A WHISKEY AND A SMOKE | CHAPTER 01
W: DESCRIPTION OF INJURIES, GRIEF, MENTION OF THE GREAT WAR, PTSD, ANXIETY ATTACK, SMOKING, EARLY 20'S VIBES.
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CHAPTER 01 - GHOSTS THAT FOLLOW
The first thing Birmingham did was swallow me whole.
The station was not so much a building as a living thing with a filthy mouth. Steam breathed from the engines in great white clouds, rolling over the platform and dampening everything it touched. Men pushed through it with bags over their shoulders and newspapers tucked beneath their arms. Women gathered children by the collars. Porters shouted over the shriek of brakes. Somewhere close, a horse gave a miserable snort, and the smell of coal, wet wool, iron, and bodies pressed in on me with such force I stopped with one foot on the platform and one still inside the train.
Behind me, someone cleared his throat.
I looked back. The coughing man from the compartment stood with his handkerchief crushed in one fist, his face grey around the mouth.
“Sorry,” I said, stepping down properly before I could hold up the queue of passengers any longer.
My suitcase nearly pulled my shoulder from its socket when I lifted it. I had packed as if I owned nothing, which was mostly true, and still it felt as heavy as a dead man. The handle bit through my glove. I shifted it from one hand to the other and moved with the crowd because there was little choice in the matter. Birmingham had no patience for a woman who needed a moment to gather herself.
The platform trembled beneath my boots.
That was what unsettled me first. London stations were loud, yes, and full of people rushing as though God himself had given them a schedule. But this place had a different sort of movement. Harder. Meaner at the edges. Everything seemed to scrape against everything else. Metal on metal. Voices on smoke. Boots against stone.
I made it as far as a pillar near the exit before I stopped again.
A boy ran past me carrying a crate of newspapers, his cap too big for his head, shouting something about King and country and another factory-strike somewhere north. A woman beside me cursed after him when he nearly took her ankle out. Two soldiers stood near the wall with their backs to the brick, one missing a hand, the other with half his face turned away from the world. Neither of them spoke.
I tried not to stare. Afraid of them being the ghosts inside my head. I looked for a sign instead. Any sign. Something pointing toward the street, the city, the hospital, a place where one could stand without being shoved aside by men who smelled of tobacco and rain.
There were signs, of course. Too many. None of them useful.
“Come on, Margaret,” I muttered under my breath.
My voice sounded small here.
I had the address written in my pocket. Birmingham City Hospital. I had read the letter so many times I could see the paper in my sleep, the black ink, the neat signature, the promise of work and lodging arrangements to be discussed upon arrival. It had seemed straightforward in London. Just one train, one station, a single hospital. A new life, if one was inclined toward dramatic thinking.
Standing in the middle of that platform with smoke dampening the hair at the nape of my neck, it felt rather less straightforward.
I set the suitcase down for a moment and reached into my coat pocket for the folded paper.
“Watch it,” a man snapped.
I looked up. “You walked into me.”
He turned, surprised perhaps that I had a voice. His eyes moved over my coat, my hat, my suitcase, and the gloves I wore even though the day was not cold enough to justify them. Then his mouth twitched.
“London girl,” he said, as if it were an insult.
He gave a short laugh and disappeared into the crowd.
I hated him at once., then hated myself a little for being glad he had guessed it so quickly, because at least someone seemed to know where I was from.
The paper had softened along the folds from too much handling. I smoothed it against my palm and looked down at the address again as though it might have changed since the last time.
Birmingham City Hospital.
I could ask someone for directions.
That was the sensible thing to do. Nurses were sensible by necessity. We asked for instruments before we needed them. We counted pulse, checked pupils, watched the colour drain from lips and learned to move before panic had a chance to enter the room. Asking a stranger for directions was hardly a battlefield procedure.
Still, my feet remained where they were.
There were too many men. Too many eyes. Too many ways for a simple question to become an invitation I had not meant to give. I had learned that in London before the war and learned it again in France, where a woman in uniform was either a saint, a mother, or something men thought they could grab if the pain was bad enough and the morphine had not come yet.
My thumb pressed against the inside of my wrist.
I folded the paper and pushed it back into my pocket.
The voice came from my left. Male, young and amused in a way that immediately made me want to be difficult.
He was leaning against the pillar as though he owned it. Flat cap pulled low. His coat was dark, with his hands in his pockets. Younger than I expected from the confidence in his voice, though not a boy. There was something quick about his face, something bright and restless in the eyes. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth unlit.
He looked at my suitcase, then at my gloves, then at my face.
“You’re standing in the middle of the station reading the same bit of paper like it owes you money.”
“It’s a thrilling hobby.”
That made him laugh. A real laugh, short and warm, and I found that more irritating than if he had sneered.
He pushed himself off the pillar. “Where you headed?”
“I’m perfectly capable of finding my way.”
“Didn’t say you weren’t.”
“You implied it.” I went in completely defensive.
“I implied you looked lost.”
His eyes flicked toward the exit, then back to me. “Right. Then you’ll be wanting that way.”
He pointed with his chin toward a passage half-hidden behind a knot of passengers and porters.
I picked up my suitcase again. The handle had warmed where my palm had been. “Thank you.”
“That all you’re carrying?”
Another laugh, softer this time. “Fair enough.”
I started toward the passage without waiting for him to say anything else. If I walked with enough purpose, perhaps Birmingham would be fooled into thinking I belonged to it already.
I managed six steps before he fell into stride beside me.
I stopped. “Are you following me?”
I studied him properly then. He had that look men in rough districts often wore after the war, whether they’d gone to France or only watched others come back from it. A face trained to make a joke before anyone noticed the bruising. Not actual bruising in his case, though there was a small healing cut near his brow and a faint swelling along one knuckle. His coat was good enough to mean money of some kind, worn carelessly enough to mean he did not have to beg for it.
“Do you make a habit of approaching women at stations?” I asked.
“Only ones who look ready to stab somebody with a hatpin.”
“I don’t own a hatpin sharp enough.”
He looked pleased by that, which told me he was either foolish or very used to women threatening him.
He waited a second. “That’s usually where you tell me your name.”
“In polite places, I hear that’s how it goes.”
“This is a polite place?”
He glanced around the station: the shouting men, the crying baby, the porter arguing over a trunk, the blackened glass overhead. “No. Suppose not.”
He kept pace as if my refusal had been an invitation written in gold.
“I know the city,” he said. “You don’t.”
“You’ve gathered that from my accent?”
“That and the way you’re looking at everything like it might bite.”
I hated that I wanted to ask which parts.
We reached the main concourse where the crowd widened and split toward the exits. A gust of colder air rolled through whenever the doors opened, carrying the stink of horses and smoke from the street beyond. I could see it now, Birmingham proper, waiting outside with its soot-dark buildings and narrow faces. The sky above the station was the colour of dirty dishwater.
John nodded toward my suitcase. “Hospital?”
