He stood in front of the elderly woman, hands clasped behind his back, eyes fixed directly on her.
“Mrs McCaffrey, would you like a cup of tea, coffee or milk?”
The ceaseless call for her mother abated. She perked up as she contemplated a familiar and unexpected choice. “Tea,” she beamed and he set down a cup with a flourish that reminded her of china with flowers on it and dating Jack, now two years gone. “Cuts!” the nurse declared, then conspiratorially, “It’s like a psychiatric ward in here, but it isn’t.” Cries for help ricocheted around the bay where they sat huddled over notes. They weren’t being cruel; they were driven to exercise professional selection.
I knew him, the orderly, but I couldn’t put a name to him, so I hid behind my paper.
“Miss Woods,” he read the name where it appeared above my head “Would you like something tonight?”
“No thanks.”
Not to be churlish, I allowed the rims of my glasses to float above the print. He moved off and I lowered my shield further. His hair was tinged grey, there was a slight hunch at the base of his neck and he had put on weight, but there was still a hint of unmistakeable swagger.
The name came to me later when I couldn’t sleep; not the one on his ID card - a peek that meant nothing - but the one they’d called him, ‘The General’. I knew Roland White had christened him. Roland was an irritating boy, playground plankton, with a cunning that allowed him to survive. He insinuated himself to stay safe and camouflaged his disdain for those less clever than himself. In a fight, he’d be the one holding the coats, though he might easily have been the one being kicked on the ground. He would have enjoyed that the name had stuck, knowing that his classmate’s military prowess had all the strategy of a provoked bull. The General had never aspired to a white-collar job, but I was surprised that he had washed up here, which is why it took me so long to place him. If I had ever thought about him, I might have expected him to be already dead.
During my recuperation, I sensed recognition in other faces. Stolen glances weighed up the thickness in the pile of my dressing gown and took in the cut of my backless slippers that suggested at least a stage or two before the geriatric. When they noticed that I saw them looking, it is hard to tell who felt more exposed by the intimacy of my nightdress, now on display, after so many years of guarded privacy. They drifted in with the passing traffic of visiting hour and tentatively stopped on the way out to wish me well. It helped to pass the time and as their kindness outweighed their curiosity, I gave up attempts at concealment and learned to be glad. The General was a daily fixture on the ward, but he said nothing that departed from his habitual script. From him there was no flicker of acknowledgement, no subtle shift in tone or even a glint to indicate that our lives had crossed briefly in a pocket of time.
As my chest infection cleared, I was allowed to sit up more. I watched out for him and when there was still no reaction, I began to grow bold. I would ask him to pass a book from my locker or to return the blanket they had draped over my knees to the bed. Nothing broke his quiet neutrality. I grew irked and ruffled by curiosity that contained at least a speck of injured pride. I did not recall treating him with anything other than fairness, therefore to be so completely obliterated from his memory seemed a response beyond contempt.
“How’s your mother?” I inquired.
Although there was no mention of discharge, things were progressing as well as they could and it wouldn’t be long or so I hoped. I hadn’t thought the thing through. I hadn’t intended to be the one to speak first - why should I - but in this environment it was easy to slip and my thoughts over spilled.
“She was asking after you,” he said.
“Give her my regards.”
“I will.”
He trundled on with the trolley, cups and saucers tinkling.
Maybe it was not so strange. Can professions not be inherited as well as eyes, hair or general disposition? There are families of teachers and of pharmacists. His mother had been one of our dinner ladies. He used to slip off to her between classes when the others didn’t notice. He would arrive late with a tell tale smudge of tomato sauce around his lips or when he hadn’t been deemed unwell enough to go home, he’d trail in, heralded by a dramatic trumpeting as he unblocked his nose. Perhaps he took after her after all, although it was his father, a soldier, whom he idolised. His father had been killed in action - Iraq, the Balkans - the story changed with the telling, the details around the solid fact were hazy.
So he had told his mother and she had remembered me. That was as far as the dialogue went, though he did slip me a few magazines to break the monotony of staring ahead. It was summer. People were on holiday. He noticed I had little to distract me.
The main thing I recall about his mother was the day she’d arrived in my classroom in such a fluster that she’d forgotten to remove the netted cap from her hair. She was used to his fists landing him in trouble, but this time she was clearly upset and had come to me before I’d got to her.
