The Oeuvre Page 9

  Gnawing her lip, Kitty stepped towards him, hovering her hands over his shaking shoulders, unsure whether to touch him or not.

  “It's alright. Nothing will hurt you here.” She wasn't convinced by her own words as she spoke them.

  An eye opened and locked onto her. She took hold of one of his hands squeezing it, gently. She felt like she was making contact with someone but only just, peering through a grey haze, across a black abyss.

  “It was my fault. I couldn't do it. He had hold of my legs. I could've pulled him up. Pulled him away from those fucking things but I couldn't do it. He didn't have to die.” Wilson rocked backwards and forwards. “I couldn't do it and now I've brought them fucking things back here with me. I can hear 'em in my head!”

  Kitty sat with him, listening.

  “I'm sorry,” he said to thin air, “I'm sorry for what I did, so sorry. It hurts and it won't stop hurtin'. It won't go away and I don't know who I am.”

  Kitty wished Mad was here, she was much better with this sort of thing. She could not leave him though. His eyes were earnest, desperate for her attention and understanding. No-one else's. Who knew what would happen if she did not give it to him?

  “I keep hearing them making noises, you see, the rats, they're always scratching away. Can you hear that, Sister? The scratching? Is it just me?”

  Kitty placed a tentative hand on his shoulder. “I think you should try and sleep. They're just dreams and they can't hurt you. We all hear or see things when we're very tired. I'm sure if you sleep a little more, these 'rats' will go away and leave you alone.”

  Wilson placed his hand over hers.

  “I hope so.”

  He didn't take hold of her hand. He just rested his own on top of it.

  “You're so soft,” he said, smiling at her.

  They sat together for a few minutes. Kitty felt she'd pulled him part of the way out from the grisly place he had been sliding into.

  “Can you remember your name yet?”

  “No.”

  “It’ll come to you, I’m sure. Maybe that’s what the rats are. You trying to remember who you are. Trying to scratch out the truth.”

  “Maybe. Thank you, Sister. I'll try to sleep.”

  He removed his hand from hers and lay down.

  “I'll see you in the morning,” she said.

  Moving back to the table in the middle of the tent, Kitty didn't see Sister Fearing standing outside, watching. She'd seen them touching each other. The older woman pursed her bitter lips together and slipped away.

  *

  Madeleine and Dawson stood inside the hut, looking at each other. He fidgeted, hardly able to believe his luck, being propositioned by a good-looking girl. Dawson had a dull ageing wife and children back home. Sex was a distant memory for him. Something that happened years ago. He had expected it to remain so. His wife never need know about this. It would be a secret to keep him warm at night when he was back there, next to her, a wheezing edifice of indifference.

  Madeleine knew this was not the proper thing to do but she had to do it. There were rules of conduct about fraternisation between staff and Sister Fearing observed them to the letter. If she broke them, then she could take Kitty away from here, back to their safe little cottage. Her reason for doing this was sound. She was able to excuse herself morally, just. Throughout the day, more of the rat-infested dream had come back to her. Thinking of it now sent chills through her. The rats spread out before her, covering the deadlands. A verminous sea of thousands, she was looking down on them from an outcrop of rock. She could feel its rough, gritty surface biting into the bottoms of her bare feet. Across from her was another outcrop of rock, it rose up out of the squealing ocean below. A wolf stood upon it. An ugly, powerful specimen with patchy fur and many scars criss-crossing its skin. Its claws appeared to be carved from jet and its eyes were lit from within by a luminous arctic glow. Its muzzle seemed to be shaping itself into a cadaverous sneer. It was pawing at a pale, cloth-swaddled form. Madeleine saw who it was.

  Kitty!

  She opened her mouth to scream a warning. No sound came out. The wolf made a grizzly chuckling sound in its throat. It leaned over the prostrate Kitty. Its jaws slung wide, drooling ichor. It closed its maw around her sister's throat. It tore the flesh there wide open. A red rain fell. There was a terrific flash and boom of flame.

  Then, nothing more.