His expression changed before he could hide it. Only a little, but enough. His teasing eased back., and his gaze went to the cuff of my coat, where the sleeve had shifted and shown a glimpse of white beneath.
He had not guessed. He had seen.
“Then you’ve had practice.”
His jaw moved once, like he had bitten down on a thought. “Birmingham’s got plenty of need for nurses.”
Something passed through his face then, too fast to name. France, perhaps. Or a room where someone had died badly and no one had known what to do with the blood.
I had seen that look in London. In train compartments, or in pubs, on men who laughed too loudly and women who flinched at dropped plates.
The war had ended, according to newspapers.
No one had informed England.
“I need Birmingham City Hospital,” I said, because it was easier than standing there with the ghosts between us.
John nodded. “I can show you.”
“I don’t take walks with strange men.”
“And yet I’m going that way, and you’ve got a suitcase that looks heavier than you.”
“I carried wounded men heavier than this.”
The words came out sharper than I intended.
John’s face stilled. He did not make a joke, and that was something, at least.
“Then you can carry it,” he said quietly. “And I’ll walk beside you so nobody bothers you.”
He held my gaze without pushing. There was no noble look on his face, no grand display of gentlemanly sacrifice. He seemed, if anything, mildly uncomfortable with having said something decent.
I let out a slow breath through my nose. “Fine.”
His grin came back, though smaller. “Fine?”
“You may walk beside me.”
“You may also refrain from speaking.”
We stepped out of the station into Birmingham.
The city hit me with both hands.
London had fog, but this was different. This was industry thick enough to taste. Smoke dragged low between buildings and clung to window ledges, faces, washing lines, the backs of horses. The street outside the station was churned with mud and black water. Carts moved alongside motorcars, boys darted through gaps with the desperate confidence of children who had learned early that wheels rarely stopped for them. Men in caps stood in clusters outside shops and public houses, smoking, watching, saying very little.
Everything looked as if it had been rubbed with coal.
John noticed me taking it in. “Welcome to Birmingham.”
“That’s the sunniest bit.”
He laughed again and moved to the outside of the pavement, closer to the road. I noticed that without wanting to. Men did that sometimes when they wished to appear protective. Men did it sometimes because they understood roads better than women’s fear. John did it with the distracted ease of someone who had been taught by women and trouble.
“You’ll want to learn the streets quick,” he said. “Main ones first. Don’t cut through alleys unless you know where they come out.”
“I’m from London, Mr. John. Alleys are not a Birmingham invention.”
“No, but ours have more personality.”
“By personality, do you mean knives?”
He smiled around the unlit cigarette. “Sometimes fists. Depends on the day.”
“You’ll also want to keep your bag close in the markets. Don’t look too interested in anything unless you want the price doubled. And if a man offers to carry that for a penny, he’ll run with it before you’ve finished saying thank you.”
“I would never pay a stranger to steal from me.”
“You’d be surprised how many do.”
We passed a row of shops with grimy windows. A butcher was hosing blood from the front step into the gutter. A girl no older than twelve stood outside with a basket over one arm, her cheeks red from the wind, watching us with open curiosity. Across the street, a man came out of a public house though it was barely afternoon. He leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette with hands that shook worse than mine.
I looked away before he caught me seeing him.
The suitcase pulled at my arm again. I adjusted my grip.
John noticed. Of course he did.
“You sure you don’t want me to take it?”
“My aunt says that as though it’s an illness.”
That earned a quick look from him, amused and bright. “You talk posh, but you’ve got a bite.”
“I’ll write to my mother. She’ll be relieved.”
“She worried about you coming here?”
“Everyone is worried about everything nowadays.”
A cart rolled past close enough to splash dirty water over the hem of my coat. I stepped back too late and looked down at the black spots blooming in the wool.
John winced. “There’s your first bit of Birmingham.”
“Don’t worry. By next week the whole coat’ll match.”
He pointed ahead with two fingers. “Hospital’s past there. Another few streets.”
I followed the line of his hand and saw taller buildings rising beyond the roofs. Red brick with long windows and a shape that looked stern even from a distance.
Something inside me tightened.
Not panic this time, though panic stood nearby, waiting for permission. This was the edge of arriving. The last few minutes before a person became whoever she had claimed she was going to be.
A nurse, twenty-three years of age, and somehow capable.
John slowed half a step. “You all right?”
“You saying fine before I’d properly asked.”
I looked at him. “Do people in Birmingham make a habit of examining every word?”
“Only when they’re interesting.”
“You’re a London nurse with war medals, a suitcase, and a temper. That’s interesting enough.”
I stopped walking and he stopped too, a few feet ahead, then turned back.
“I didn’t say medals,” I said.
“You did at the station.”
“No. I said I carried wounded men.”
He looked at me for a second, and there it was again, that flicker of something more careful beneath the grin.
“Your posture said the rest.”
“That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard today.”
“You stand like a soldier pretending not to be one.”
I had no answer for that.
A woman pushed past us with a basket of laundry, muttering about fools blocking the path. I moved aside automatically, cheeks warming in the cold air. John waited until she had gone.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said.
People always said that after meaning enough.
I started walking again. “I trained as a nurse during the war. That’s all.”
“It is all I’m telling you.”
We continued in silence for a while.
I preferred him that way, or told myself I did. It gave me room to listen to the city: Hooves, wheels, a factory whistle in the distance, a baby crying somewhere behind a closed door. The low rumble of men coming out of a building in work clothes, shoulders bent from labour and lungs filled with whatever made this city rich enough for some and hungry enough for the rest.
There were women everywhere too. Women with cracked hands and tired backs. Women in dark coats holding children by the wrist. Women who looked at me and saw the stranger in my boots, my London coat, my suitcase. Some glanced away. Some did not.
The hospital grew larger with each street.
By the time we reached the gates, my hand ached from the suitcase handle and my lungs felt lined with soot.
Birmingham City Hospital stood behind iron railings, broad and severe, its brick darkened by weather and smoke. The windows were tall, many of them open a crack despite the cold. Somewhere inside, a bell rang. A motor ambulance waited near the entrance, its paint scratched, one wheel splashed with mud. Two orderlies carried a stretcher through the doors at a brisk walk. The patient on it was covered to the chest with a grey blanket, one hand dangling over the side.
The sight steadied me more than anything else had.
A hospital was a hospital. Even an unfamiliar one.
Blood had the same smell in Birmingham. Pain made the same sounds. Fever flushed skin the same way. A frightened man was a frightened man no matter the city.
John watched me instead of the building. “You’ve got that look again.”
“Like you’re about to fight it.”
He looked at the building then. His expression softened in a way that made him look younger for half a second. “Well, give it a hard one for me.”
Despite myself, I smiled.
John pointed at the main doors. “Ask for the matron when you get in. If she scares you, don’t show it.”
“I avoid hospitals when I can.”
“That’s usually what men say before turning up half-dead and bleeding on the floor.”
“Then you’ll see me soon enough.”
He tapped the side of his cap. “That almost sounded kind.”
I shifted the suitcase to my other hand and looked at him properly. “Name’s Margaret. Thank you for walking me.”
