10. Nurse Betty Bloomer

THE HIDDEN FOREST-10

The nurse stood glaring at Davey who looked as if he was about to bellow for Paul again, and he fell in love at once despite the fact that her expression was one of glowering impatience. But Davey had long been starved of one important aspect of a happy normal life. He was single.

A few words about our ex-detective and Taxi driving hero. He’d long been aware that he was far from being a physically appealing specimen of manhood, and unlike some who couldn’t face up to reality, he could. Consequently he had lived a single life, never expecting or having a girlfriend in his thirty-odd years though not for want of desiring at least ten over those years, but his skeletal stature and his own acceptance of his inability to appeal to the fair sex told against him. So when he looked at this nurse who looked as if she’d stepped right out of a 1960s rather saucy Carry On film, complete with a uniform that revealed almost as much of her as it concealed, his heart gave a distinct flutter and things started unravelling elsewhere within him. He was smitten.

And it was easy to see why. She was physically on a human scale rather than dwarfed like the triplets and even the absurd Blondeau himself, so medium height for a woman therefore, blue eyed with waving blonde hair that almost reached her waist and certainly managed to tease her bosom as it moved with a gentle breeze that suddenly appeared inside the Manor, coming from nowhere, probably for no better reason to stir her hair. Her uniform was crisp and white and short enough for him to know she had spectacularly wonderful thighs, and it was smart enough to contrast favourably with the drabness that was the inside of Blondeau Manor. So he was most definitely smitten.

“Cor,” he said.

“Pardon?” she asked, and before he said anything else he made a monumental effort to pull himself together, both mentally, by trying to think straight, and physically, by making sure that his trouser zip was done up.

“I mean, cor-could you tell me where I am and where my fat friend has gone to? I say friend, but he’s really just a neighbour who needed some help. He sort of disappeared into that wall.” He pointed to what he thought might be roughly the spot that where his obese neighbour Paul Fairweather together with the Reverend Tidy aka Sallowman had been swallowed up by solid stone.

“”First of all, who are you and what are you doing here?” she asked, “you don’t look like one of the fleeters to me. You’re sort of too solid, and if I may say so, quite sweet on the eye.”

He blushed when she said that, something he barely ever did. He wasn’t the blushing sort, never had been, and the sensation was almost new to him. “I’m … just call me Davey. I drive a cab,” he replied, “if you don’t mind me asking, who are you?”

She smiled at him, and he saw it as a cheeky come-and-get-me sort of smile. “I’m Betty,” she said, “short for Elizabeth. Betty Bloomer, and I’m a nurse. It’s my job to fix broken limbs and mend broken hearts.”

He wanted to sweep her up in his arms and run off with her, hopefully to his cab where he’d left it on the Drainport Road, but he frowned when he recalled the fat man that he felt responsible for. Damn Paul! He could be getting in the way of a blossoming romance before it started.

“Where’s my, not exactly friend, comrade, gone to with that vicar fellow?” he asked, “if your must know he’s a darned nuisance.”

“They’ve gone to the dormitory,” she replied, “to get their heads down for a while. Don’t worry. They’ll not sleep for ever, though if you measure it against the passing of the hours in the big wide world outside it might seem like quite a long time.”

“I don’t understand,” he muttered, truthfully enough. How, he wondered, could time be measured in more than one way? A clock ticks the minutes away, and surely that ticking outside where he’d left his cab took the same length of time to tick-tock as it did inside the Manor. Anything else just couldn’t make any sense at all. He raised his wrist to listen to his own watch in order to confirm the idea, but being a quartz mechanism it was silent. No ticks and no tocks. He frowned, and shook hus head.

“It’s really quite simple,” chirruped the nurse, smiling and revealing rows of perfectly white teeth, “Blondeau has created a way of decreasing the speed at which time passes if you’re lying on one of his beds, which has the effect of making each minute, shall we say, last for a different amount of time for those resting in the sleeping room. A minute in the sleeping room is equivalent to weeks and possibly many months in the world beyond it. It scares me to think of it.”

“Blondeau can do that?” asked Davey, “something I’d have thought impossible…?”

“Which is why I look quite young still even though I was born in the nineteen thirties,” she grinned. “But the truth is my body is only twenty two when maybe you’d expect me to be nearly a hundred! Yet in reality I’ve only lived for twenty-two years, but some of them have been quite distorted in my sleep. Things have passed me by, maybe decades, without me noticing. At first it scared me, but it doesn’t make much difference in the long run, and I’m still a nurse, which is what I always wanted to be. Do you fancy sleeping with me for the odd hour or so? It could be quite amusing.”

The offer was too much for Davey and he swallowed, wiped his brow and very, very slowly as his world and everything it it went from monotonous grey, to black, and he fell to the stone floor in a dead faint.

“You poor darling,” crooned the nurse, “mummy will put you right. Let me tuck you up in our beddy-byes...” and despite her apparent feminine frailty she managed to scoop him up in her arms and carry him, with no apparent difficulty at all, through the wall and into a huge dormitory which opened up the other side of it.

In truth it was like an old-fashioned hospital ward, but without any technical equipment for the resuscitation of the dying, just rows of single-sized beds and a calming hum. Had Davey been able to see, but he was still in an unconscious land of his own making, he would have seen Paul Fairweather slipping out of his trousers and sliding between the sheets of a bed next to where Nurse Betty had lain him.

And he was still unconscious, though possibly stirring a little, as she undid his trousers and pulled them off him, all apparently without needing to make much of an effort. Then, she draped a sheet over him, smiled warmly at him, and walked away, humming to herself about blue birds somehow finding their way across a mighty ocean so that they could fly over the white cliffs of Dover.

© Peter Rogerson 11.11.20