poem going between the two rooms, that you can’t catch a disease from a poem unless it’s love ha ha and that’s not bloody likely when you’re what? ten going on eleven? He never heard the likes of it, a little fella shifted upstairs for saying a poem and he has a good mind to go to the Limerick Leader  and tell them print the whole thing except he has this job and he’d lose it if ever Sister Rita found out.Anyway, Frankie, you’ll be outa here one of these fine days and you can read all the poetry you want though I don’t know about Patricia below, I don’t know about Patricia, God help us. He knows about Patricia in two days because she got out of the bed to go to the lavatory when she was supposed to use a bedpan and col- lapsed and died in the lavatory. Seamus is mopping the floor and there are tears on his cheeks and he’s saying, ’Tis a dirty rotten thing to die in a lavatory when you’re lovely in yourself. She told me she was sorry she had  you  reciting  that  poem  and  getting  you  shifted  from  the  room, Frankie. She said ’twas all her fault. It wasn’t, Seamus. I know and didn’t I tell her that. Patricia is gone and I’ll never know what happened to the high- wayman and Bess, the landlord’s daughter. I ask Seamus but he doesn’t know  any  poetry  at  all  especially  English  poetry. He  knew  an  Irish poem once but it was about fairies and had no sign of a highwayman in it. Still he’ll ask the men in his local pub where there’s always someone reciting something and he’ll bring it back to me.Won’t I be busy mean- while reading my short history of England and finding out all about their perfidy.That’s what Seamus says, perfidy, and I don’t know what it means and he doesn’t know what it means but if it’s something the English do it must be terrible. He comes three times a week to mop the floor and the nurse is there every morning to take my temperature and pulse. The doctor listens to my chest with the thing hanging from his neck.They all say, And how’s our little soldier today? A girl with a blue dress brings meals three times a day and never talks to me. Seamus says she’s not right in the head so don’t say a word to her. The July days are long and I fear the dark.There are only two ceil- ing lights in the ward and they’re switched off when the tea tray is taken away and the nurse gives me pills.The nurse tells me go to sleep but I can’t because I see people in the nineteen beds in the ward all dying and green around their mouths where they tried to eat grass and moaning 199