Mother of Pearl (3 page)

‘I used to know an Irene once,' Charlie Piper said to her one day when she came to deliver his dinner tray. ‘She was a real goer, I can tell you! She used to …'

‘That's quite enough, Mr Piper,' Nurse Dowd interjected, holding his thin wrist between her fingers in search of a pulse. He was back in The Camp then; it was just after his failed escape attempt. Irene slid the tray on to his lap. He winked at her. His jokiness belonged to a healthy man; here it seemed macabre.

‘Ooh,' he cried in falsetto, spotting the dessert. It was a Sunday. ‘A bit of tart!'

He poked at the pale apples which fell drunkenly out from the pastry and splayed out on to the plate, bringing their juices with them. They were windfalls which she and Annie had gathered in the grounds.

‘Really!' Nurse Dowd scowled, and dropping his hand, marched out. He jiggled his eyebrows at her retreating back. He communicated by such deft arrangements of his features, at once mocking and self-deprecating.

‘Really!' he mimicked.

He spoke of women like a condemned man. Of Gloria, the telephonist who sat in a box inside the main hall. He lusted after her, her fat glossy lips, her painted hands, the beauty spot high on her left cheek. Her encasement behind glass.

They traded innuendos.

‘How's your lordship?' Gloria would sing out.

‘Oh, picking up, darling,' he would reply, ‘all the better for seeing you.'

And then, inexplicably, he changed. One evening when Irene came to collect his tray, he leapt out at her from behind the door.

‘Aha!' he cried. ‘Gave you a fright, did I?'

He pushed the door closed and wedged a chair under the handle.

‘Now, I have you!'

Irene felt a quick pang of alarm. But it was only Charlie Piper.

‘Irene,' he whispered, tracing a path with his fingertips along her cheek. There was a hungry look in his eye. ‘Irene …'

He crushed her to him, nuzzling his chin into the crook of her neck, his fingers clutching at the hair around her nape. A strange warmth invaded her limbs. It stopped her from crying out. This was just a game, she told herself. Soon he would laugh out loud and smirk at her. She felt his tongue in her ear. His hand was clutching the fabric at her breast. Playfully she tried to push him off but he had the wiry resistance of the chronically unwell. He plunged a hand beneath her blouse; a button popped. ‘It's been so long,' he breathed, ‘
Please
.'

Over her shoulder she could see the tea tray she had left earlier, the food untouched. She fixed on it as Charlie Piper's other hand scrabbled at her crotch. He steered her towards the bed, locked in a stiff embrace. And then, suddenly, he released her. He sank on the side of the bed as if all his strength had seeped away. He held both of her hands in his.

‘I just want to look.'

Mutely she complied. Unbuttoning first her tunic and peeling it away from her shoulders, then the waistband of her skirt which slid away, ballooning at her feet. She carefully undid her already molested blouse noticing the gaping buttonhole which Charlie had torn. The silky chattering of her slip up around her ears. Her vest next, of which she was ashamed. Grey and ragged-ended from too many washings; there was a rip in it now below the underarm. She unhooked her stockings and rolled them down to her ankles. She unclipped the stays of her corset, slowly, deliberately, taking care to unfasten each one when normally she would wriggle out of it before they were all undone. She concentrated on the ritual, stonily releasing the clips of her brassière – she fumbled a bit with this, her fingers working blindly away behind her back – then she lifted her breasts carefully out of the cups. It fell with a dejected flap. And then her knickers (bloomers, her mother always called them bloomers, she remembered). Calmly she edged them down over her thighs until they slipped, joining the frothy hem of stockings and skirt floating around her shoes. Her shoes. She had forgotten about her shoes. And all the time she kept her eyes on the tray. The beetroot, she could see, had bled into the hard-boiled egg.

Charlie Piper came in his hand, his eyes shut tight, his head thrown back, the cords of his neck clenched, a pulse in the hollow of his throat throbbing.

Neither of them spoke. She gathered up her fallen garments and retreating to a corner of the chalet, she clumsily redressed. He sat, head bowed. She skirted around the bed to fetch the tray; there were ten more to collect and she was way behind time now. There was an ashtray on the bedside locker. It was a bright canary-yellow with ‘Souvenir of St Helier' in green writing around the rim. She fingered it briefly. Charlie turned around.

