White Feathers (12 page)

‘Where are we going?’ he asked, still on the bed and somewhat perturbed by the look of fierce resolution on her flushed face.

‘It’s time for your bath,’ she said, not looking at him.

‘Oh,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘One of the other nurses usually helps me with that.’

‘Yes, but I’m doing it today,’ she replied stiffly.

‘Oh,’ he said again, then lapsed into silence.

There was a short interlude during which neither moved, then Erin said, ‘Joseph, can you get into the chair, please?’

‘What? Oh, yes, sorry.’

He shuffled his backside over to the edge of his bed, put one
hand on the outer arm of the wheelchair and heaved himself into the seat. She checked that his legs were in place, his left foot resting securely on the foot-plate, snapped the armrest back up and pushed the chair briskly towards the door.

Passing Sonny’s bed Joseph caught a smirking, head-nodding wink, and as they went through the doorway he heard behind him the voices of several of his roommates joined in a gleeful and speculatory ‘Ooooh, eh?’

He resisted the temptation to turn and look up at Erin to see if she’d also heard, but evidently she hadn’t, or if she had she was doing a good job of ignoring it; in silence she wheeled him at a vigorous rate down the corridor, not even giving him the opportunity to propel the chair himself. Parking him outside the bathroom, she propped open the heavy door, wheeled him through, then locked the door behind them.

The bathroom was cool and smelt of disinfectant that masked a suggestion of mould, its thick walls tiled in white and the polished porcelain of the two urinals gleaming in the diffused light spilling through a single high window. There was also a heavy cast-iron bath on clawed feet, and two toilet stalls he hadn’t been able to avail himself of yet because they would not accommodate his wheelchair. He yearned for the day Doctor Birch promoted him to crutches; they would not only mean more mobility, but also the luxury of sitting on the toilet to move his bowels instead of the humiliation of perching on a pan in his bed and trying to clean himself up afterwards.

Erin reached over and turned on the taps, and they waited in silence as the plumbing clanked and rattled and slowly filled the bath with tepid water.

Joseph could not think how to diffuse the suddenly amplified tension between them. Instead he sat dumbly in his chair, watching the water swirl around the tub. Eventually Erin judged the bath full
enough and briskly turned off the taps. She secured the wooden board Joseph would use to ease himself down into the tub, then stood back.

She looked him in the eye at last, took a deep breath and said, ‘I’ll need to help you in, and I’m not leaving you alone in case you have an accident.’ Then, when he didn’t move, and with another flush staining her cheeks, she added, ‘Er, you’ll need to take your pyjamas off.’

Joseph nodded and fiddled with the buttons on his jacket, then stopped, struggling with an urgent and overwhelming urge not to reveal to her his body and his ruined legs.

She read his mind and said gently, ‘Oh, Joseph, I’ve seen so much worse than what’s happened to you. You’re still the same person to me. Please.’

In that instant he was aware she was encouraging him to lay himself open to her, to let her see him as he was now and allow her to accept him.

‘Here, let me help,’ she murmured, leaning over and undoing his jacket. This close to her, he could smell the chemical acidity of the dressings and lotions she handled in the course of her work, the warm scent of her skin and a faint hint of fresh, feminine sweat. She slid the jacket off his shoulders and down his arms, tugged it out from between him and the back of the wheelchair, and let it fall to the floor. Then she knelt in front of him, untied the cord securing his pyjama pants at his waist and ordered, ‘Lift.’

He placed his hands on the arms of the chair and raised his buttocks an inch off the seat, allowing her to slip the cotton trousers down over his slim hips and across his lap, where his penis, flaccid with his shame and discomfort, lay in its nest of wiry black pubic hair. Finally she slid the trousers down his brown thighs and to his knees. Filled with sudden panic, he grabbed her wrists and said, ‘Stop.’

‘No,’ she replied.

‘Yes.’

‘
No
, Joseph!’ She sat back on her heels and gazed up at him. ‘Can’t you see? It doesn’t make any difference to me. How you were before and how you are now, it hasn’t changed anything. It hasn’t changed how I feel at
all
!’

He heard urgent desperation in her voice, as if she were the one broken and scarred and craving reassurance, not him. But he also heard her words, and they gave him hope.

