. His arm hurts a lot. He feels sick. But he’s not going to black out now. He wishes he could. He thinks he might cry. The men come into view. Jackson a column of blue trousers and brown coat, and then the flapping white coats of two of the younger doctors.

“Sorry, Cos,” he says. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

On Thursday, when they wheel Cosimo back in after his operation, he looks like he is dead and half mummified already. The doctors—Mr. Smyth and the students with their pathetic moustaches and shaved-over spots—they all look so proud of themselves. Will just wants to be sick.

Will’s left arm is angled, set solid and hammocked in a sling. The cast is newish still, and clean. It smells of the workshop, of canvas and plaster. His leg, though, is out of plaster. They’re treating him, he thinks, like an important prisoner, like a captured officer. Distant, respectful, occasionally cruel. When she cut the old cast off him, Matron left a beaded line of blood up his leg; he gritted his teeth and bore it. Given what Cosimo was going through, it didn’t seem right to make a fuss.

There was a shower of dead grey skin in there. Grey as Cosimo’s face.

He’d thought he was going to be brave, but in the end he’d been very far from brave. His arm had hurt so much; moving him had hurt so much. He’d gone into a total funk, wailing, streaming tears. He doesn’t like to think back to that, to see himself in that state. But, somehow, it had done the trick. Sister Kathleen promised she’d talk to Mr. Smyth. And then Mum and Dad drove down, and Mum looked huddled and anxious in her new jacket and lipstick, and Janet scribbled in her colouring book and sniffed, and Dad kept calling Mr. Smyth “Doctor” until Mr. Smyth corrected him.

There was a hissed scolding about the fuss and bother, and the nurses and the doctors who knew best, and were doing their jobs, looking after him and making him better and him thinking
he
knew best? Will watched his dad’s hands clench and unclench. There was oil beneath the nails—the car had broken down on the way—but he couldn’t hit
Will, not there in the public ward, with the nurses stalking up and down and Mr. Smyth actually listening to Sister Kathleen and Matron, heads together at the nurses’ station. And with Will up to his shoulder in plaster of Paris.

So he got away with it. They won’t pin his hip. But they won’t give him any ice cream either.

Cosimo, though, hadn’t cried and wailed and got into a state. He’d been in not that much more pain than usual. He’d followed Will as Jackson carried him back, walking between the two doctors, stumpy bandaged hand swinging, calmly finishing his cigarette. On Thursday he was wheeled off to theatre while Will was still sleeping. Will thinks it was a nasty trick to do that, to sneak off with him in the night. But it was also a relief to wake and find the bed next to his empty. It had already happened, so he didn’t have to try to stop it.

At first, the curtains are kept drawn round Cosimo’s bed. Will can imagine every detail of it—the bloody cut, the flap of skin stretched over the stump, the skin stitched back onto the scarred wrist, everything scabbing up; all of it swaddled, strapped down tight. Because you would tear it straight out otherwise; you wouldn’t be able to help yourself. Waking up to find they’d turned you into a freak.

When Cosimo is awake again, and the curtains are drawn back, Will tries to be as he always was. They play backgammon, both one-handed, on the ridges of Will’s knees. They crunch Will’s Maltesers from the box. Later, Will passes him a fresh comic. Cosimo can read the pictures, and gets the sense of words like Aargh and Achtung and Phew. And it goes on like this for a while, for days, even a week. But Will can’t really look at him any more. Can’t think about him even. That hand tucked and sewn inside himself. Though he unwraps him sweets and passes comics and slides his backgammon chips around the board for him, he keeps his mind averted, from what he thinks and feels and what it must be like to be Cosimo now. An experiment.

Mickey is worse too. His speech has somehow slumped, and Will finds it embarrassing trying to pick apart the words.

The nurses keep a close eye on Will. They’ve confiscated his arrows and his penknife. Bed rest, and a set of exercises, supervised by Mr. Smyth. This is a new kind of experiment for Mr. Smyth, rather different from his usual hack-and-slash approach: physiotherapy, they call it. Will rather likes it.

They start off with a football, in the lobby. He has to kick it with
his good foot, which means balancing on the bad. Then the other way. He grits his teeth and tries and wobbles and clutches Sister Kathleen and tries again. Mr. Smyth looks on, frowns, takes notes. Will kicks the ball. Sister Kathleen laughs and claps and runs to fetch it, her footfalls echoing off the marble floor.

The old isolation ward upstairs is being cleared of beds. Will can hear it going on from where he lies playing cards with Cosimo—the rumbling of the wheels on the boards, the shuffling as new equipment is moved in. When Sister Brenda takes him up there, along with another three boys from off the ward—Spastic Pete is one of them, one’s a new boy with a compound fracture that isn’t healing right, the other is Humpy Hoggarth, who has scoliosis—there are parallel bars and mats and balls and ropes and it looks like great fun, but it turns out that it is exhausting too. Nights are just black oblivion, he sleeps so deeply. He doesn’t mind the hard work, or the pain, because it’s for a reason.

