The God Squad (16 page)

In the heat of the ward my grey suit was too warm and my black boots felt heavy and tight on my feet. I opened the laces and did not tie them again until it was time to leave.

An elderly woman wearing a heavy blue cape with red straps criss-crossed over the front of her striped uniform entered the ward and spoke to the nurse on duty. They both walked to where I was seated and the nurse handed her a paper bag containing my pyjamas and toiletries.

‘What about his chart?’ the older woman asked.

The nurse had forgotten it and followed us down to the ambulance with the record of my stay in the Mercy Hospital.

I began my journey in the ambulance seated on what appeared to be a stretcher. The small panes of frosted glass allowed little light in and the air was still and stuffy. An opaque sliding glass panel separated the interior of the ambulance from the driver and there were two small windows in the back with a red letter ‘A’ stencilled to them. The elderly nurse sat opposite me and tapped on the window behind the driver to start up. It was not possible to see through the windows and the only sense of movement was the motion of the ambulance over the rough road. Not long into the journey I began to feel sick and told her so.

‘Take some deep breaths,’ she said.

I did. But to no avail. As I retched and began to vomit, she banged on the glass shouting at the driver to stop. She stooped under the stretcher to get a bowl and I got sick on her cape. She was furious and referred to me as stupid. When the driver opened the back doors to let me out she shouted at him for not stopping sooner. She stepped out onto the country road, brushing her cape down with
a towel she had taken from the ambulance.

‘Get out, child,’ she said to me, angrily.

As soon as she set foot on the road she made me turn towards the ditch and told me to get sick into it. I became very distressed at being unable to control the vomiting and at being referred to as stupid and silly.

‘Take plenty of deep breaths,’ she said.

I opened my mouth and sucked in the fresh country air. She hit me across the back of the head.

‘You’re not supposed to breathe in through your mouth, you eejit,’ she said. ‘It’s in through your nose and out through your mouth.’

She demonstrated what she meant and after a few minutes I felt much better though I was shivering from the cold.

‘I have a good mind to belt him again,’ she said to the driver, ‘just look at the state of me and he’s no better. How are we supposed to put up with this all the way to Waterford? Are you finished?’ she asked me.

‘I think so,’ I said.

‘You better be sure, because I don’t want a repeat of this episode.’

Just fifteen minutes after we resumed the journey I was vomiting again and the nurse was shouting to the driver. He stopped immediately and rushed to the back doors. I was dragged from the ambulance and held with my head bent over a low wall.

‘Jesus in Heaven,’ she said, ‘what in the name of God is wrong with this lad that he can’t go more than a few yards without throwing up all over the place?’

‘Maybe he’d be better in the front with me, it’s not as stuffy and he would have something to look out at. That would keep him occupied and maybe prevent him being sick.’

‘You know well,’ she said to the driver, ‘that I am not allowed to have patients in the front.’

‘Well, please yourself,’ he retorted. ‘But it’s either that or carry on as we are.’

When the journey resumed, I was put into the front of the ambulance with the driver and nurse. He had the window open and the fresh air made me feel a lot better than I had in the back. I was able to see the fields and the houses in the small villages we sped through. The hedges on either side of the road rushed by occasionally giving way to flat green fields where cattle grazed. In the distance I could see the spire of a church and I asked the driver where it was.

‘It’s beside the hospital that we have to get to,’ he answered, the nurse adding that it wasn’t a minute too soon. As the ambulance drove through the town, it appeared to me that everyone was staring at me through the windscreen. I felt as if I was doing something wrong.

The hospital in Waterford was clearly visible from the town. Its stony grey colour and shape stood drearily against the half light of evening, and its large black-barred windows gave it the appearance of a prison. Hurriedly, the nurse got me out of the ambulance and left me at the admissions section of the hospital without even saying goodbye. Inside, the hospital was as drab and dreary as it appeared from outside. The corridors were high, narrow and dimly lit. Ancient people sat in rows on wooden benches along the sides of the corridors, many of them muttering to themselves while others rocked back and forth in their chairs, totally oblivious to anything happening around them. A few shouted obscenities at passing nurses who didn’t take the slightest notice. But it was the appearances of these old people that frightened me most. They held cigarettes between feeble, gnarled fingers and, when they inhaled, coughed weak chesty coughs. Some sat slumped in chairs,
their heads to one side and their mouths wide open, revealing toothless gums. The only evidence of life was a continuous dribble onto their dark brown dressing gowns.

A nurse came to take me to the ward, and as she took my hand, I protested, saying I didn’t want to stay in the hospital. She ignored me and led me into a ward of ten beds. All the patients there were over sixty and probably much older. Like those I had seen on the benches of the corridors some coughed, some slept and others spoke out loud to no-one in particular. Most of them were unshaven and looked dirty. One man smiled at me, saying that I was the youngest old man he had ever seen, before he broke down into a horrible chesty laugh that I was frightened by.

The nurse gave me a pair of oversized pyjamas but I didn’t protest. She rolled up the sleeves and the legs until she was satisfied that they were a reasonable fit. Then she folded my own clothes and told me that she was going to put them away in a locker until I needed them again. I asked her when that would be, seeking reassurance that I would not be kept too long in this geriatric environment, but she didn’t reply.

Beside me an unshaven man complained bitterly about the pain he was in and wished aloud for God to take him. When he wasn’t praying for deliverance he used to talk to me about when he was my age, all the running, the jumping and the climbing of trees. He looked sad and pathetic there, barely able to breathe and unable to sit up in bed without the aid of many pillows pushed under his back and sometimes two or three nurses to hold him.

‘Where is it ye hail from?’ he asked and became impatient when I didn’t answer immediately.

‘What part of the country are ye from?’ he asked again.

‘Cappoquin,’ I answered.

