The first thing he noticed in the hospital was the smell. A mixture of cleaning fluids, perspiration, blood, and who knew what else. Something foul. It pervaded the air and made him want to gag, but instead he put a hand over his nose until he could grow accustomed to it.
Looking around, he thought he was in an office of some sort. There was a table in the center of the room, and on it stood a few empty mugs and a teapot with a knitted cozy on top. Hanging over the side of a chair was an apron with a map of Ireland on it and the words A GIFT FROM SKIBBEREEN underneath. A tearoom, Alfie decided. Not an office. Somewhere the nurses came to take their breaks. A sound to his left made him turn, and he noticed a kettle on the stove with steam starting to rise through its spout. The moment it began to whistle he gasped, knowing he had only a few seconds before someone appeared and discovered him. Running back out into the corridor, he made his way a little farther along, trying to ignore the faint echo of moaning in the air, a noise that was difficult to decipher; it sounded as if a hundred people were in distress behind these doors. He ducked into another room, this time on the right-hand side of the hall, just as he heard footsteps running down to where he had come from.
Closing the door behind him, he turned around with his eyes closed in relief and exhaled.
When he opened them again, he saw that he was in a bedroom. A man was lying in bed next to an open window, sitting up, his pajama top unbuttoned halfway down his chest. He had thin gray hair, although his face did not look so very old. He was staring at Alfie with a terrified expression on his face, his mouth hanging open, his hands pressed to his ears to block out the noise of the whistling kettle, whose scream penetrated even here. Alfie looked at him, aghast, not knowing what to say, and only when the whistling stopped a few moments later did the man take his hands away slowly, very slowly, and let them rest on top of his blanket. He stared down at them then, his mouth still open, before turning to look at Alfie. He was trembling slightly.
In a bed opposite him, a second man was reading a novel. When he got to the end of every page, he ripped it out, crumpled it up, and threw it on the floor. There were dozens of pages down there already. Alfie narrowed his eyes to make out the words on the front cover. Madame Bovary.
“Where’s my mum?” asked the first man, and Alfie turned back and opened his mouth, uncertain what to say. “Is she outside?” he asked finally. “She said she’d come this morning.”
“I don’t think so,” said Alfie. “I haven’t seen any visitors out there.”
“Here, you,” said the second man, waving an arm in the air as if he were a child in a classroom. He held the book up. “She has a fancy man, you see.”
“Make it stop, please,” said the first man, bending forward and closing his eyes.
“Make what stop?”
“Her husband doesn’t know about him,” laughed the second man. “She’s French, though. And you know what they’re like. They’d hop on anything.”
The first man made a sudden lunge forward in the bed, and Alfie jumped in fright, pulling open the door and running quickly back out into the corridor, where he turned a corner and found himself in a ward where ten beds were lined up, five on either side, each one occupied. The moaning sound had been coming from here; each man seemed to be in terrible pain. Some had bandages all over their heads, some had tubes emerging from their bodies with dark-red blood either being put in or taken out of them. He felt his stomach twist in fright and looked at the man in the bed next to him, who had no sheets over his body and was simply lying on top of his mattress, making very slight movements as if he could not bear to be lying down much longer. Alfie stared at him: something wasn’t right, but it took him a moment to realize what. The man had no left arm, just a stump that ended above the elbow, and his right leg had been amputated at the knee. Both wounds were exposed and a trolley holding clean dressings stood next to the bed; someone must have been attending to him and got called away. Whoever had answered the kettle’s whistle, perhaps? Alfie tried not to stare at the angry, pulpy places where the limbs came to an unnatural end, but it was difficult not to. He could see chaotic stitching, and the skin had been folded in upon itself at the center, leaving a wrinkled knot with something resembling a black nail at the center. Yellowing bandages surrounded his skull and an eye patch covered one of his eyes. Alfie looked at him in horror, and the man turned slowly, his one eye blinking as his hand reached out and took hold of Alfie’s. The boy gasped, tried to pull away, but the man, despite his injuries, was too strong for him, dragging him closer, hissing something under his breath. Alfie reached a hand out to push himself away from the mattress, but it landed on something soft and moving—a bottle filled with some dark-yellow fluid that fell over as Alfie’s hand touched it, spilling its contents on the floor by his feet—and as he pulled away from the man, he slipped in the liquid and fell to the floor, realizing that he had landed in a puddle of the man’s piss, and it was all he could do not to scream out loud as he scrambled to his feet and ran from the room.
His father couldn’t be here; it wasn’t possible. No one could be in a place like this and not go mad.
Out in the corridor again, he gasped for air, wondering whether he was going to be sick as he held his wet hands in front of his face before wiping them on his trousers. There was blood there too, he realized—blood from the man’s urine. Alfie turned around, desperate to get away from these horrors, and started to walk down another corridor, confused now, disoriented, wondering why he had ever thought it was a good idea to come here at all. His legs felt weak beneath him, the way they did when he had that dream where he couldn’t run at all and his feet were like ten-ton weights.
He hoped he might find a door that would take him back outside, but instead the corridor led to a nurses’ station and, beyond that, another set of glass doors. He desperately wanted to go through them, but there were two people standing by the station—a young doctor and a nurse—talking in concerned voices. If he went that way they would certainly see him. He crouched low in front of the desk, happy now that he was not tall enough to see over the ticket counter at King’s Cross, for this desk was about the same height.
“Which ones?” asked the doctor, who spoke in a very posh voice. “B wing or C wing?”
“C wing, Doctor,” said the nurse in an Irish accent, and Alfie wondered whether she was the person who had brought the tea towel with the map on it. “Dr. Edgerton says that all four of them are to get their final assessments this week.”
“But what’s the hurry? They have another month of recovery ahead of them at least.”
“They’re wanted back,” she said, and although Alfie couldn’t see her, he knew that she was shrugging her shoulders. “It’s ridiculous, of course, but I don’t see what I can do.”
“I can do something,” he insisted, his voice growing angrier.
“Then do, Arthur,” she said. “Those men won’t survive another month over there. It’s criminal to send them back. My God, if the War Office has no thought for their well-being, let them at least consider the other soldiers whose lives will be put in danger by their presence.”
“You’re preaching to the converted,” said the doctor irritably. “Look, leave it with me, all right? I’ll do what I can. If I have to kick up a fuss, I will. Now, what about those fellows up on the third floor? What can we do with—”