“You’re welcome, Margaret.” He replied grinning.
“Mr. John,” I said slowly, “are you always this pleased with yourself?”
“That must be exhausting for everyone around you.”
“Then your brothers sound sensible.”
He scoffed “That’d be news to them.”
A shout came from farther down the street. John turned his head toward it, attention catching like a match strike. For the first time since he had appeared beside that pillar, I saw the restlessness in him sharpen into something harder. Recognition, perhaps. Duty, or trouble calling a familiar name.
“You’ll be all right from here?”
“I’m standing in front of a hospital, not the mouth of hell.”
“You haven’t met the matron yet.”
“I have survived surgeons with God complexes and soldiers biting through leather straps. I can manage a matron.”
His smile returned, quieter now. “I believe you.”
I was not used to strangers believing me.
He stepped back from the gate. “Careful in the city, Margaret.”
Before I could say something else, he nodded once and began walking backward down the pavement, hands in his pockets again.
“Welcome to Birmingham.” John said over his shoulder and disappeared into the moving street as if the city had folded around him.
I stood by the gate for a few seconds after he left.
The iron was cold beneath my gloved hand when I touched it. Behind me, Birmingham went on shouting. Ahead of me, the hospital waited with its tall windows and open doors. I felt suddenly aware of my coat hem stained with street water, my hair loosened by the walk, my mouth dry from nerves and cigarette smoke.
I wanted to light another one.
Instead I lifted my suitcase and walked through the gates.
The entrance hall smelled of carbolic soap, boiled linen, damp coats, and that sour scent of sickness. It was unpleasant enough to be comforting. My boots struck the tiled floor with a sound that seemed too loud at first. A clerk behind a desk looked up over his spectacles, took in my suitcase, then returned to his papers as though women carrying their whole lives through hospital doors were a daily inconvenience.
“I’m here to report for nursing staff,” I said.
He did not look up. “Name?”
He dipped his pen into ink. “From London?”
“Matron’s expecting you.”
The word matron landed with more weight than it had outside.
The clerk pointed down the corridor without lifting his head. “Straight through. First left. Office at the end. Don’t wander.”
“I wasn’t planning on sightseeing.”
That made his pen pause. Only for a moment.
Then he wrote something down. “First left.”
I followed his directions.
The hospital corridors were wide but busy. Nurses passed in pairs, aprons clean, faces set in that particular expression women wore when they had too much to do and no intention of being interrupted by men pretending urgency was competence. A porter carried a stack of folded blankets high enough to hide his face. Somewhere beyond the walls came the sharp cry of a child, followed by a woman’s soothing voice. A bell rang twice.
My shoulders loosened one inch.
Work had a rhythm and rules. Even chaos behaved differently in a hospital than it did on a train platform. People could still die, and often did, but there were basins, charts, bandages, routines. Pain could be given a name and written in ink.
At the end of the corridor, a frosted glass door bore painted letters.
I set the suitcase down, smoothed my coat, and knocked.
The voice on the other side was crisp enough to cut bread.
Matron Hawthorne stood behind her desk rather than sitting at it. She was tall, narrow, and built from discipline. Her grey hair was pinned beneath her cap with military precision, and her uniform looked so exact it seemed less worn than enforced. She held my letter in one hand.
Her eyes moved over me with swift assessment. Coat. Gloves. Boots. Face. She missed nothing, which meant I disliked and respected her within the same breath.
I glanced at the clock on the wall. “By seven minutes.”
“Late is not measured by how much one prefers it to be excused.”
A silence. Then her mouth twitched so faintly I wondered if I had imagined it.
She set the letter down and lifted another sheet. “You served in France.”
“I trained in London first, then volunteered with a medical unit attached to casualty clearing work.”
“I did not ask for modesty, Miss Allen. I asked for confirmation.”
I held her gaze. “Yes, Matron. I served in France.”
“Experience with surgical cases?”
My fingers tightened inside my gloves. “Yes.”
The room grew smaller for half a second.
Matron Hawthorne nodded once and placed the sheet on her desk. “Then you will find Birmingham less dramatic and more relentless. We have industrial injuries, infections, births, beatings, burns, men who drink away their wages and women who pay the consequence. We have children with lungs ruined before they learn to read. We have former soldiers who will not call themselves patients until they collapse in the street.”
“No, you don’t. But you will.”
She moved around the desk and opened the door. “Your lodging has been arranged temporarily at a nurses’ boarding house two streets over. Respectable enough. Cold in the mornings. You’ll be given directions after supper. Until then, you’ll meet the staff, receive your schedule, and change into uniform.”
“I know what you meant. We are short-staffed.”
Every hospital in England had been short-staffed since the war, and before that too, though men only noticed shortages when they were the ones needing care.
Matron Hawthorne stepped into the corridor, and I followed with my suitcase.
“You’ll begin on women’s surgical for the remainder of the afternoon. Tomorrow you’ll rotate through receiving. After that, we’ll see where you’re useful.”
I liked the word more than I should have.
She led me down another corridor and into a small room where two nurses stood near a cupboard, arguing in low voices over a missing apron.
One of them was tall and fair, with a sharp chin and tired blue eyes. The other was shorter, dark-haired, with a rounder face and a mouth that looked as if it smiled often despite the hospital’s best attempts to prevent it.
Both turned when we entered.
“Nurse Clarke,” Matron said. “Nurse Doyle. This is Nurse Allen from London. She’ll be joining us.”
The fair one, Nurse Clarke, looked me over without warmth and without cruelty. A practical assessment.
The dark-haired one smiled at once.
“London?” she said. “Well, that’s fancy.”
Nurse Clarke stepped forward and gave me a small nod. “Edith Clarke.”
Her handshake was dry and firm.
Nurse Doyle took my hand next with both of hers, warmer than expected. “Mary. Don’t mind Edith’s face. She was born disappointed.”
Edith sighed. “I was born quiet. You mistake the two because you’ve never tried it.”
Mary looked at me. “See? Friendly already.”
A laugh almost left me. It caught somewhere near my ribs and turned into a breath instead.
Matron Hawthorne pointed to the cupboard. “Find Nurse Allen an official uniform and show her where to change. She’ll be on women’s surgical.”
Mary’s brows lifted. “Today?”
Edith looked at me again, this time more directly. “War?”
Something shifted in her face. Recognition without pity.
Mary’s smile softened but did not disappear. “Right then. We’ll keep the worst of ourselves hidden until tomorrow.”
“Speak for yourself,” Edith said.
Matron Hawthorne gave them both a look capable of sterilising instruments. “I expect her on the ward in fifteen minutes.”
“Yes, Matron,” they said together.
Matron turned to me. “Miss Allen.”
“Birmingham does not reward softness. Do your work. Keep your head down. Ask when you don’t know. Don’t pretend around our patients.”
The room seemed to breathe again once she was gone.
Mary leaned closer to me and whispered, “She likes you.”
I looked toward the closed door. “That was liking me?”
