by Nene Gare
This time she could not tear herself away from the scene. More! She must have more! What happened when a fire alarm was set off? If she hid, she would know. The Moreton Bay fig tree, its branches hidden beneath big sheltering leaves! If she climbed up into it, hid herself in its darkest part, she would see and hear everything.
Trilby heard the truck approach, watched it stop, gloated as the men fanned out to look for the fire then converged once more on the truck. She heard them talk, heard every word they said. The exhilaration remained. It was like being born again. She saw and heard everything and herself remained safely hidden.
‘Same one did it before, I’ll take a bet on that.’
‘Might be around still, too.’
A man with authority in his voice spoke last. ‘Two of you men stay here. Have a good look round, everywhere, and I’ll go down to the station and fetch a policeman.’
Trilby’s heart gave a great lurch. She kept very still, almost too afraid to breathe in case she made her presence known. The two men angled out from each other, searching the dark doorways of shops, penetrating the night-filled lane across the street from the fire alarm. Trilby knew she must drop from the tree and take a chance on escaping, but she waited too long. The men came back. Trilby’s fear grew. She wanted to believe that she was dreaming and that she would wake from this horror safe in her bed. Sweating, shaking still, but safe! It could not be she who perched in this tree while two men below searched only for her. It must be a dream.
A third man came. Trilby recognised his uniform. This was the policeman the other man had called. Despite herself, a sob of terror forced its way through her lips. The branch of the tree shook and a dead leaf detached itself and fell scuttering to the ground.
The officer was quick. This was something in which he had been trained, this lightning-quick note of detail. In a second he was underneath the tree, peering up through the branches.
He called: ‘I see you! Come on down, whoever you are.’
Trilby clutched the branch tighter but did not answer. There was a chance that he was gammoning. How could he see her, through so many thick dark leaves.
He had a torch out. The beam was directed up into the tree. It moved slowly across and across, thoroughly exhausting the potentialities of one spot before moving on to the next. Trilby closed her eyes, endured the torture of waiting. Then she felt the beam of the torchlight strong on her eyelids.
‘Hah!’ There was satisfaction in his voice. ‘Got you!’ The fire-brigade officers followed the line of light, saw the material of Trilby’s skirt and her dangling dark legs and her clutching hands.
‘A girl!’
‘You coming down or am I coming up to fetch you?’ the police-officer called.
A wild rage surged through Trilby. ‘No!’ she yelled, lashing out viciously with her foot. ‘And if you come near me, I’ll kick you, you hear?’
‘You will, will you?’ The policeman grinned. ‘I’m coming up just the same, young miss. Unless you change your mind and come down.’
‘Go away!’ Trilby shrieked. ‘Go away! If you come near me, you bastard, I’ll push you down. I’ll make you fall. You’ll get hurt.’
‘Tut! Mustn’t threaten police-officers. Mustn’t swear, either.’
‘I think you’d better come down, girlie.’ There was a kindly note in the voice of the fire-brigade man. ‘Can’t stay up there all night, you know.’
‘I won’t come down. I won’t. Go away, all of you.’
‘Looks like I’ll have to go up,’ the policeman said. He moved over to the great round trunk of the tree, searched with experienced eyes for a foothold. Trilby saw him come up the tree with the agility of a small boy.
She froze with fear. He must not be allowed to touch her. She would not let him. She closed her eyes and her mouth opened in a grimace. Letting go her hold on the branch she jumped forward just before the man reached forward to stop her. A broken bough caught her skirt when she was half-way to the ground. She hung for a second, then the branch broke with a tortured crack and she fell the rest of the five or six feet to the ground.
She was up like a shot. Off and away! But the fire-brigade officers were too quick for her. She felt her shoulder grasped. She rammed her head into one man’s stomach, putting all her force behind it. When he lost his balance and detached his hand from her shoulder she made off again, but the other one had her this time.
‘I got her,’ he called breathlessly to his mates, ‘but you better come and help me. She’s as strong as a young lion.’
The policeman dropped from the tree and came over to them.
“All right! All right! Break it up,’ he told the terrified and struggling girl.
There were three of them. And they had caught her.
Trilby stopped fighting, relapsed into fatigue and hopelessness. She was in terrible trouble, another sort this time.
Between two of them she walked, docile enough now, to the police-station. She did not even hear the men when they spoke to her. She only heard their footsteps echoing along the empty dark street, saw only the dull gleam of glass in shop windows.
Inside the station, terror seized her stomach so that it knotted. She kept her head bent, knowing there was only one weapon left to her, silence.
‘Look, don’t you understand? All we want from you is your name, and your age and a couple of other things, and then you can go and have a sleep.’ The young police-sergeant was getting impatient.
Each time he asked, Trilby’s alertness increased. She felt danger ahead if she answered so much as a single question.
‘Find out, if you want to know,’ she snapped once, and when one of the officers had moved closer to her she had lashed out at him with her foot and caught him a crack on his ankle. He kept his distance after that.