‘I know it well, I used to sell cattle at the market there
and many’s the pig I brought to the bacon factory. What about the big school that’s there? D’ye know that?’

‘I live there,’ I said.

‘All belonging to ye must be dead so, are they?’

‘I have an uncle and he lives in Wexford.’

‘What part?’

‘I don’t really know.’

‘What was it they died from?’ he asked.

‘A car crash,’ I answered.

‘It’s not so bad when ye have someone all the same. Will ye be in long?’ he asked.

‘They told me I’d be staying a week.’

He laughed. ‘That’s what they told me twelve months ago when I came in and there isn’t a sight of me getting out.’

Then he sighed deeply and turned his head away saying that the only way he would get out of hospital would be feet first, ‘in a wooden suit’.

It was difficult to sleep at night. The coughing, the ravings of a man out of his mind or the sound of a priest imparting the last rites broke the stillness. It was the regularity of death in the hospital which had the most profound and frightening effect on me. I spent a week there, and during it I experienced what death meant for the first time in my life. In seven days, five or six people died. The ritual became familiar, silence in the ward, the radio turned off, the deep voice of a priest invoking God’s blessing on the soul of the dead person and a plea to God that he would see fit to take that patient, who had suffered in pain, to his right hand in Heaven where he would live for ever and ever.

Once the corpse had been taken from the ward the other beds were shifted around. The men joked with whoever was nearest the door, that it was their turn next. They referred to it as ‘Death’s Door’. For some reason I decided that what they were joking about was in fact true and
became increasingly worried as I moved closer to the door. I prayed hard remembering the words of the nuns in the dormitory each night before I went to sleep: ‘You never know the day or the hour when God will call, and you must always be ready with your soul as white as white can be.’ Any black marks would mean eternal damnation.

The way nurses and doctors reacted to death was a source of confusion to me, I could not come to terms with their laughter from behind the screened-off bed, it all seemed so irreverent and disrespectful, and it was not until I was older that I realized that this was to hide how they were really feeling.

While I was frightened by the death of an individual, the men in the ward didn’t appear too upset. They joined in the prayers for the soul departed and remained silent until the dead body had been removed from the ward. Once that was done, one of them would pull a bottle of Guinness out of his locker and uncork it while the others gathered around his bed like a bunch of children planning a mischievous deed. In turn they put the neck of the brown bottle to their wrinkled lips and swallowed hard, gasping pleasurably. If a nurse appeared, the bottle quickly disappeared beneath the bedcovers until she was gone. When it was empty they rolled it in as many sheets of newspaper as they could find and left it in a bin at one end of the ward.

In the mornings a man came around the wards selling newspapers and almost all of the men took one from him, even those who looked so frail that it was hard to imagine that they could read at all. They studied the racing page and discussed among themselves the form of the horses and what kind of money they were prepared to bet on them. Heated discussions took place about how good or bad jockeys and horses were. After all the debate the bets were written out on pieces of paper and given to the porter in
charge of the ward who would place them when going to the shops to get messages for the patients. When the money for the bets had been added up, a few shillings was added for him as a token of appreciation. In the evening they listened attentively to the radio waiting for the results and, as they came through, marked their newspapers. Those who lost cursed the horse or the jockey, though usually the horse, describing it as a ‘three-legged ould nag only fit for the knackers’ yard’.

One week after I arrived in St Joseph’s I was told to be ready for the ambulance which was to take me to a hospital in Kilkenny. It was another upset in my life but I was becoming used to it, resigned to moving from place to place, not even bothering to ask nurse or doctor whether I was ever going to come back. I shook the hands of each of the patients before I left and they wished me well. As I was saying goodbye to one of the nurses, she told me that the new hospital I was going to would be much nicer than the one I was leaving. There would be children there. As the ambulance doors were being shut she shouted to me to write to her. I said I would, then realized that I didn’t know her name. I was sick many times during the journey but the nurse in attendance didn’t seem to mind and by the time I reached Kilkenny I was exhausted from retching and vomiting.

The hospital in Kilkenny was of modern design and completely different to any other I had been in previously. It was a single-storey building spread out among the green fields of the countryside. I was admitted and brought down a long glass-walled corridor to the childrens’ ward, where I was welcomed by a friendly-faced nurse who took me to a room with just one bed. It had large glass doors looking out across fields towards the spires of Kilkenny city. Once a chart had been made out for me, I was helped to undress
and put into bed. The room was quiet and from down the corridor I could hear the voices of the other children shouting and playing. I asked if I would be allowed into the childrens’ ward but the nurse said I would have to wait. ‘The hospital is new and we have very few patients yet. When things become a bit more organized we will decide what to do with you. How is that?’

‘Fine,’ I told her.

I found the solitude of the room disturbing and as each day passed and I was not brought into the main ward I became more and more anxious. The only time I was moved was if the weather was fine when the big doors of the room were opened and my bed was pushed out onto the veranda.

During my first weeks in Kilkenny doctors spent a great deal of time examining me, listening to my chest and heart, moving my foot about, testing reflexes and doing the other examinations I had become used to. They asked me many questions, a lot of which, about parents, relations and brothers or sisters, I didn’t understand or simply had no answers to. I became frightened that I would be operated on and, with this in mind, always answered in a way which I felt would deter them from taking me to the theatre. I dreaded the idea of being put to sleep, to me it meant certain death.

I found being alone very difficult. I was nine years old and had been used to company for as long as I could remember. Now the days were empty except for the occasional visit of a nurse, a doctor or one of the domestic staff serving meals. The company of sick and dying adults was preferable to the loneliness of my room. The isolation frightened me and convinced me more than ever that I was going to die. It is possible that I was kept separate from the other children because of the stigma attached to being an orphan, or more likely, because of the danger that my
condition, as yet undiagnosed, might be contagious.