White Feathers (10 page)

‘What’s wrong with me?’ he asked, struggling weakly but failing to sit up.

‘No, you don’t,’ said the nurse kindly but firmly, pushing his shoulders back against the table. ‘You need to lie completely still until Doctor’s had a chance to examine you.’

Joseph licked his dry lips and asked, ‘How long have I been here?’

‘Just arrived,’ said the orderly. ‘You copped it this morning, according to the blokes that brought you on board, and it’s five in the afternoon now. You’ve been lucky, mate, you didn’t have to wait long. Want a smoke?’

Joseph nodded and the orderly lit a cigarette and held it to his lips while he drew in shallow lungfuls of soothing nicotine, then immediately felt dizzy and turned his head away. ‘Maybe later,’ he mumbled.

‘Right you are,’ replied the orderly, nipping the end off the smoke and slipping it back into its packet. ‘Doctor’s here now anyway.’

A surprisingly young man in wrinkled battledress with a major’s pips on the shoulders loomed over the table. His eyes were baggy and he had at least a day’s growth on his chin, but his voice was hearty enough.

‘Righto lad,’ he said, as if Joseph were years younger than himself, ‘what have you done to yourself? Let’s take a look, shall we?’

‘
I
haven’t done anything to myself,’ Joseph muttered. ‘My legs and back hurt.’

Both the nurse and the orderly smiled but Forster was too busy prodding Joseph’s chest and belly, then snipping layers and layers of soiled field dressings off his legs. He dropped the bloodied bandages and pads on the floor, poked around for a few minutes, then bent down and sniffed. Apparently satisfied, he straightened up and said, ‘You’re lucky. Sergeant Deane, isn’t it? No sign of infection yet — that’s a definite plus, I can assure you.’

The doctor moved closer to the head of the table, sighed and said in a voice leaden with regret, ‘Well, old chap, I’m sorry to say you’ve lost your right leg below the knee but I’m pretty sure we can keep the left one for you, providing you don’t develop septicaemia. It looks a bit of a dog’s breakfast now but it should come right.’

As Joseph stared blankly up at him, Forster scrabbled around for some better news. ‘You got a fair knock on the head, I’d say, which is why you’ve been in and out of consciousness, and you lost a lot of blood up on that hill by the looks of it, but I wouldn’t worry about that side of things. And your back might just be wrenched, I can’t feel anything particularly out of place, and if that’s the case we’ve got a couple of excellent masseuses on board who can sort that out for you. But we’ll do some X-rays, and I’ll have to tidy up this stump and some bits and pieces on the left leg, which should do the trick. You’re well out of it now, though.’

Joseph’s eyes moved away from Forster’s face and fixed unseeingly on the cat’s cradle of pipes traversing the ceiling above him. Eventually, he said without any emotion at all, ‘I can still feel both of my legs.’

‘Sorry, but it’s phantom pain. We see a lot of that.’

But Joseph didn’t hear him; he was thinking back to when he
was a boy and he and Ihaka and Wi used to swing out over the river on a long rope and let go over the deepest point, screaming and laughing, and the times they would run along the beach as fast as they could, racing each other then splashing into the surf, breathless and giggling. He thought about the horse he had bought himself after his return from Australia, put out in the paddock behind his father’s house now, waiting for him to come home, and what he would do if he couldn’t ride and be a drover any more. He thought about Erin McRae, who wouldn’t want a man with only one leg, about his mother’s face when she found out, and of his unspoken and faintly embarrassing desire to return home from the war a hero.

‘Fuck,’ he said quietly.

‘Indeed,’ said the doctor, more than a little relieved to see that his patient appeared to be taking the news calmly. He cleared his throat. ‘They’re making some pretty good artificial limbs these days. I hear a man can get around almost as good as new. You’ll get one before you go home, I expect.’

Joseph nodded absently. ‘Where will I go from here?’

‘Well, the ship’s leaving tomorrow morning for Mudros and you’ll be transferred from there to Egypt, either to the New Zealand hospital at Port Said or the one at Cairo, I don’t know which. After that you’ll probably go on to the one that’s just been set up for New Zealanders at Walton-on-Thames in England. Then home, I’d say.’

Home.