Make the muscles strong and they’ll support the joint; keep the joint supported and the damaged bone won’t fail. This is what Mr. Smyth says. He says it directly to Will now, rather than over his head, involving him in his treatment, making him take responsibility for it. The problem is that the joint is so damaged and unsupported at this point that it just wobbles around—it’s these minor dislocations that’ve been causing Will the pain. That’s what the pin was supposed to do—stop the wobbling. But if Will works hard, and builds up that muscle to hold his joint in place, then his pain will be reduced, can be made perhaps to just go entirely away. No need for that pin. He can be like other boys. He can even play football. This, Will wants to say, is what he’s been saying all along. But he doesn’t say it now, in case that makes them decide to take all of this away.

“We could take them swimming,” Sister Kathleen suggests.

Mr. Smyth gives her a look. “Do they look like they need a dose of polio, sister?”

And she blushes and no more is said, which seems a shame as it would be nice to go swimming with Sister Kathleen.

Soon, he has read all his comics to rags. Mum has stopped sending them, as a punishment. When the library cart comes round, he asks to have a closer look. He borrows a book. It is Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
. It’s smashing.

Cosimo has new friends, Clive and Trev and Tiny Brian, from down the far end of the ward. They play darts together, the four of them. It
works out quite well for Cosimo; he’s got better balance than the other boys, a steadier hand, even if it is only the one of them.

Will finishes
Treasure Island
. He picks a paperback next, with a cowboy on the cover, and that’s quite exciting. He ploughs through the
Just So Stories
, but finds them silly and a bit boring. Then he finds
Kidnapped
, which is by the same old fellow as
Treasure Island
, and he just romps through it. When he has read his way through the library trolley, Sister Kathleen starts to fetch books in from the library in town. He likes westerns, and adventures, and war stories. One day she comes in with a book as fat as a loaf; she hands it over to him and it drops in his hands, heavier than he’d expected.

“I asked the librarian. You’ve got through all their Junior Readers.”

He turns the book over. No exciting cover picture, just blank maroon cloth plastered onto cardboard. He can’t hold it comfortably.

“It’s very heavy.”

She smiles at him. “It’ll build up your strength.”

He turns it over, reads the spine.
Great Expectations
.

SHE CAN’T MAKE SENSE OF IT
. The room is smaller than it should be, and the bed is in the wrong place. She has to get ready, get herself sorted out. She can’t get the blankets off her. She struggles up and sits, their weight across her knees. She heaves the blankets back and drags her legs round, her nightie all rucked up, and there are her slippers on the rug. She feels her toes into them.

She has to get herself tidied up and dressed and make some breakfast. He is coming home. It has been such a long voyage.

She goes over to the window and drags back the curtains. It’s dark, which seems strange, but it doesn’t put her off. What seems stranger is the shape of the sky. It should be a narrow strip above the houses opposite—and Knox Road itself a ribbed band of cobbles below—but here it is an open plane; a bald flat moon stands on the sky, and makes everything blue-silver—the gardens, the sheds, the back lane with chalky runnels and the backs of houses beyond. For a moment she is intensely troubled by this, where she is and how she got here, and what she’s going to do, and how he’s going to find her here, and then something shifts in her thoughts, and she knows it will be fine. The arrangements are made. They have agreed it. She will be safe. That’s why she’s here.

She stands on the bedside mat, her flesh goosepimpling. She is going to wear that suit. The new suit in the longer line, and her new hat. He’ll be so proud when he sees how their boy has looked after her. She moves towards the wardrobe, but then remembers, the album, her picture book; she has to find it. Show him how she kept the postcards that he sent. She casts around the room—and it is tiny, narrow, pokey—how they will fit his sea-chest and him in here as well she doesn’t know.
She stumbles back across the bedside mat in her slippers, and flicks on the light. She can’t see it. There is a blue suitcase lying flat by the end of the bed, and there is the wardrobe with its knobs like petrified lace, and there is a dressing table pushed up next to it, and a chair with her cardie over the back of it, and a bed and beside the bed a nightstand with a glass with her teeth in it. She catches sight of her reflection, and sits down at the dressing table.

She turns her face from side to side. A good man doesn’t mind. She picks up her powderpuff and pads it against her cheeks and nose. A thick dust of lavender-white sticks there. She opens drawers and peers inside and tips a toilet bag out onto the glass top of the dresser. She finds a lipstick and draws it on.

She shivers. She picks up her cardigan and holds it for a moment, and then hooks it over the back of the chair carefully so that it will keep its shape and will not crease. She opens the door and goes out onto the landing. She knows this place but can’t work out how. There is one window on the landing, casting a pale rectangle on the patterned carpet. The stair treads are silvered with light from below. She climbs carefully down. He will be coming up the garden path. He will be about to step onto the doorstep, raise his hand to knock. A wooden sun rises across the door; its rays fan out across the frame, holding the glass segments in place. The light through the panes is muted blue, but then it flares into astonishing brightness. It’s a blessing, she realises: a promise. Any minute, his shadow will move across the light, and he will be there. He will be home. But the brightness grows, and then explodes. And it hurts.