He’d tried to write those letters himself, thinking how hard could it be, but he soon found out. The wavering lines were like something traced by a blind man and then the writing tablet slipped and he made an unthinking lunge to stop it, sending fierce howls through his body. Janet
tsked
and dragged the screens around the bed, the way she did when she came to share one of his cigarettes in the middle of the night. She said, “You don’t have to say much, and anyway, they’ll be so happy to know you’re alive and coming home. Shall I just write that there’s a problem with your arm?”
“You mean the fact that it’s not there?” he said, and they fell into helpless, stifled laughter, like children in church.
“Something like that,” Janet said, when she could speak, and that set them off again. “My goose is cooked if anyone complains,” she said, but they knew that no one would.
The other nurses were all kind and some were beautiful, but he felt a connection with Janet that had something to do with the glint in her eye when she tapped the end of a cigarette on the tin before putting it in her mouth, the small sound clear in the darkened ward. It had something to do with the sharp things she said about the village she hoped she’d never go back to, and the way every joke she told was on herself. She wasn’t there when the porter delivered his kit, finally sorted from the splintered wreckage of the train he’d been on, but she came hurrying as soon as she heard. Looked at the banjo on top of his battered bag and sat down beside his bed, held his only hand between hers.
Later that night, when the ward was quiet except for the usual coughs and moans, she told him a thing she was ashamed of, looking right at him with her straight-ahead eye. She said that she couldn’t help thinking, with so many not coming back, that the men who did would have their pick, and what chance did someone like her have?
Once he was past the indignities of the bedpan he made his slow way to the toilets on his own, getting used to the fact that even the way he pissed had changed. The journey tired him out and in the daytime he barely made it back to his cot before he tumbled into sleep, but the nights were different. He knew that this hospital on the coast was really someone’s grand house and when he wandered the night-lit hallways he wondered if they were still there. The lord and the lady now living a smaller life behind one of the
Private
doors. There was a stone staircase near his ward and a small window that was usually left open, and though he couldn’t see it he could hear the restless sea, a sound that soothed him back to being a boy in his own small bed on the other side of the world. Shuffling through the dim corridors he sometimes passed other night-roamers, their faded blues glowing against the shadows. There might be a tiny nod but mostly they ignored each other, making their silent way like ghosts from layers of time.
One of those nights, as he moved down the ward, he heard Janet’s loud whisper from somewhere near the screens that surrounded the burned boy’s bed. “Then what chance does someone like me have?” she was saying, and Robbie almost laughed. As he closed his eyes, back on his cot, he realized that there had been a hazy idea in his head, pushing aside the thoughts he should have been having. Thoughts of his wife, Edie, and
thoughts of the son he hadn’t yet seen, who’d been made by a different, whole man.
Things were not quite the same between them, after that, and he thought Janet knew it, though she didn’t let on. He knew it wasn’t fair to begrudge her, and he knew he was no better, not really. Letting her wrap him in her sympathetic hands, letting her think what she thought about the banjo. “No, no—you won it fair and square,” Duggan had said, throwing his cards down. But he hadn’t, of course. When he was a boy, helping out at the hotel, he got to know Edie’s great-aunts when they visited every summer. Her aunt Nan was a bit of a devil, hiding behind an old lady’s soft pink face. She taught him all kinds of shuffles, and how to deal from the bottom of the deck without being spotted, and she was always opening her wrinkled hand to show the coin or the shiny new marble he’d had tucked deep in his pocket. “Don’t
torment
the poor boy,” her sister Kez said, giving her a swat on the shoulder, but they all knew he didn’t mind.
When he did his finger exercises now, trying to train his neglected left hand, he always thought of how Duggan was, after that game on the ship. The restless movements on the table in the mess, twitching and tapping his fingers and toes to all the music, trapped now in his head. Robbie remembered what Nan used to say on the wide hotel veranda, when they piled up their matchsticks, or smooth pebbles from the beach. She said, “Never bet a thing you’ll mind giving up,” so really there was no reason to feel badly about Duggan, who should have thought it through. Against the banjo Duggan had asked him to bet the picture of Edie, with her hair falling loose around her face, and that was the uncomfortable
thought. How easily he’d agreed to it, even if he’d been sure he wouldn’t lose.
