The Centre of the Green Read Online Free Page B

shadow priest administer a shadow sacrament, while the dying man lay passively on the bed, and the priest leaned over him to catch the last confession of some shadow sin. They watched the shadow nurse sit by his side reading
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, and the slow occasional stirrings of the man in the bed, made only, it seemed, as if to show that life was not done yet, not quite done, not until at last the man jerked upwards a little, and bubbled, and snored, and stopped, and was gone for ever, leaving only his body on the bed. Then they watched the departure of the shadow nurse to report, and waited out the hour that went by before the dead man could indeed be treated as dead. All the deft routine of laying-out, they watched in shadow-play . They saw the shadow nurse shave the dead body, dab wet swabs on its eyes, strip it, fold its hands neatly beneath its buttocks, tie its toes together, slip a bandage beneath its chin so that it should not stiffen grotesquely awry, and finally ease it into its shroud. Then she let the bib of the shroud fall over the body’s face, and made all safe with cotton, biting the thread when the task wasdone. She summoned the porters. Soundlessly on rubber wheels the trolley was brought to the bedside, and the corpse transferred to it to be taken off to the hospital mortuary. Only then was the light switched off, and the performance over.
    “Will you take note of that now?” said the Irishman in the next bed. “They’ll have someone else in it when we wake in the morning.”
    But in the morning the bed was empty and freshly made, and it was not reoccupied until midday.
    *
    “Well,” the doctor said, “what the hell did you think
you
were doing?”
    When Charles did not reply, the doctor sat down on the chair next to the bed, and motioned to Sister that she might leave them together. She nodded, and went swiftly through the swing doors at the end of the ward. “She disapproves of psychiatrists,” the doctor said. “You can’t blame her really. I disapprove of them myself. We’re not much more than a sort of confidence trick really. Still, a man must live.”
    “Yes, I suppose so.”
    “Had a chap in here the other day,” the doctor said. “Same trouble. Pills, stomach pump—all that fuss! He said he’d taken the pills by mistake in a cinema. It was some sort of Western, and he couldn’t stand the racket. Thought he’d go to sleep for a while, had the pills in his pocket, took one, and couldn’t stop. Said it was like eating sweets. Same sort of compulsion. I believed him. I’d believe any story under these circumstances, you know.”
    Charles said nothing.
    “I mean it. When you came into this hospital, we saved your life. You may think that was interfering, but it’s our job; we have to do it. The next job, as I see it, is to make sure you’re not prosecuted for attempted suicide.We don’t think that being prosecuted does people much good, you see. In our experience, it sometimes depresses them so much that they go straight off and try again. This chap I was talking about, now; he’d come down in the world a bit. Thrown out of his job with an insurance company for doing a bit of fiddling, found work as a waiter, gone to live in Stepney, and felt the difference. I take it you’re not in any trouble of that kind.”
    “I was tight.”
    “That’s a start. You mistook the bottle?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good. Can you think of anything you mistook the bottle
for
? Indigestion tablets? Alka Seltzer? You had to go out, and didn’t want people to know you’d been drinking.”
    “What people?”
    “Well, that’s a point, isn’t it? Haven’t you any friends who’d care whether you were tight or not?”
    Charles said, “It wasn’t premeditated or anything. I really was tight. It was just a sort of impulse.”
    “You haven’t thought of suicide before then?”
    Again a silence. “I suppose I have,” Charles said.
    “Often?”
    “Not often. I get moods of