The End Bed
A Red Cross nurse tries an unusual technique on a hopeless case.
There wasn't much to look forward to at Number Five Casualty Clearing Station. Even if there had been, Nurse Becky's round would still have been the highlight of the day.
The VAD uniform was designed both for hygiene and to make its wearers as sexless and homogenous as possible. With Nurse Becky it had failed, at least in the latter purpose. The headdress that perched between her triangular ears and framed her head seemed to make her face even smaller and more elfin, her green eyes even huger.
Her starched white apron lay like a carpet of snow, softening the contours of the landscape beneath to render it mysterious and alluring. The blood-red cross on her bosom served to draw more attention, if it were needed, to that feature; the horizontal line undulated across her breasts, while the vertical nestled in the valley between them.
Only the cat's face, tail and paws emerged from her ankle-length blue dress. If you looked hard, you could just make out faint tabby stripes against the dark fur. And the men, sick or wounded though they were, looked very hard indeed.
"C'mere, Sheila, I've got something for yer!" leered a dingo, one of the ANZACs, patting the bulge under his bedclothes.
"It's 'is leg, Miss!" hooted the gibbon in the next bed.
The dingo looked ruefully down at the wicker cage that kept the blanket from touching his injured limb.
"It was worth a try," he said.
Briskly and primly, Nurse Becky moved through the ward. Here she smoothed a sheet, here took a temperature, here administered a pill.
As she went she swung her tail and buttocks out of reach of pinching paws quite naturally, as though she had no idea anything was going on. None of the comments she received merited a reply, though sometimes she would fix her jade eyes on the perpetrator and flash him a pitying smile.
Her patients would do a great deal for one of those smiles - and frequently did. It was a rare case, and usually a hopeless one, who didn't respond to Nurse Becky.
The red setter in the end bed was one such case.
He had arrived on a stretcher, without papers or identity discs. A shell had blown up in his face, peppering his head and upper torso with shrapnel. One ear was a bloody rag and his eyes were bandaged.
Temporarily blind and deaf, the doctors said. His senses should return in a day or so.
Days passed in which he showed no response to sound, lights, touch or smell, nor did he raise his voice to ask what was happening or where he was. The nurses dribbled water and meat broth into his mouth, and he swallowed; that seemed to be the limit of his reactions.
"Shell shock," said Dr. Tooley.
"Swinging the lead," said Dr. Richards. "Snap out of it, laddie, or it's a court-martial for you."
For four days he lay without moving or speaking. On the fifth evening, Sister set a screen around his bed so he could die in privacy.
In the last hour of the fifth night, Nurse Becky crept on to the ward.
She had taken off the stiff, starched apron and the blue frock and she padded silently in her knickers and liberty bodice, white stockinette glowing palely in the dark. The night nurse, reading picture papers at her station, noticed nothing.
Nurse Becky sat on the edge of the setter's bed, watching him. His chest moved noiselessly up and down. Sounds of breathing and snoring from the other beds surrounded her island of quiet.
Bending over him, she pushed the bandage up with her thumbs and licked his closed eyes, her tongue prying into the corners. The eyelids didn't flicker, though the fine whiskers above them quivered a little.
Her sealskin nose nuzzled his neck. She swung her leg up and astride his torso, drew the sheet down to his waist, and lifted the hospital nightgown.
She sank her paws into his curly chest and kneaded at him, claws flexing in and out. Her thumbs found his nipples and stroked them in small circles. She bent her head to lick the bare pink skin and the little wrinkled peak - left-hand side, then right.
Someone coughed, a machine-gun rattle in the quiet night.
"Nurse...nurse! Water!"
Nurse Becky flattened herself down and froze. Her cheek against the setter's chest, his warm fur tickling her face with each intake of breath.
She heard the creak of a wicker chair and the rustle as the night nurse crossed to the bed. Water glugged into a tin cup. The nurse's footsteps travelled back across the ward. Rustle. Creak. Sigh. The turned pages of a magazine.
Nurse Becky let out her breath in a soft whisper and slid the sheet further down the bed to expose the setter's abdomen and thighs. She rubbed her forehead up and down his stomach, marking him with her scent.
She ran her tongue up the crease of his groin, where the auburn curls gave way to downy skin. The setter's leg kicked reflexively, and his penis began to rise, naked and smooth, from the soft folds of the sheath.
Nurse Becky touched her nose to the pink tip. She lapped at it with her tongue. Dozens of tiny papillae caressed the head, then brushed the whole length from base to tip with rough, vertical strokes.
The skin tautened under her tongue. Nurse Becky angled her head and licked from every side in turn. Every so often she gave a quick, delicate bite with her incisors, as though snapping up a choice morsel. Still he made no sound.
Her mouth closed around him and she suckled, silently but insistently. The tabby paws kneaded his belly in time with the action of her mouth, pressing deeper and more quickly at every tug. She was poised so gracefully above him that the mattress never squeaked, despite the violent movement of her head.
The nurse began to purr under her breath. Her foreclaws needled his sides, digging in just above the hips.
The setter's body shuddered. She increased the frequency of her strokes, her back arching at the top of each. When she felt him tense, she squeezed her thighs against his legs, and as he climaxed she bit gently down and rocked her head back and forth, pulling him with her until he was done.
She licked him clean as though he were a newborn kitten, pulled down the rough nightshirt, and tucked the bedclothes under his chin. Licking the back of her paw, she passed it twice across her face. Then she leaned down and kissed his forehead.
It was the softest and gentlest of kisses, but the setter's eyelids fluttered and his mouth opened.
"Ssh," whispered Nurse Becky, settling the bandage back over his eyes. "Sleep now."
She slipped to the floor and stole away across the ward.
When Sister came on duty the next morning, the setter frightened her half to death by sitting up and announcing that his name was Murphy, he was dyin' for a smoke, and could somebody please take this thing off of his eyes?
But the surest sign that all his senses were functioning again was the appreciative whistle he gave when Nurse Becky appeared.
"Give us a kiss, Nurse!" he beamed.
Nurse Becky cocked an eyebrow at him, starched bosom crackling as she folded her arms across it.
"Not on your life," she purred.