They came from different places, but they were all missing something. One wag made a sign that said
Lumberjack Ward
, but spoiled it by saying, “Because of the stumps, see?” Everyone made black jokes like that, and they didn’t need spelling out. He did it himself, but there were times he got so tired of the need to always be wisecracking. So tired of saying, “Oh, it could be worse, I’m better off than so-and-so.” That was true, he supposed, there was always something worse, though he wondered what it was for the burned boy, in his raw yet crispy shell. The minister, when he visited, told them to remember that the Lord never sends more than we can bear, and Robbie felt his missing fist clench with the need to punch him, for the terrible trick that was.
He knew he was not so bad, compared with some; he could play that game all day. The two brothers from Newfoundland, for example, who’d been blown up together and between them lost three legs, two arms and an eye. They talked sometimes about what they wouldn’t miss. The raw, freezing hands and the sheer slog of hauling in nets, muscles screaming no matter how many times you’d done it. And the terror when the boat was storm-tossed, at the mercy of the wind and the raging sea. Though he knew that on the far side of that terror was a feeling of such power, such absolute joy, and they’d be missing that too, for the rest of their days.
The fisher-boys still had powerful voices, and sometimes they sang in what was called the lounge. Judging by the paper on the walls it had once been a lady’s bedroom, and there were jokes about that too. One brother tried to play two spoons
on the other’s leg, while it tapped up and down, and Robbie’s favourite was the song about the maid on the shore, rollicking yet lonely-sounding, that reminded him of his mother. Reminded him of running ahead of her on the pebbled beach in the early morning, with the wind blowing hard through their hair.
Before the
Erebus
he hadn’t had much to do with boats, and that had surprised the girl in the bed in Liverpool. He’d just finished telling her about the town on the shores of Lake Huron, the big ships lining the horizon. “Whatever’d you join the navy for then?” she had said, kneeling to push aside the curtain, the dubious blanket still pooled around her legs. She had a splotched mark on her shoulder blade and he reached to run his fingertips around it, trying to think what the shape reminded him of. Too ragged for a teardrop, but maybe a faraway island he’d seen on a map. “Still pissing down rain,” she said, letting the curtain slither back, and she said that she didn’t mind staying longer, only she’d need more money, she had bills to pay, same as anyone.
Her name was Caroline, or so she told him, and she didn’t mind what he did. In the end she stayed through the afternoon, though he had to open his wallet from time to time. “No offence,” she always said, and each time he made a little bow and said, “None taken, miss,” just to hear her giggly laugh. He told her that for some reason it was not boats but trains that had always drawn him, and he told her that one of his first memories was being held in his mother’s arms, that’s how small he was, while a big, gleaming engine huffed to a stop. Panting and grunting like a living thing, belches of steam swirling around them. He’d shrieked and his mother thought he was frightened, but it was a cry of pure delight.
He told her too that when he was eight or nine he played a sort of game, standing on the rail, out of sight of the station, until he felt the vibration through the soles of his feet. The game was to stand as long as he could, with the train coming at him around the long bend, to wait as long as he could before throwing himself sideways and rolling, the world spinning along with the angry blast of the whistle. He did it for days before the station master caught him, dragged him home with a hard hand clamped on his neck. “Poor little Robbie,” Caroline said, leaning closer with her smudged mouth.
Later she held on to his hand in the dark and glistening street. He felt hollowed out, and completely at peace, walking her to the pub on the corner. She told him he could find her there, if he ever came back on leave. “Ta-ra then,” Caroline had said, and just for a moment he wrapped both his arms around her.
He had other, lesser injuries, including a bad knock on the head. One of the beautiful nurses, Elizabeth, told him that was probably why everything was scrambled. Apparently he’d been on his way to Liverpool again and he remembered the train station, remembered mothers and children, suitcases and shopping baskets; he remembered feeling strangely like an intruder in the normal world. He remembered the slam of the closing door and the conductor’s whistle, the old woman in his compartment who was knitting something grey, but nothing at all about the crash. “Think of that as a good thing,” Elizabeth said, as she tucked and smoothed his blanket.
