My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (23 page)

The scalpel. Cut cut cut, slide underneath with the blade to release: lift. Not much give – good. Slide over forehead, swing down, twist, position under the new jaw. It’s so simple – beautiful. The pedicles are already curling in on themselves – tack them, swiftly, carefully, into tubes.

Stitch into place.

Turn the edge for the lower lip.

Clean.

Dress.

Good.

Next . . .

*

A card:

March 17 1918

In haste – the surgery went off well. The weather is not the best at the moment but that doesn’t matter as he cannot move around so very much until he is better healed.

He cannot move around much?

And so Nadine wrote a letter:

My dear Rose,
I have hardly time to write a proper letter but I wanted to tell you how very much I appreciate you writing to me about Riley. It makes so much difference to me out here just to know that he is in good hands. But forgive me, I am confused. Why is he still there? He said his wound was not serious. You said his wound was not serious. Has something else developed? When do you expect him to leave? I hope you do not mind me asking these questions but I am haunted by what he wrote to me, torturing myself you may say but there is nothing I can do about it . . .

And in reply came this:

Dear Nadine,

I am so sorry but it seems I am not to write to you about Riley any more. It seems there is a conflict of interests, an invasion of privacy, a – I don’t know quite what, but the Powers That Be here deem it inappropriate, for us as VADs, to go into details about a patient’s condition and treatment and so on, which of course we must understand, though it seems hard – I’m sorry. It doesn’t mean that we can’t write though. Just not about one individual patient.

It half relieved Rose to know that she need no longer skate between lying and truth.

It shocked Nadine.

Dear Rose, and whoever else is reading this,
individual patients passed through my ward last night;
through the hospital. That makes about
this month.
of them died. It seems a shame that I cannot have news of
who I have known since we were
years old and who has escaped the final release.
tell me their last orders of the day were backs to the wall and fight to the death;
tell me they never got those orders because the only leader they have seen out there is Colonel Chaos.

Oh, I am sorry. I know it must be so. ‘Things have been very busy here’, with the charmingly named Spring Push, i.e. the Germans pushing everybody back through us, and us pushing back like god knows what. I can’t write about it. I can’t write at all.

The black marks of the censor looked like the mourning stripes for words that cannot be spoken, that may not live.

*

Fourth year of the war, if not yet four years. It was all hotting up, quite a show: lots and lots of injured men, lots of death. Three weeks of constant shelling. Sunsets lurid and ancient, burning like blood and sugar. Screaming of shells. Lovely little white puffs of anti-aircraft fire. Temperature pulse respiration: keep it up, nurse, good work.

The ghosts of the men killed in 1916 were rising up on the battle-fields of the Somme, apparently, side by side, fighting back.

Four years. She would have finished art school long ago.

Six months she had been out here. She would carry on until she exploded, and what form her explosion would take was not her business, not under her control. She would continue, her body jerking and rattling, like a machine out of order. That first letter:
I do not exist . . . be there when I come back out . . .

The nights were shorter now. More daylight. Sunshine, from time to time. Pale folded leaves on trees. Blossom. She just did as she was told. Physical exhaustion leading to physical pain. Étaples was bombed! Keep scrubbing. Sleepless weeks. In May they ended up spending the sleepless nights in trenches, in the woods. Once, she did sleep, sitting up on a canvas stool, her cheek against soil like a dead woman’s. And when she woke that first morning, she saw above her an almond tree in bloom, a twisty branch against a pale, dusty blue sky, waxen white blossoms.

Spring Push.

*

Six weeks after his second operation, Riley was healing. He had a chin, and within it a jaw, of the same hardened rubber as the pink plate of his mother’s false teeth. He tapped it, under his peculiar new skin, under his bandages. It was an unlikely, unnerving weight, a strange new sling, under his face. He had, he realised, got used to having no chin.

His scalp, where it had had been scalped, itched appallingly beneath the dressing. He could not scratch it. Bare red living skull. As if his head were a very small world and Gillies had carefully cut a strip of turf from it, to be rolled up and used elsewhere in the garden.

He tapped it repeatedly with heavy fingertips, hitting it almost, seeking relief. He scratched his chin instead: it felt as if he were scratching his head. ‘Nerve endings,’ said Gillies. ‘They think they’re still on your scalp.’

The chin was the first to be released from the dressings. There it was, the roll, tucked under his face like a pack under a saddle, sliding lipless where his lower lip had once been. Fresh air would help the healing. Riley slid his fingers gently between his pedicles and his cheeks – there was his little mole, hidden away – and fingered the flattened tubes of flesh draped in front of his ears. They felt like very tough pancakes, leathery, spongy, and they stuck out at the side where they were folded down. They seemed to flare back like mad horns, or weird handlebars.
Intestines
, he thought.
Taxi horns.