The bloodletter
Sun slid early over the curtains and woke her still smiling from their victorious photo finish of the night before. They had been together for a year and together was the word. She saw now that without this private truthful allying in powerful pairs all over the globe, without this nothing would work and the world would come to an end.
Then came the tide of unease like a body blush, the flush of dismay. What had they done in the night? She flicked on the radio and he moaned in his sleep beside her.
"Sorry," she whispered, remembering he was on a late, and slipped off to the kitchen with her work clothes. She put some toast on and filled the kettle. "Has he killed as many people as Stalin?" came the voice from the radio, keen as mustard, "proportionately, that is?"
How eager they had all been to step out of the blood-boltered 20th century, she thought as she pulled on her tights; how sick to the back teeth of the fangs of history and misery they all were. Now look. Some belle epoque. Not even one prelapsarian decade this time; not even one paltry year of peace.
Stopping at the cornershop to buy a paper, she scanned the photos beneath the headlines on display, palm trees and oily black cumulus clouds and silent howling faces.
"Lovely morning," said Asad as she paid him.
"Beautiful," she agreed. "Terrible," she added, indicating the front page of her paper.
"Terrible, terrible," muttered Asad. "The poor people. What have they done? They have done nothing."
She stifled the impulse to apologise. He too, presumably, had helped to vote in this government.
On the bus it was standing room only. It had always caused her trouble with men - war. She dreaded its approach, from the moment when they first mentioned its possibility on the news to the pretend discussion about rights and wrongs in the run-up. She remembered her first proper boyfriend, Ewan, and his rage at her objections to the Gulf war. True, her talk had sounded childish even to her, even then when she was only 20 - wishing that women could go off and live on another continent, man-free, war-free. Or at least, go to that neutral continent taking the children with them for the duration of any war the men had created. Without testosterone and the desire for phallic toys, she'd argued, the world would be a better place.
Bollocks, he'd said.
Who had she been with during the Kosovo conflict? With Dan, of course. War is the worst, she'd told him; living in a state of murder and the reversal of all things good.
What about the second world war? he demanded. Eh? Wasn't that a just war? You'd have been wringing your hands along with Neville Chamberlain, wouldn't you, all out for appeasement.
At times like this, she cried, Women get put in their place. They go horribly quiet. It comes down to rape and babies. Ah, ah, you don't like me going on at you like this. You'd prefer me in a chador! A burka!
You're like a fox terrier, aren't you, he'd said when she'd continued to disagree with him; you get hold of an an idea and then nothing'll stop the yapping.
· Up on the fifth floor in haematology, they were slopping around with their early morning caffe lattes and setting up for the day ahead. Ambulance sirens hooted like owls, the noise drifting up from the roads round the hospital. She took her own coffee to a grime-streaked window and looked down over the waking city, its tower blocks and churches and grids of terraced houses spread out to the sun, some hundreds of thousands of lives within her purlieu, and as she looked her eye's imagination pumped clouds of poison in an unnerving pall across the landscape.
Soon there were 20 or so patients clutching numbered paper tickets in the waiting room where she was. Her job was to take blood, but not till nine o'clock and it was still only five to. A mournful-faced elderly man appeared at the door, clutching a big pink plastic-covered number eight.
"Is this where I should be?" he asked.
"No, you're a warfarin if you've been given that plastic number," she told him. "You want the anticoagulant clinic down on the third floor."
"Are you sure?" he said. "This is the blood department, isn't it? Some other young woman assured me it was up here."
"Well yes, this is one part of it but you need the other part, and that's on the third floor."
"Just my luck. The lift's broken."
"There's one that works on the other side of the building," she told him. "If you walk along that corridor, follow it along to the swing doors, then keep left."
I'll never believe the government again when it says there's no money for public services, she thought; not after this, not after it's written a blank cheque to the army without a murmur.
In her side room of sharps and vacutainers she passed her working days in a sequence of three-minute cycles. Hello! she said with a reassuring smile, yes one arm out of a sleeve please; some random chat if they wanted that while she hunted for the vein; then they looked away often talking rapidly while she slowly drew off a dark crimson tubeful. Occasionally someone would express surprise at the blood being purple-crimson, and she would take another half minute to explain that this was venous blood as opposed to the oxygenated arterial scarlet sort that flows from cuts and wounds.
These days, rather than quiz them about holiday plans before she inserted the needle, she simply said in a neutral voice: So what do you think of the war, then. She found the daily montage of opinion this tactic produced addictively compelling.