  Except for that dead, uncomfortable feeling. A foreboding, growing stronger, leading her to Dawson. Someone must have seen them both coming here, to her hut. She had not had time to check. Madeleine was relying on human nature and its habit of prying, unasked for, into other people's business. Word would get to Sister Fearing. Then she could get her sister away from here. She returned her thoughts to the matter in hand.

  Madeleine looked Dawson over. He was older than her, losing his hair. His skin was beginning to sag with the years. They embraced each other. Their lips met. Their tongues ran over each other in a passionate snake dance. She felt Dawson's old fingers fiddling with the fastenings of her uniform. She was very close to him and was reminded that he was not a handsome man. Age had accentuated his physical ugliness. His skin felt strange and loose as it brushed against her. She felt her underwear loosening, falling away. She slipped off her shoes. Dawson laid her down on the bunk.

  She raised her knees, opening herself to him. He eased his fingers inside the soft delicate parting between her legs. The roughness of his skin tickled her. Moist muscles squeezed tight around his fingers. He circled his fingers inside her, exciting the nerves, making her wet. He withdrew his fingers and wiped them on his trousers.

  With a rustling of fabric, he unfastened his trousers and climbed onto the bunk. He mounted her with no ceremony. His cock was not big but it felt good inside her as it swelled up to a rigid hardness. She could feel a tingling, a light-headedness, edging in on the fringes of her senses, a soundless buzzing. She felt his cock stroking the nubbin of her clitoris, teasing it until it was a hard tender bud. The tingling became a tension, then a weakness, spreading outwards from where he was inside her. It rushed up towards her head and down towards her toes. Dawson was settling into a steady, insistent rhythm.

  Madeleine felt herself becoming tighter around him, her muscles pulling at him, holding him there as that wonderful tension continued to build and build. The boundaries of her world were contracting, encircling them, joining them. Nothing else existed. She was caught in the moment. She was running too fast. She was rushing up to the surface from the bottom of the sea. There was a pushing outwards, a rushing inwards. A singularity burning down to nothing. A small cry, a sudden bright hot bursting.

  Madeleine came, hard.

  Dawson stroked her face and kissed her cheek. Gentle and thankful, he helped her to re-dress. She hoped she had done the right thing.

  *

  Kitty sipped at a mug of tepid beige liquid. You could not have called it tea. She looked first at Wilson then around the tent at the other shell-shocked men. Some were sleeping fitfully, others just lying there, staring off into space.

  Wounded in heart and soul.

  That was how Sister Fearing described them.

  They all had purplish bags under their eyes from night upon night of restless horror-ridden sleep. So much silent torture was confined to this tent. It seemed to taint the air. Kitty wondered if that was why this hut always seemed dingier inside than the rest, even in the day time.

  She realised how little she knew about the war. Shrapnel wounds were horrible things but bearable for the soldiers, and the civilians back home. These men with their fits, their panicked cries and unstill bodies were not bearable. They would not be feted or praised for their deeds. People would turn away from them in fear. They would cross the street to avoid them. They would hide them away. Families would try to forget them. Wives and sweet-hearts would take new beaus. Pretending the boyfriend or husband who lost his mind never existed, writing them out of history.

  These men h
ad squatted in water-logged holes, their stomachs growling, listening to dying comrades screaming out their last breath. Shells had rained down in a continual hellish chorus, but they wouldn't be called heroes for surviving it all. There would no fine words for them because they would be forgotten, as simple as that.

  Kitty did not sleep. Instead she kept looking at the men, turning over one single thought in her mind.

  I will remember.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Wilson was walking through the hospital camp in the dead of night. He didn't remember getting up, nor leaving the tent. His skin was creeping. His nerves were aching. The only sound was the snap-snap of tent flaps in the midnight wind. Wilson walked out onto the main duckboard path that ran through the centre of the camp. Wilson caught glimpses of hanging mottled limbs, gaunt faces, white as nitre. He turned to see, to look at them closely but they melted away, the stuff of dreams. He could feel them. They were here. The creatures that killed Captain Bone. Lurking out of sight, in the shelter of the shadows. They were all around him. In the spaces between one heartbeat and the next. Their skins asquirm with maggoty fears, worming with neuroses. He swallowed hard, shaking his head in denial. What were they?

