IT IS HOT IN BEA’S FLEABAG AND HOWEVER PROUD SHE is of her strength at the steering wheel, her arms and shoulders ache as though they’ve been pummelled. Her underclothes are soaked through. They’ll just have to dry off during the day – it gets damn hot enough for them to, even here, on the northern coast of France. The heat makes everything smell worse, including herself. Ladies didn’t sweat at the start of this war, but then they didn’t dash around in thick wool uniforms at the height of summer. Now, well, she won’t say what it’s like, but you can hardly simply whisper ‘perspiration’ any more. It’s the fear as much as the exertion that brings it on, though it’s not always easy to distinguish between the two. Some jaunt this is.
Ladies’ pretty bodies weren’t livid with flea bites before the war either, especially ones where they have to sit on their hands to prevent themselves scratching the tops off. You can hardly sleep in that position, not unless you’re on your stomach, fingers trapped under your hipbones, which is hellish hard to achieve given the sag on the canvas bed under her. She might as well be sleeping in a hammock. Bea examines her fingernails for traces of blood from scratched bites. There is a brownish gunk under her fingernails, and some smeared around the side; it could be from her, or … she doesn’t want to think about that.
And there’s no time to dawdle; she was woken by the whistle. She’s had a full three hours’ sleep and now she has five minutes until roll-call at seven thirty. Sharp. One slip and she’ll be scrubbing the lavatory again. At first they all tried pulling their uniforms on over their nightdresses and pyjamas, but the commandant saw right through that. You could see your face on the lavatory floor for weeks afterwards, so many of them had been ordered to scrub it. Now they just fall asleep in their combinations so they’re ready to go in the morning. They often fall asleep in everything they’ve got on. Too damn tired to do anything else.
Four minutes to go. Teeth. Bitter, bitter taste. Three minutes. Uniform, cold water again, get that red-brown mark out of the front of her skirt, if it hasn’t set in there. Two minutes, hair and just enough time for the end of last night’s cigarette as she finishes off. Smoking, that’s one thing she’s come to enjoy more out here. It kills appetite which, given what is on offer, is no bad thing. Now she has a cigarette between her lips as often as she can. In fact, she’s downright irritable, they all are, when they’re short of them. One minute left, make her bed. God, she longs to get back into it, and fat chance of that. How can it be this hard to straighten a fleabag? She shouldn’t be in the warmth of a fleabag in summer anyway, but she needs it, she needs, for whatever small part of the day she can, to draw up a barrier between her and the outside world.
Bea glances across at the bed next door. The blankets are crooked, a hairbrush and pins strewn on them. She moves across to whisk them off before they are seen by the commandant. Watching somebody else being given some heart-grinding task is almost, but not quite, as bad as it happening to you. Bea hesitates. But it’s not going to happen to Peggy, is it? That’s what her real name was, though, snub-nosed and bright-eyed, she was known out here as Bunny. They all have nicknames, preserving their real ones for the life they will, hopefully, return to. Bunny, a decent sort, from Bromley, still eighteen.
Her truck turned over on the mudslide that passes for a road up to Hospital Number Eight. Just as good as being hit by a shell turfed out of the cockpit of a Hun plane, having to pelt lampless down that road in the dark to pick up the next lot. Plucky girl, they’re all saying, as though it wasn’t every one of them being damn plucky. Every damn night.
As Bea stands to attention, she can feel the bites on her thighs itch but she can hardly lean over and have a go at them now. Death is just about the only way out. That and septicaemia, dysentery or measles. Even spotted fever has its appeal. The next time Bea has somebody infected with it in the back of her truck, she’ll climb in and embrace him good and long. And when she and the truck are disinfected, she’ll simply pray the disinfectant doesn’t do its trick.
Bea laughs to herself. So this, this is the big adventure she’d been longing for, the one that she had envied Edward, Tom, Edie’s Tony and the rest of all those chaps who’d been khaki-ed and brown-belted and sailed over here. Even poor Mr Campbell, who had eventually written to her to explain why he had suddenly signed up. Poor man. Bea would be in pieces even if just Edward went. Now Mr Campbell is fetching and carrying on stretchers, and Bea doesn’t envy him one bit; she sees quite enough of the mash of men who are ferried into the back of the truck. How had she thought that ambulance-driving would be glamorous? She’d had a vision of herself careering between shell-holes and swaggering back to the cosiness and camaraderie of barracks. At least that’s the picture she’d put together from her love of driving and Edward’s letters, all football and polo and jolly dinners in the mess.
