Corridor

There was a family at every door.

He saw them from the street, on the steps and the grass, and he saw them inside, in the hall of the emergency entrance, which was a long low room with plastic chairs bolted to the floor in rows and a desk at the end, and every chair was full, and the floor between the rows was full, and the walls. Families. You could tell a family. They sat together and stood together and held each other’s arms and they all looked at the same place, which was the door at the end of the hall beside the desk, the double door with the round windows in it that went through into the hospital, and every time it opened every face in the room turned to it, together, like the faces in the lobby of the Municipal Building had turned to the screen, and then turned back.

At the desk there was a board.

It was a whiteboard on wheels, a big one, the kind they had in the muster room at Fifty-First Street for the rota, and somebody had wheeled it out from somewhere and stood it beside the desk, and it was covered in writing. Not names. Numbers. A column of numbers down the left side, from one to something, in red marker, and beside each number a few words in black.

14. F. 30-40. Dark hair. Green coat. Wedding ring. GC.

15. M. 60s. Grey. Beard. Brown suit. GC.

16. M. 20-30. Fair. Work boots. UM.

17. F. Child. 8-10. Plaits. Blue school uniform. GC.

There were a great many numbers. The board was full and somebody had started on the back of it, and somebody else had pinned sheets of paper to the wall beside it, more numbers, more words, in different hands. In front of it, at all times, there was a knot of people, reading it, close, the way you read something when you are afraid of what you will find in it and more afraid of not finding it, and when one of them found something they went to the desk, fast, and the woman at the desk looked at the board and at a list in front of her and said something, and the person went through the door with the round windows, sometimes alone, sometimes with a nurse, and the faces in the room turned to watch them go.

He read the board.

He read all of it, from the first number to the last, and then the back, and then the sheets on the wall. UM was the march. He looked at every UM. M. 20-30. There were nine. Dark hair, four. Work boots, three of those. He read them again. None of them said scar through left eyebrow. None of them said anything about eyebrows at all. They had not had time for eyebrows.

He stood in front of the board in his uniform with the bandages on his hands and the label on his pocket and read the nine again.

---

A porter knew him.

He did not know the porter. He was a man of sixty in the hospital’s dark blue tunic with a trolley, coming through the double door with the round windows with an empty trolley to take it out to an ambulance, and he stopped, and looked at Tom, at his face, close, and his mouth moved, and Tom pointed at his ears.

The porter looked at the ears. Then he took Tom by the arm, the upper arm, the way Frank had at the steward line and Dinny Shea had at the Trades Council, and leaned in close, and made his mouth very large and slow, the way you would talk to a foreigner.

You’re Maureen’s.

Tom nodded.

The big one. The policeman.

Tom nodded.

The porter looked at him for a moment longer. Then he turned the empty trolley round, against the flow, and pushed it back through the double door with the round windows, and held the door open with his foot, and jerked his head at Tom. Come on.

---

The corridor was on the ground floor of the old building. He knew it. It ran the length of the block, from the emergency department at one end to the old wards at the other, wide and long and tiled to the shoulder in pale green and painted above the tiles in cream, with a high ceiling and lights in cages, and he had walked it at nine with a tea towel held to Frank’s eyebrow and at fourteen with his mother’s lunch, and he had never seen anything in it but people walking.

It was full of trolleys.

Both sides. All the way down. As far as he could see, nose to tail along both walls, leaving a lane down the middle just wide enough for one trolley to pass, the way the marchers had left a lane down the middle of the road for the ambulances: trolleys, with people on them, under the cream paint and the caged lights, under hospital blankets, white and pale blue, with drips on poles beside them and labels on their wrists, and a few with nobody beside them at all, and most with a nurse or a doctor or a porter or a stranger bending over them, or sitting on a chair at the head of them holding a hand.

It was quiet. He could see it was quiet. Nobody in it was moving fast.

The porter pushed his empty trolley down the lane in the middle, and Tom walked behind it, past the trolleys, past the faces on them, and he looked at every face, every one, on both sides, looking for an eyebrow with a scar through it, and the faces looked back at him, some of them, and some of them did not look at anything.

And halfway down the corridor, at a desk that was not a desk, a trolley with no one on it and a clipboard on it and a jug of water and a box of gloves, standing beside it with a chart in one hand and a pen in the other, in a blue uniform with a fob watch pinned upside down on the front of it, with her hair coming down out of its pins and the grey streak at the front of it gone wild, looking down at the chart, his mother.

---

She looked up.

She saw the porter first, coming down the lane with the empty trolley. Then she saw what was behind him.

He watched it happen to her face. He had seen her face do a great many things in twenty-six years, and he had never seen it do this, and he did not have a word for it and did not look for one. He watched her see him, the whole of him, the way she looked at a man coming into a ward, from the hat that was not there to the shoes: the dust, white and grey; the red, to the elbows, down the front; the bandages on his hands; the gauze on his neck; the label on his pocket. All of it. In one second. The way she always did.

The chart went down onto the trolley beside her. The pen with it.

She came down the lane between the trolleys. She did not run. Nurses did not run in a corridor; he had been told that at nine, sitting in a waiting room with his brother’s blood on his shirt, by this woman. She walked, fast, down the lane, and stopped in front of him, and put her hands up to his face, the way Teresa had, and held it, and looked at it.

