Last Train from Liguria (2010) by Christine Dwyer Hickey

Author:Christine Dwyer Hickey [Hickey, Christine Dwyer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christine Dwyer Hickey
Publisher: Atlantic Books

PART SIX

Anna

DUBLIN, 1995

June

SOMETIMES I WONDER WHAT she does hear in there, if anything. I close my eyes and try to decipher it all through her ears. Can she tell the difference, say, between the uptight clatter of a hospital morning and the easier sounds of the evening wind-down? Would she know the tea lady’s whine from Thelma’s childish delivery? Does she recognize, maybe even dread, the brisk snarl of curtain around her bed and know that it’s time for a drip to be changed, a tube to be ruthlessly inserted? Is she earwigging away while the nurses exchange gossip over her head? Does she sense the sudden charge in the atmosphere when a doctor makes a rare appearance?

And does she ever get afraid, I wonder that too, when it all goes wrong and gets out of control? As it does now and then, when something might happen, or even nothing might happen, except inside the head of a patient who suddenly and unaccountably becomes distressed. One setting off another, setting off the next. Does it upset her, all that noise and emotional chaos? Old men crying for their mammies. Old women howling over torments from the past.

*

I went back last week to the house on Pembroke Road and the flat where I used to live with Nonna. Dust-sheeted and stuffy, but completely unchanged since she left it for the nursing home a few years ago.

After I had a good root around, found nothing of any consequence, and put everything back the way that it was - as if Nonna would somehow find out - I walked all the way home to my own place on the far side of town. It took a good hour and a half, I think. There were angelus bells when I came out of Nonna’s anyway, and when I opened the door into my flat, the lazy brass music of Coronation Street was coming from the telly. I can’t honestly recall one step of the long walk home. Some days are like that.

The following afternoon, up in the hospital, little Nurse Blondy gave me a pat on the arm as she unlocked the ward door to let me out. ‘God, you’re as good,’ she said. ‘I mean, the way you give her so much of your time.’

I could have replied, ‘I’ve got buckets of the stuff. What else am I going to do with it?’ but I didn’t like to spoil the moment.

Since breaking up with Hugh, and even more again since leaving my job a fortnight ago. Time.

When the headmistress finally got round to discussing her ‘concerns’ regarding my future, I couldn’t have made it easier for her. ‘Lack of commitment, quite simply,’ she began. ‘Too many excuses for too many absences, basically. You may well be having personal problems, Miss Moore, but essentially your duty lies with the students. We’re talking Leaving Certificate students here. We’re talking portfolio preparation. The future of our young people.’

To listen to her you’d think she was headmistress

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