The only faint resemblance this bears to what Bea expected is the driving at top speed along rutted tracks, and Bea has made sure that she is the fastest at this. Where the others slow down to take a pothole, Bea just goes hard at it, and flies her truck over the top. Her truck, Mildred she’s called it, they’re one and the same creature when they’re on the road, Bea tries to let herself think of nothing else, not of the men in the back, who have names and families. That one of them might be somebody she knows. Might be Edward.
The loss of Bunny makes her feel hollow. Not any more wobbly than she is already, rather that a piece of the gang has been cut away and it could be anyone next. No matter that she’s only ferrying the parts of men that are still breathing from the convoy trains up to the camp hospitals – the Hun’ll get you if he can, even if it’s only by willing a flat tyre at the wrong moment in the road.
For the men, death is the only way out. The men volunteer and are then sent back and back again until they are too ruined to fight any more. No funking for them or they’ll be shot as deserters and cowards. When she hears the words ‘This one’s gone’ as she reaches the hospital, she wonders whether she has done them the kindest favour she could.
She could be a funk, have herself written off as a spectator and say goodbye to all that baking heat and hunger and dirt. There is something demoralising about being dirty; you can’t for one second imagine anyone, let alone any man, would want to come near you. It makes her feel she has lost the power she once had. She could be warm, dry, clean and being admired as she thwacks a tennis ball over a net, but that would be giving in. And not just on her own part. Every woman who gives in is another not making the grade, showing that women aren’t up to it. However irritating it is that Mrs Pankhurst isn’t campaigning for the vote any more, there’s something in what she says, that we should all be mucking in, showing that women can do what men can do. It’s more than just ‘a fantastic job’ they’re doing out here, they could be killed at any moment. That, Celeste wrote to her, is what makes it worthwhile. When Bea first read this, she laughed, thinking, Damn you, Celeste. But Bea’s found it again, that rush from doing something that has some effect on the world outside her old, petty life. Curiously, Bea driving ambulances is the one thing that Celeste and Mother have, unknowingly, agreed upon, even down to the same words. Bea has been bouncing between ‘I’m so proud’ coming from both directions, and Mother has sent over a surprising onslaught of letters.
Breakfast is reassuringly not good. This means that Bea is not dreaming. She can’t work out whether she’s strengthening her teeth on the bread or grinding them down. Whichever it is, she’s too damn thin, she knows her breasts are shrinking. But out here they’re not really women, are they, rather staging posts on the way between the two sexes. And always so damn hungry, unless what they’ve just seen is still making them feel green. Actually, breakfast itself can be enough to make you feel green. No matter, they’ll be at the parcel contents afterwards, though food parcels have been thinnish recently, but not, however, parcels of carbolic belts sent by relatives to ward off body lice and other evils. Celeste provides enough to Bea for her to supply two of her room-mates. This is not entirely altruistic, for the fewer lice in their room the better. They say it’s hellish difficult getting rid of the buggers, and that they’re doing the rounds of London as well, among those who are being ‘foolish’, as Clemmie calls it. Though Bea suspects that this is rumour fabricated to try and deter the increasing loss of what Mother’s generation call ‘virtue’.
So Bea has carbolic belts a-plenty, but all too few bottles of Bovril and ginger biscuits. Not that any of them ‘has’ anything once it arrives. Everything is thrown into the ring and divided up, apart from the cigarettes. Bunny had two packets of cigarettes. They all know that and none of them are mentioning it. By the time somebody does, they will have been pilfered.
It is Mrs Wainwright who sends Bea food. Bea wonders if she realises that she is supplying almost all of Bea’s diet. There are no army rations for volunteers. Although Bea is not sure that volunteer is an accurate description of young women who have to pay for the privilege of being out here. They just have Mrs Bell, whom Bea is sure scratches the flea bites on her arms over the mixing bowl, into whatever food she is pounding beyond recognition.
When Mrs Wainwright’s parcels reach Bea they come up trumps every time, with the Bovril-to-drink standard fare, the biscuits Huntley and Palmers Best Assorted, together with roof tiles of chocolate. The top-notch stuff is the potted meat, which is served out among them ‘like caviar’, Razor cut in when Bea’s first package arrived. Razor, her one-liners as sharp as her nose and chin. Bea was sure the caviar allusion was a dig at her and her family.