He saw her mouth.

Tommy.

Then she put her arms round him.

She was small. She came up to his chest. She put her arms round him and held on, in the corridor, in front of the porter and the trolleys and the people on them, with her face against his shirt, against the label and the two forms from the clerk and the glove packet and the telephone in his pocket, and held on, hard, and he could feel her shaking, the whole of her, very fast, like a bird held in a hand, and he put his arms round her, with the bandaged hands, carefully, and stood there.

He did not know how long.

---

She let go. She stood back. She was a nurse again; he watched it happen; he watched her put it back on, whatever it was, the thing she wore on the ward, the way you put on a coat.

She looked at the label on his pocket. She lifted it, by its string, and turned it to the light, and read it, the boxes the doctor in the green clothes had filled in, in a doctor’s hand he had not been able to read and his mother read at once. He watched her read it. He watched her face read it.

She let it go. She looked at his ears. She did not need to turn his head to look; she looked, from where she stood, at the dried blood below each of them, and at the gauze, and back at his face.

Her mouth moved. Slowly. Large. For him.

Can you hear me at all?

He shook his head.

Nothing?

He shook his head again. Then he held up his bandaged hand, finger and thumb, a little apart. A bit. Very little. Like through a wall.

She nodded. Her face did not change. It was her ward face. But he saw her swallow.

Then she said the other thing. He saw it before she said it. He saw it in her face, behind the ward face, the thing that had been in her since whenever it was that she had heard, here, in this corridor, on the first of May, on her quiet shift, that there had been a fourth one, and that it had been the march.

Frank?

He took the pad out of his pocket.

It was not a pad. It was the glove packet, the doctor’s, and the two forms from the clerk, folded, and he had nothing else to write on; he took out the glove packet and unfolded it and turned it over to a corner that was still clean, and his mother took a pen out of her top pocket without a word and held it out, and he took it and wrote.

HE WAS AT THE JUNCTION. AT THE FRONT OF THE LOCAL. HE HELD THE LINE. I WAS THERE. I WENT IN PAST HIM.

She read it as he wrote, upside down. He saw her read I WAS THERE.

DINNY SHEA SAYS WHEN THE LINE OPENED HE WENT IN. HE CARRIED A MAN TO THE PARK. HE WENT BACK IN WITHOUT HIS JACKET. THE JACKET WENT ON TWO POLES FOR A WOMAN. NOBODY’S SEEN HIM SINCE.

He stopped. He wrote the last thing.

HE’S NOT ON ANY LIST.

His mother read it.

She read it for a long time. Then she took the glove packet from him and folded it, very carefully, along the folds it already had, and put it back into his shirt pocket, behind the label, and buttoned the pocket, and patted it, flat, the way the nurse in the Municipal Building had patted the first label.

Then she looked down the corridor.

All the way down it. Both sides. The trolleys, nose to tail, under the caged lights, under the cream paint, as far as you could see, to the old wards at the end.

He watched her look at it. He understood, watching her, that she had been looking at it since noon. That every trolley that had come into this corridor since the first ones came in from the junction at half past twelve had come past her, down this lane, and she had looked at the face on it, every face, every one, the way she had looked at Tom just now, in one second, from the top of the head to the feet, for an eyebrow with a scar through it, or for a face she had made, and had not found either, and had gone on, and had taken the next one, and had looked again.

She looked back at him. Her mouth moved.

There are forty-one in this corridor I can’t name. Some of them can’t talk. Some of them can’t be seen yet, their faces. They’ve been in theatre and in scan and they’re coming back to me, one at a time, all evening.

He read it. He nodded.

I’ve looked at every one that came. She stopped. I’ll look at every one that comes.

---

There was a chair at the end of the corridor, by the door to the stairs. A plastic one, orange, by a radiator, with a hospital blanket folded on it.

She took him to it. She sat him down in it, the way Teresa had sat him down on the marble, with one hand on his shoulder, pressing, and when he was down she took the blanket off the radiator, where it was warm, and put it round his shoulders, over the dust and the red, and tucked it, and her mouth moved, close.

Sit there.

He looked up at her.

Sit there. Don’t move. Don’t go anywhere. I’ve got thirty people on this floor and four nurses, and two of the nurses are students, and I can’t look for you as well. Sit there where I can see you.

He nodded.

She looked at him for one more second. Then she put her hand on the top of his head, flat, the way she had put it on his head when he was small and had a temperature, to feel it; and took it away; and turned round, and went back up the corridor between the trolleys to the trolley that was not a desk, and picked up her chart and her pen, and bent over the person on the next trolley, an old man with a bandage round his head, and took his wrist, and looked at her fob watch, upside down, and counted.

He sat in the orange chair at the end of the corridor with the warm blanket round his shoulders and watched her.

He watched her go from trolley to trolley. He watched the porters bring new ones down the lane from the emergency department, one at a time, every few minutes, from theatre and from scan, people with new bandages and new drips and new labels, and he watched her go to each one as it came, before she did anything else, and bend over it, and look at the face; and straighten up; and go on.

It was five to eight.