Edith opened a cupboard and moved a stack of linens. “She didn’t send you home crying. Practically a kiss on the cheek.”
“I can still hear you, Nurse Clarke,” Matron’s voice called from the corridor.
Mary pressed her lips together so hard her whole face trembled.
Despite the ache in my arm, the soot in my lungs, and despite Charles folded somewhere inside my suitcase with my old life, I laughed.
Mary looked delighted. Edith looked less disappointed than advertised.
“There she is,” Mary said. “We were beginning to worry London had sent us a statue.”
“I’m too tired to be made of stone.”
“That’ll fit in well here.”
Edith handed me a folded apron and pointed toward a screen in the corner. “You can change there. Keep your purse on you. Don’t leave cigarettes in the common room unless you mean to share.”
Mary gasped. “Edith Clarke, accusing nurses of theft?”
“I’m accusing nurses of being nurses.”
I set my suitcase down beside the screen. “I only smoke when my hands shake.”
The words came out before I had measured them.
Both women went a little quiet.
I hated the quiet more than I hated the mistake.
Then Mary reached into her own apron pocket and pulled out a cigarette case, scratched silver, clearly lived. She flipped it open, showed me three crooked cigarettes inside, and winked.
“Then you’ll never be without company.”
Edith shook her head, but there was something kind in the movement. “Change quickly. Women’s surgical waits for no one.”
I stepped behind the screen and began to unbutton my coat.
I folded my coat over the back of a chair and reached for the clean uniform. Changed fast. Women’s surgical smelled of boiled linen and old pain.
That was my first thought when Nurse Clarke pushed open the ward door with her hip and gestured for me to follow. There were sixteen beds, eight on each side, with narrow walkways between them and windows tall enough to let in a grey wash of afternoon light. The glass looked clean, which surprised me, until I noticed how the soot gathered thick around the frames where fingers could not easily reach.
A coal fire burned low at the far end. It gave off more smoke than warmth.
“Beds one through six are post-operative,” Edith said, walking with the brisk pace of a woman who did not waste steps. “Seven is waiting on Dr. Whitcomb to remember he’s got a patient with an abdomen hard as a board. Eight is Mrs. Barlow. You’ll know her because she shouts before she needs anything. Nine through thirteen are dressings, observation, infection watch. Fourteen is dying.”
She said the last part the same way one might say it was raining.
I looked toward bed fourteen before I could stop myself.
An older woman lay there with her face turned toward the window, cheeks hollow, skin stretched too thin over bone. Her breathing lifted the blanket in small, uneven movements. Beside her sat a girl of perhaps seventeen, twisting a handkerchief between red fingers.
“How long?” I asked quietly.
Edith paused near the medicine trolley. “Maybe tonight. Maybe tomorrow morning. Depends whether her heart is stubborn.”
“The daughter knows. Sons haven’t come.”
There was a bitterness in her voice that made me wonder how many times she had said those words before.
Mary came in behind us carrying a tray with fresh bandages stacked high enough to hide the lower half of her face. “Mrs. Barlow threw a slipper at Dr. Whitcomb while you were gone.”
Edith did not look surprised. “Did she hit him?”
Mary set the tray down and gave me a quick smile. “Welcome to women’s surgical.”
I thought of Matron Hawthorne’s words. Less dramatic and more relentless.
There was no time for ceremony after that. No gentle introduction, no careful placement of the new nurse where she might watch before being trusted. Edith handed me a basin, Mary gave me a stack of clean cloths, and the afternoon opened its mouth.
I changed dressings on a woman with an infected incision below her ribs while Edith watched my hands for the first few moments, then moved away when she saw I knew what I was doing. The woman’s name was Clara Evans, twenty-eight years old, mother of four, husband working at one of the factories with a cough he refused to name. She apologized every time she winced.
“You don’t need to apologize for pain,” I told her, unwinding the old bandage slowly.
“Pain makes fools of everyone. You’re in good company.”
That made her smile for half a second before the dressing pulled at the dried edge and took the smile with it.
The wound was angry, red around the stitches with a thin seepage that had soaked the gauze yellow. I asked Mary for carbolic and kept my face steady as I cleaned it. Clara watched my expression more than my hands, as patients always did. They searched a nurse’s face for the truth doctors refused to give them.
“You’ve seen worse?” she asked.
“Am I meant to be comforted by that?”
She gave a small laugh, breathless. “Does it?”
Mary looked at me over the tray, eyes softer than her mouth allowed.
After Clara came Mrs. Barlow, who had indeed been the slipper-thrower. She was a large woman with iron-grey hair, a sharp tongue, and an operation scar along her thigh that needed inspecting.
“You’re new,” she said the second I came near.
“Thought so. You’re pale enough.”
“I’ll try to develop a Birmingham complexion by supper.”
Mary coughed into her shoulder to hide a laugh.
Mrs. Barlow narrowed her eyes at me, then decided I would do. “That doctor’s a fool.”
She barked a laugh loud enough for the woman in the next bed to stir. “Oh, I like this one.”
“She’s been here twenty minutes,” Edith said from the foot of another bed. “Don’t encourage her.”
The afternoon went on like that. Bed to bed. Name to name. Pain moving from one body to another until the ward became less a room and more a collection of small wars nobody wrote medals for.
A girl with burns along her forearm from a kitchen accident bit down on her lip until it bled while I changed the dressing. A seamstress recovering from a fever asked me twice if her employer had sent word, and when I told her no, her eyes turned to the ceiling. Mrs. Barlow complained about her tea. Clara Evans asked if infection meant she was dying, and I answered carefully because there were cruel ways to be honest and cowardly ways to be kind.
“No,” I told her, adjusting the blanket at her waist. “It means we watch it closely.”
“That’s what nurses say when they don’t know.”
“That is what nurses say when they intend to keep watching.”
She studied me with tired eyes. “You talk funny.”
That earned another small smile. I tucked it away as if I had done something useful.
Near four o’clock, Dr. Whitcomb appeared with a harassed expression and ink on his cuff. He was younger than I expected for the authority in his voice, perhaps late thirties, with thinning hair and the kind of confidence often given to men before competence had a chance to catch up. He examined bed seven, finally, and did not like what he found. The woman’s abdomen was rigid, skin shining with fever sweat, pulse too fast beneath my fingers.
“Prepare for theatre,” he said.
I moved before anyone told me to.
For a moment, the ward narrowed to the width of a stretcher and the sound of wheels rattling over tile. Mary went ahead to clear the corridor. Edith spoke to the patient in a low, firm voice while I helped secure the blanket around her. The woman gripped my wrist.
“Am I dying?” she whispered.
Her fingers were hot. Too hot.
“No,” Dr. Whitcomb said too quickly and too annoyingly from the foot of the bed.
I looked down at her. “You’re very ill, Mrs. Ellis. They’re taking you to surgery because waiting would be worse.”
Her eyes filled. “My boys—”
“We’ll send word,” Edith said.
Mrs. Ellis kept hold of my wrist until the doors to theatre took her.