Masters is hardly a triple-barrelled rarity. But Blister – one complaint was all it had taken for the girl to be given that name, Bea learnt – had asked it straight out, in that reflex, cocktail-party-chat way. Bea, off-guard, must have reddened for there was a chorus of ‘Ohs’ and ‘Are you?’ and ‘Hardly Park Lane here’. Razor was on to her straight away, ‘Rails’. And it stuck.
Bea is first out into the yard. The ambulances still have last night’s muck and a putrid stink inside them and when Bea opens the rear of her truck the smell of urine hits her first, and she draws away. Then she steels herself and climbs in, chucking buckets into the corners and trying to step out of the way of the stream running back out. It brings the vomit from the floor with it, the rest she will have to scrub off the sides. If it is vomit, it is bile, for by the time the poor souls reach Bea, bile is all they have left inside them. Lumps are something altogether different and there is a pile on the floor this morning that will not wash off as she sluices it. The water nudges it a little, unsticking the edges, but the centre does not move. Bea cannot tell its colour in the gloom inside the truck. She has little wish to tell its colour. Some poor bugger coughed his gas-ridden lungs up, or tore off his bandages on the way, letting the bits fall out. Bea is amazed at how much a human body contains: it’s so densely packed that when the skin opens, all bursts forth.
Really this job should be done before breakfast. Bea wouldn’t have anything in her to vomit then.
Her engine is still playing up. She’s cleaned everything, put her arms right down inside and felt the satisfaction of reaching the nuts with long fingers that are nonetheless strong enough to turn them. But it still splutters, just when you need the oomph to push out of a hole. There’s no point in saying anything; she’d be told to fix it, which she can’t. She doubts anybody can, engines don’t always work to rules. Instead she has become used to taking the dips a little faster. If you keep on going it’s not too bad. It’s the braking afterwards that throws it back.
The commandant is here. She climbs right into the back of Bea’s ambulance, poking her nose where Bea barely dares to venture. Then she goes around to inspect the front. Bea’s grille is, luckily, like a looking-glass this morning. The commandant pauses, as if she’s caught sight of herself in it, and moves on. Pass. Bea goes back to her dormitory. There’s a pause now, though they’ve not a clue how long it’s for as more trains than ever have been coming in for the past month. The worst was at the beginning of July. It’s almost the only way they know what’s going on in the war. That, and out-of-date copies of the papers whose descriptions bear so little resemblance to what passes beneath their own eyes that, sometimes, they simply laugh.
One of the beds has a pair of scissors on it. Next to them sits a brown-haired girl who looks as if she’d pout given half the chance and is, as ever, pulling and pushing her locks about her ears. They laugh at her for this. She does this every day and more than once a day. She is therefore known as Hairnet. It’s one thing if you’re going into the town for the evening, but another altogether when you’re driving the near-dead in the dark. What a waste, thinks Bea watching her, what a waste of time, and Bea checks herself. A year ago, she, too, would have done hers more than once a day. She gets the knots out some days, though mostly when she finally crawls into her bed she hasn’t the energy to wield a hairbrush, and in the morning she just stuffs it up under her cap for roll-call.
She runs her fingers through her hair. Four inches out, they jam. She picks away with a comb but her hair, dried out by summer and dust, starts to break. Hairnet’s scissors gleam at her. Bea wouldn’t be the first, it’s almost a badge of honour, provided that you don’t think about the main reason for doing so. Nobody back home would put head lice and young ladies together in a sentence. No, they take short hair as le dernier cri for a devil-may-care gal who’s game. Bea still hesitates; the shorter her hair, the harder she’d have to work at making herself feel feminine, and femininity is not a concept she feels close to at the moment. When she runs her hands over her face and body at night, she finds not the idolised softness of female flesh but a dry tautness, and those flea bites. Her hair is perhaps all she has left. She digs the comb in deeper, hoping that she doesn’t scalp herself in the process. Christ, Beatrice, what the hell are you doing out here?
