My eyes dawdled across the missalette. I had never noticed before that the official title of the ‘Lord have mercy’ prayer was the gracious phrase ‘Invitation to Sorrow’. Hey there, Sorrow, how’ve you been keeping? Come on in. If your bike doesn’t have lights you can always crash on our sofa tonight. Oh, so you’ll be staying a while, Sorrow? Planning to get to know me better? Grand, so. There’s tea in the pot. All.
Sometimes love is a pie. There just isn’t enough to go around. Or OK, maybe there is enough love, but not enough time and attention, so you have to grab your piece, and then the pie smashes and you’re fighting for crumbs...
Luckily Sumac has extra Rakhi in her pocket and hands them out to anyone who wants one, because really, who cares so long as the threads get tied.
In childhood, Lib remembered, family seemed as necessary and inescapable as a ring of mountains. One never imagined that as the decades went by, one might drift into an unbounded country.
Swiping’s bad but if I was a swiper I’d swipe good stuff like cars and chocolates.
Men never feel quite the same about a woman’s body once they know it’s done that thing: widened and torn to push out a baby’s head.
A Nightingale!” he marvelled. Ah, so Matron had told him that much. Lib was always shy of introducing the great lady’s name into conversation and loathed the whimsical title that had come to be attached to all those Miss N. had trained, as if they were dolls cast in her heroic mould. “Yes, I had the honour of serving under her at Scutari.” “Noble labour.” It.
I’m just preparing the way, just like John the Baptist for Our Lord.
She murmured, We could always blame the stars. I beg your pardon, Doctor? That’s what influenza means, she said. Influenza delle stelle – the influence of the stars. Medieval Italians thought the illness proved that the heavens were governing their fates, that people were quite literally star-crossed. I pictured that, the celestial bodies trying to fly us like upsidedown kites. Or perhaps just yanking on us for their obscure amusement.
The human race settles on terms with every plague in the end, the doctor told her. Or a stalemate, at the least. We somehow muddle along, sharing the earth with each new form of life.
I seem to have stumbled onto love, like a pothole in the night.
This flu was clogging the whole works of the hospital. Not just the hospital, I reminded myself – the whole of Dublin. The whole country. As far as I could tell, the whole world was a machine grinding to a halt. Across the globe, in hundreds of languages, signs were going up urging people to cover their coughs.
Only for the duration, of course, for the foreseeable future, as the posters said. Though I was having trouble foreseeing any future. How would we ever get back to normal after the pandemic.
That’s what influenza means, she said. Influenza delle stelle – the influence of the stars. Medieval Italians thought the illness proved that the heavens were governing their fates, that people were quite literally star-crossed.
Influenza delle stelle – the influence of the stars.
Guilt was the sooty air we breathed these days.
Nursing was like being under a spell: you went in very young and came out older than any span of years could make you.
All rather humbling, she added ruefully. Here we are in the golden age of medicine – making such great strides against rabies, typhoid fever, diphtheria – and a common or garden influenza is beating us hollow.
But if there’s no heaven what remains?
None of this dirt is yours, I told her. You’re as clean as rain. She kissed me, but on the forehead this time.