Hands

At eight o’clock a porter brought a trolley down the corridor from the scan rooms.

He watched it come. He had watched eleven come since he sat down, one every five minutes or so, and he had watched his mother go to every one of them as it came, before she did anything else, and bend over it, and look at the face, and straighten up, and go on; and he watched this one come down the lane in the middle of the corridor between the others, and his mother put down her chart and went to it.

It was a young man. He could see that from the end of the corridor, from the orange chair: the length of him under the pale blue blanket, long, longer than the trolley, so that his feet made a tent of the blanket at the end. A drip on a pole, clipped to the trolley, swinging a little as the porter pushed. A label on the end of the trolley, hanging on its string. One arm out on top of the blanket, with a band on the wrist. And the head on the pillow, bandaged, a great deal of white gauze round it and over one side of the face, the left side, from the hair down over the eyebrow to the cheek, taped, and the rest of the face that he could see from here swollen, dark, purple and yellow at the jaw, and cut, with small white strips across the cuts, and the eyes shut.

The porter stopped the trolley in its place against the wall, nose to tail with the one before, and put the brake on with his foot, and said something to his mother, and she nodded, and he went back up the corridor for the next one.

His mother bent over the trolley.

She looked at the face. He watched her look at it. One second, the way she always did, from the top of the bandage to the jaw. He watched her not know it. He saw that. He saw her look at the gauze over the left eyebrow and the swelling and the dark and the strips, and he saw her face stay her ward face, and he saw her straighten up a little, the way she had straightened up from the eleven before, and look at the label on the end of the trolley, and he could read it from the chair if he leaned forward.

UM 31. M. 20-30. No ID. Conc. Ribs L. Lac face.

She took the wrist.

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She took it the way she took every wrist. He had watched her take thirty of them since five to eight. She lifted the hand that was out on top of the blanket, the right one, by the wrist, with her thumb on the inside, and turned her own other wrist so that she could see the fob watch pinned upside down on the front of her uniform, and looked at it, and counted.

She did not count.

He saw her stop. She stopped the way the faces in the lobby of the Municipal Building had stopped at two o’clock: all at once, entirely, in the middle of something, so that nothing on her moved at all. She stood beside the trolley with the hand lifted in hers and her head bent towards the fob watch, and she did not look at the watch, and she did not count, and she did not move.

It went on.

It went on so long that the student nurse at the next trolley looked round at her. It went on so long that he got up.

He did not decide to. He found that he was standing, at the end of the corridor, by the orange chair, with the blanket fallen off his shoulders onto the floor behind him, looking at his mother standing very still with a stranger’s hand held in hers under the caged lights.

Then she turned the hand over.

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She turned it over in both of hers, slowly, palm up. She looked at it. She looked at the palm, and the fingers, and the thumb, and she ran her own thumb along the inside of the stranger’s thumb, slowly, to the end, to the nail, and stopped there, and he saw her thumb feel the nail.

He knew what was on that nail. Everybody in the family knew. A ridge, across it, a long raised line from side to side, from the summer Frank was fourteen and had caught it in the door of their father’s car outside Hrynko’s and lost the nail, and it had grown back with the ridge in it, and their mother had said it would grow out, and it never had.

She turned the hand over again. Back of it up. She looked at the knuckles. At the second knuckle of the first finger. He could not see it from where he stood and he did not need to. A white scar across it, small, shiny, the size of a fingernail, from his first year on the steel, at nineteen, from the hot end of a rivet gun, which he had not told their mother about for a month, and she had found it at Sunday dinner by looking at his hands while he passed the potatoes, and said Francis, and he had said it’s nothing, Mum, it’s the job.

She looked at it for a long time.

Then she lifted the hand to her face.

She held it there, against her cheek, the back of it, with both of hers round it, in the middle of the corridor, with the student nurse watching her and the people on the trolleys either side, and her eyes shut, and her mouth against the knuckles, and he saw her shoulders do what Teresa’s had done on the steps of the Trades Council, go up, very high, almost to her ears, and stay there.

Then she opened her eyes and looked down the corridor, at him, standing by the orange chair.

Her mouth moved. He read it from forty yards.

Tommy.

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He came down the corridor.

He walked. You did not run in a corridor. He walked down the lane in the middle between the trolleys, past the faces, past the student nurse, who had put her hand to her mouth, past the old man with the bandage round his head whose pulse his mother had taken at five to eight, who was awake and watching, and he came to the trolley and stood on the other side of it from his mother, and looked down.