Afterward, I stood in the corridor with the warmth of her hand still printed on my skin through my glove.
For a second I was back in France.
Canvas overhead. Mud beneath the boards. Men calling for mothers, wives, saints, water. A boy no older than seventeen catching my sleeve with half his hand gone, asking whether he would see Kent again. I had told him yes because he needed to hear it, and because I had been twenty-one and still foolish enough to believe God might forgive a lie told gently.
Mary’s voice cut through before the memory could finish sinking its teeth into me.
The corridor came back. Brick walls. Hospital tiles. The smell of carbolic.
Mary stood beside me with an empty basin in her hands, her face no longer bright. “You with us?”
“Yes.” My voice sounded too flat. “Sorry.”
I flexed my fingers once. “What now?”
She looked at me for a second longer, then nodded toward the ward. “Now Mrs. Barlow wants to know why her tea is cold. Very serious matter.”
By the time the afternoon began to loosen toward evening, my feet ached, my shoulders burned, and the clean white of my apron had taken on honest stains. Matron Hawthorne came through once, checked the ward, checked us, checked me with particular attention, and said nothing. Edith later informed me that silence from Matron after a first shift was practically applause.
I believed her only because Mary agreed.
At half past six, another nurse came to replace us. The ward settled into that strange evening quiet hospitals had, when pain did not lessen but became more private. Lamps were lit. Curtains were drawn around bed fourteen. The daughter still sat there, handkerchief twisted to threads.
I washed my hands longer than necessary.
Some blood came away first, then only soap, then nothing. But I kept scrubbing.
Mary leaned against the basin beside me. “You’ll take the skin off.”
My knuckles had gone pink.
I reached for the towel. “A little, yeah.”
Mary did not argue, which I appreciated more than agreement.
Edith joined us in the small changing room, unpinning her cap with a sigh that seemed to come from the soles of her feet. “You did well.”
I glanced at her in the mirror. “That sounded painful.”
Mary grinned. “She means it, though. Edith doesn’t hand compliments out unless someone’s fever breaks or a doctor admits he’s wrong.”
“That ever happen?” I asked.
“The doctor admitting he’s wrong.”
Mary pressed a hand to her chest. “We live in hope.”
Edith gave her a look. “Ignore her. She talks more when she’s hungry.”
“I talk the correct amount.”
“You talk enough for three wards.”
Mary turned to me. “See how cruel Birmingham makes a woman?”
I folded my apron carefully, buying myself a moment to enjoy them without showing it too openly. Their bickering had a rhythm worn smooth by familiarity. It made the room feel warmer than the small stove had managed.
Matron had said lodging would be at a nurses’ boarding house two streets over. I expected directions, perhaps a scribbled note with a map, and to be sent out into the dark with my suitcase and a stern reminder about punctuality.
Instead, Mary pulled on her coat and wrapped a knitted scarf twice around her neck. “I’ll walk you.”
“Probably. But you’re new, it’s getting dark, and Birmingham likes to introduce its rough self after sundown.”
Edith buttoned her own coat. “Let her walk you.”
I looked between them. “Is it that bad?”
Mary’s mouth tilted, though this time the smile did not quite reach her eyes. “Depends on the street.”
“Everything seems to depend on the street here.”
Edith took her gloves from the shelf. “And keep your cigarettes out of sight if you’re walking alone. Men will use any excuse to speak to you.”
“Men do that everywhere.”
“Yes, but here they’ll pretend it’s local charm.”
Mary laughed, then reached for my suitcase before I could stop her. “Come on. I know you can carry wounded men and your own luggage. Let me be useful before Edith calls me decorative.”
“I never called you decorative.”
“Same thing, in a nicer dress.”
I let Mary take the suitcase because my arm throbbed and pride was less useful than bone.
Outside, evening had settled over Birmingham with a blackened hand.
The lamps were lit along the street, their glow smeared by smoke and damp. Workmen moved in groups now, caps low, shoulders hunched against the cold. A woman dragged a child along by the sleeve while the child cried for bread. Somewhere down the road, a piano played badly through the open door of a public house, the notes staggering into the street as if drunk before any man inside had touched a glass.
Mary walked with purpose, suitcase in one hand, the other tucked into her coat pocket. She seemed smaller outside the hospital and somehow more alert. Her eyes moved constantly. Corners. Doorways. Men lingering near walls.
I noticed because I did the same.
“The boarding house is respectable,” she said. “Mrs. Hodge runs it. Widow, and sharp as a sewing needle. She’ll charge extra if you take hot water too often and scold you if you come in after ten, but she keeps clean sheets and doesn’t let men past the front room.”
“That’s better than London gave me.”
“She likes nurses. Her daughter died in the influenza. Had a nurse with her at the end.”
Mary nodded once. “Everyone is sorry for someone these days.”
We turned into a narrower street. The buildings leaned closer, their upper windows staring down with dark, blank faces. Washing hung between two houses, stiff in the cold. A group of boys scattered when Mary clicked her tongue at them, though one called something under his breath that made her stop and turn.
“Say it louder, Billy, and I’ll tell your mother where you hide the coins you nick off the bookies.”
The boy’s face went pale.
I stared at her. “I’m beginning to think you’re dangerous.”
“Only to children and doctors.”
She gave me a quick sideways smile, then her expression sobered as we approached another turn.
“Listen,” she said. “You’ll hear things about this part of the city. Half of it true, half of it told by men who like frightening women because it makes them feel tall.”
“This isn’t the West End. It isn’t London respectable, either. People here mind their own business because their own business can get them killed if someone else minds it first.”
The street opened slightly ahead. More houses. More noise. A public house at the corner, windows glowing amber, men gathered outside with cigarettes and hard faces. One of them glanced at Mary, nodded once, then looked at me with interest.
Mary’s hand tightened on my suitcase handle.
“Watery Lane isn’t far,” she said quietly.
The name sounded familiar only because I had heard it in frightened versions of Birmingham before leaving London. My mother’s voice. Newspaper gossip. Women whispering while pretending not to enjoy the danger of it.
“That’s gang territory?” I asked.
Mary huffed a humourless laugh. “All of Birmingham is someone’s territory if you ask the right men.”
“That belongs to the Shelbys.”
I looked at her. “Shelbys.”
“That sounds like an answer from someone who doesn’t wish to be overheard.”
Mary’s mouth pressed thin.
We passed the public house. The men outside stopped speaking for the few seconds it took us to walk by. I kept my gaze forward, though my skin prickled with the effort.
Once we were a little farther on, Mary spoke again.
“They run the betting, protection, pubs. Some factories fear them, some pay them, some do both at the same time. Men around here don’t say their names too loudly unless they’re friendly with them or too stupid to live long.”
“Peaky Blinders,” she said, testing the name on my tongue.
The words landed with a strange quiet despite the noise around us.
I had heard the name, of course. Everyone had, in the way everyone heard names of men who became more story than flesh. Razor blades sewn into caps, men blinded in alleys, bookmaking, policemen paid to look the other way. My mother had said Birmingham was rough. She had said gangs as though the word itself might snatch me off the pavement.