An hour later Forster operated on Joseph’s legs in one of the
Maheno
’s two theatres, cutting away the shredded flesh below his right knee, trimming the bone and stitching skin and muscle over the wound to make a decent stump. Although it was intact, the left leg was a trickier prospect: neither the tibia nor fibula was
broken but there was gross tissue damage requiring painstaking debriding and repair. By the time he had finished, however, Forster was reasonably satisfied with his work and expected that Sergeant Deane would regain more or less full use of his leg, provided infection was kept at bay and he received good medical care after he arrived in Egypt. But if septicaemia did set in, then it was possible that he would lose the left leg as well, and not just the portion below his knee. Forster was in fact surprised that Deane had survived his injuries at all; the extent of his wounds suggested he’d been very lucky not to have been blown to pieces. And if the
Maheno
had not been in Anzac Cove at the time, he would undoubtedly have died waiting on the fly-infested beach.

But Joseph did develop a major infection, and the hours before the surgery were the last he could remember with any clarity for some time. By the time the
Maheno
weighed anchor to sail back to Mudros Harbour the following morning, he lay in his cot sweating and shivering as bacteria swept through his body, one of four hundred soldiers packed like sardines in the belly of the ship. Forster was disappointed, but not inexperienced enough to blame himself; the
Maheno
was one of the better hospital ships but if casualties came on board having already developed septicaemia or, worse, gangrene, then there was little anyone could do, bar chopping the infected bits off, which Forster thought would be premature in Sergeant Deane’s case.

Joseph was unconscious during the trip from Lemnos to Port Said, a town perched on the Egyptian coast near the Mediterranean end of the Suez Canal. He did not regain consciousness until some days after his arrival, and even then he was only partially awake for minutes at a time.

He dreamt of something huge and dank and dark that chased him and wanted to hurt him, and when it caught him it did, crushing his legs and making him scream out loud. He dreamt
of Ihaka sitting at the end of his bed telling him to hurry up and make up his mind — was he coming or was he staying, because the pair of them had a lot of things to do together if he wasn’t going to hang around here in this hospital with its lovely view of the sea. Ihaka’s hair was long again, and tied up in a topknot from which two black and white feathers protruded, and he was naked except for a woven
tatua
about his waist and his grandfather’s treasured dogskin
korowai
over his shoulders. He had a full-face
moko
now, too, one befitting a man who had fought with honour on the battle field.

Joseph also dreamt of Tamar, and of his father and his brothers and sisters, of one-legged Cassius Heke who had captained the
Whiri
all those years ago, and of the girl Emerald with whom he had almost lost his virginity at the age of twelve in a dirty little room above a bawdy tavern in Wellington. He dreamt of the terrifying old woman Te Whaea who had once prophesied that his blood would be spilt on foreign shores, and realised, even through the heavy fog of his delirium, that she had been right. Often, he imagined he was a boy again but when he tried to jump out of bed to run outside and play he felt himself being held back, and cool hands on his brow and gentle voices telling him things would soon be all right, but he knew they wouldn’t because the
taniwha
that lived in the river outside the village had finally got him and was chewing his legs off and he’d never ride a horse again. Sometimes the hands belonged to Erin McRae and sometimes they belonged to angels who wore long white veils and smiled sadly at him. And it was so hot, and when it wasn’t he thought he might freeze to death.

He came very close to dying. The surgeon in charge of his case, Doctor Birch, took him into the operating theatre twice to debride the wounds in his left leg, saying in worried tones to the theatre sister after the second operation, ‘If we have to bring him in again, I’m afraid it’ll be to take the leg off.’

But somehow Joseph defeated the rampant poisons in his blood and twelve days after his arrival at Port Said he opened his eyes and croaked, ‘I’m thirsty.’

There was no response so he said it again, louder this time, or as loud as his parched throat would allow.

‘Jesus Christ, mate. We thought you’d had it.’

Joseph swivelled his eyes to the right, feeling his eyeballs grind painfully in their sockets, until he could see the owner of the voice, a freckle-faced man sitting up in the bed next to him wearing a blue pyjama jacket and matching trousers rolled up well past his knees to reveal a pair of short, heavily bandaged stumps.

‘You’ve been yelling your head off for nigh on two weeks now,’ the man said conversationally, as if he and Joseph had known each other for years. ‘They’ve been expecting you to pass any day but I says no, you’re bloody wrong as usual, just you wait and see.’ He leant over and extended his hand. ‘Bert Croft. Private, the Wellingtons.’ When Joseph didn’t move he said, ‘Oh, sorry, mate, I expect you’re still feeling a bit wobbly. I’ll get someone, shall I?’ He opened his mouth and bellowed ‘
Nurse
!’ at the top of his voice, making Joseph wince and close his eyes.

