‘Jesus, mother of God,’ Flannigan said.
‘You’re all right,’ Luke said. He rubbed the blood out of Scullion’s eyes and reached for his meds. Fingers were missing on Scullion’s right hand but he continued to stare out and pick at the rags of his trousers. He was shaking as he saw the leg a few feet away and touched the sheared, bloody bone of his knee. The bullets had stopped coming and it was weirdly quiet up there, the dark about them and Scullion murmuring, which seemed a good
sign, while the men tried to keep him from passing out. ‘Look,’ said Flannigan, ‘Jimmy-Jimmy’s here. We’re all here.’
‘What’s the score with these trees?’ Scullion said.
Luke stabbed the morphine needle into the major’s stomach. He returned from some place in his head and was again the boy in training. He took charge and had the old logistical zeal, the clarity of thought. He pulled out the field dressing and ripped it open with his teeth. Scullion looked up at him and smiled. ‘You’re a bad soldier.’
‘Come on, sir. You’re going to be all right. Hold my hand ya auld fucken wanker that you are.’
‘Come on, Charlie. Keep your eyes open,’ Flannigan said. ‘We’re not having a kip out here. Come on.’
Scullion had stopped feeling around his knee and his smile continued as Luke radioed for a stretcher. They were down from the convoy in minutes and the medic from the parachute regiment said one of the boys was religious and good at prayers. ‘Don’t be fucken daft,’ Luke said. ‘He’s going to be fine.’ One of the guys lifted Scullion’s torn-off leg by the boot and wrapped it up in a piece of plastic.
‘You’re great, now. Okay, fella. Just keep the head,’ Flannigan said. ‘Keep it together, sir. Jimmy-Jimmy’s here and the boys are coming up for a fucken smoke in a minute. Dooley wants to tell you about that moose of his, the bird he’s going to marry because she’s a staff nurse.’
Scullion was lying on the stretcher and his face was grey. Luke wiped his brow and tried to say everything was cool, they’d soon be out of the zone. The major’s smile went cold after a moment and he started whispering. ‘
Or had I but riches and money in store
.’
‘Come on, sir.’
‘Cop on!’ Flannigan said. ‘Give us one of your songs. Give us a few verses, ya mean bastard.’
‘It’s there on the banks of the lovely Bann river,’
spoke Scullion.
‘Keep going, Charlie.’
‘Oh, fuck,’ he said.
A bit of a tune came into it, nothing much, but Flannigan picked it up and Scullion got the words out.
‘In all kinds of splendour I’d live with my dear.’
‘Go on, lad. It’s a beauty.’
‘My name is Delaney, a name that won’t shame me.’
They had to make it to the top of the hill because there was nowhere for the chopper to land. Luke and Flannigan stayed at the side of the stretcher on the way up.
‘And if I’d had money, I’d ne’er had to roam,’
Flannigan sang. His eyes had filled up and he wiped the tears as they jogged. Over his shoulder Luke could see that the convoy had broken through and was at the gates of the dam and the trucks were rolling down.
‘But drinking and sporting,’
whispered Scullion,
‘night rambling and courting …’
‘Go on, sir,’ said Flannigan.
‘Keep it together, Charlie,’ said Luke.
‘Are the cause of my ruin and absence from home.’
LOVE ME DO
In the waiting room, Alice looked at the frosted glass and wondered why receptionists are always so impatient and puffed up. Always, she thought. Did they want to be doctors themselves, and that’s why they hate giving out forms and taking calls about appointments? It made sense. You don’t want to spend your life feeling secondary to the person upstairs. It pleased Alice to allow a thought like that to flourish silently in a boring room, as if she had now become, at this point in her life, a lesson to herself, the kind of person on whom no small thing is wasted.
‘I’m not sure,’ Dr Sabin said. ‘It’s complicated.’ He had taken to wearing tweed jackets and knitted ties. He offered Alice a mint from a little vintage tin showing a smiling kid and a Union Jack. ‘The truth is we’re all getting older and your mother is eighty-two.’
‘It’s the hallucinations, as I call them,’ Alice said. ‘It comes and goes all the time. Some days she’s quite normal. But yesterday she was talking as if it was the 1960s. Just talking about the bands and the short skirts, you know. Not recalling it but blethering to me, and to Maureen, her neighbour, as if it was all happening now. I mean, that’s quite hard to take when the person was always so — well, intelligent, I’d call it. My mother has always behaved as if the truth was the biggest thing. The photographs she took when she was young were all about that.’
‘Was that her skill, taking photographs?’
Alice looked at the window and sighed. People’s offices always said so much about them, the old, soothing prints, the sweets, the boxes of wine glasses sitting on the filing cabinet. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It’s a sad story, really. Sad, I’d call it. She was a name. A bit of a name. Anne Quirk. Her photographs still turn up in a few collections.’
‘Really?’
She looked at him. She waited. ‘Anyway, she gave it up. Then she started going to Blackpool just before I was born and she met the man who must be my father.’
‘You didn’t know him?’
‘I saw him a few times. His name was Harry. She met him at a night school or something. A young woman who’d lost her goal. And suddenly there was this Harry and he was a photography lecturer in Manchester. He was in with that group of young photographers who were out on the streets and in the factories, you know, recording it all, and it gave her another chance. She was the only woman — I mean, among the photographers.’
‘They didn’t get married?’
Dr Sabin found it interesting to talk to somebody who didn’t have angina or a common complaint. People tend to forget you’re human when you’re a doctor and what he liked most was conversation. So the appointment with Alice ran on, the doctor wishing to expand his knowledge of this strange family who had travelled the world, who had talent, stories. The old mother was even quite famous, she was saying.
‘No, they were never married. She got pregnant. She’s got some information about Harry written down. I think he wrote it.’ Alice shook her head and the silence that came said enough.
‘We can move on if you like.’
‘It’s hard to talk about. It’s hard to know what’s true. Harry was a war hero. Harry flew the spy planes. But I’ve never seen any of the medals she talks about.’
‘They’re a bit overrated, those things,’ he said. She chose to ignore the doctor’s easy familiarity with all the world’s predicaments and situations. He was a bit like that. She came quite regularly to see him and always left feeling better, but it annoyed her the way he found every problem so familiar. It was clearly a part of his effort at cheerfulness and she found herself hoping he was a secret drinker.