‘Neilus Grundy,' he explained. ‘Fell down on his last payment. Not that it's much use here. Or where I'm going for that matter.' His face brightened.

‘You take it, go on.' He flashed a grin. ‘Something to remember me by!'

 

CHARLIE PIPER MUST
have told the others. The male patients used to gather after church on Sundays and talk among themselves. Talk dirty, Irene suspected. Dressed up in their shiny suits and shirts with threadbare collars (Irene was able to calculate how long a man was ‘in' by the cut and fashion of his suit), they became the men they had been on the outside. They regained their stature even though their clothes had been made for bigger men. They stood in knots outside the chapel sizing up the female patients, who also dressed for the occasion. The women did not rely on the clothes they had brought in with them. Sisters would arrive on visiting days with a borrowed dress, or a pair of stilettos would be smuggled in courtesy of the bed-mechanic. If Dr Clemens thought the recreation period in the Day Room on Saturday evenings catered for his patients' social needs, he was sorely mistaken. The real exchange took place on Sunday mornings during Mass. Notes were passed, trysts arranged and a great deal of ogling went on among the pews. There was an air of suppressed gaiety which rose with their voices to the vaulted roof of the chapel. They sang lustily despite their coughs for the glory, not of God, but of health. Of survival. And afterwards they indulged their capacity for survival by flirting and gossiping, or resorting to forlorn tussling in the woods behind The Camp.

Irene had never ‘paired off'. In the early years she had concentrated on getting well and getting out. She had thought it was a simple matter of picking up her life where she had left it. As if that lunch hour when she had left The Confectioner's Hall to go for the X-ray had merely been extended. She had asked Julia Todd to put a cream horn by for her and she liked to think of it sitting there in the shelf beneath the till, the cream and jam smearing the greaseproof wrapping, kept for her return, as if no time at all had passed. She was wearing her uniform when she left, a striped pinny and a white Miss Muffet hat. During her first months at Granitefield she worried that she had never returned the uniform. She feared it would militate against her getting her job back. She would wonder who was filling in for her now, and if they were getting the tots right. Every week she would check in the newspaper to see how she was doing. Each patient had a number so that relatives would know how they were faring, even if they couldn't visit. B4704: infectious. B4704: critical. B4704: fair. She wondered if Jack or Sonny ever opened these pages to seek her number out? Did they even know what it was? Or her father? She remembered how when she was small he would come up behind her and, swooping from behind, would toss her high in the air, crying ‘And how's my little girl?' Or he would nuzzle his head in the crook of her neck and make growling sounds. Why, she wondered, did he care no longer? What punishment was this, and when would she be forgiven? She worried away at these questions but to no avail. And as the months went by and nobody from home or work materialised at Granitefield, it slowly dawned on Irene that she would never go back to
that
life. It was going on, but without her.

It was Arthur Baxter who first approached her one Sunday morning, bearing a box of chocolates.

‘These,' he said, ‘are for you.'

He was a big man with a sad, sagging face. The skin on his knuckles as he clutched the box, was stretched and sheeny but it hung from his face in pendulous folds like an ill-fitting coat.

‘Why, thank you, Arthur …'

A gift, particularly in Granitefield, was as rare and wondrous as a smile from a beloved.

‘I thought you might be able to help me,' Arthur said, still holding the chocolates hostage.

‘Oh?' Irene said. ‘In what way?'

He looked at her queasily. ‘Charlie Piper says that you might be able to render me a service …'

It was always done in darkness. In the boiler room at the back of the camp, or the spit room where they boiled the sputum, or the mortuary. As she stripped, Irene would think of the many times she had done this for Dr Clemens, how he had poked and prodded, listening intently to the workings of her congested chest and clogged lungs. He did not seem to see the exterior, her breasts, her bare shoulders, goose-pimples rising on her forearms. No, he saw only a collection of livid organs, the pictures of which she had seen so often that she began to recognise herself only by them. She feared that one day she would look in the mirror and see a blue skeleton, a trellis of ribs and two pear-shaped sacs that were her lungs. To be watched as she undressed had been robbed of any erotic allure; she felt she was revealing very little. She had already been seen through, down to the marrow of her bones.