In his other life things had always brushed by him, though sometimes close enough he felt their breath. A fall from a tree,
cushioned by lower branches, or the time he and his friend Stevie went through the ice but somehow managed to crash their way to shore. They had sidled through the blacksmith’s doorway and he let them steam by the fire until they were dry enough to avoid a fuss at home; the dim air rang, and sparks flew and sizzled. “Hellfire and Damnation,” Stevie said, thumping his chest like Whiskey Ted did when he shouted in the street, and it was the funniest thing ever.
Another time a fever clamped hot jaws on him, shook him around and then dropped him, spent and gasping. It had lasted for days and those days were also lost to him, as if he’d stepped out of the regular flow of time. The fever dreams, if they were dreams, were almost too vivid to bear. Once he was suddenly fishing from a rowboat on a hot, still day, the lake a sheet of dull green glass. Someone was with him in the boat and he knew it was his father, though the man was bent over baiting a hook, his face hidden. In the dream, if it was a dream, Robbie toppled over the side while he was leaning to see what his father looked like, the glass lake turned to thick liquid around him. He was soaking wet when he opened his eyes, and in the early morning light his mother was whispering,
Please please please
, as if it was a thing she would say forever.
Even the war brushed past him, in a way, shut up as he was in the ship’s wireless office at the bottom of the steep staircase, the steeper ladder. The knobs and bars and switches all within reach, his tiny desk hard by the cage that surrounded the root of the great communications cable. His whole focus was on what passed between his ears and his fingertips, on getting it right, passing it on; no time, and anyway not his job, to think about what it meant. Mostly they were on convoy duty out of
Gib, and at first it was like some strange holiday, with the sun and the sparkling Mediterranean. He tried to describe it in his letters to Edie, along with the routine of the ship, the men he was with. In the margins he sketched pictures—tall Beadle with his headset and his knees crammed up to his chin, and the gunner, Duggan, with his huge buckteeth.
Sometimes they steamed through chains of small islands, barren-looking mounds rising separate from the empty water. Once he borrowed a pair of binoculars and saw that what he’d taken for a puzzling play of light was a herd of brown goats, trotting in a mass that flowed. Wild ones, he supposed, but then he caught a glint of brass and knew that there were people, at least one person, who had fastened bells around their warm necks; the engines were too loud, but he knew just how they would sound, that particular clatter.
Shall we do that
, he wrote to Edie,
when all this is done? Shall we come back here and be goatherds?
It would be as though they were courting again and they’d lie in the sand, different sand, and look up at the stars in another sky.
When the season changed there were storms, and even the solid
Erebus
pitched and rolled. And when it changed back there were days when the cabin was a furnace, his fingers slippery with sweat, and even breathing was work. They only had to fire their guns once, at a sub that completed its dive untouched, but sometimes there were flames on the horizon, and there were times they sailed through days-old debris fields that stretched as far as they could see. He had thought then that if he learned more about tides and currents he would have some idea where all that wreckage would end up. Empty life jackets and crates and splintered wood, shredded cloth, things
much more mysterious than the coloured bottles, the floats and torn nets that had washed up on the shore of his childhood. He imagined it all floating into the future, so slowly and gently, the dull knock as a bobbing table leg nudged the side of a fisherman’s skiff. He imagined a small boy, one who’d never had to know any wars, wading into the surf that foamed around his shins and dragging his treasure to safety.
The closest call he had came in the hot middle of a quiet day. He was on deck with a man named Jury, both of them trying to put an exact name to the colour of the water they were moving so serenely through. Looking down they saw something dark streak by below them, just under the surface, and part of his brain knew that was just how Death would come, dark and blurred and when you least expected. But nothing happened, no alarm bells, no sudden yaw, and for whatever reason, no second torpedo. He remembered that they just looked at each other, and then Jury shrugged his shoulders and said, “Aquamarine?”