The evening’s business starts early, straight after lunch, with an evacuation down to the harbour at Boulogne. The tide is kind today and it’s not a four thirty in the morning start to catch it high. Bea’s given Hospital Number Four as she leaves the yard; that’s not too bad. Four isn’t far, though there are a couple of hairy bits along the way. There’s something to look forward to, the satisfaction of driving and the back-to-frontness of evacuations lightens the journeys. At least these men are going home – you just have to keep your mind off the wives and mothers who will be welcoming back their mauled bodies.
Bea drives up to the hospital empty, her behind settled into its familiar dips in the leather, evidence of all the hours she’s spent on this seat. It’s not quite rock, unlike the steering wheel, which is as hard as nails and thin as a rail. If it weren’t for the cushioning of her driving gloves, there’d be little to hold on to. But she’s off, and when she’s on the road she can lose herself completely in the mere action of driving. She almost feels as though she’s riding a mare with a perfect gait as she bounds up and down, steering hard to keep the truck on the track. Driving empty, and light, is pure pleasure, not as though she’s doing any work at all. She wills her ambulance forward, and feels a surge of elation when it makes it over a particularly vicious hillock or rut in the road.
The voices are almost sing-song as they are loaded in, even if they are missing a limb or two. They’re well enough to make the journey, and they’re on their way back to Blighty. Anything is less bleak than being here. A growing number of craters pockmark the browning fields, like an unpleasant skin condition breaking out across them. Bea has grown used to the smell of fireworks. It lingers for days, it seems, after a raid. And the men bring it with them, explosive embedded into their wounds and uniform.
When they reach the ship, Bea walks to the rear of the truck, and is whistled at. Kisses are blown in her direction. She waves back, laughing with them at their gallows humour. Evacuations are definitely the best of the lot.
By the time she’s back in the yard, a convoy is coming in and it’s down to the station. When she arrives there, the train has ground to a halt half a mile along the line. Bea starts to mill around among the ambulances lined up, rears open to where the carriages will draw in. The stretcher-bearers are talking about being moved further forward. ‘Could be our last evening with you,’ says a weather-beaten man, a crescent grin spreading the width of his face as he grabs Bea by the arm and waist and pulls her into a mock waltz. Playing up to the scene, Bea tilts her head back and closes her eyes. The voice that comes, she thinks, is perhaps all the louder for the fact that she cannot see the speaker and it bites into her ears. ‘Masters! Let go of that man. This isn’t some dance hall’ – she pauses – ‘or a debutante ball. As you seem to have so much spare time on your hands, you can clean out my ambulance for a week.’
Bea manages a half-smile at her dancing partner as she backs away. Goodbyes are best not said. See you soon is perhaps the worst: even in good times it can mean that you’ll not see each other again. She clambers back up into her cab. New stretcher-bearers. Who will replace them? The image of Mr Campbell comes into her mind. But what’s the chance of that? And would she have heard, if he knew? He doesn’t write often – even less than he did before she came out, when he was still sending letters to Celeste’s. Then why should he write, it’s not as though they are sweethearts. Maybe he has one, someone younger than Bea, fresh out, her face not yet ravaged by lack of sleep and the wind blowing through the front of a windscreen-less truck. With this thought Bea’s elation subsides and she starts to look forward to the grim but distracting business of the train’s arrival.
Even at the snail’s pace with which the train crawls into the station, the screech of the brakes hammers in her ears. It’s barely stopped when her ambulance begins to rock with the stretchers being loaded in. From what she sees it’s hard to believe that many of them were ever alive in the first place, butcher’s shop that they have become, served up on stretchers slotted into the sides of the truck. Bea’s stomach turns. It turns with every convoy. When she arrived, a girl called Ginger – raven-haired, but ate a pack of the biscuits in one go – told her it would wear off after a couple of weeks. It will never wear off. For as long as Bea lives she will, she is sure, wake at night to memories of bloodied parts of men. She is sick at the whole damn war – and she can’t let on; at twenty-three she’s one of the older ones and the others look up to her. So she has to bottle it up, but it festers. Other things fester in her mind, too. Explosions have lost their glamour. She never wants to hear one again and she feels, well, downright shameful to think that she ever enjoyed it.
She’s loaded, she’s away. Number Six she’s given at the gate, and it’s down the track, the weight of the stretcher cases in the back adding swing to the bumps. She’s already growing tired today, and she can feel each jolt hitting the base of her spine, or is it just the screaming from the back that is sharpening her senses? Even the wool pressed against her is grating her bites as the truck lolls forward and back and from side to side in jerky fits and starts.
