Life Class Passage

Pages 202-203

 

The open door sent an oblong of moonlight across the beds and the jumble of papers on his side of the table. He grabbed a writing pad and pencil, paused in the doorway to light a cigarette, and set off across the waste ground to the shed at a half run. The air was fresh and crisp. The puddle that lay in the hollow ground by the ambulances’ turning circle had a gray film of petrol across it, like a cataract. He stopped to draw breath. An incongruous moment, standing there in the darkness, bracing himself to go back onto the ward, thinking like a painter. Deep breaths, one, two, three. A final drag on the cigarette and he pushed the door open.

            Goujet stared at the writing pad and pencil in apparently bewilderment, so perhaps it wasn’t what he wanted and the waving of his hand in the air meant something else entirely. Paul left the pad by his bed and, by the time he’d reached the end of the row, Goujet had reached for it and begun to write. He didn’t seem to be keeping to the lines, but then the poor devil could hardly see. Paul brushed the incident aside, turning his attention to another patient who’d just been brought in from theater.

            The new patient woke everybody with his screams. Sister had her hands full trying to settle him. What had been a relatively quiet shift became busy. Paul and Hickson attended to the other patients as best they could. As Paul passed his bed, Goujet offered him a sheet of paper. There were no words on it and no drawings either, it was meaningless scribble as far as he could see. But he smiled and nodded “Merci.”

            It happened again and again, at intervals as the night wore on.

            “Merci.”

“Merci.”

“Merci.”

Mercy, he started to translate it after a while. Precious little of that round here, he thought, looking at the body of a young man who hadn’t recovered consciousness, and wouldn’t last the night.

Up and down. Up and down.

Goujet became more insistent as the night wore one, more obviously deranged. As far as you could tell. But it’s difficult to know whether somebody’s mad or not if he can’t speak. What he wanted, and he made this very clear, was for Paul to take the paper from him and keep it. By the end of the shift, the pockets of Paul’s tunic and breeches were stuffed full of folded pages, every one of them marked by lines and lines of scribble. Only when the pad had been used up did Goujet lie back, apparently satisfied.

Lewis didn’t appear in the morning. No doubt Sister Byrd had talked to him. His absence was rather disconcerting. Paul had grown used to seeing him there.

Going off duty, he stood for a moment in the doorway, smelling the dawn wind. Two miles away, no more noticeable than the beating of his heart, the guns thudded: the usual early morning intensification of fire. He took the sheets of paper from his pocket, bunched them together and tore them into tiny pieces. Released onto the wind, they whirled high above his head then slowly, bit by bit, drifted down till they lay on the bare ground. A driver was bending down, turning the crank handle of his ambulance. Soon within a minute or two, the big wheels would force the scraps of paper deep into the mud, but before that could happen Paul had already turned away.