I looked toward a narrow lane disappearing between rows of houses. A man stood there smoking beneath a lamp, cap pulled low enough to hide his eyes.
“And the hospital treats them?” I asked the real question that concerned me.
Mary gave me a look. “The hospital treats anyone bleeding enough to be brought through the door.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
We walked a few more steps.
“Yes,” she said at last. “Sometimes. Usually they’ve got their own people for smaller things. When it’s bad, they come to us. Or someone comes instead and pays in cash, asks no names, leaves before the constable can be fetched.”
“And Matron allows that?”
“Matron allows patients to live when she can manage it. She will only judge them afterward.”
I liked Matron Hawthorne a little more then.
Mary glanced at me, thoughtful. “You met one today, I think.”
My feet slowed before I told them to.
Mary stopped with me beneath a streetlamp. Its weak light caught in the damp air between us.
She adjusted the suitcase in her grip. “Word moves fast if you know who to hear it from. One of the porters said John Shelby walked some new London nurse to the hospital gates this afternoon. I thought he was making it up until I saw you.”
Flat cap with a restless grin, hands in pockets… The way men had looked toward him in the street without quite looking at him.
“He said his name was John.”
“Then he was feeling honest.”
Mary gave a small shrug. “They don’t need to.”
I looked back down the street as if he might appear there again, laughing at the fact that I had been walking beside danger and arguing with it about my suitcase.
“He didn’t do anything,” I said.
Mary’s lips twitched. “That sounds like John Shelby.”
“He walked me to the hospital.”
“That also sounds like John Shelby, if he liked you.”
“I don’t think he liked me.”
“That sounds more likely.”
Mary began walking again, slower now. “John’s one of the younger brothers. Arthur’s worse when he’s drunk, which is often enough. Tommy’s the one you keep your head down for.”
There it was. The name beneath the name. Spoken lower.
Even the smoke seemed to lean in.
“He owns the streets?” I asked.
Mary looked ahead. “He owns enough of the men walking them.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
I did not like that, but also understood it.
A group of boys ran past us, laughing too loudly, chased by another boy carrying half a loaf of bread. Life went on around the warning as if warnings were ordinary weather. Perhaps here they were.
Mary stopped outside a narrow brick house with lace curtains in the front window and a brass knocker polished to a dull shine. A small sign near the door read MRS. HODGE — ROOMS.
The house looked better than I had expected. Tired, but clean. The step had been scrubbed. A potted plant sat by the door with more determination than health.
Mary set my suitcase down. “Mrs. Hodge’ll give you a room on the second floor if Matron wrote ahead proper.”
“Thank you for walking me.”
“You’ll learn the way quick.”
“You will.” She hesitated, then added, “And Margaret?”
It sounded strange hearing my name from her so soon. Kind, though. Practical kindness. The kind women offered one another without making a performance of it.
“If you see Peaky Blinders in the hospital, treat them as patients. If you see them in the street, keep moving unless they speak to you first. If they do speak, answer plain. Don’t flirt unless you mean it, don’t insult them unless you’re ready for it to be remembered, and don’t ask questions about things that don’t want answering.”
“What if I’ve already insulted one?”
Mary’s face changed. “Did you?”
“I may have been... brisk.”
“I asked whether he made a habit of approaching women at stations. I also told him he was pleased with himself.”
Mary stared at me for one breath, then laughed so suddenly that a curtain twitched in the house next door.
I frowned. “That’s reassuring.”
“No, it is. Really.” She wiped the corner of her eye. “John’s survived worse than a London nurse calling him pleased with himself.”
“Most things about them are.”
The door opened before either of us could say more.
A woman in her sixties stood inside with a candle in one hand and an expression sharp enough to make Matron Hawthorne seem warm. She wore a dark dress buttoned to the throat, hair pinned back, eyes pale and unsentimental.
“You must be Nurse Allen.”
“Mrs. Hodge. Wipe your feet.”
Mary leaned toward me. “Supper is usually bread, stew if she’s feeling generous, judgment either way.”
“I can hear you, Mary Doyle,” Mrs. Hodge said.
Mary straightened. “Good evening, Mrs. Hodge.”
“Go home before your mother sends your brother looking.”
Mrs. Hodge looked at me. “Inside. Heat goes out when doors stand open.”
I picked up my suitcase and turned to Mary one last time. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Too early and in a terrible mood.”
“Something to look forward to.”
Mary smiled. “Welcome to Birmingham, Margaret.”
Then she was gone, scarf tucked high around her chin, disappearing into the smoky evening with the same quick steps she had used in the ward.
Mrs. Hodge shut the door behind me.
The boarding house smelled of boiled cabbage, furniture polish, and damp wool drying too close to the fire. A narrow staircase climbed along the wall. Somewhere above, floorboards creaked under careful feet. Voices murmured from a room to the right, women’s voices, tired and low. The house had that particular quiet of shared lodging, where every person tried to own a private grief behind thin walls.
Mrs. Hodge held out her hand. “Letter.”
I gave her the paper from Matron.
She read it with the candle held close, lips moving slightly. “Second floor. Back room. Washstand, bed, wardrobe, small desk. No gentlemen upstairs. No hot water after nine unless arranged. No spirits. Smoking out the window only. Supper in twenty minutes if you want it.”
“Rent is deducted through hospital arrangement. Anything broken, you pay.”
She looked at my gloves. “You’ll be wanting sleep.”
“I’ll be wanting many things.”
For the first time, Mrs. Hodge’s mouth moved in something near approval. “Most of us do. Come on.”
She led me up the stairs with slow, heavy steps, the candlelight trembling over wallpaper faded by years of coal smoke. On the first landing, a door opened and a young woman peered out, hair loose over one shoulder. She saw Mrs. Hodge and vanished again.
“Factory girl,” Mrs. Hodge said. “Night shifts sometimes. Don’t lend her money.”
“Plans change when people cry.”
My room sat at the back of the second floor.
Mrs. Hodge opened the door and stepped aside.
It was small. Smaller than the flat in London, though cleaner in certain ways. A narrow bed against one wall. A washstand with a chipped basin. A wardrobe with one crooked handle. A desk beneath the window, scarred with old ink marks and a burn in the corner where someone had left a candle too close. The curtains were thin, but washed. The blanket on the bed was grey and neatly folded.
The window looked out over the backs of houses and a strip of yard where laundry hung limp in the damp. Beyond the roofs, factory chimneys climbed into the evening sky.
No Charles. And specially, no bed with memories pressed into the mattress.
My chest tightened before I could prepare for it.
Mrs. Hodge placed the candle on the desk. “You’ll have quiet enough back here.”
She looked around the room as though checking that it had behaved in her absence. “Supper in twenty.”
Then she left, closing the door with a firm click.
I stood in the middle of the room and listened to the house settle around me.