To Erin the moment was critical: she had of course already seen the state of his legs, many times in fact, but this was different and they both knew it. This was about what they might be
together
.

Joseph, for his part, knew that if he shut her out now, there would be no possibility of a shared future; she would dart back behind her emotional armour and he would be left alone to flounder in a morass of misery and paralysing self-pity. He let go of her wrists then and, almost imperceptibly, he nodded.

With a touch as light as thistledown she drew the pyjama pants down to his ankles, lifted his foot and pulled them clear. Then, so gently he could barely feel her fingers, she traced the path of the deep purple scars scoring the inside of his left leg from knee to ankle, then did the same to the puckered seam running across the stump of his right leg. He lay his hand on her veiled head and closed his eyes.

They sat that way for several minutes, both motionless and silent and aware that together they had sent the invisible blocks of some great, emotional barricade tumbling to the ground.

He ran his hand down her cheek then and, in a voice hoarse with feeling, asked, ‘Are you sure, Erin? Will you be with me? After this, I mean? For always?’

‘Yes,’ she replied simply, as if in her mind at least there could never have been any other answer. She had wanted him for so long,
and in such aching silence, and she marvelled that he might now feel the same way about her.

‘Good,’ he said softly. ‘Good. I need you.’ And he enveloped her in his arms and brushed his lips against her forehead.

She smiled and said, ‘You need a bath, too.’

He raised his left arm and sniffed at his armpit. ‘Oh. Sorry, I do too,’ he laughed, suddenly feeling absurdly light-hearted and as if, after this, nothing else could really matter.

He kissed her again, on the lips this time, then gently disentangled her from his arms. ‘Help me?’ he asked.

She nodded and positioned his chair parallel to the bath, dropped the armrests and watched while he hoisted himself onto the wooden board, admiring the well-defined muscles of his arms and chest and noting with pleasure the amount of condition he had regained since arriving at Port Said. From his perch on the board he was able to lower himself into the water until he was immersed up to his armpits. He closed his eyes again, enjoying the luxurious feel of the warm water on his skin, then submerged himself completely. Suddenly worried that he might have slipped, Erin grabbed for him but he popped up by himself, shaking his head and flinging drops of water every where.

He wiped the water out of his eyes. ‘God, I miss the sea.’

‘You’ll be able to swim as much as you like when you get home,’ she countered, pushing the wheelchair out of the way and settling herself on the floor beside the tub. She began to soap his back with a facecloth, fascinated by the brown smoothness of his skin and the long, graceful muscles that moved sleekly under it. ‘Your hair’s getting long again,’ she added softly.

‘Yes, a bloke came around yesterday doing haircuts, but I decided against it.’

‘I know. Corporal Bell. He’s an orderly, you know, not a barber.’

Joseph had a vision of the dreadful haircuts his roommates had
suffered at the hands of the singularly unqualified corporal, and laughed out loud. ‘Yes, I could see that.’

‘Will you cut it again?’ she asked, hoping he’d say no.

‘I don’t think so. Well, I won’t have to now I’m not a soldier any more.’

‘No, but you’ll still be in the military until you get home and get your discharge, and that might be months away yet.’

‘Then I’ll just have to be a soldier with scruffy hair, won’t I? I’ve done my bit, Erin. I’m not giving up anything more.’

She rubbed soap onto her hands and ran them through his wet hair, working up a lather and massaging his skull slowly as he relaxed against the end of the tub. He closed his eyes and sighed at the heavy sensuality of it, aware now that he had an erection.

Erin noticed it too, and was grateful he couldn’t see her face. She’d experienced this before, of course — patients becoming aroused during the course of her professional ministrations — and had learnt to ignore the embarrassment it caused her and all but the cheekiest of men, but this was not like that. This erection belonged to the man she loved, and although not naive she was sexually inexperienced and wasn’t at all sure what to do about it.

‘Do you want to rinse the soap out?’ she asked.

He ducked under the water, rinsed his hair, then reappeared, noting her pink cheeks.

‘I can do the rest,’ he said, not wanting her to do anything she didn’t want to do.

She nodded. He completed his wash, wrung out the facecloth and draped it over the edge of the bath.

‘I’ll need a hand to get out. I can put some weight on my left leg now but if you could help pull me up, I’ll dry myself sitting on the board and then get into the chair.’