  What was the word Captain Bone had used for them?

  He couldn’t remember.

  From somewhere in the distance, came a feral howl.

  Blinking in half-light, Wilson sat up and looked around. A low guzzling snore came from the bed to his right. Shadows moved in front of his eyes, resolving into the shape of his neighbour's bed. Blinking, he squinted at it. The shape was wrong. The contours of the body in the bed were out of place, dislocated. Wilson peeled back his bed sheets and wobbled onto his feet. He slid across to the misshapen form. Reaching out, he eased back the linen, feeling it resisting as he did so.

  He saw what was concealed by the sheets.

  Blood ran out in thick trickles from a ragged, congealing wound in the man's throat. Gore soaked his chest, pooling under his head, matting his hair to the pillow. The mouth hung open. The eyes stared blind.

  The face of the dead man was Brookes.

  Rats were foraging in the torn torso's mess, nibbling on the rotten meat. There was movement under the bed. A face peered out, a devil's eye winked at Wilson. A heavy crust of drying blood caking its lips, making the mouth grotesque and demonic. A crumbling hell-portal.

  It was smiling at him, amused.

  Kitty stroked a hand across Wilson's face. The muscles were moving in violent dances under his skin. His eyelids shuddering and then rolling. The nightmares were ripping through him. She rubbed his hand, making a silent prayer for them to leave him in peace.

  Wilson's eyelids fluttered open.

  He looked up at Kitty. Her lips were crusted with flakes of blood. Her eyes glazed over with a film of sticky wet cataracts. She sucked her lips into her mouth. She began chewing at them, frenziedly, shearing them off. Her hand clamped tight around his wrist. He tried to pull away, his heart jumping up into his throat. Through her gnawed lips, he saw broken rat's teeth jutting out from rancid discoloured gums. Phlegm was dripping onto his face as the teeth spread out into a bloodied grin. Her nose twitched, verminous. The monstrous mouth opened, breathing out a stench born from uncountable open graves.

  Wilson lunged.

  His hands fastening around the monster's sinewy throat. He dug his thumbs in under the bobbing Adam's apple. Shaking it back and forth, choking the life from the horror. A thin cracking sound escaped its constricted throat. Wilson let go. It flopped onto the bed, rolling over. Kitty's extinct eyes looked into his. A necklace of black and blue bruises blossoming around her neck. Scarlet blood came, soaking through the chest of her uniform, quickly darkening it. He reached out to her. His fingers running over the rainbow of abuse he had made.

  Wilson tore her throat out.

  Somewhere in the camp, a scrap of stygian gloom detached itself from the shelter of the shadows. Staying low, it made its way between the huts and tents. The dull orange glimmer of a lit lamp came from within one of them. There was the rustling of the occupant disrobing. The sound of hair being brushed could be heard and then, a woman's voice cursing.

  “Damned greybacks. Bastard lice get everywhere.”

  The scrap of midnight flowed around to the tent's entrance.

  “Hello. Is someone there?”

  It did not speak.

  “Hey, you shouldn't be here. Look at the state of you. You need seeing to in one of the other tents.”

  It entered the tent.

  “Good lord.”

  There was a crackle and a crunch of breaking glass.

  There were no screams.

  The light was snuffed out.

  Wilson awoke. He pinched himself. The small pain jolting his brain. He was awake this time. He breathed a sigh of relief. His sheets were a mess. He tugged them into shape and made himself ready for real sleep. Something wet squelched between Wilson's toes. He pulled back the bedsheets.

  His feet were caked in mud.

  Chapter Twenty

  Madeleine looked up as her sister entered their hut. “Are you okay, Kitty?”