A chair scraped somewhere below. Water moved through pipes. A woman coughed on the other side of the wall, a deep chest cough that made my nurse’s mind catalogue it before the rest of me could object. Outside, a cart rolled over uneven stones, wheels clattering until the sound faded into the distance.
I set my suitcase on the bed.
For a while, I did not open it.
Arriving felt different once nobody was watching. At the station, with John beside me, I could be sharp. At the hospital, with Edith and Mary and Matron measuring my usefulness, I could be capable. In this room, with only the candle and the soot-dark window for company, I was simply a woman with one suitcase and too many ghosts for the space allotted.
I removed my gloves finger by finger.
My hands were steady at first.
The trembling started in the right hand, small enough to pretend away. Then the left joined it out of loyalty or spite. I flexed my fingers, pressed my palms flat against the lid of the suitcase, and waited.
I reached for my cigarette case.
The metal was cool against my palm. Familiar. I opened the window before lighting one, as Mrs. Hodge had ordered. Cold air slid into the room and touched the sweat at the back of my neck. I struck the match on the side of the case. The flare of flame made the window glass show my reflection for a second.
Pale face. Dark eyes. Hair loosening from its pins. A nurse’s collar still fastened neatly at my throat as if neatness could hide exhaustion.
Smoke burned its way down. The first pull always hurt a little after a long day. I liked that too much.
Below, someone laughed in the yard, then another voice told them to shut up.
I leaned my hip against the desk and smoked with the window open, watching Birmingham darken by degrees. The city did not soften at night. It only changed its weapons. Daylight had shown brick and smoke, carts and men with caps pulled low. Darkness brought lamps, shadows, footsteps that seemed to pause too long beneath windows.
Somewhere far off, a whistle blew.
For a moment, it was not a factory whistle. It was the warning before wounded came in. It was someone shouting for stretchers. It was rain hammering canvas overhead while I tried to find the clamp with hands slick from blood.
I took another drag, held it until my lungs protested, then exhaled toward the open window.
“Birmingham,” I said softly, as if naming the place might keep it from becoming France.
The cigarette shortened between my fingers.
When I finally unpacked, I did it carefully.
Dresses first. Two dark ones for workdays when I did not need uniform, one better dress my mother insisted I bring despite the fact that I had nowhere to wear it. Stockings. Undergarments. Hairpins tucked in a small tin. My nursing books, worn at the corners. Bandage scissors wrapped in cloth. A fountain pen Charles had given me for my nineteenth birthday, the nib slightly bent from the day I dropped it on a floor after receiving news that three men from his regiment had been killed.
Charles stood stiff in uniform, chin lifted, eyes trying for brave and landing somewhere near frightened. He had hated that photograph because he thought it made his ears look too large. I loved it because he looked alive in it. Annoyed, nervous, proud, impatient to be done posing so he could take me for tea we could not really afford.
I sat on the bed with the photograph in my lap.
The mattress dipped beneath me with a tired spring.
“You’d hate it here,” I said.
I traced the edge of the photograph with my thumb, careful not to touch his face. “Too much smoke. You’d complain about your collar. Then you’d pretend to like it because I’d tell you to stop being soft.”
My mouth moved around a smile that never fully arrived.
The worst part of grief, I had found, was how much of love became habit. The turning to share a thought, or the listening for a key in the door. Even saving of a piece of bread because he always got hungry at impossible hours. My mind still made room for him before remembering there was no body to fill it.
A knock sounded below. Mrs. Hodge calling names.
I placed Charles’s photograph on the desk, propped against my books, and went down before the room could pull me too far under.
Supper was thin stew, bread hard at the edges, and tea strong enough to stand a spoon in. Four other women sat around the table. Two nurses I did not know, one factory girl with hollow cheeks, and an older woman who worked in laundry and said little except to ask for the salt.
Mrs. Hodge presided over the meal as if commanding a military post.
No one asked me too many questions once they learned I had come from London. That was a mercy. One of the nurses, a red-haired girl called Annie, asked which ward I had been put on. When I answered women’s surgical, she made a sympathetic noise and said Mrs. Barlow once called a vicar useless to his face.
“That was one of her kinder days,” the other nurse said.
The factory girl ate quickly, eyes lowered, one hand curled protectively around her bread. I noticed bruising along her wrist when her sleeve slipped back. Old. Yellowing.
Nurse habit, I told myself.
Human habit, something else answered.
After supper, I returned upstairs with a cup of hot water Mrs. Hodge allowed me “because it’s the first night and I’ve not yet learned whether you’re wasteful.” I washed in the basin, changed into my nightdress, and hung my uniform where the worst creases might fall out by morning. My body was tired enough to ache in separate pieces. Feet. Back. Neck. The place between my shoulder blades where grief liked to sit when it wanted to feel physical.
Sleep should have come easily.
I lay in the narrow bed with the blanket pulled to my chin, staring at the ceiling while the house quieted around me. Floorboards groaned. A door clicked shut. Someone whispered goodnight through the wall. The sounds were ordinary, which made no difference.
My body did not trust night.
It had learned too much in France.
Night was when the wounded came in blue-lipped and shaking. Night was when shells found hospitals because smoke and lamps gave positions away. Night was when men died calling for women who could not hear them. Night was when my own mind, deprived of daylight tasks, dragged every memory from its corner and set it beside me in bed.
The blanket scratched my cheek.
Charles watched from the desk, his photograph dim in the candlelight.
“I’m trying,” I whispered to him.
The window rattled as I closed my eyes.
For a few minutes, perhaps longer, I drifted somewhere shallow. Then a crack split the distance outside.
Far away. Somewhere beyond the houses. One shot first. Then a second. Then shouting, thin and carried by the night.
I was out of bed before I knew I had moved.
My bare feet hit the cold floor. My hand went to the wall, searching for a basin, a lamp, an instrument tray that was not there. My heart slammed once, twice, too hard. The room tilted.
The shouting outside grew louder, then broke into laughter or anger, I could not tell which. A man cursed. Something smashed. Another voice roared back.
I pressed my hand over my mouth.
The wall beneath my other palm was wallpaper, peeling slightly under my fingers. The floor was wood. The air smelled of coal and candle smoke, not mud and chloride and open bodies.
Still, my knees nearly gave.
I fumbled for the cigarette case on the desk and knocked my pen to the floor. It rolled beneath the chair. I did not bother reaching for it. My fingers were clumsy with the match. The first one snapped, a second scraped uselessly. The third caught, flame trembling so violently I nearly burned myself before getting the cigarette lit.
I stood at the open window in my nightdress and smoked as if it were medicine.
The street behind the house was dim, shadows layered over roofs and laundry lines. I could not see whoever had fired. I could hear men somewhere to the left, voices rough with drink or rage. Then came the sound of running feet. A door slammed. A woman shouted from a window for them to take their bloody business elsewhere.
Mary’s voice returned to me.
Watery Lane just down the street.
John Shelby’s grin appeared next. That careless tilt of his head. The way he had known the streets belonged to someone and still walked through them as if ownership were a coat he could shrug on or off depending on the weather.
