The Silver Dark Sea. Susan Fletcher

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СКАЧАТЬ only room with a view of the sea is what she calls the mending room. She’s always called it this. Surgery feels too grand for it: a white-painted room, linoleum floor, a small cabinet of pills and liquids that islanders have prescriptions for and others which she keeps just in case. A table and chair face the door. Behind them, she has a poster of the musculature of the human body – reddish and gruesome, which the children love. On the table, Tabitha keeps an African violet; she likes its dark, furred leaves.

      This room has seen plenty, that’s for sure. It holds its secrets – small ones, and ones that have changed a life and other lives. She, Tabitha, knows all of them. Lorcan, also, must have heard some strange confessions over the years – he walks with the weight of what he’s been told, or so it looks, for he has lumbar pain that she gives him codeine for and a stern telling-off when he carries too many hymn books. They go to him for their souls; for their bodies they come to Lowfield, and so here it is that Tabitha listens to hearts and takes temperatures and tends to the wounds that come from a life of farming, or the sea – a half-severed thumb from the shearing blades, or rope-burn that has broken the skin. She knows who has high blood pressure, who does not sleep, and who is on the contraceptive pill. She knows who drinks too much, whose skin flakes under their clothes, who takes pills to thin their blood, who has athlete’s foot, cold sores, piles. She knows of Sam’s migraines, of her own sister’s painful joints. And Tabitha has brought babies into the world, in her time – all five of the Lovegrove children and three of her own family have slid like eels into her waiting hands.

      Tabitha sips. She thinks all those secrets … Once, newly qualified, she’d believed that everything was curable – every human pain. But she was wrong to think it. Guilt, heartbreak – what cures them? Or simply makes them bearable? Nothing on her shelves.

      Still – she views this room as safety. She wants each person who steps into it to feel cared for. With the pot-plant and the pressed bed linen, she has always tried for that.

      In the far corner, there is an iron-framed single bed. Tabitha goes to it, sits down. She pushes her slippers off with her toes, swings her legs up and nestles back. From here, she can see the finger of land called Litty, the nettle patch which no-one has ever mowed or dug up because of the voles that live there. The tiny, tufty-eared Parlan vole – it is its own species, and rare, and she has seen one or two in her time or at least the nettles swaying where a vole has darted from. Beyond Litty, there is the water. The sea – scattered with light. What view was ever better than this?

      She wiggles her toes in their polka-dot socks.

      Tabitha drinks her pink wine.

      * * *

       You knock.

       No, you. I can’t take my hand away, it’s under his head – see?

      Ian curses. He is aching. He has carried a thousand sheep in his life, slung round his neck like a collar and he’s carried boat engines and tractor wheels and his own kids when they were young – but not this weight, and not so far. I’m too old for this, he thinks.

      He kicks at Tabitha’s door. Three kicks, low down near the doorframe – all too hard.

      The men shift. They are steaming like horses, sweat on their top lips and brows. The man they carry groans overhead so that Ian says, hurry up …

      The kicking must have startled her for when Tabitha unlocks the door, she peers around it as if unsure of what she might find. But then she sees Ian. She sees all of them, widens her eyes. Looks like you’d better come in, she says.

      She leans against the wall to let them pass.

      The room smells of disinfectant and a false, lavender scent which comes from a bottle plugged into the wall. Put him on the bed.

      He goes down heavily.

      All four men exhale. Then they stretch, step away. Nathan straightens and his back clicks. Jonny rotates his right shoulder and says Jesus. What do you think he weighs?

      Tabitha is by the bed. Foremost, she is the nurse – not the aunt, not the great-aunt or the friend – and she busies herself with what a nurse must do, lifting the man’s head and arranging the pillow beneath it. She takes his wrist, watches the wall clock as she does so. With her eyes still on the clock she asks who is he? Do we know him?

      Ian says no.

       What happened?

       Sam found him.

       Where?

      At Sye.

       On the stones?

      Just lying there, says Sam. I thought he was dead.

      She nods; the man’s pulse is good. Tabitha can feel the warm bloom of his breath against her arm. She feels the edge of the vest he wears, finds it is cold and hardening with salt – so she opens a nearby drawer, lifts scissors out. When had she last used them? For what? On whom?

      She cuts away his clothing. The chest that appears is dark with hair. Has he spoken?

      Jonny shrugs. He’s muttered a bit –

      He tried to say something, Nathan tells her.

       So he’s been conscious?

       Yes.

       He didn’t lose it at any point?

       Not since we’ve been with him.

       Any wounds?

      His hands – Ian points.

      She looks. Ian’s right – the fingernails are torn, and three of his knuckles are bruised. When she turns the hands over, she finds his palms are dirtied, rough and red-coloured. Pinheads of blood. Grains of sand. Grazes.

       From what?

       Rope, maybe? Hard to say. And here …

      There is more, too. On his left hand, in the soft web of flesh between the thumb and forefinger, there is a very different wound. It is neither fresh nor old. It is reddish-brown. Perfectly round, like an eye.

      Tabitha cannot know what caused such marks. But hands mend and mend quickly; hands do not worry her too much. It is his head that Tabitha turns to now: the head, which she always thought of as a world in its own right – with its seas and land and weather, its mysteries that, in fact, no human brain can fathom. She snaps on latex gloves. Slowly, she starts to feel through his hair. She searches for cuts, or swellings, or a tender part that will make him wince. His hair is so thick she must move it aside, in sections. Where there is scalp, she presses it; like this she makes her way round his head – from ear to ear, from brow to nape. His eyes half-open. His lips move, as if he dreams.

      No sign of swelling, she says.

      That’s good. Right? Sam is anxious.

       Yes, Sam – it’s good.

      She СКАЧАТЬ