He did not know it. He looked at the face and did not know it. The gauze over the left side, over the eyebrow, over the scar from the Larkins’ wall, all of it covered, white, taped. The swelling. The dark at the jaw. The strips across the cuts. The mouth, split at the corner. It could have been anybody. It was one of nine on a board in a waiting hall. M. 20-30. Dark hair. Work boots. UM.

He looked at the hand in his mother’s hands. The right one, against her cheek still. The knuckles. The white scar on the second knuckle of the first finger. The thumb, with the nail, with the ridge across it.

It was their father’s hand.

That was what he saw: not Frank’s hand but their father’s, long and big and brown across the back from the sun and pale across the palm, with the knuckles standing up, the hand that had put a piece of bread on Tom’s side plate on Sunday, and a piece of exactly the same size on Frank’s; the hand that had gone on Frank’s shoulder in the green doorway, once, and then on his, once, for exactly as long. It was the same hand. It had always been the same hand. He had never once in twenty-two years noticed.

His mother was looking at him across the trolley.

She did not say anything. She held the hand against her cheek and looked at him, and her face was not her ward face, not now, not at all; and then, as he watched, it was her ward face again. She put it back on, the way you put on a coat. She lowered the hand from her cheek to the blanket, and held it there, flat, with hers on top of it, and with her other hand she took the pen out of her top pocket, and she lifted the stranger’s wrist, the one with the band on it, and turned the band to the light.

UM 31, said the band, in somebody else’s biro.

She wrote under it. He watched her do it. Small and clear and careful, on the white plastic of the band, in capitals, pressing hard so it would stay.

FRANCIS KEANE.

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She called the student nurse. He saw her call; he saw the girl come; he saw his mother’s mouth, quick, the ward voice, go to the front desk, tell them thirty-one, the board, the march, it’s Francis Keane, K-E-A-N-E, twenty-two, he’s mine. He saw the girl’s face at he’s mine. He saw her go, up the corridor, fast, not running.

He saw, two minutes later, through the double doors at the end of the corridor with their round windows, a long way off, in the waiting hall, a woman at the whiteboard on wheels with a cloth in her hand, rubbing out a line.

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His mother bent over the trolley. She put her mouth close to the swollen face, to the ear that was not under the gauze, and said something. He could not read it; her face was turned away from him, into Frank’s. He saw her lips move against the side of Frank’s head. He saw them stop.

Frank opened his eyes.

One of them. The right one; the left was under the gauze. It opened slowly, as if it were heavy, a slit, and then wider, and it was their father’s eye too, pale blue, with the white of it gone red at one side, and it looked up at the caged light in the ceiling of the corridor, and did not know where it was, and then it moved, and found his mother’s face, close, over it.

The split mouth moved.

He read it. It was the easiest word in the world to read, on any face. It was the first word.

Mum.

His mother said something back. Then she straightened up, and looked across the trolley at Tom, and moved her head, very slightly, towards the face on the pillow, the way you would move your head to tell somebody where to look.

He looked.

The eye had come off his mother’s face. It was moving. Slowly, the way the eye of somebody concussed moves, as if every inch were uphill. Up from his mother. Across the blanket. Across the hand on the blanket under his mother’s hand. Across the trolley rail. Up. To the uniform on the other side of the trolley, white and grey and red, with the label on its pocket and the bandages on its hands. Up. To the gauze on the neck. To the face.

It stopped there.

He did not know what Frank’s face did. There was not enough of it that he could see. The gauze, the swelling, the dark, the split mouth. He saw the one eye stop on his face and stay there, and look, for a long time, the way it had looked at him at the steward line at the foot of the bridge in the sun, at all of him, the dust and the hat that was not there and the uniform under the dust; and he saw it go into the eye, whatever it was, and down through it, the way the colour goes into a river.

The split mouth moved again. It did not make a word he could read. It was too swollen, and it was not a word, he thought; it was what a mouth does before a word, when it has not decided which.

Then the eye shut.

Not as if it were sleeping. As if it had seen enough to be going on with, and wanted to keep it.

His mother put her hand flat on Frank’s chest, on the blanket, on the left side, very gently, over where the ribs were, and kept it there, and looked at her fob watch, upside down, and counted.

This time she counted.