Strangers’ bodies weighed against mine. I pictured trams grinding along their lines across Dublin like blood through veins. We all live in an unwalled city, that was it. I saw lines scored across the map of Ireland; carved all over the globe. Train tracks, roads, shipping channels, a web of human traffic that connected all nations into one great suffering body.

A light in a druggist’s window below us illuminated a handwritten apology: Have Run Out of Carbolic. Passing shopfronts and houses, I glimpsed hollowed-out turnips with penny candles that wavered with flame. I was happy that the old beat of festivity still sounded. On Halloween when Tim and I were small, we had barmbrack, the moist fruit bread, toasted at the fire and buttered till the raisins shone. I always hoped to get the lucky ring in my slice, but I never did. My stomach growled now. How long it had been since that bowl of stew this afternoon.

I wondered what Bridie got to eat with the boarders at the motherhouse.

The tram rattled on, past a dark maze of streets where many of my patients lived—rickety stairways, toppling walls, filthy courts, red brick browned by coal smoke; smashed fanlights over doors were eyes put out. A Negro man sat slumped against a wall.

No, a white man, metamorphosed. Red to brown to blue to black. This poor fellow was at the end of that terrible rainbow. Had anyone run to a telephone exchange to ring for an ambulance? But the tram trundled past before I could make a note of the street.

Nothing I could do now. I tried to put him out of my mind.

Alighting at my stop, I caught a whiff from a communal kitchen for the needy. Corned beef, cabbage? Rather nasty, but it made me even hungrier for my supper.

John Brown’s baby has a pimple on his arse, a drunk sang.

John Brown’s baby has a pimple on his arse,

John Brown’s baby has a pimple on his arse,

And the poor child can’t sit down.

In the alley I found my cycle locked safely. I drew up the sides of my skirt in preparation, knotting the tapes for safety.

Light blinded me. A high-pitched call: All right there?

Two of the Women’s Patrol shone their beams all the way to the back wall. To ensure my protection or, put another way, to check if I was reeling drunk or up to no good with a soldier.

I snapped, Perfectly all right.

Very well, carry on.

I wheeled my cycle up the alley, towards the street.

A bell sounded in the factory ahead. Munitionettes began spilling out, calling to each other, their fingers dyed so yellow I could see it by streetlight; were these women from Ita Noonan’s Canary Crew? One of them coughed whoopingly, laughed, coughed again as I pedaled past.

At the top of my lane, boys skittered by in motley gear—a bright scarf around a forehead, a checkered tie worn over the nose, men’s jackets on backwards, the smallest boy wearing the paper face of a ghost. I only wished they had shoes on their knobbly feet. It surprised me that they’d been let out to go house to house at such a time; I’d have thought all doors would be shut. I tried to remember what it was the old ones used to sprinkle on us children at Halloween in the part of the country where Tim and I had grown up.

A tall boy blared at me. His bugle was dented, scarred with solder, plating all worn away at the mouthpiece. Was his father a returned veteran, perhaps? Or a dead one, of course, his bugle sent home in his place. Or perhaps I was being sentimental, and the boy had won it off another in a bet.

The younger lads clashed saucepan lids. Apples and nuts, missus!

The miniature ghost cried, Go on, would you ever have an old apple or a nut for the party?

He sounded drunk to me. (Quite plausible, since many people believed alcohol could keep the flu at bay.) I dug into my purse for a halfpenny even though he’d called me missus instead of miss.

He blew me a phantom kiss over his shoulder.

Clearly to a child I looked well past thirty. I thought of Delia Garrett calling me spinster. Nursing was like being under a spell: you went in very young and came out older than any span of years could make you.

I asked myself whether I minded about tomorrow’s birthday. The real question was whether I was going to regret it if I never got married. But how could I possibly know for sure until it was too late? Which wasn’t reason enough to do it, to throw myself headlong at every half-viable prospect the way some women did. Regret seemed all too likely either way.

When I let myself into the narrow terraced house, it smelled cold. Candle stubs burnt in jam jars.

My brother was scratching his magpie’s glossy head at the table.

I thought of the old rhyme for counting magpies. One for sorrow, two for joy.

Evening, Tim.

He nodded.

Odd how one took conversation for granted. A ribbon held taut between two people—until it was cut.

I mentioned too perkily: Rather a red-letter day. Sister Finnigan was needed up in Maternity, so yours truly found herself promoted to acting ward sister.

Tim’s eyebrows jogged up and down.

I had an awful habit of making up for my brother’s lack of chatter by doubling my own. I put my bag down and peeled off my coat and cape. The trick was not to ask questions, or only safe ones to which I could guess the answers. How’s your bird?

(I didn’t know if he’d given it a name in his head.)

Tim didn’t meet my eyes very often, but he could manage a half smile.

In the summer he’d found the enormous creature in the alley, grounded by a banjaxed leg. He’d bought it a rusty rabbit hutch to roost in and kept the door tied open with a piece of string so it could come and go as it pleased. Its sheeny green tail was always knocking things over. The magpie also did its business wherever it liked, and whenever I complained it was a menace, Tim pretended not to hear.

I’d been looking forward to something hot tonight, but clearly the gas was off. What about the water? I tried the tap—only a dribble. Damn and blast it!

It was a luxury to let myself curse off shift. To shed the guise of Nurse Power and be Julia.

Tim had a saucepan still hot on the Primus stove; he lit the kerosene flame to bring the water back to the boil for tea. I pushed aside the notebook that was always on the kitchen table for writing notes. Mine were frequent and chatty; Tim’s rare and sparse. (Whatever was locking his throat had the same grip on his writing hand.)

I remarked into the silence, Awfully busy today. I lost one patient, from convulsions.

Tim shook his head in sympathy. He tugged at the touchwood charm on its chain around his neck as if wishing protection for me.

The week he’d joined up I’d given him the creepy charm half in jest—an imp with a swollen head of oak and an attenuated brass body. Some soldiers called it a fumsup because of the two thumbs perpetually turned up, for luck, on the tiny arms that went up and down. The only features left on Tim’s touchwood were two staring eyes; I supposed the rest of its face had been rubbed away by his fretful thumb. I thought of Honor White with her holy beads doubled around her wrist; it wasn’t just servicemen who clung to amulets.

I added, But it could have gone very much worse, really.

I’d have liked to tell Tim about the odd redhead who’d helped me today. But an uneducated girl with cracked shoes, raised in a home, lodging at a convent—Bridie might sound as if she were the opening line of a joke. I couldn’t seem to find words for her.

Tim took saucepan lids off two plates and set them down at our places.