I had met a gangster at the station and argued with him about luggage.
That should have frightened me more than it did.
Perhaps fear was too crowded in me already.
I smoked halfway through the cigarette before my breath began to obey.
On the desk, my journal waited beneath Charles’s photograph. Brown leather with worn spine and pages inside filled with years I sometimes wished I could tear out and years I feared forgetting if I did. I had begun it when I was sixteen because my mother said a young woman should keep her thoughts orderly. The war had made a mockery of order, but I kept writing all the same.
I sat at the desk and opened it to the next clean page.
The pen was still under the chair.
I crouched to retrieve it and had to pause there, one hand gripping the seat, because another shout outside made my stomach drop. No gunshot followed. Only drunken laughter fading away.
I returned to the chair and uncapped the pen.
For a moment, I did not know what to write.
The ink looked too black on the page.
I arrived today with one suitcase and all the confidence I could afford to pretend. The city is darker than London. Rougher in the mouth. Smoke gets everywhere. The hospital is better than I feared and worse than I hoped, which is likely true of most places worth staying.
The house remained quiet.
Met Matron Hawthorne. Severe woman. Clever eyes. I think she could make a surgeon cry if given the proper motivation. Nurse Edith Clarke is sensible and dry. Nurse Mary Doyle laughs as though she has decided the world is absurd and she refuses to let it win. I like them both already, which is inconvenient.
My cigarette had burned down near my fingers. I crushed it in the saucer Mrs. Hodge had left on the sill, then rubbed ash from my thumb.
I hesitated before writing the next part.
A man called John walked me from the station. John Shelby, according to Mary. Peaky Blinder. I did not know. He was irritating, amused, and kinder than I expected from a stranger. I may have insulted him. He did not seem wounded.
I should have left it there.
Instead, I wrote Charles’s name.
Charles would have laughed at me for getting lost before leaving the station. He would have carried my suitcase even if I told him not to. He would have hated Birmingham’s smoke and loved Mary within five minutes. He would have called John trouble. He would have been right.
I blinked hard, angry with my own eyes.
My grief had become less theatrical with time. That was what made it dangerous. In the beginning it had come like weather, loud enough that people could see it on me and step aside. Now it waited in ordinary places. A suitcase handle. A hospital smell. Some stranger offering to walk beside me. Thin stew at a boarding house table. A joke I wanted to tell a dead man.
I pressed my fingers beneath my eyes until the tears retreated.
“I’m not doing this tonight,” I whispered.
Of course, saying that never stopped anything.
I turned the page in my journal to an older entry without meaning to. The paper fell open where it had been opened many times before.
Rain through canvas again. Took in twenty-three before dawn. Three abdominal, six gas, too many limbs to count properly. Sister Agnes slapped Private Warren when he tried to stand with his femur in pieces. I laughed afterward and then vomited behind the tent. Charles’s letter came, muddy at the corner. He says he dreams of toast with too much butter. I dreamed last night I could hear him calling from one of the stretchers and could not find him.
My mind had already found the tent.
The candle flame leaned in a draft. Shadows moved over the walls. For a moment, the washstand became an instrument table. The blanket at the end of the bed became a stretcher. The dark coat hanging from the wardrobe became a man standing in the corner with half his face gone.
I stood so quickly the chair scraped the floor.
The word was useless. Breathing was the problem.
I crossed to the basin and splashed cold water over my face. Once. Twice. The shock brought me back in pieces. My hands gripping porcelain. My hair falling loose. The floor cold enough to sting. Birmingham outside the window. Charles on the desk. The cigarette taste in my mouth.
I looked at my reflection in the small mirror above the washstand.
“You are in a room,” I told myself. “Second floor. Mrs. Hodge’s house. Birmingham. March, 1921.”
My reflection stared back, unconvinced.
“You are twenty-three years old.”
My voice broke on that one.
“You are twenty-three years old. You are a nurse. You worked today. You will work tomorrow.”
A sound came from outside. Quieter now. Wheels over stone, maybe. Or thunder too far away to matter.
I went back to the desk because lying down felt impossible. Studying was better. Studying gave the mind something to hold that did not bleed.
I opened one of my surgical texts and began reading by candlelight. Infection. Drainage. Fever patterns. The words lined up neatly, obedient little soldiers. I copied a note about abdominal rigidity, then another about antiseptic irrigation. My pen moved slower as the hour deepened. Somewhere in the house, a woman coughed again. I listened for the wetness of it, judged it without meaning to, then wrote more.
Around midnight, another distant crack sounded.
This one might have been a motor backfiring.
The pen tore through the paper.
I sat frozen, ink blooming at the ruined point of the sentence.
No shouting followed. No boots. No cries for stretcher-bearers.
Minutes passed, or perhaps seconds disguised themselves as minutes. I could feel every beat of my pulse in my throat.
At last, I reached for another cigarette.
The room had grown cold with the window open, but I did not close it. Smoke needed somewhere to go. So did I.
I smoked and watched the city through the dark glass until my eyes stung. Birmingham looked almost peaceful from above if one ignored the sounds. Roofs gathered close together. Chimneys stood black against a blacker sky. A few lamps burned in upstairs rooms where other people fought their own private wars.
I wondered how many widows lived on this street.
I wondered how many men had come home from France and found they had brought the battlefield with them tucked under their minds.
I wondered whether the Shelby’s slept well in the city that spoke their name so carefully.
The thought came from nowhere and irritated me at once.
I did not need to wonder about dangerous men. I had work in the morning. I had Matron Hawthorne’s eyes, Edith’s dry approval, Mary’s warnings, patients with fevers, a boarding house with rules. I had enough to fill my mind without making room for a gangsters I had no business being around.
I finished the cigarette and returned to the journal.
The sentence sat alone on the page, too honest and too small.
First night in Birmingham. Gunshots in the distance. Men fighting somewhere near Watery Lane. I thought of France more than once. I thought of Charles too. I smoked too much and studied because the body must eventually tire if the mind refuses mercy.
I am afraid I will never sleep properly again.
The words looked shameful once written.
I almost crossed them out.
There had been too much crossing out in my life already. Too many things softened for other people’s comfort. Father left became Father travelled for work when neighbours asked. Charles was blown apart somewhere in France became Charles did not make it home. I was terrified became I am fine.
Ink could keep the truth if my mouth would not.
Near two in the morning, the street quieted. Real quiet this time. The dangerous sort, though I was too tired by then to care what danger wanted from me.
I undressed from my dressing gown and returned to bed with cold feet and a head full of smoke. Charles’s photograph remained on the desk. I did not turn it away. I needed him there, even if looking at him hurt.
The mattress creaked as I lay down.
I kept my eyes on the ceiling until shapes began to blur. A cart rolled somewhere distant. A dog barked once. The woman beyond the wall coughed into cloth.
My last thought before sleep finally came was of the station.
Steam with noise. And a stranger’s voice asking whether I was lost.
I wondered, as Birmingham dragged me under, whether that had been my first lie in this city.
Or only the first one anyone had heard.
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