A poor old boy came in late this afternoon with crush injuries to both legs from just below the pelvis. One of those insanely freaky accidents that aren’t even supposed to happen at all. He’d been walking along minding his own business when a block of concrete fell off an elderly factory’s cornice. If it had hit him, there wouldn’t have been enough of him left to scrape up, but what hit him was the sheet of iron attached to it just far enough from the ground when it met it to squash his legs flat, and then, rebounding, to release him, let the ambulancemen rush him to Queens. There was no hope for him, of course, not at his age. Eighty.
I was returning from the female staff room to my own domain when Sister Herbert, on evening shift, grabbed me and asked me if I was busy. I said no.
“Look, the place is a shambles and I’ve got more nurses coming any minute, but I need someone trained to see what’s bothering my poor old boy in Seven. He’s terribly distressed, he won’t settle, and I don’t want him pegging out unhappy. We’ve done what we can—he’s going to meet his Maker tonight for sure, but he keeps crying for someone called Marceline. I can’t bear the thought that we’re not making his last moments what they should be, but I can’t spare anybody to talk to him. He insists he’s got no family or kin—oh, he’s fully conscious, it’s that sort of shock. Could you talk to him for me?” Off she dashed—the place really was a shambles.
He was so sweet, the poor old boy, and scrupulously clean. They’d taken his false teeth, so he smiled at me gummily, clasped my hand. The drips, the cradle, the monitors didn’t seem to impinge on him. All he could think about was Marceline. His cat.
“I won’t be home to feed her,” he said. “Marceline! Who will look after my angel?”
The words hit me like a ton of bricks. His angel.
My heart always aches for the old and forgotten—there are so many of them around the inner city, living in those dreary, neglected terraced houses between Royal Queens and the Cross. BOARD AND LODGING, MEN ONLY the hand-lettered cardboard signs say, and men like my poor old boy eke out an existence in a tiny room a thousand times over. Subsisting on dignity and the smell of an oil rag, or else sodden with drink. Eating in the soup kitchens, resigned to their solitude. And here was this one, dying before my eyes, with no one to care for his angel.
A fourth-year nurse arrived not five minutes after me, and between us we managed to convince him that I would feed his cat, care for her until he came home. Once he believed us, he closed his eyes and drifted contentedly away.
I borrowed Chris’s canvas shopping bag and a supply of safety pins, walked up to Flinders Street, found the house, knocked. When no one answered I pushed the front door open and started knocking on every door inside. Absentee landlord because no one in authority challenged me. An old boy with a bad case of the shakes and enough alcohol on his breath to make my head spin pointed toward the backyard, such as it was. A mean little rectangle full of junk. And there, sitting on the skeleton of a gas stove, was my poor old boy’s angel. A skinny tortoiseshell cat which stood up and mewed at me plaintively.
I held out my hand. “Marceline? Are you Marceline?”
She jumped down, came to rub around my legs purring loudly. When I put Chris’s bag flat on the ground and lifted one edge of it to make a cave, the cat calmly walked inside it, and when I set it on its flat bottom and began to shove safety pins in it to close it, the cat just kept on purring. So I carried my burden home with no trouble except the fear that Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz would refuse to let me keep Marceline angel. No one else has a pet except Klaus, who keeps two budgies in a cage and lets them fly around his room.
She knew what was in the shopping bag, though it neither moved nor emitted a meow. How does she know? Because she sees it in the cards or the Glass.
“You keep it, princess,” she said, waving a dismissal.
I didn’t tell her that Marceline was an angel. That I had brought the animal home as an omen.
When I undid the shopping bag, there was Marceline in its bottom, paws tucked under, snoozing. Maybe my poor old boy had some reason on his side, to be so attached to this only other living thing in his life. Marceline was special. I fed her on smoked eel, which she devoured ravenously, and when I pointed to the partially open window, she stared at me solemnly, then waddled to it with distended belly, jumped to the sill, and vanished.
I wonder will I still have a cat in the morning?