It's all wrong that they're emailing home, said one; soldiers should cut-off from the soft domestic side of things, they shouldn't be thinking about whether their boy was Man of the Match; you know he sends his football team to be tortured if they lose? I'm 50, said another, and this is the first time in my life I've felt ashamed of my country; I wake up and I feel ashamed. War is inevitable, shrugged the third in line, it's part of human nature; they haven't had one for a while. Why is war inevitable? fumed the next one on; who says? People no longer fight duels to settle arguments, so why continue to do so at a national level? There are other ways to get what you want.
"Here we all are," declared a stout well-dressed old man! "We've been managing to live alongside Muslims for the last thousand years - and now this! Don't they know anything? Haven't they read any history? Ouch." He rolled his eyes up to the sky with dismal sarcasm. "Maybe Jesus will save us."
"Everybody's got used to it now, because it's not affecting our lives here," claimed a large woman with a toddler in tow. "We're all still doing what we normally do. It's awful really, the way the children sit in front of the television and say, 'Oh not the war again', and zap it with the remote. Ben, put that down. Now. But nobody's making plans, that's the difference. The airlines have been cutting even more flights. We were thinking of Brittany this summer, the usual, you know, Eurocamp, but now I'm not so sure. They'd probably spit at us."
Her last of the morning was American, heavily pregnant and incandescent with indignation. "It's like a bad dream," she cried, not waiting to be prompted, "but the trouble is when I wake up each morning I realise it's not a dream. You know he's from Texas? Did you know it's legal there to carry a gun but against the law to own a vibrator? Make war not love, hey! I'm glad I'm not in the war zone right now, I'd be in the queue of pregnant women at the hospital begging for a Caesar. Cluster bombs, shrapnel, did you see that bus they bombed last night, killed eight children, the baby in a shroud ..."
"Shhh, shhh," she said to her once she'd sealed up her blood and put it safely to one side. She handed her a tissue. "You mustn't think about it for the next few days, you must avoid the papers and the news generally or your blood pressure will go sky high and they'll haul you in for observation and you don't want that."
"Right," agreed the woman, blowing her nose. "But it's hard not to think about it all the time, you know?"
· Down in the staff canteen, she took her tray of lasagne over to a table of her friends.
"Very anti this morning," she said as she sat down. "Five for, 16 against, three undecided."
"You could be on to a nice little earner there," said Agnes. "You should get on to Gallup Poll or whoever it is that comes up with these statistics."
"Pre-emptive strike," said Femi as she reached across and grabbed the last bread roll.
"Widespread confusion and dismay," she added. "Nobody's very happy about it. It's as though the national auto-immune system was starting to pack up. I still haven't met anyone who knows what it's for."
"Can we not talk about the war for a change?" asked Femi plaintively. "Look, I've got pictures of my new niece to show you."
"She's gorgeous," said Agnes, studying the proffered photographs. "She's scrumptious. She's got a face like a flower." Agnes was gentle and indecisive generally, a dove if ever there was, but had flown out hawkishly over the war. Her brother-in-law had been in his prisons and though she would not say what had happened to him there, Agnes thought even war was better than letting such things exist.
But if we remove one tyrant, then why not another, she'd said to Agnes; most of the staff at this hospital could give ample reason for us to go to war with their country of origin - every single one of them, if you were to ask the cleaners.
True, said Agnes; and maybe that's the way ahead.
"She's her third," said Femi. "My sister says that's it, three girls are as much as she can cope with. But I tell her not to be so sure, her husband's always on about wanting a boy to play football with."
Three girls, she thought. Three girls in pinafores and four boys with side-partings her great-grandmother had raised - the 100-year-old photograph was in a shoebox at home somewhere. One son had been killed in each year of the first world war. Apparently their mother had not done much after 1918; there was nothing physically wrong with her but after the last boy was killed she hadn't really got out of bed, though she'd lived another 30 years, tended by her daughters.
"Room for a little one?" said 15st Patricia, fellow phlebotomist, breezing up with a plate of fish and chips. "I've been taking blood all morning in a draughty old church hall and I'm starving."
"Aren't they letting us have the school gym any more?" she asked.
"No, they decided the little bleeders were missing too much PE, so that was that," said Patricia, shaking on the vinegar. "Joke, ladies, joke. We're allowed to say bloody and bleeder, perks of the job."
"Is it because stocks are low?" asked Agnes. "Is it because of the war?"
"They're always a bit low," said Patricia, tucking in. "People are squeamish, Tony Hancock's got a lot to answer for. As well as the other one. So yes, supplies can always do with being beefed up, and of course blood doesn't store terribly well, it's only got a shelf life of a week or two."
"I would like to give blood," said Femi.
"Good for you," said Patricia. "Though honestly, they've turned it into such a palaver that if you're not careful it'll take you half a day rather than half an hour, you have to fill in questionnaires about drugs and travel and whether you've had a new sexual partner in the last three months, and you can't be on any sort of medication."