They were invariably grateful, the infectious ones. Shut up in their little coops all day, their arms picked up and dropped for pulse-taking, their mouths a receptacle for thermometers, their chests and backsides like pin cushions, they longed for a touch that lingered. Someone to pause, hand on flesh, to marvel at this breast bone, that hollowed-out nape, the wing of an eyebrow, to stroke the shattered line of a ribcage or the ghostly shadow of a haunch. She had her rules. She would never let them penetrate her. If they wanted gratification they must do it themselves. She could touch them, but they must never lay a finger on her. Irene would remain a virgin; she was saving herself.
This
was her calling, she believed, her life's work.

At first the names had faces. Billy Ratchett; Mossie Watling; Matthew Bennett. Matthew gave her nylons, Mossie traded with scented soap. Billy Ratchett had unwittingly left her a calendar stalled at the month of his death. It showed a Swiss chalet, its wooden gable set against an apron of blue.

‘The great sanatorium in the sky,' he had said, laughing grimly. Phil Morgan, John Conway, Jim Thorpe … afterwards they became blurred, a procession of the wounded, whom Irene recalled with the helpless fondess of a mother for her absent, roving sons.

Davy Bly worked in the laundry. It was a place of torture for clothes. Pyjamas, bed linen and towels emerged from it thin and scratchy as if they, too, had caught a debilitating, terminal disease. The battering they got seemed like a mirror of the nerve-racking round of injections and rib-cracking their owners endured. Davy, another of Dr Clemens' refugees, fed the stolid machines which laboured constantly, drumming away softly against one another. They looked as if they were being put through some kind of drill as they harrumphed into action and shuddered together in a comradely fashion. The high tide of suds rising in their portholes and the constant thrum made the laundry feel like an infernal cabin deep in the bowels of a ship, close to the engine room. Irene had never liked Davy. She distrusted his goitred eye, his drinker's face. She found his bulbous gaze and the spittle which gathered in the corners of his mouth lewd. And she had seen him handle things, the innards of the machines, for example, as if there was some secret gratification in it.

He did errands ‘for the lads' as he called them, ‘backing the gee-gees' or smuggling in drink. As a patient, Irene had secretly cheered such anarchy; now she saw it as a reneging of duty. Davy, another ex-patient, was on the front line; he did not take his responsibilities seriously. He cornered her one evening when she arrived to deliver a basket of soiled teatowels from the kitchens. Years of practice had made Irene alert as a wild animal to the swoopings of men's appetites. Nobody would ever surprise her as Charlie Piper had done. The moment she entered the steamy laundry she sensed his tense readiness, the gathering of limbs for ambush.

‘More of your dirty washing, eh?' he said with an odd air of menace. He was standing lazily by one of the machines, arms folded with the satisfied air of one who has delivered an opening shot. Even the din was menacing, Irene thought. The machines seemed to thunder like the pulse of Davy's evil intent.

‘Where shall I leave it?'

‘Anywhere you like,' he said, smirking. ‘You haven't been fussy up to now, have you?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I know what you're up to, I know what you do.'

He raised a hand and for a minute she thought he was going to strike her, but it was only to point a finger.

‘You go around here, Miss Holier Than Thou, looking down on the likes of me, doing favours for the lads, and if I make a few bob on the side, what harm? But you!'

He jabbed his finger at her. His hands, which she always expected to be filthy, were flakily clean.

‘You're nothing but a tramp. And Charlie Piper is your pimp!' He licked his lips and smiled triumphantly.

It had never struck Irene that Charlie had been exacting a price for his referrals. Sickened, she saw how she had been duped, her life's work degraded, her crusade besmirched; they had turned her into a whore. Irene set the basket down.

‘What do you want?'

‘I wonder what your precious Dr Clemens would think about this …' Irene shuddered. She could not bear for
him
to know. He would not understand that she had done this for him, her small equivalent of his sacrifice. He would see it as Davy did, that she had sold herself for favours.