White Feathers (11 page)

‘I’m Ngati Kahungunu,’ Joseph replied matter-of-factly. ‘We don’t give up easily.’ His eyes felt leaden and he was having trouble keeping them open.

‘Well, you’re not on your own then. When you’re feeling a bit better you can introduce yourself to the rest of the lads in the ward. We’ve got legs in this one, or rather, patients without legs, and a couple of them are from the Maori Contingent. But take your time, you’ve been extremely ill and you mustn’t overdo it if you’re planning to be up and about as soon as you can.’ Birch stood up, patted his tunic pocket and said, ‘Well, time for a cup of tea and a smoke, I think. Sister Griffin will look after you, although I’ll be around twice a day to see how you’re getting on. She’s pretty good, Sister, and so are her girls. I suggest you try and get some sleep.’ He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Sister and I do actually get on, but we pretend we don’t so Croft here has something to entertain him. He’s in a bad way and it’s turned him into a bit of a wet blanket, although I suppose he could have been one of those before he even joined the Army. But he’s being transferred to the UK soon for convalescence and hasn’t got long to go here. I know you’ve a lot to come to terms with yourself, but see if you can’t jolly him along and set him a bit of an example, will you?’

Joseph wondered whether this was a genuine request, or a ruse designed to take his mind off his own semi-legless state. He thought of Erin and was overcome by an intense sense of shame that she should see him like this. He allowed his eyes to close and was asleep even before Birch had left the ward.

She was sitting next to his bed when he next woke, staring sightlessly
across the room at a spot on the opposite wall. He watched her in silence for several minutes, noting her great dark, expressive eyes, the strands of hair struggling to escape from beneath her veil and the rather uncomplimentary cut of her stiff, white apron. It made her breasts look enormous. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick and her hands red and dry-looking. He wondered how long she had been there.

‘Hello, Erin,’ he said quietly.

She jumped and went pink. ‘You’re awake,’ she said.

Neither said anything more for a moment, then to Joseph’s absolute mortification he began to cry. Not great loud sobs, but a slow and helpless trickle of tears that ran across his temples and into his ears.

‘Let them come,’ she whispered, fighting to conceal her own embarrassment and despair at this shocking and desperately intimate manifestation of his pain. She took his left hand and squeezed it gently, averting her eyes so he could weep with a modicum of privacy. He had always been such a vital and essential man, and always somehow larger than life. Seeing him now, lying in this cot broken in both body and spirit, was something she wasn’t sure she could bear.

He held her hand tightly, feeling the dryness of her skin against the clamminess of his own, and was grateful for her presence.

Presently, when his tears had slowed, she said, ‘I wired your Mam, and asked her to pass the news on to your father, and sent a message to Keely as well. She’s stationed at Number Two Hospital in Cairo. I told them you’d been seriously wounded but that you’d be coming home soon.’

Joseph nodded and wiped his nose on his pyjama sleeve as unobtrusively as he could.

‘Do you want a handkerchief?’ Erin asked, feeling silly and redundant. She was a thoroughly trained and highly skilled nurse,
and this was all she could offer him. She wanted to reach out and lay her hand on his brow again, to gently smooth away the furrows of hurt and sickness as she had for so many hours when he had been unconscious, but she was too embarrassed now that he was awake.

He examined her face closely for signs of pity, but there were none. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘but could you give me a hand to sit up?’

She slid an arm under his back and levered him up with surprising strength, rearranging his pillow so he was more comfortable.

He eyed the unnatural-looking hump at the foot of his bed, then leant forward and quickly flipped the sheet off it. Underneath was a metal frame enclosing his legs, or what was left of them. His left lower leg, swathed in bandages, appeared almost twice its normal size. He gazed at the space below his right knee in numb silence, feeling dizzy and breathless at this horrible and blunt proof of his loss.

Erin bit her lip to stop herself saying that he would get used to it in time: right now it would sound trite and empty.

‘So, that’s it, then,’ he said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say. More than anything, he felt a fool. For putting his hand up for a war he needn’t have become involved in, for so blithely assuming he would come through it unscathed — because, underneath his caution and his occasional misgivings, he
had
assumed that — and for being stuck now with this gross and irreversible insult to his body.