  “I think so, Mad, just tired. It's so terrible. I just sat there all night. There is nothing I can do for those boys. I can help dress the wounds on their body but not the wounds in their minds. You can't even see where those wounds are. You don't know where to start. You don't know if someone is getting better or worse. You can only hope, and even then, it just seems to go on and on. It makes me feel so empty inside, so helpless,” she sighed, pulling off her cap and running a hand through her hair. Madeleine got to her feet, went over and embraced her sister. They hugged each other hard.

  Sister Fearing entered the hut.

  The two sisters parted instantly.

  “Young ladies, would you come with me, please?”

  They both followed Sister Fearing to the hut which made up her office.

  She rested her knuckles on the desk, giving the impression that she was readying herself for a fight which her baleful expression reinforced as she spoke to the two sisters before her. “Miss Katherine Goldsworth, you have some explaining to do.”

  Madeleine looked up in surprise. Kitty was the one in trouble? That couldn't be right. She was always good. Madeleine had been the one carrying on with an orderly. That's what she had thought this summons would be about. What could Kitty possibly have done to excite Sister Fearing's wrath?

  Sister Fearing glared at the two VADs before her. She hated them. Training to be a nurse was hard work and she had put in that hard work. During the back-breaking first two years on the wards she had been paid nothing. She hadn't had it easy. Long hours of study followed by long hours of duty followed on by more long hours of study and duty. An endless daily grind these rich strumpets knew nothing about. They were treated by the patients as if they were royalty, never mind qualified nurses. They were not either of these things in Sister Fearing's eyes. They had no right to be addressed as nurse or Sister. They had not earned that right. Especially the little one she had seen holding hands with a patient earlier tonight.

  Sister Fearing felt like she had been struck across the face as she watched the scene unfold between Kitty Goldsworth and the soldier in the nervous ward. Such a blatant display of affection between staff members and patients was unacceptable. The younger Miss Goldsworth did not know how to behave. Sister Fearing was going to tear a strip off her and her molly-coddling sister for it. Her anger simmered hot and bright. She felt her heart clenching, relishing the infernal feeling.

  “I would remind you both that there are rules of correct conduct and behaviour between patients and staff members. Disobeying any of these rules will lead to your being sent home. Neither of you is indispensable. There are hundreds of volunteers in England waiting to take your place. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  Madeleine eyed Sister Fearing as the woman made her self-important little speech. That was all it was. A speech to remind them that she h
ad risen to her position through hard work and that they had not worked half as much as she had. This gave her the right to be their superior here, even if she was not so in social standing. There was also an undercurrent that had nothing to do with hard work or class privilege.

  It was plain and simple jealousy.

  Madeleine noticed for the first time that there was no wedding band on the white-knuckled hand of the Sister. No-one loved her. It could not be said outright but those were the pair of all-too-apparent ingredients that made Sister Fearing what she was. A lack of love and a lot of jealousy. A septic cocktail lacing the wound where her heart should be. She fed and cared for that wound the way a mother does a child, by punishing those around her for the bitterness she chose to bear.

  “You, Katherine Goldsworth, have broken the rules of conduct. You will both be put on the next train and taken back to England in the morning. May God have mercy on your sinful souls and one day show you the righteous path before your wandering feet.”

  “Me? But I have done nothing wrong.”

  Kitty was not happy with Sister Fearing. The attitude of this older woman was horrible. She treated the men as if they were carcasses on a butcher's slab. They'd gone through all that pain and the thanks they got was this sour-faced scarecrow of a witch ill-treating them.

  “I saw you. I saw you carousing and holding hands with one of the patients.”

  “I did not carouse with anyone. I held his hand because he was feeling lonely and unloved. He needed to feel better about himself. Haven't you ever needed that, Sister? Some affection?”

  Kitty had innocently put her finger right on the emotional wound at the heart of Sister Fearing. The puckers of Sister Fearing's face deepened into ridges, drawing themselves together, knitting into lines, ferocious cracks and crags emerged. She came forward, her skin darkening with spots of blood. Her thin hand raised to lash out, fingers all stiff, then it faltered, wavered, collapsing in on itself, defeated.