She’s trying not to listen – she must get the man now sitting beside her to talk to distract her. Body lice, thinks Bea, then tells herself off. But that’s how we catch them, isn’t it, wedged up against someone straight out of the trenches.
She glances beside her and the wind presses a loose strand of hair into the side of her eye as a splatter of grit stings her jaw. Bea is beyond wincing; at least, she thinks, it wasn’t in my mouth. From what she can see of his uniform he is a corporal. He has one arm in a sling, the end of it looks thin for a hand, and his head is hanging down, chin practically on his chest. Screaming again from the back. They’re a noisy bunch, this lot, except this man who looks as though he may never talk. But this trip she needs to crack him, and she is well provisioned to do so.
‘Cigarette?’ she asks. ‘I’ve a packet.’
She glances to her side again. He nods, or rather she thinks it’s a nod, it could just be a jolt in the road.
‘They’re wedged into the back of the seat. Behind you. Matches, too.’ Thank God, she thinks, that his good arm is on this side, for he’s fumbling for them as it is. He lifts the packet to his lips and taps a cigarette out into his mouth. Bea slows down so that he has a chance of lighting it. She shouldn’t, she should be doing everything she can to reach the hospital as soon as possible, but if they’d damn well give her a windscreen she wouldn’t have to. With impressive dexterity, the man manages to hold the matchbox between two fingers and the match between two others. He gets the cigarette alight and then offers it to Bea. Strictly forbidden, and Bea hesitates, then the noises racket up again, that last bump no doubt. She takes the cigarette, and he lights another.
He exhales, and with the smoke come words.
She doesn’t mind any more how terrible his story will be, she’s heard it all. She knows how a body can disintegrate in dozens of ways. Just keep on talking, she wills him, as the noises rise again. Makes her long for a funeral transport. A noiseless run, then five minutes’ calm standing there, head bowed, as the service runs its short course and Bea wishes the poor man well in the peace he has found.
The sitter falls silent and she is listening to the screams again. Listening to them makes her want to slash the Hun. After all, that’s what she came out here for, to do her bit in one of the few ways she could. Only she’s not slashing the Hun, is she? She’s as good as feeding it with the men she takes to be repaired so that they can be sent back to be fired at. Don’t think like that, Beatrice, she tells herself. It’s war, it’s about being brave and taking risks, being as daring as you can, it always has been, hasn’t it? She half laughs. Right now, being as daring as you can consists of smoking while she’s driving, but the track ahead is smoother for a while and she puts her foot down. Sooner she can get this lot into hospital beds the better.
Number Six; she’s arrived. Stretchers off, groans fading as the men are carried inside, and then she’s back to the station as fast as she can, there’ll be another load off this convoy.
It’s about half past five in the afternoon when they filter back into the dorm. Blister is heating up Bovril on the gas burner. Bea lies down on her bed; every drop of strength has been shaken out of her limbs. Christ, is her fleabag still damp with last night’s sweat? She closes her eyes.
That voice cuts in again. Sharp and shrill.
‘Masters.’ Oh God, the commandant’s ambulance. So soon? But it hasn’t been ambulance-cleaning time. Perhaps she’s done something else wrong? It’ll be another week now, and no doubt a week after that. She’ll still be cleaning it at Christmas at this rate. Bea pulls herself upright, sitting, then standing. Her nose is almost touching the top of the commandant’s cap.
‘Masters.’
Bea nods.
‘Out here.’
Bea follows her outside.
‘It seems that you do have your debutante ball after all. You’ve been invited to dinner. His Highness the Prince of Wales needs some company to help him do his good works, visiting his subjects at war. Someone, unsurprisingly, picked your name off the list. You will be fetched at seven.’
The commandant turns to leave but comes back.
‘You’ll be on duty afterwards.’
Bea nods again. She is too tired to speak, let alone be company at dinner.
The others are still on their beds, nursing Bovril, and Bea hopes that none of them overheard. No potted meat will cure that envy, as misguided as it may be.
Bea is going to have dinner with the Prince of Wales in her uniform and boots big enough to break a wall. She starts to beat the dust from her jacket.
‘Not in here!’ Ginger yells.