They sat in silence for a minute longer, then Erin said, ‘I know this probably won’t make you feel any better now, but for a traumatic amputation it was quite a tidy and convenient one.’

Joseph stared at her in amazement, then surprised himself by laughing out loud. ‘A
convenient
one?’

‘Well, yes,’ she replied cautiously, wondering whether she’d said the wrong thing after all. She ploughed on regardless. ‘You’ve still got a bit of your lower leg left, which means that when you get
your prosthesis you might not have much of a limp at all if it’s a good fit. Losing your leg above the knee can pose much more serious problems.’

‘Oh, well, I should feel grateful then, shouldn’t I?’

Erin’s face reddened slightly before she responded, and when she did she forgot her inherent shyness and hissed rather more forcefully than she had intended, ‘Yes, you should, Joseph, so don’t start going down that road. Look around you. Look
next
to you!’

Joseph remembered Croft and immediately felt ashamed of himself. He rubbed his hand across his eyes and said, ‘Oh God, Erin, I’m sorry, I really am.’

She patted his hand forgivingly. ‘Yes, I know.’ Then she stood up and smoothed her apron. ‘I’ve been on my break but I have to go back now. I’ll come and see you whenever I have a moment, shall I? I’m not on this ward today but I probably will be later in the week. In the meantime you could get to know your roommates. They’re not a bad bunch, if you don’t mind bad language and having your bottom pinched, but then I don’t expect that yours will be,’ she added wryly.

When she had gone Joseph looked around the room, saw that everyone was staring back at him with undisguised curiosity, except for Croft who was on his back snoring, and introduced himself. There were five others sharing the ward, two of them Maori whom he recognised but didn’t know by name, a man from the Otagos who introduced himself as Lofty Curtis, and another from the Mounteds, named Henry Ormsby.

‘Sonny Tahere, Ngati Maniapoto,’ announced the man opposite Joseph. ‘I seen you on that hill at Anzac. She was rough, eh?’

His neighbour, who introduced himself as Eru Te Moni from Ngati Tuwharetoa, said, ‘You in B Company, eh? We was in A. Yous were up near us at that push on the Sari. That’s where I got it,’ he added, pointing ostentatiously at his truncated left lower limb.

‘Eru, shut up about your bloody leg,’ said Sonny benignly. ‘You always going on about it.’

‘Well, it was a good one. It suited me,’ Eru replied with an affronted dignity that made Joseph smile. ‘What do I do with only one bloody leg?’

‘Same as you done before. Nothing,’ replied Sonny.

Joseph listened as the two traded amiable insults, suspecting, from the amused looks on the faces of Lofty Curtis and Henry Ormsby, that this was a routine the pair of them had been polishing for some time and thoroughly enjoyed. Henry looked over and gave him a broad wink and it occurred to Joseph for the first time since he had been wounded that, notwithstanding Erin’s unexpected presence, he might not have to face his recovery alone.

He came to know the men in his ward very quickly — it would have been very difficult not to. They lay within feet of each other, shared the minute details of each other’s progress, heard and smelt each other farting and emptying their bowels, and became very familiar with each other’s personal habits and idiosyncrasies. Their intimacy reminded Joseph of his relationship with the men in his section, and it comforted him.

With the exception of Croft, they all seemed, at least outwardly, to accept their injuries and subscribed strictly to the soldier’s creed of never exhibiting signs of weakness, never talking about dead mates and never admitting out loud that it hadn’t been worth it. But occasionally at night one of them could be heard weeping quietly; Joseph thought it was probably Lofty Curtis, whose right leg had been amputated almost at the hip and the other, shattered and deformed, was suspended by a complicated series of pulleys and weights above his bed, but he never asked and certainly nobody else ever mentioned it.

Croft, though, regularly slipped into deep troughs of depression that made him totally uncommunicative on some days, and on others sullen, sarcastic and aggressive. Because he could not get out of bed by himself, and the rest of his roommates had learnt to ignore his unpleasant behaviour, he often directed his unhappiness at the nurses. He would find fault with everything they did, complain that they didn’t treat him as well as they did the others, and make extra work for them. When he was especially miserable he would shit in his bed and sit in it until the smell wafted over to someone else’s nostrils and a nurse would have to be summoned to clean up the mess.

