Ears

The doctor came at half past two.

She was young, thirty perhaps, small, with dark hair that had been put up that morning in a knot and was coming down, and green hospital clothes under a white coat that was not white any more, and a stethoscope round her neck, and she had been on her knees, he could see it, since one o’clock at least; the knees of the green trousers were grey with the marble dust and dark with other things. She came along the row of walking ones against the wall with the nurse with the upside-down fob watch, and the nurse pointed at him, at the label on his shirt, and the doctor knelt.

She looked at the label first. BOTH DRUMS. She nodded at it, as if the nurse had got something right that she had expected her to get right.

Then she took a torch out of the pocket of the coat, a proper one, black, with a cone on the end, and took his chin in her hand, and turned his head, and looked in.

She looked for a long time. He sat still. He looked at the floor beside her, at her knees on the marble, and at her hand on the floor holding her up, which had a wedding ring on it and a long scratch across the back. She did the other ear. Then she sat back on her heels and looked at him, and her mouth moved, and he pointed at his ears and shook his head.

She closed her eyes for a second. Not long. A second. The way somebody closes their eyes who has been told something they knew already and is tired of it being true.

Then she opened them, and felt in her coat pocket for something to write on, and found a packet of gloves, the paper packet that the rubber gloves came in, torn open at one end and empty, and flattened it on her knee, and wrote on the back of it with a pen from her top pocket.

Both eardrums perforated. Ruptured. The blast.

She held it up. He read it. She took it back and wrote more.

They heal. Usually. Weeks. Hearing comes back, mostly, over weeks. Some of it may not. Can’t tell you now. Nobody can.

She held that up.

Don’t get water in them. No swimming. Cotton wool in them in the shower.

She looked at him while he read that, and he saw the corner of her mouth almost go, the way Teresa’s went, at the absurdity of writing no swimming on the back of a glove packet on the floor of the Municipal Building on the first of May, and then not go.

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Then she looked at his neck.

She turned his head to the side again and looked at it close, below his left ear, where the wet had been, where Teresa had seen it, and her face changed a little, and she wrote on the packet, quickly, and held it up.

Glass. Going to take it out. Will hurt. Keep still.

He kept still.

She had tweezers in the coat, long thin ones, in a paper sleeve, and a little steel dish, kidney-shaped, the kind his mother brought home sometimes from the hospital when they were throwing them out, and he had played with one as a boy and kept marbles in it. She put the dish on the marble by her knee. She held his head still against the wall with one hand, flat on his forehead, and with the other she went in with the tweezers, below his ear.

It hurt. He felt it. It was the first thing he had felt properly since the steward line: a bright, small, exact pain, there, and then there, and then there, and it was so clear and so separate from everything else that he almost welcomed it. He sat against the wall under the plaque with the doctor’s hand on his forehead and felt the glass come out of his neck one piece at a time.

He heard each piece go into the dish.

He did not hear it. He saw it. He watched the dish out of the corner of his eye and saw each piece go in, small and bright and red, and the dish move very slightly each time, and he counted them. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.

She stopped. She looked. She went in again, deeper, and it hurt more, and she took out the seventh, which was the biggest, the size of his little fingernail, and held it up in the tweezers to the light from the high windows for a moment, and looked at it, and dropped it in the dish.

Seven.

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She dressed it. A square of white gauze, and tape, four strips, firm, and she pressed the tape down at the edges with her thumb, all round, the way his mother did it, so that it would not lift.

Then she took the nurse’s label off his shirt button, the one that said BOTH DRUMS, and untied the string, and put it in her pocket, and took a new one out, a proper one, a printed one, with boxes on it, and filled in the boxes, fast, in a doctor’s hand that he could not read, and tied it to the same button, and patted it flat.

Then she took the glove packet and wrote on it, at the bottom, under everything else, in capitals, and underlined it twice, so hard that the pen went through the paper on the second line.

GO HOME.

She held it up.

He looked at it.

He took it from her. She let him. He took the pen from her too, out of her hand, and she let him do that as well, and he turned the glove packet over, to the inside, the white side, which was clean except for a smear, and wrote on it with his bandaged hand, slowly, in the capitals that went up and down.

I AM A POLICE OFFICER.

She read it. She took the pen back and wrote underneath it.

