A bleak fog of searing sunlight and disinfectant throttles Brigid, strikes her straight to the throat, the chest, weakening her knees. The fog is clammy, dismal; the spoiled-meat stink of sickness catches somewhere about her uvula.
"It's just along this way, madam; I'm so sorry but we can't allow too long a visit. Your niece - I'm so sorry, madam - she's very, very ill. Would you be amenable to having the chaplain in this evening? She hasn't much longer."
Brigid nods automatically, bewildered as endless windowed doors pass, blurred, unreal, allowing glimpses only of beds, walls, basins, and the cold impersonal whiteness of the sheets, sheets, sheets...
She takes a longer look through one door and sees a body she's certain is dead. The liver - coloured linoleum is suddenly interesting, something worth viewing. She studies her cracked leather shoes, suddenly ashamed, a schoolgirl. Black and black and clack and clack, endless and continuous as the lives of those behind the windowed doors are not and never will be. Mesmerised, inculcated, Brigid is lost in the fascinating current of her shoes -
The nurse pauses before a door, white on white. She opens it carefully, reluctantly. Is it a holy relic or a diabolical monstrosity caged up in here? Brigid is afraid to ask.
"This -" she manages, dry-lipped, hesitant with deceit. "This is - Julie's - room, is it?" The door is white, the walls are white; she can just make out, in the intense glare of the uncovered windows, a white-sheeted bed. I'm afraid of the white. Mother of God, I don't care if I never see this colour again in all my living days.
Stepping gingerly, she enters; the floor could be glass, the thin skin of a thermometre, aching to give way and plunge her into the scalding sea of mercury. The nurse has left; Brigid is utterly alone in a cold, damp room with her thoughts and a girl she believed to be dead a year before.
Julie McCarthy has withered; Brigid, totally unaware of the finer points of human anatomy, is imbued with an awful knowledge of man's gross components. Every segment, every element and piece of Julie McCarthy's body is only too visible beneath an inadequate skin too fine and watery white to conceal any longer the horrid whispered secrets of mortality, secrets which are collected much too neatly in a basin full of blood and slime. She is too consumed by fever to be flushed; Julie McCarthy is a white corpse in a white bed, alive only in and of her rapid and crepitous breathing.
Consumption has constructed of a living girl a plaster saint, a marble martyr. The eyeless St Lucy is there, as is the wheel-broken St Catherine of Alexandria; the painfully young consumptive St Therese of Lisieux, who died spitting blood and calling on the Virgin Mary to end her pain, accosts Brigid through Julie McCarthy's covered eyes and public decay. "Mother of God," Brigid whimpers. A child, a naive and frightened child, she kneels by the bed of Julie McCarthy. My bladder must be near my eye, oh God, and so help me, I don't know what to do. Tentatively, hesitantly, she folds her hands, steeples them into a tiny church of flesh. Mother of God, I don't know what to do.
The bruised and transparent eyelids, fenced in by protruding bone and sunken flesh, open, barely. Half-moons of blue iris, blue as water, blue as, Brigid imagines, the fluid that must fill Julie's lungs, move hazily to watch her. Brigid gazes back, suddenly and terribly calm beyond any capacity for control she was ever aware of, thinking stupidly that she must be outside her own body, watching all this from a safe place against the cowardly phlegmatic green of the walls, not brought to earth on liver-coloured linoleum by a bed of unbearable white. Out of nowhere, it's difficult to breathe, exhausting to inflate her lungs against the damp chilly infectious air and the oppressive reek of disinfectant and rotten meat: the pervasive penetrative odour of sickness. It seems to Brigid's whirling mind that the walls are tumbling toward her, never breaking, squeezing and shrinking. She swallows a scream, and finds that her hands have gripped Julie McCarthy's so desperately tight that her knuckles are pale as the girl and the sheets, white on white on white.
"Brigid." From the doorway, a voice - male, young, and completely bewildered. Brigid turns, keeping her gaol-door grip on the white-hot hands, and sees Barry Casserly for the first time since she has come to know him. His customary black jacket is off; to Brigid's newly opened eyes, he is virtually naked. The loose-hanging grimy shirt and braces cannot hide the hard knotty truth of ribs covered by inadequate flesh; the bony underpinnings of his face reveal for all to see, as no x-ray could, the minute dank events turning the flesh that is Barry Casserly into a damp, infectious mass like the one in the bed.
Julie stares at Barry, unable to process any coherent thought or feeling save an overweening sorrow. She is too far gone with the consumption, the damp unholy infection, even to speak. He comes closer, halts, and closer still, and kneels beside Brigid.
"Julie, Julie darling.. " He cannot speak, cannot express what possesses him, what controls him at this late date. It must be his own wrong, gone, infested lungs, gone the same way as Julie's, taking flesh with them. He knows, looking at Julie, that he will die, and, looking at Brigid, that she knows as well. She yields a thin, birdlike, bony hand to him; Barry takes it up, sensing a mouldy drowning humour under the skin - under his own skin, as well as Julie's. Crushing the pale ineffectual remnant of a human to his chest, he weeps for them all, the whole sick, decayed, deranged, and dying world, and for Julie McCarthy.
Brigid retreats to the wall, the safe green cowardly wall, some manner of anchor in this room which reeks of dying and of futile lives, ending in a time and a place where the very air screams, with Brigid, of the obscenity of the events it must witness. She sinks to the linoleum, drops to her knees, bows under a force she would never willingly acknowledge.
In the blinding, shining, consecrating light of the uncovered windows, a dead girl reaches upward, gasping, drowning, spitting the last of her lifetime in bubbles of red onto the defeated dirty whiteness of the sheets. From where Brigid watches, it all seems to move so much more slowly than it should; Barry dives almost gracefully for Julie, consumes her in his overbold encircling arms, does what he will and must and should at drunken speeds. As all things must, the agony elapses, the thrashing passes, and a fogbound silence covers the room of the green walls, bright windows, and blood-filled basin.
It is finished.
Brigid rises after some minutes, fumbling under an anaesthetic awe. She speaks automatically, from rote; vox Dei, ex machina.
"Eternal rest grant unto her, Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon her... " She cannot finish, and stumbles to the door, tripping over the livery tiles. The enormity of death is smothering in the room, embracing and adulterating the smell of disinfectant to a maddening degree.
Brigid collides briefly, once, as a stranger on the street, with Barry as she fights blindly out of the room, leaving him in bleak communion with the dead.
In the awful brevity of that association, she can smell the sickness rising from his skin.
FIN