After the third time he had done this, Joseph, who vacillated between feeling intensely sympathetic for the man and despising him, threatened to drag himself out of his bed and belt Croft one. This elicited a round of cheers from the rest of the ward, and prompted Croft to retreat into a sulk that lasted three days because he’d thought he’d found an ally and it was clear he hadn’t. But Joseph was left with an unpleasant taste in his mouth: Croft could be quite pleasant when he wasn’t feeling down and it seemed obvious the man was suffering from some kind of serious emotional disruption. In the end Joseph more or less gave up — he had enough adjustments of his own to make without worrying about Croft.

After a week Joseph was allowed up and into a wheelchair, which gave him an immense sense of freedom and alleviated the crushing boredom of being confined to bed. Eru, Sonny and Henry were already mobile, either on crutches or in wheelchairs, and had regularly congregated around either his or Lofty’s bed to play cards or dominoes. Doctor Birch would not let him use crutches yet, as his left leg still hadn’t healed sufficiently to take his weight, but it now required only a light bandage at night, under which it itched fiercely and constantly. His stump was healing well, too, and in
some ways was in better condition than his intact leg, but he was still having trouble with pain in places where there was no longer any flesh and bone. Birch assured him it would go away eventually and Joseph, sick of waking up in the middle of the night and catching himself in the act of reaching to massage non-existent toes, wished heartily that it would, and sooner rather than later.

His days were occupied, like everyone else’s, with resting, talking, writing letters assuring everyone at home he was fine and recovering well, going for short trundles around the hospital in his chair and outside for a smoke, speculating on what would be served for breakfast, lunch and dinner and then complaining when it arrived. Croft left, and was not missed. His bed was taken by a man called Noah Jackson who had lost both feet and was such a persistent joker that Joseph suspected he did it to stop himself from slitting his own wrists.

Joseph’s mood had improved markedly since his arrival, and he thought he knew why. Somewhere between his first week at the hospital and the third, it occurred to him that he might just have fallen in love with Erin McRae. She had been as good as her word and had come to sit with him at every opportunity. When she was assigned to his ward Joseph happily spent hours watching her tend to the other men, bathing poor old Lofty who was still attached to his traction device, changing dressings on the others, tidying their beds and generally jollying them along. He noted that when she worked, her shyness fell away like the outer petals of a rose opening into full bloom, and she shone. She chatted away, joked, laughed and cheerfully tolerated endless well-natured teasing — daily proposals of marriage from Henry, or Eru announcing that he had a shocking itch in his groin and could Nurse McRae please scratch it for him. Every nurse on the ward received the same treatment, except for Sister Griffin whose glare could freeze even Sonny’s backchat.

This was a side to Erin that Joseph had never seen before, and it enchanted him. She had always seemed so shy and self-conscious, but time and perhaps her nursing training had obviously allowed some very charming and appealing facets of her character to blossom. Or was it that perhaps he had just never looked hard enough? She was patient and kind and sympathetic without conveying a sense of pity for her charges.

He wondered how she felt about him, and spent much of his time devising ways of asking her. If Keely had been here it would have been easy — she would have confronted Erin and asked outright, then relayed the answer back to Joseph immediately. He couldn’t summon the nerve to ask Erin himself, fearing that her extra attention and frequent blushes and the intensity of her gaze when she thought he wasn’t looking might just be symptoms of her compassion for a man crippled by a random shell blast.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

October, 1915

I
n the end, he didn’t need to ask, for Erin made her feelings perfectly clear herself. Until now, she had avoided taking him for his bath and shave in the bathroom down the corridor — whether deliberately or not, he didn’t know — but on this day she came to his bedside with a fresh towel folded under one arm and a very determined look on her face. She positioned his wheelchair at his bedside, toed the brake on, lowered the armrest and motioned for him to transfer himself into it, a manoeuvre he was now quite good at.