"Hmm," said Femi. "I wouldn't have to take the time as holiday, would I?"
"I'll do you upstairs after lunch, love, if they can spare you over in casualty," said Patricia. "You'll have to wait till I've had my pudding, though."
"So what do you think of the war, then, Patricia?" she asked, despite herself.
"She can't leave it alone, that one," tutted Femi.
"It feels wrong because we started it and it wasn't in self-defence," said Patricia, "And it feels perverse because we're not going to get anything out of it; least of all safety or honour. Not bleeding likely. That's what I think."
· "Nobody will join the army after this," she said, staring at images of dust and tanks and gunfire.
"Oh but they will," he said. "Of course they will. They'll sign up in their thousands. This is what you want if you're attracted to the army. What's the point if you don't get to fight. Especially if you're on the side with the best guns and you know you've got a hundred times the firepower of the enemy."
"But how can they want this?" she asked.
"What," he said, half listening.
"How can they want this."
"Men like fighting," he said simply, staring at the screen. "They always have. Action. Competition, aggression, call it what you like."
"What?" she said.
"The challenge. Adrenaline. Fitness, strength. Pitting yourself against the enemy. Targets. Explosions."
He picked up the remote control and pointed it at the television.
Mothers repeating their grief, she thought. If she had a son, where would she hide him? She imagined a future call-up, the open-faced conscripts; a quick horrid fantasy of fear and protections; taking milk to the cellar.
"You'd want a boy," she said. "Wouldn't you. You would."
"What?" he said, absently, staring at the little brightly coloured manikins that had appeared on the screen. "Oh! Nice one!"
He had been flipping between channels for a while now, the flares and flashes and explosions changing place with roaring and balls and goals. Men are for Mars, she thought; is that it?
"Can't you stay with one channel," she said.
"I just wanted to see how Arsenal were doing."
"Come on the Gunners!" she sneered.
"What?" he said, startled.
"I don't know what you think about the war," she said. "You never talk to me."
"Yes I do!" he said, rising to the attack.
"We only ever watch television and go to bed."
"No we don't!"
"Yes we do," she said. Oh yes we do. Were they clowns arguing in a pantomime?
"Look, I'm tired. I've had a long day. But if you want to "talk" - FINE," he said. He pressed the mute button on the remote control; not the off button, she noticed, the football was in its 83rd minute. "What about?"
"The war," she said.
He made a noise somewhere between fury and disgust.
"I just can't believe you get so angry when I try to talk to you about the war," she said.
"I'm not angry," he said. "You just go on and on."
"Don't hate me," she said. "I put up with sitting in front of hours of football because I love sitting with your arm round me and my head in your shoulder."
"I don't hate you," he said. "I love you."
"I know. But I need to know what you think about the war because we're part of each other."
"Right. Yes. This is what I think. If it's over fast, with few civilian casualties, there will be a feeling of, it's all been worth it. It was justified. Whereas if it goes on for months and eats up the national budget and there are more casualties on both sides than expected, then it will not be seen as good."
"But what do you feel?"
"I've just told you!"
"What, so how it turns out will justify it or not?"
"Yes."
"But surely there are first principles? The end doesn't justify the means?"
"I've said what I think," he shrugged, his eyes back on the screen. He pressed a button and the crowd started roaring again.
Even she could see that she wasn't going to get any more out of him in the 86th minute of the game; and it wouldn't be just four minutes to wait, it always went into extra time. She decided to get ready for bed. In the shower she soaped and scrubbed and loudly sang until the tiles echoed: "And another one gone and another one gone, Another one bites the dust ..."
In bed, he turned to her and held her. Don't mention the war must be her motto now, on the home front at least. He buried his face in her neck. She stiffened and willed herself not to shrug him off. If she stayed with him, she'd have to button her lip. He put his hands in her hair and his mouth on hers, and moved to lie on top of her. At this point usually her arms would clasp him and her legs twine round his as she returned his kisses; but now she found herself heaving his weight off with unexpected violence.
"What's the matter?" he asked, baffled.
"I don't know," she said, sitting up.
"Nothing's the matter," he murmured, "Come here," and pulled her back down to him.
"Don't", she said loudly, surprising them both.
"What?" he said.
"My body can't pretend," she found herself saying. "You always said you liked that about me. My body can't tell lies."
"What?" he said again, trying to draw her into him.
"Unless you're happy with forcing legs open and spit in your face," she hissed. "Yes, you would like that, I bet."
"No," he said, aghast.
"Then you can just fuck off," she said.
"What?" he said.
But she had already left the bedroom, slamming the door behind her. She stormed off to the sofa and to late-night television. There, she lay down and watched the war and wept.
· Helen Simpson's latest collection of short stories, Hey Yeah Right Get A Life, is published by Vintage.