There was a big yoke beside him now and it frightened the life out of him the first time he saw it and there were two bags hanging off it with tubes coming out of him and the tubes were stuck in his arm. The first time he saw it, it looked like a big alien robot with bug eyes and he thought it was a dream and he tried to pull the wires out of his arms but an angel was beside him and there was bright light all around her and she told him it was a drip and it was putting medicine in him and he’d be fine and the angel had a lovely voice, just like the Lovely Voice and the angel was the Lovely Voice, of course, it made sense now, he wasn’t dead and in heaven or hell or purgatory so, but this couldn’t be far off heaven, floating about like this and seeing lovely angels with golden hair.
HE WAS panned out after it. Jaysus you got an awful dose, youssir, Mumbly Dave told him, and you only days from getting out of here, you misfortune. It was hard to stay awake. The infection had left him very weak. He’d have to stay on another while. Misfortune? It was a huge stroke of luck. The Lovely Voice was now a lovely face and lovely hands and a lovely light-blue uniform that he thought would be white but then he realized he had kind of been imagining them ones that do be in the ads in the back of the Sunday World unknown to himself, dressed up as nurses, and the ad says things like Sexy nurses on the line, waiting to give you your medicine and there’s a big long phone number and you can see nearly all their boobs and a bit of their knickers under their short white skirts and wasn’t he an awful pervert to have been imagining the Lovely Voice in that way without even knowing he was doing it? If only she knew, she wouldn’t be as gentle and kind to him and she wouldn’t be in and out to check on him even when she wasn’t really meant to be.
Siobhán, her name was. Imagine that, all these weeks, and he hadn’t known. Siobhán. It was soft. It was easy, saying it. You could whisper it and it was like a breath, or a sigh. It was the most beautiful name. It nearly tasted sweet in his mouth.
Siobhán gave him great hop again now and seemed to have forgotten all about Mumbly Dave. She felt a bit responsible for his infection — she had been meant to be taking out that yoke every so often and changing it and watching for badness starting but she couldn’t be remembering everything all the time, there wasn’t half enough staff here, anyway, and if that fat cow of a sister asks make sure and tell her she was forever pulling and dragging and checking that all was well with cat eaters and cat ate hers and what have you. She was awfully sorry; he could see that clearly.
He would tell any lie for her but it wasn’t really a sinful lie. It would be like telling the English officer that the boys had been tucked up in bed all night long when they’d really been abroad around the countryside shooting Black and Tans — it was a lie, but neither God nor man could ever hold it against you.
SIOBHÁN SAID the old ward sister was an awful wagon, and a few of the other nurses were pure sly and were terrible licks and they’d stab you in the back as quick as look at you. They wouldn’t do half the work she would do, but yet would be forever watching her and reporting back to Sister, and she knew why — it was because they were all the one with the nurse she was filling in for who was out on maternity leave and they wouldn’t let her be seen to be as good as their friend. Mother would have called the likes of them poisonous bitches. Johnsey told Siobhán that, and she laughed. Then she did something you would as a rule only see happening in a soppy film: she put her hand on the side of his face and smiled down at him and he chanced looking straight into her eyes and it looked like fondness he saw there or maybe something beyond fondness; maybe she saw him in a way that no one else saw him — after all she could only judge him on what she had seen since he was carried in by the ambulance.
Maybe she had more regard for him than other girls would have because she had never seen him walking watery-eyed up through the village with Eugene Penrose pelting stones or scrunched-up cans at him or seen him getting kicked around the school bus or being set fire to and having his fiver swiped off of him on the way to the only disco he ever nearly went to. All she knew of him was that four yahoos had attacked him and he was in bits but never gave out and that he was a grand quiet chap who took his medicine and didn’t moan or groan like some lads did. Hadn’t she told him he was a great patient? Probably she would sooner a fella like Mumbly Dave, even though he was a handy-sized baldy lad with a belly like a beach ball. Mumbly Dave never stopped talking. Maybe she saw Johnsey as being a bit like Clint Eastwood. Clint Eastwood never said too much but bejaysus he sure was cool. James Bond wouldn’t be the chattiest, either, but girls were forever trying to get off with him.
And besides saying he was a great patient, which was not a thing you could go around boasting about because as far as he could see being a patient only involved lying down, she had paid him four compliments. He remembered her exact words and the way her voice sounded as she said them. They were the only compliments he had ever gotten from a girl who was not either related to him, in the ICA or Mrs Unthank. The first was about a week after he was brought in, when he was still very woozy and they were pumping him with stuff to stop pain. He distinctly remembered her saying he had lovely long eyelashes, just after Doctor Frostyballs had done his daily check and she was gently replacing his bandages. Then not long after that she was helping him to sit up and she was making a meal of it and he was starting to feel embarrassed when she said Oh you’re a big lad, and he’d thought she meant he was fat. Then she stood away a bit and he got the feeling she was looking at him. He felt his face burning and that’s when she delivered her second compliment: she said he was very well built. Very well built. Now! And she’d know, too, being in a line of work where she’d get to see an assortment of bodies and body parts. The third compliment had come just a few days ago, the day after his bandages had been removed. She had said You know you have the loveliest blue eyes. The loveliest blue eyes. Imagine that.
So, according to her, he was a grand, well-built chap with the loveliest blue eyes and grand long eyelashes. It was all old talk, of course; he wasn’t going to be cock of the walk around the place thinking he was a fine thing or anything. Still, though, she didn’t sound like she was only saying these things for the want of something to be saying. The fourth compliment was the best of all; it had a proper ring of truth about it, like it was something that made her feel a bit sad to say it, somehow, but she had to say it, but she couldn’t be saying it too loud because it was maybe more than a nurse should be saying to a patient. She was in around, tightening things up about the place and she stopped all of a shot and turned and looked straight at him and he looked away too quickly for her not to know that he’d been watching her progress around the room like an old dog would look at a joint of beef that had just been taken from the oven and she said You’re really sweet. Do you know that?