They clasped wrists and she pulled him out of the water, then guided him onto the board and handed him his towel. He dried
himself quickly while she repositioned the wheelchair next to the bath, then held it still as he moved into it. Seated, he bunched the towel in his lap, self-conscious now about the erection which refused to go away.

‘No,’ said Erin, ‘leave it.’

‘What?’

‘The towel. Put it down.’

He did as she asked, and gasped involuntarily as she reached out and hesitantly stroked the soft, silky skin of his rearing penis.

Then she withdrew her hand and plucked out the pins that held her veil in place, and untied her dark hair so it fell straight and shining down her back. She took off her apron, unbuttoned the bodice of her uniform, then drew aside the folds of her chemise, revealing full, white breasts tipped with firmly erect nipples in the centre of large, dark areolae.

As she began to raise her skirt Joseph said, somewhat reluctantly, ‘You don’t have to do this, Erin.’

‘I want to,’ she replied, defiant now. ‘And I’m going to.’

With her skirt tucked temporarily under her arms, she hooked her thumbs into the elastic waistband of a pair of very utilitarian knickers and drew them down past the tops of her stockings, secured midway up her firm, white thighs by plain garters, and let them fall to the floor.

She stepped out of them, pulled a face and said, ‘Lovely, aren’t they?’ Then she smiled apologetically and added, ‘I don’t feel comfortable taking everything off here. I’d rather, well, do it this way.’

Joseph nodded and held out his hand. She came to him then, raised her skirt again and straddled his thighs. He looked down at the dark, glossy mass of curls between her legs and almost lost control of himself.

‘Am I hurting anything?’ she asked.

‘Could you move up just a little?’

She did and they both clutched at each other in fright as the chair lurched backwards.

‘Bloody hell!’ Joseph exclaimed. ‘Is the brake on?’

Erin, giggling madly, couldn’t answer.

‘Perhaps you’d better check,’ he said, beginning to laugh himself now.

She climbed off him and checked the brake. ‘No, it wasn’t. We could have ended up in a toilet cubicle,’ she said, still giggling.

‘Come back here,’ Joseph said softly.

She manoeuvred back onto him but as she moved to settle her buttocks on his thighs, he guided her so that she was positioned over his penis instead.

‘Sure?’ he murmured, examining her huge, expressive eyes for even the smallest sign to the contrary.

She answered by adjusting the angle of his penis and sitting down on him, using her thigh muscles to balance her weight so that the initial depth of his penetration would not be too extreme. He immediately realised what she was doing and moved his hands under her buttocks to help her. She grunted involuntarily as he entered her, but she was ready and there was only a slight sensation of resistance for both of them as he slowly slid in. He stopped then, wrapped his arms around her, pulled her to him and held her tightly.

He whispered in her ear, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t hold on.’

‘Then don’t,’ she whispered back.

So he didn’t and his release came with such intensity that he wondered for a moment whether he might pass out. As his shuddering subsided he let his head fall backwards, feeling her cool hands gently smoothing his dark hair back from his temples. When he opened his eyes her face was only inches from his, and she looked concerned.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘Oh, I’m more than all right,’ he replied, smiling. ‘Are you?’

She sat back and smiled back at him, a slow wide grin that told him everything he could have hoped to know.

‘There’s more to it than this,’ he said, still smiling but somewhat ruefully now.

‘Oh, I know that, but we’ve plenty of time.’

He enfolded her again and pressed his cheek against hers, hugging her to him.

‘Ow,’ she said as she felt his bristles. ‘We forgot to shave you.’

They laughed again, and then he started to cry and she held him tightly for a long time.

Noah Jackson turned to Joseph and said, ‘That was a bloody long bath. Nice and clean now, are we?’

‘Squeaky,’ replied Joseph shortly, settling himself against his pillow. Although quietly elated and almost giddy with the knowledge that the woman he loved loved him back, he was bone weary and the stump of his right leg throbbed monstrously from his recent exertions. He thought, or at least hoped, that he might have shed his final tears for his lost leg against the solid comfort of Erin’s breasts, but whether he had or not, he knew now that he wouldn’t have to adjust to a life of disability alone, and that seemed to him a miracle.