I Knew You'd Have Brown Eyes by Mary Tennant Read Free Book Online Page B

hoping for one of those. The eye ward was prized since there was no lifting and patients could shower themselves. When I eventually got assigned there, on night shift I would make a bed out of a linen bag, pull it into the pan room and have a nap, since the patients rarely called us. The surgical wards had younger patients with shorter hospital stays. In the theatres junior nurses didn’t have to do much – just get packets of instruments – and there was no lifting because there were wardsmen to do that. One day on my ward, a patient had a cardiac arrest. A specialised team came running to the patient’s bedside with the crash cart, a trolley especially equipped for emergencies. I heard the ward phone ring and, since all the other staff were tied up with the emergency, I answered it. It was the sister of the patient who was being attended to.
    ‘He’s just had a cardiac arrest,’ I said, ‘but he’ll be okay. The doctors are resuscitating him.’
    ‘Oh, he’ll pull through again, will he?’
    ‘It looks that way. Has he arrested before?’
    ‘This is his ninth.’
    ‘Why do some people die and not others?’ I asked Suzie that night as we sat smoking on my small balcony.
    ‘I don’t know Mare, just luck I suppose.’
    ‘Where do you think we go when we die?’
    ‘Heaven! Didn’t the nuns teach you anything?’ Suzie had also been to a Catholic school, as had many of the girls in our group. We laughed.
    ‘No really, do you believe all that bullshit about heaven and purgatory?’
    ‘No, I don’t. I think we all have a purpose and it’s up to us to find out what that is.’
    ‘Well, why do you think bad things happen to some people and other people just breeze through life?’
    ‘Luck.’
    ‘Nah, I don’t think like that. I think people who have bad things happen are lucky, because they learn to grow up, to stand on their own two feet and face life’s challenges.’
    ‘A wise statement from a young girl!’ She kicked me, jokingly. But I wasn’t joking.
    ‘I don’t want to go out this Saturday. My friends are going to see Normie Rowe at a club in town.’
    ‘I’ll come with you,’ Bryan said.
    ‘No I don’t want to go out with you tonight. I want to go with my friends.’
    ‘What are you talking about? Aren’t I your boyfriend?’
    He was, and he had stuck with me through thick and thin, but I was increasingly uncomfortable in his company. He wanted to resume a sexual relationship but I couldn’t – sex meant babies and babies meant sadness. It would be years before I had sex again. I wanted to put all the grief behind me, throw myself into a career and be the young girl that I was. I wanted to savour being young since I’d missed the best part of a year of it. For Bryan, ‘moving on’ meant resuming our relationship as it was before our son was born.
    ‘Look, just this one night, okay? Let’s go out for dinner next Saturday, I have the night off.’
    By the time Saturday came round I had made up my mind. It was over. I told him over dinner.
    ‘What! But you promised me we’d get married.’
    ‘I know, but I don’t think it’s such a good idea any more.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘I can’t explain it, Bryan. It feels wrong to me.’
    He was angry. I couldn’t blame him. But I knew what I felt.
    Over the coming week he rang me every day.
    ‘Nurse Capra, nurse Capra.’ The home sister chimed.
    At first I answered and repeated over and over, ‘It’s over Bryan.’ Then I stopped taking the calls and he left message after message.
    ‘Boy, are you popular,’ Catherine said to me one day. ‘All I hear on the pager is your name.’
    ‘I wish he’d get the message.’
    One day soon after, I was on morning shift when I received a call from a nurse in the emergency department.
    ‘There’s someone here asking for you. He’s in the admission ward.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘I think you’d better come and see him.’
    I asked to be relieved from my duties and ran downstairs. When I arrived in