I can see that. GO HOME ANYWAY.

He took the pen again. He did not want to. He wrote it because it was the only thing he had, the way Teresa had written the thing about the nod, because it was the only thing in her pocketbook.

MY BROTHER IS MISSING. HE WAS AT THE MARCH. HE WAS A STEWARD. HE HELD THE LINE. I DON’T KNOW WHERE HE IS.

He gave it back to her.

She read it.

She read it for longer than it took to read. She was kneeling on the marble in front of him, in her green clothes with her knees grey and dark, with her hair coming down out of its knot and the kidney dish with seven pieces of glass in it on the floor by her knee, and she read what he had written on the inside of a glove packet, and then she looked up at him.

He did not know what her face did. He did not have a word for it. It was a face that had been looking at things since one o’clock that it was not going to tell anybody about, and it looked at him for a moment as if he were one more of them, and then it looked at him as if he were not.

She took the pen. She crossed out GO HOME. She crossed it out with one line, straight, and then wrote under it.

Then don’t go home.

She looked at it. She wrote more.

But don’t go back in there. Not the junction. Not any of them. You’ve done that. If you go back in there with your ears like that you won’t hear a wall coming down and you won’t hear anybody shout at you to get out from under it. Do you understand?

He read it. He nodded.

Look for him. Look for him out here. Ring the hospitals. They’re all taking people. All of them. Bellevue, St Vincent’s, Beekman, the Presbyterian, the lot. They’re taking them from everywhere and they’re not all labelled, it’s been too fast. Ring them all.

He read it, and nodded again.

She looked at him for one more second. Then she wrote one more line at the very bottom of the glove packet, small, and folded it, and put it into the pocket of his shirt, behind the label, with the two forms from the clerk and the telephone with Mum’s stitches on it, unsent; and she picked up the kidney dish with the seven pieces of glass in it, and stood up, slowly, with one hand on the wall, the way his father stood up, and went on along the row with the nurse to the next one.

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He took the glove packet out when she had gone, and unfolded it, and read the line at the bottom.

The hospitals are holding. Tell him that when you find him.

He looked at it for a long time. Then he folded it again and put it back.

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Teresa had watched all of it. She had sat on the marble beside him with her shoulder against his shoulder and her pocketbook closed on her knee and watched the doctor take the glass out of his neck, piece by piece, into the dish, without moving.

She took the pocketbook out now and wrote.

WHAT DID SHE PUT AT THE BOTTOM?

He took the glove packet out again and showed it to her.

She read it. She sat for a moment with it in her hand. Then she gave it back to him, and wrote.

BELLEVUE.

He looked at it.

YOUR MOTHER’S AT BELLEVUE. SHE’S ON SHIFT. SEVEN TO HALF SEVEN. YOU TOLD ME. THE FIRST OF MAY, NINE YEARS RUNNING, BECAUSE IT’S QUIET.

He read it.

He had not thought of that. He had thought of his mother, sitting against the wall under the plaque, with the label on his pocket that said BOTH DRUMS, and he had thought of the fob watch pinned upside down and the tea towel and the orange and you press, Tommy, and he had not once thought, all afternoon, that she was at Bellevue, on the medical floors, on a shift she had chosen because it was always quiet, and that every hospital on the island was taking people from four places at once, and that she would be on the floor with them, on her knees, with her hair coming down, since noon, the way the doctor in the green clothes had been since one.

And that she did not know where either of her sons was.

Teresa was writing again.

THE LANDLINE BEHIND THE DESK. I’LL RING BELLEVUE. I’LL RING THEM ALL. YOU STAND NEXT TO ME AND TELL ME WHAT TO SAY ABOUT HIM. WHAT HE LOOKS LIKE. WHAT HE WAS WEARING.

He read it. He nodded.

She got up off the marble. She held out her hand to him, the way you hold out a hand to somebody on the floor, and he took it with his bandaged one, and she pulled, and he got up, slowly, with his other hand on the wall, under the plaque that said For the Better Government of the City, and stood.

It was a quarter past three. The big screen at the end of the lobby had the photograph of the woman in the plain dark jacket on it still, with the corner of her mouth going in, and under it the white letters on the dark red that did not move.

They went across the lobby between the rows, to the telephone.