The Shining Girls. Lauren Beukes

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       Harper

       22 November 1931

      The Mercy Hospital does not live up to its name. ‘Can you pay?’ the tired-looking woman in the reception booth demands through a round hole in the glass. ‘Paying patients go to the front of the line.’

      ‘How long is the wait?’ Harper grunts.

      The woman inclines her head towards the triage waiting area. It is standing-room only, apart from the people who are sitting or lying half-collapsed on the floor, too sick or tired or plain goddamn bored to stay on their feet. A few glance up with hope or outrage or some unsustainable mix of the two in their eyes. The others have the same look of resignation he’s seen in farm horses on their last legs, ribs as pronounced as the cracks and furrows in the dead earth they strain the plow against. You shoot a horse like that.

      He digs in the pocket of the stolen coat for the crumpled five-dollar bill he found there, together with a safety pin, three dimes, two quarters and a key, worn out in a way that feels familiar. Or maybe he has become accustomed to tarnish.

      ‘Is this enough for mercy, sweetheart?’ he asks, shoving the bill through the window.

      ‘Yes.’ She holds his gaze, to tell him that she is not ashamed to charge, even though the very act of doing so says otherwise.

      She rings a little bell and a nurse comes to collect him, her practical shoes slapping against the linoleum. E. Kappel it reads on her name-badge. She is pretty, in an ordinary sort of way, with rosy cheeks and carefully ironed cherry-brown curls under her white cap. Apart from her nose, which is turned up too much, so it looks like a snout. Little piggy, he thinks.

      ‘Come with me,’ she says, irritated that he’s there at all. Already cataloging him as so much more human trash. She turns and strides away so that he has to jolt after her. Each step sends pain shooting up to his hip, like a Chinese rocket, but he is determined to keep up.

      Every ward they pass is crammed to capacity, sometimes with two people to a bed, laid head to foot. All the sickness inside spilling out.

      Not as bad as the field hospitals, he thinks. Mangled men clustered on blood-stained stretchers among the stink of burns and rotting wounds and shit and vomit and sour fever sweats. The incessant moaning like a terrible choir.

      There was that boy from Missouri with his leg blown off, he remembers. He wouldn’t let up screaming, keeping them all awake, until Harper sneaked over, as if to comfort him. What he actually did was slide his bayonet in through the idiot boy’s thigh above the bloody wreckage and neatly flick it up to sever the artery. Just like he’d practiced on the straw dummies in training. Stab and twist. A gut wound will drop a man in his tracks every time. Harper always found it more personal than bullets, getting right up into someone. It made the war bearable.

      No chance of that here, he supposes. But there are other ways to get rid of troublesome patients. ‘You should break out the black bottle,’ Harper says, just to rile the chubby nurse. ‘They’d thank you for it.’

      She gives a little snort of contempt as she leads him past the doors of the private wards, tidy single-occupant rooms that are mostly vacant. ‘Don’t you tempt me. Quarter of the hospital is acting as a pest-house right now. Typhoid, infection. Poison would be a blessing. But don’t you let the surgeons hear you talking about no black bottle.’

      Through an open doorway, he sees a girl lying in a bed surrounded by flowers. She has the look of a film star, even though it’s been over a decade since Charlie Chaplin upped and left Chicago for California and took the whole movie industry with him. Her hair is sweat-plastered in damp blonde ringlets around her face, made paler by the wan winter sunlight struggling through the windows. But as he falters outside, her eyes flutter open. She half sits up and smiles at him radiantly, as if she was expecting him, and he’d be welcome to come sit for a while and talk with her.

      Nurse Kappel is having none of it. She grabs him by the elbow and escorts him away. ‘No gawping, now. The last thing that hussy needs is another admirer.’

      ‘Who is she?’ He looks back.

      ‘No one. A nudey dancer. Little idiot poisoned herself with radium. It’s her act, she paints herself with it so that she glows in the dark. Don’t worry, she’ll be discharged soon and then you can see as much of her as you like. All of her, way I hear it.’

      She ushers him into the doctor’s room, bright white with an antiseptic sting. ‘Now sit here and let’s take a look at what you done to yourself.’

      He hops up unsteadily onto the examination table. She screws up her face in concentration as she cuts away the filthy rags he has tied as tight as he could bear in a stirrup under his heel.

      ‘You’re stupid, you know that?’ The little smile at the corner of her mouth says she knows she can get away with talking to him like this. ‘Waiting to come here. You think this would get better all on its own?’

      She’s right. It doesn’t help that he’s been sleeping rough for the last two nights, camped out in a doorway with a cardboard box to sleep on and a stolen coat for a blanket СКАЧАТЬ