It was only then the light fell from his eyes.
'I don't have the ticket' I said.
I made my breakaway at that moment, having realised that the article in the portmanteau was an axe. How he had put his hands on such a thing on the way in from Hull, I could not have said. Perhaps Mike had handed it to him as he stepped from the train. At any rate, it meant there might be worse in store than a bullet in the brain.
I was running as I had these thoughts, and I was not my present self as I ran, but a young boy caught in a thunderstorm on the beach at Baytown, fleeing the one lightning bolt that would do me, while the lugger I'd been watching out to sea rocked on the waves and waited. The bullet came into my back, pushing me forward, so that I flew a little way before landing in darkness.
Chapter Thirty-three
It was the rumbling boots of the railway clerks that brought me back to the world. They were coming down off the footbridge, and swerving away as they caught sight of me. I was lying on the hardest of beds: Platform Four, but with half a dozen blankets placed over me. And I was shivering. A train came in over the way on Platform Five, and I had the notion that it was shivering too. The sky was bright blue, springlike beyond the roof glass miles above me, but my teeth were chattering.
Some of the clerks looked sidelong at me as they raced towards the ticket gates. What were they thinking? Passenger in bother? Company man in bother? Either way, the Company would deal with it. The right side of me, I realised, wasn't somehow keeping up with the left.
The Stationmaster was standing a little way off talking to a station official I did not know. I noticed him before I saw the Chief, even though the Chief was closer. He was talking to another stranger, and all these men were different from me, for they were all standing. I put my hand under the blanket towards my chest, feeling as if they must have placed a hot bottle or hot brick there, but there was none to be found and when I removed my hand, I saw and tasted blood at the same time; I turned my head to try to spit away the blood, and that brought the second stranger kneeling down beside me. I tried to look again at my hand, for it had been whiter than I had ever known it before, and I wanted to marvel again at the colour. I knew there was a bullet in me, and I badly wanted it out.
Somebody, another upright person I didn't know, was coming forwards from the refreshment rooms, carrying a glass; it was handed to the man kneeling beside me, who lifted my head and made me drink; it was warm wine, which mixed with the warm blood in my mouth. Other people came racing forwards now, ambulance attendants, carrying a stretcher. As they lifted me, and the blankets slid away, a great commotion broke out in my body, and I was shaking rather than shivering; it took them all aback, I could tell, and I tried to apologise for it, but could not control my speech, so that the word 'sorry' was more like 'surround'. I also tried to ask for immediate extra-special protection for the wife – for yet more men to be posted outside the house near the church at Thorpe-on-Ouse, and I believed that the message got through. At the moment they hoisted me, a train came in on Platform Four, and I caught a glimpse of my reflection – head bandaged, I had not bargained on that – and the mortified faces streaming by at the carriage windows.
I was taken by fast-trotting horse to the County Hospital; I tried to say to one of the attendants that I had never expected to go so fast along Monkgate while flat on my back, but that was quite beyond me. It bothered me that nobody spoke back, even so. I was about to try again as we flew along the hospital drive but it suddenly came to me that I'd done a great piss in my trousers, and that silenced me.
I was whirled about the whiteness of the hospital on a trolley, catching some of the words passed between the people moving about me: 'gunshot', 'concussion of the brain', 'fixity of the chest' and 'heart' and 'great vessels'. In a tiny, crowded room a needle came towards me, and somebody was good enough to say 'ether' as they put it in. It put me into a daze, not right out, and I was quite aware of my head being shaved by a very fast woman barber, and then painted, while at the same time my suit was removed, and my undershirt cut by mighty shears that moved from my waist to my neck in three great bites. A man entered the room whom I knew straightaway to be the top man, for he moved a little slower than all of the others. He was looking at my ribs, and I thought I was supposed to be looking too, and I raised my head like an idiot to see an open eye there on my chest. The man pushed my head down, and ordered me to be turned over, where he looked at my back, saying some words I did not care for, like 'lodged bullet', 'traversed the whole thickness of the chest'. Then the bandage was unwound from my head, and I don't believe that he liked the look of that either. I saw the Chief in the room, in his long coat as ever. But not for long, and soon a pair of fat India rubber lips came towards me and put an evil-smelling kiss on my whole face that sent me sinking into the bed below with all the voices roundabout becoming bent out of true.
The top medical man appeared out of nowhere some time later; he was carrying something small and silvery. I was in a long dark room, and there were other people there, all in beds and at the head of each bed was a shuttered window. The man sat on my bed, and his name came out: Kenneth Munroe; we had a conversation, but I cannot recall it, except that he made it clear the wife was quite safe. He returned again some time later, when I was still in the same place, with all the beds, and the closed shutters as before, but this time sunlight was fighting to come through them. He carried the silver object, also as before, and he placed it in my hand. He was smiling a very beautiful sort of smile, but there was a better one behind him: the wife, without the baby… free of the baby She watched me as Kenneth Munroe said, 'These are for you', in words as clear as a bell. I raised my hand and saw a pair of forceps. His speech ran on just as clearly, like a stream, but he spoke a little faster than I could understand.
'Bullet forceps,' he said,'… they grip the bullet with great force… seize it, you know, with no entanglement of the soft parts… smoothly rounded blades as you see… It is the extractor of preference for the British army.'
Everybody – for there were some more people around the bed by now – waited as I said, 'It is a very pretty instrument.'
'Thank you,' said Kenneth Munroe, 'they are constructed to my own design.'
He said that I might keep them, adding, as he rose from the bed, and the wife replaced him there, that he had many more besides.
'Where's the baby?' I said, and the wife said, 'Oh, he's…'
But I had fallen back to sleep already.
When I woke I had my hand to my head, feeling the bandage. I saw the bullet extractors on the cabinet beside me, and there was a thing like a metal tooth beside them: their trophy, the bullet itself. Kenneth Munroe was there again, and now the shutters had won their fight against the light outside; it was night time, the gas low in the long room. He explained that I had taken a bullet to a lung; it had gone clean through without causing over-much damage.