Bea takes her dust clouds outside. She is not sure about dinners in the officers’ mess. Last one, an older officer she knew from London – he’d been at Park Lane more than once – drove her back himself. As they passed what remained of the farm on the road between the town and here, he pulled off to the side, lights out, and without so much as a May I, leant over and kissed her. His mouth tasted of whisky and ash and she pushed away, but he pulled her tighter with one arm and started unbuttoning her jacket before clamping his mouth on hers. She screamed but that only opened her mouth wider. So she hit him, with the one arm not pinned to her side. Hit him harder and harder, on the chest, then the shoulder, the neck. At last she winded him and he drew back, gasping for air. When he pulled himself upright he looked at her as though she were the Hun.
‘Well, not quite like mother, like daughter.’
Bea didn’t reply.
He started up the engine again and drove her home, not looking at her once.
Bea sat smarting, as much at the slight of Mother as at his attempt to kiss her.
When they reached Bea’s hut, he climbed out and walked round to open the door for Bea. She gave him a curt nod as she slipped by.
Thus, when Bea is driven back after her dinner with the Prince, she wedges herself at the far side of the seat from her escort. This time, she makes it to her hut intact. As she reaches the yard, the girls are starting up the ambulances. Bea is straight into hers and out towards the station.
Once she’s going, the fresh air coming at her in the cab is an improvement on the fug and smoke of the mess. She does three rounds before she realises it is half past one. Her truck feels heavy, as though she’s pushing against an ox and she’d really just like to fall asleep on its shoulder. Well, dinner was jolly. There were a couple of FANYs there as well and as she walked in, bottles of wine were beckoning from the table. My God, she was gasping for some and clearly so, for the Prince noticed, smiled and, with a flourish of his arm, said, ‘Give Miss Masters a glass. She looks as if she might expire.’ Bea felt as though she hadn’t been shown gentlemanly good manners like that – the steady I-will-look-after-you sort – in an age. He was as charming as Edward at his best.
‘Do you enjoy your work?’ the Prince asked all three women. ‘It’s damn good of you all to come out here. Though it seems as though you manage a fine time, too.’
Six months ago these comments would have infuriated Bea, but tonight, indeed any night or time of day, she was simply grateful for being thanked. Perhaps it’s because it has become clear that what she is doing is something genuinely worth being thanked for, rather than some fatuous task meriting fatuous praise.
Her glass was filled, and refilled each time she emptied it. She had forgotten how delicious a good red wine could be. But it was the food, it was the food that did it for her. Only beef stew, but meat distinguishable from its sauce, and what a sauce. Monsieur Fouret would be sacked on the spot if he sent this up, but it tasted better than anything Bea had eaten in months. How can you use the same word, eating, for that and what they’re served up back in their hamlet of board huts?
By the time the meal was over, it was already nine thirty and Bea felt her eyes were going to close. It was stiflingly warm in there, and any breath she managed was filling with cigar smoke; quite a different proposition to Bea’s cigarettes. Please let him go, she sat wishing, so that we can, too, and I have a chance of even just the shortest shut-eye before the night runs. Blast the tradition of not being able to leave before a member of the Royal Family, even out here. The more dire the circumstances, the more it appears people cling to etiquette. Just as she was thinking this, a trio of troopers entered, song sheets in hand. Oh no, how could she have forgotten: of course there was going to be an after-dinner show.
As Bea struggled to keep awake through half a dozen tunes, her mind turned to Edward. He claimed to spend his evenings like this, but it wouldn’t make him safe, would it? Some of the men she has transported spent their evenings like this, too. It didn’t mean they hadn’t ended up on a stretcher. Dear God, she sat silently praying, dear God, please don’t let that happen to him.
And then her thoughts are interrupted as a new train comes in to the station. Bea feels herself revving up, her sleepiness metamorphosing into a buzz as she reverses her ambulance in beside Blister’s, turning to wave at her. The girl’s face is drawn back over her cheek and jaw bones, as though she has taken a sharp intake of breath and it has stuck. She isn’t looking to the side; she’s rigidly facing forwards, as though she wants to see as little as possible of what is going on. Bea, thank God, is not there yet. She’s loaded up faster than she’s been before and the side of her truck is rapped to tell her to be off. ‘Busy tonight,’ yells a stretcher-bearer. And, relieved to be away from the terror on Blister’s face, she is gone.
