Mother of Pearl Read Online Free Page B

Arthur …’
    A gift, particularly in Granitefield, was as rare and wondrous as a smile from a beloved.
    â€˜I thought you might be able to help me,’ Arthur said, still holding the chocolates hostage.
    â€˜Oh?’ Irene said. ‘In what way?’
    He looked at her queasily. ‘Charlie Piper says that you might be able to render me a service …’
    It was always done in darkness. In the boiler room at the back of the camp, or the spit room where they boiled the sputum, or the mortuary. As she stripped, Irene would think of the many times she had done this for Dr Clemens, how he had poked and prodded, listening intently to the workings of her congested chest and clogged lungs. He did not seem to see the exterior, her breasts, her bare shoulders, goose-pimples rising on her forearms. No, he saw only a collection of livid organs, the pictures of which she had seen so often that she began to recognise herself only by them. She feared that one day she would look in the mirror and see a blue skeleton, a trellis of ribs and two pear-shaped sacs that were her lungs. To be watched as she undressed had been robbed of any erotic allure; she felt she was revealing very little. She had already been seen through, down to the marrow of her bones.
    They were invariably grateful, the infectious ones. Shut up in their little coops all day, their arms picked up and dropped for pulse-taking, their mouths a receptacle for thermometers, their chests and backsides like pin cushions, they longed for a touch that lingered. Someone to pause, hand on flesh, to marvel at this breast bone, that hollowed-out nape, the wing of an eyebrow, to stroke the shattered line of a ribcage or the ghostly shadow of a haunch. She had her rules. She would never let them penetrate her. If they wanted gratification they must do it themselves. She could touch them, but they must never lay a finger on her. Irene would remain a virgin; she was saving herself.
This
was her calling, she believed, her life’s work.
    At first the names had faces. Billy Ratchett; Mossie Watling; Matthew Bennett. Matthew gave her nylons, Mossie traded with scented soap. Billy Ratchett had unwittingly left her a calendar stalled at the month of his death. It showed a Swiss chalet, its wooden gable set against an apron of blue.
    â€˜The great sanatorium in the sky,’ he had said, laughing grimly. Phil Morgan, John Conway, Jim Thorpe … afterwards they became blurred, a procession of the wounded, whom Irene recalled with the helpless fondess of a mother for her absent, roving sons.
    Davy Bly worked in the laundry. It was a place of torture for clothes. Pyjamas, bed linen and towels emerged from it thin and scratchy as if they, too, had caught a debilitating, terminal disease. The battering they got seemed like a mirror of the nerve-racking round of injections and rib-cracking their owners endured. Davy, another of Dr Clemens’ refugees, fed the stolid machines which laboured constantly, drumming away softly against one another. They looked as if they were being put through some kind of drill as they harrumphed into action and shuddered together in a comradely fashion. The high tide of suds rising in their portholes and the constant thrum made the laundry feel like an infernal cabin deep in the bowels of a ship, close to the engine room. Irene had never liked Davy. She distrusted his goitred eye, his drinker’s face. She found his bulbous gaze and the spittle which gathered in the corners of his mouth lewd. And she had seen him handle things, the innards of the machines, for example, as if there was some secret gratification in it.
    He did errands ‘for the lads’ as he called them, ‘backing the gee-gees’ or smuggling in drink. As a patient, Irene had secretly cheered such anarchy; now she saw it as a reneging of duty. Davy, another ex-patient, was on the front line; he did not take his responsibilities seriously. He cornered her