“It won’t happen again, Miss Woods. There’s no excuse for it.”
The following day he’d brought me in a note.
“Don’t you owe Roland an apology?” I suggested.
He shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’m just sorry that it happened in your class, that’s all.”
“What’s your mother say about that?”
“She says there’s rules, even in war. But I don’t know,” he shrugged.
There are televisions attached to the beds in the wards, but only one appeared to work and it wasn’t mine. It was tuned to a radio station that played songs on repeat. The first five or six times, they were entertaining; after that it became like a shop at Christmas. The General produced an aerial, a remote and earphones from the bottom of his trolley one evening.
“They’re not broken,” he explained, “People nick the aerials and there isn’t money to replace them.”
He attached the devices, hooking me up to the outside world. His lips toyed with a smile as my praise lapped round him.
“You seem to like working here,” I said.
“I don’t just do here.”
“No?”
“I have a school, another school and a bar to fit in. A sixteen hour day, six days a week,”
“Not much time to get into trouble.”
“None.”
“Do you ever hear of….”
“Roland works as a dentist. I ran into him once in the bar. He was…cool.”
I doubted it but that would be Roland. He only attacked from a position of safety. He sat at the front of the class. The General usually settled to a comfortable stretch at the back, preferably near the window so he could keep an eye on whatever was going on outside in the pitch. He had no inclination for poetry, so I was pleased when he took an interest in Wilfred Owen.
“They must all have been thick!”
Roland’s response to Owen’s expression of the futility of war was deliberately without nuance.
“Misled perhaps,” I corrected.
“Who did he call thick, Miss?”
“The soldiers who went to the front to get shot at,” chirped Roland.
“They’re not thick. They’re fighting for their country. Tell him, Miss. My dad was a soldier.”
Roland landed the fish with relish.
“You’re da was a traitor. He was a Brit.”
The General was up and out of his seat like a whippet at a race and had landed several successful punches on Roland before the Principal arrived to intervene. He took them both away and the class and I sat silently listening to air locked radiators. How could I tell them that The General’s mother had fallen for the charms of ‘the other side’, a war crime in the part of the North where she lived? How could I begin to explain that love and war could get so mixed up that it was sometimes hard to tell where they started and ended?
“Back to your books,” was all that I said, “We’ll try to continue.”
“What channel do you want?”
The General had tuned the TV.
“Are you into soap?”
“No. Put on the news.”
In the three weeks I’d been in, large parts of Gaza had been reduced to ruins. I remarked how it takes considerably less time to pull down something than to mend.
“No money for cancer treatment, but always plenty for war. I’m sure you’re glad you didn’t become a soldier?”
I meant it as a statement rather than a question.
“No,” he said, “I still think it takes guts to fight for your country. I coped out.”
I was surprised. I thought he had grown out of the notion.
“So why did you ‘cop out’?”
His head was down but I pressed on. There was no going back.
“It is what you wanted.”
Everybody knew. In Career’s class, Art, History - the same aspiration always surfaced. His mother tried to dissuade him, her only son, but she could not argue against a memory she had created so he would not have to go without. He rolled up his sleeve and showed me a tattoo of four stars, three coloured in, which stretched across his upper arm.
“Gina, my wife, she’s expecting. I’ve told her when I’ve filled in this one, that’s it. No more.”
He traced his finger along the contours of the first of the stars.
“I’d just joined up, hadn’t even got the uniform. Ma lost it. It wasn’t the child. It was because I was going to go on ahead. Apparently he’d left her to it, me da, a few months before he died. She was already on her own, apart from me and I was two. I didn’t know before that. No more, I’ve said. I say plenty of things, don’t I?”
He was embarrassed, as if he’d let me down. I reached out to touch the little constellation.
“They’re great,” I said.
“They sure are,” he agreed, “More than great.”
On the television screen we saw a biblical figure in beard and gown search for his mother in rubble that had been their house. A sister held a photo of her uniformed brother who was missing.
“ It may be brave to die for your country, but it takes guts to live for it, everyday. War is just not for soldiers.”
He sat with me for a while then and we watched together.
Catherine Kelly lives and works in Co Down. She teaches English, history, drama and creative writing in schools and on various adult education courses. She has taught at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast and Down Arts Centre and has had two plays broadcast on RTÉ.