No sitters on this one, just Bea, out alone with half a dozen strange men. And no chaperone; she laughs to herself in the way that you only can when you’re losing your reason, and things seem lighter, funnier, tonight.
A thud shakes the truck’s rear axle, and a screaming starts up in the back. Hell, it’s that ditch. No, it’s not that ditch; the truck isn’t stuck, it’s still going. Bea’s certainly got that awakening fear now; she can feel the sweat soaking into her hair under her cap. Had the ambulance fallen into that hole, there’d’ve been no pumping it out. The screaming is still going too, though it’s not a scream, it’s a yell, with words, the same words coming again and again. ‘He’s down, he’s down. Stop, for God’s sake.’ Someone half off his head. You can’t stop, you’re not allowed to stop, you have to get them to a hospital as quick as you can for the sake of those who might still make it. More words are coming. ‘He’s off the rail, rolling around the floor.’ Bea goes on driving but the yells worsen. ‘He’s down, I tell you he’s down.’ It’s the same voice. ‘Stop the bloody ambulance.’ Bloody ambulance, thinks Bea, yes, in every imaginable way. ‘Stop! Stop! Stop.’ It occurs to Bea that maybe she should stop and, as gruesome as the prospect of manhandling a near corpse back on to its stretcher might be, she could save a life. It would not be so terrible to be sent home, either. Isn’t that what she wants, a decent excuse? But she knows they can’t spare her, rumours of what this job is really like are seeping back and the girls are sticking to Blighty now, working in hospitals. Lead-swingers. What would Bea say to her burstingly proud mother, Celeste, even Edward, if she went home?
The calls from the rear of her truck are going on, ‘He’s on top of one of us. Get him off!’ They’re all at it now, and what, what if they’re right? There are hellish turns ahead. No matter what’s been drilled into her, she can’t carry on knowing that her driving is killing a man behind her.
She’s passed the turning to Six and Seven and there’s a flat patch on the side of the road. The commandant can’t see Bea here. She won’t be going this far for she always gets the nearest hospitals, and expects you to be just as quick even if you’ve been three times the distance. Bea pulls over, she takes a deep breath, climbs down, goes to the back and opens up. She hates this, looking in. Remember to keep your eyes away from the faces, Beatrice, for there’s always that fear – that you’ve danced with one.
A stretcher in the middle row is empty. The man has rolled off it and is lying against one of the bottom stretchers, which is only just far enough off the floor to avoid the blood and urine. It is not far enough to stop the fallen man’s torso covering the face of the man lying on this bottom rung. The latter’s legs are flailing as though he’s gasping for air. Bea’s mind, slowly it seems, is taking it in. Then she leaps up inside and grabs an arm of the fallen man to pull him away. The arm comes off in her hands. She retches as she drops it, adding her own vomit to the cesspool around her feet.
The legs have stopped flailing. The man on the bottom stretcher is quite still. Bea can’t look up at where she thinks the voice came from. Whichever he is, he’s fallen silent, too. There’s just one still groaning ‘Help me, Mother’ up there.
Bea turns and jumps out, jarring her knees, and rushes back to the cab. She left the engine running, thank God, she’s not going to be a damn fool who finds it can’t start again. For hell’s sake, Beatrice, get moving.
It’s fallen quiet as she leaves Nine. But empty she can drive faster, as fast as she dares, keep that fear going, keep her awake. After all she’s Beatrice Masters, proving that she’s not just some little rich girl by being the fastest on the road. She knows every bump, she could do it blindfold, and she might as well be blindfold when there’s no moon and she’s driving in the dark without her lamps on. She shuts her eyes for an instant, just to see what it is like. There is, she concludes, little difference, even if there is a flicker of a moon tonight. Cigarette, yes, she’ll have a cigarette. She slows down to light it and as she draws breath she feels a rush and exhales as though she is a dragon breathing fire. The cigarette sits in her right hand, which is only barely resting on the wheel. Now put your foot down, Beatrice, to make up the time. There’s that pit she detests coming up. Dammit, she thinks, I’ll have the better of you and she ups the throttle. But she’s fumbling almost, what is wrong with her? Blast, that’s too much. The ambulance bucks and skids forward on its rear wheels. One catches in the pit. At least she thinks that is what is happening as the truck turns on to its side and off the track.
Blackness.