‘All right, all right, Private Croft, we’re in the next ward, not the next country,’ remonstrated a nurse, the soles of her boots squeaking as she hurried down the centre of the room. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘It’s him,’ said Croft, pointing at Joseph.

The nurse stopped and a slow smile spread across her face. ‘Well, Sergeant Deane, I see you’re back in the land of the living!’ She moved to the side of his bed, picked up his hand and placed two fingers over the pulse in his wrist. ‘Well, that’s better, isn’t it? We were quite worried about you for a while! How are you feeling?’

‘Thirsty,’ replied Joseph. ‘My leg hurts.’

‘Yes, I expect it does. I’m Sister Griffin. We’ll get Doctor to give
you something for it, shall we? He’ll be very pleased you’re back with us. He’s done a lot of work on you, you know.’

Joseph, pain fraying his temper already, wondered if he should apologise for being such an inconvenience, but couldn’t summon the energy. ‘Could I have some water, please?’ he almost begged.

‘I’ll bring a jug for you after I’ve fetched Doctor Birch,’ Sister Griffin replied.

As she marched away Croft rolled his eyes and complained, ‘I don’t like that one much. Got a face like a horse’s arse and no sense of humour. The others are pretty good, though. Except for Matron, she’s a real bitch, won’t even let us smoke in bed. Nurse McRae’ll be dead chuffed you’re back.’

Joseph froze. ‘Who?’

‘Nurse McRae. Erin, I think her first name is, except we’re not allowed to call them by their first names. Spent no end of time sitting by your bed holding your hand. You belted her once, right across the tits, but she didn’t seem to mind. Does she know you or something?’

Joseph swallowed but didn’t turn to look at Croft. ‘Yes, we’re cousins. Sort of.’

‘Well, that explains it then. She cried a lot and Sister bloody Horse-Face had to tell her to pull herself together a couple of times.’

They were interrupted by the arrival of Doctor Birch, a tall man in his forties wearing a white coat flapping open over a New Zealand Army uniform, with a stethoscope draped around his neck and a packet of cigarettes sticking out of his tunic pocket.

‘Him and Sister don’t get on,’ whispered Croft, loud enough for the entire ward to hear.

‘That will do, Private Croft,’ commented the doctor as he rested his rump against the end of Joseph’s bed and crossed his arms. ‘Welcome back, Sergeant. You’re at Number One Stationary
Hospital, Port Said, Egypt. How are you feeling?’

‘He’s thirsty and sore,’ interjected Sister Griffin as she padded up with a glass jug of water. ‘Do you think we could sit him up?’ she asked, then, without waiting for a reply, proceeded to raise Joseph’s head and fluff his pillow. She poured a tumbler of water, added a measure of white powder, swirled it and held the glass so he could drink. ‘Morphine to help with the pain. Now, not too much water to start with. You’ve had nothing of substance in that stomach of yours for nearly a fortnight and you don’t want to overdo it.’

Joseph slurped greedily, his eyes darting about, taking in the other beds in the ward and the men in them. Several, who were watching with interest, waved. The cool water trickled down his gullet and he grimaced as his stomach responded immediately, contracting violently and noisily ejecting the fluid. Sister Griffin wiped the mess off Joseph’s chin and front and said, ‘Have another go now, but slowly this time. You’ve nothing to hurry for, you’ll be fine.’

When Joseph had had enough, Birch said calmly, ‘Get him another jacket, thanks, Sister.’

‘Yes, that’s a good idea,’ piped up Croft who had observed the entire procedure with interest. ‘That one’ll stink to high heaven now.’

Sister Griffin glared at him and whipped his curtain across on her way out.

Birch tapped his front teeth thoughtfully with the end of his stethoscope, then said, ‘You know you’ve lost your right leg, don’t you, Sergeant? Well, the bottom half of it any way.’

Joseph nodded. ‘Yes. How’s the other one? It’s still there — I was worried it might not be.’

‘Oh, it’s fine, don’t worry about that. Or it soon will be, despite the fact that we seriously considered taking it off. You’ll have some scarring which won’t be pretty but providing you’re able to build the
muscles up again you’ll walk on it all right. It’s a bit of a miracle really — a lot of men with the level of infection you had die, even after they arrive here. You must be made of stern stuff.’