THOMAS HICKS COULD SEE HIS WIFE, Emily, sitting across from him at the table. He felt terribly ill and knew he’d vomited down his nightshirt. He couldn’t catch his breath no matter how hard he tried and his head was throbbing so violently he was afraid his skin would split apart at the temples. He tried to cry out for help, but Emily didn’t seem to notice. She was drinking her tea in that dainty precise way he remembered so well. He knew that his bladder and bowels had voided and he was ashamed even in front of her. He wanted to move, to stand up and get away from the pain in his chest, but he couldn’t.
She put down her cup and saucer and folded her hands neatly in her lap.
“Have you come for me at last, dearest?” he managed to ask her.
“Yes, Tom, I have, “she said and her smile was so sweet, his eyes filled with tears and he wept.
“Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care.” Murdoch had studied Macbeth in the fifth standard. Brother Julian, who was stupefyingly dull, had taught the class and he and his pupils had never progressed beyond the thorny hedge of the unfamiliar language. Brother Julian seemed to find Shakespeare as foreign and uninteresting as they did. However, just once, the play had come alive when quite out of the blue, the Brother said that Shakespeare had understood, even in that long ago time, how disease of the soul can affect sleep. “Macbeth hath murdered sleep,” proclaimed the Brother, his voice unusually resonant. “His guilty conscience prevents him from sleeping.”
Murdoch had suffered from insomnia as long as he could remember, and Brother Julian’s remark had thrown him into a dark period as he tried to discover if his own soul was indeed sick and, if so, how he could heal it. Fortunately for him, there was a priest, Father Malone, who was attached to the school, had listened to the young boy’s painful confessions, reassured him, and absolved him. But the insomnia never went away and many a night Murdoch found himself lying awake, waiting for dawn to come when he could fall asleep.
He thumped at the scrawny pillow as he tried to get more comfortable. Staying awake this time was a choice, which made matters a little easier, but he still felt the familiar twist of utter loneliness in his guts. He was sharing a room with about sixty other men, but he felt alone, the perpetual outsider. What would they do if they knew he was spying on them? Did he have copper written all over him? He hoped not. He thought his own cover story was plausible and they’d seemed to accept it. He could just make out the shape of Bettles and Kearney across the aisle. They were both lying still and their sleep seemed genuine. Traveller was on his back, snoring softly, his breathing deep. Murdoch owed him a debt now for his intervention. From the beginning, he had been most friendly. Was he like that with every newcomer or was he currying favour? Did he suspect the truth?
Murdoch could hear Alf, in the next bed, snuffling and whimpering periodically in his sleep like the puppy Traveller had called him. Murdoch let his thoughts drift. He wondered if anybody was awake at home. Katie might be tending to the twins. Perhaps Amy had got up again and was helping her. She was so good with the babies. Murdoch grinned to himself. She wasn’t like any teacher he’d known. The nuns at his school were strict, but in the early years he was a studious and obedient boy and he’d liked school and done well. It was later, when his Aunt Weldon had sent him to study with the Christian Brothers, that school descended into unremitting misery. Murdoch chafed at the strict and unjust rules, the capricious dishing out of punishments, but above all, he loathed what he perceived as the superstitious ignorance of the Brothers. Most of his teachers seemed poorly educated, hardly one step ahead of their pupils. He began to challenge them, to speak back, and almost every day he was caned for some infraction, supposed rudeness, or simply because that day the Brother felt like beating his pupils. The worst, the man who became his hated enemy was Brother Edmund, a big-boned, hard-faced man who before he’d found his calling had worked for a horse breeder somewhere in Alberta. This Brother boasted that there wasn’t a horse or a boy he couldn’t break. Murdoch had desperately wanted to prove him wrong, but the contest was impossibly unequal. By the end of his second year, Murdoch knew he had only three choices. He could leave the school without an education of any kind, endure a brutality usually reserved for hardened criminals, or stop questioning everything, learn whatever he could and go silent. He chose the last option and Brother Edmund crowed.
Murdoch’s jaw had clenched at the memory. Unlike Traveller, his body no longer carried the scars of the floggings the Christian brother had administered with such undisguised delight, but his soul did. He’d heard a few years ago that Brother Edmund had died from diphtheria and Murdoch’s first reaction was one of regret that he’d never gone back to the school, found the man and given him the thrashing he deserved.
Amy Slade’s pupils would never carry that kind of memory, quite the opposite.
He hadn’t told her what he was up to, but Charlie would have explained why he wasn’t at home. She’d be eager to hear his tales when he returned, he knew that. He was lucky to have her and Seymour, and he’d come to rely on their company the way he had on the Kitchens. As long as he’d been living with the Kitchens, he’d had some feeling of family and he dearly hoped Arthur would recover. Murdoch would like to have his own family, he knew that. He and Liza had talked about having children, had even picked out names.
Murdoch sighed. The possibility of finding a wife seemed remote now that Enid had left him. Maybe he should go back to professor Otranto’s dance studio. There were some very attractive young women there, but he didn’t feel comfortable dancing with them, treading on toes, his hands sweating on the silk of their dresses. He was out of practice and he’d be sure to make a bollocks of the waltzes.
If he were at home in his own room, he would have got out of bed at this point, pushed back the rug, and done a few reverse turns. If he did that now, they’d probably send for the doctor and he’d get committed.
Thank goodness Dr. Ogden had been drawn away by Parker. Clever Ed. All that trickery paying off.
Somebody at the far end of the ward got up to use the commode. He seemed to be ill and groaned and broke wind alternately until he voided. Murdoch hoped he wouldn’t forget to empty that bucket.
The nightshirt was itchy. He scratched his chest remembering the bedbug bites on the men going into the bath. Somewhere in the city, people were sleeping in soft feather beds with linen sheets that were washed regularly. They were warm and fed. Of all the men in this room, how many deserved this wretched fate? Less than one-third in his estimation. The others, through the misfortune of injury or ill health, were sentenced like convicts to a wandering life with no home or family and little prospect of getting out of the mire. The more time a man spent in the casual wards, the less chance he stood of getting back to a respectable job. Employers were suspicious of the wayfarers and as he’d already seen, they were the first to be suspected of a crime if one occurred in their vicinity.
Was it one of these men who had attacked Charles Howard so viciously? In his mind, both Bettles and Kearney were capable of it. Bettles had shrugged off his bruised face and the minister didn’t seem to have marks on his knuckles, but he could have struck out with his elbow, an object in his hand, anything really. Which of them had been wearing Howard’s boots before Parker took them?
Murdoch sighed and pulled the threadbare cover up to his chin. He’d better start acting more like a detective and less like a tramp if he was going to find out.
Josie groaned and tried to sit up, but the room swam nauseatingly in front of her eyes and she dropped back to the pillow. She reached over to touch her mother, who was lying beside her.
“Ma, can you get me some water, I’m desperate thirsty.” She thought she’d said this, but she wasn’t sure. Her head ached and she felt as if the air was so heavy it sat on her chest making it hard to breathe.
“Ma,” she said again and she turned her head. A cold, clammy fog from the lake had crept into the room and she was finding it hard to see anything clearly. She so wanted to go back to sleep, but she knew she shouldn’t. Through the deepening mist, she tried to see her mother’s face.
“Ma, get up. It must be late.”
Esther stirred and Josie saw her struggle to get out of the bed. She knew she was trying to get to Wilf.
She always puts him first, she thought irritably. Can’t she see I’m dying?