‘I’ve got an idea she’s one of those Comeaway girls that just came down from some mission,’ one officer said after a while.
‘Your father Joe Comeaway?’ the sergeant asked sternly.
Trilby maintained her sulky silence.
‘Take her away, Ted,’ the sergeant said at last. ‘Lock her up until she’s in a better frame of mind.’
Lock her up? Trilby marshalled all her strength for one last attempt to get away. Before any of the men knew what she was about she had darted back to the doorway.
She was nearly out into the street before one of them grabbed her arm and held it fast. She was jerked inside again, kicking and struggling. The man was strong. She felt herself shoved through a doorway, then a door slammed. She looked up. A light shone feebly through a barred space at the top of the doorway, illuminating a few objects. She picked out a bed against one wall. A chair stood alongside it. She swung it up and crashed it against the door and her wrists jarred painfully.
Once more she lifted it and smashed it against the locked door. Across her mind raced the words: ‘Lock her up.’
Only when her strength was gone did she pause in her efforts to break down the stout wooden door.
‘Bet she’s broken that damn chair,’ said a voice. ‘Gee, some temper.’
Another sterner voice floated through to her. ‘If you don’t behave yourself you’ll be made to behave. Get on that bed and lie down. Now!’
‘I will not!’ Trilby shrieked. She made a jab at the hole with one of the chair legs. There was a scuffling noise and a yell of pain. Trilby felt fiercely triumphant.
She looked round the room to see what else it held in the way of missiles. On a table in a corner of the room stood a glass jug of water with a tumbler alongside it. She swooped on it, crept with it to the door, standing to one side so that she should not be seen.
‘Is she in bed yet?’ someone asked softly. ‘Have a look!’
Trilby let fly with the jug of water. From further sounds of snuffling and gasping she knew she had scored one more victory. Her upper lip was curled back from her teeth and her eyes caught the glow of the light.
Footsteps receded down the passage and there wa
s silence. Like a cat, Trilby prowled round the room. Her thoughts darted here and there, seeking a way to escape. She had to get out—she had to put an end to this suffocating feeling of being locked up like a dangerous animal. There was no hope of escape through the door. There was equally small chance of squeezing her body through the narrow barred window. The walls were of crumbling stone and cement. The jail was old. The walls had been built by convict labour. Trilby did not know that. In one of her circuits of the room she stopped to lean against the old stone wall. Her hand reached out idly to crumble a little more of the loose cement. Others had been at work on the stones beneath her hand. It was almost free of the wall. A tug showed her that it was still too firmly embedded to be dislodged. But she could do it! She darted over to where the broken chair lay on the floor and took up one of the pieces of splintered wood. With it as her tool she worked doggedly away at the deep furrow surrounding the stones. Action—any sort of action was preferable to waiting and thinking.
At first she worked carelessly, but as her spirit quieted caution came and she knew that any loud noise would bring an officer up the passage seeking the cause. Every now and then she stopped to listen. Once she heard footsteps approach. Like lightning she made for the bed and dived under the blanket on top of it. And none too soon. The beam from the torch shone on the bed. Trilby closed her eyes and lay still. The light was switched off and the footsteps retreated. As soon as she was sure it was safe, Trilby was out of the bed again.
Soon the stone was almost free of the wall, and a gentle tug was all that was needed to move it. Pausing only to place it on the floor at her feet she started on the next one. Before the grey of coming day appeared like smoke in the square of the window, Trilby had removed three stones from the wall. She had not expected to tunnel her way through. The arduous work was meant only to occupy her mind and her strength, and to fend off the quivering madness that had overwhelmed her when she had been flung into this room and imprisoned there. It meant, too, that she was not submitting tamely. If she could fight, she could hope to beat them.
SIXTEEN
When the grey was tinged with blue she curled up on the bed. At her side were the stones she had patiently chipped from the wall.
Later, when footsteps came near, she folded the blanket so that they could not be seen—and waited. The top half of a man’s face appeared at the square hole in the door. Trilby gave stare for stare, her eyes shining silver-grey between swollen lids.
‘Going to behave yourself this morning?’ the police-officer asked banteringly.
Trilby did not reply. Her hand closed hard over one of the stones.
‘I’ve got some tea and toast here for you,’ the man said, and she heard a key grate in the lock of the door.
She was ready with her stone the moment the door opened and the officer, taken completely by surprise, dropped his little tray with a crash and stood for a second holding his shoulder whilst he gazed at her with shocked eyes. Trilby had time to throw another of her stones before he was on her, holding her down on the bed by the shoulders.
‘Why, you young devil. You might have killed me,’ he said when he had her thin young wrists in a bone-crushing grip.
‘Let me alone,’ Trilby said between her teeth. With her head she tried to butt him in the stomach. With her feet she kicked wildly at him.
‘Hey! Les! Come here,’ the young officer yelled, but another man had already entered the cell.
‘See if there’s any more stones in that bed,’ Trilby’s captor said. ‘And if there are, grab them.’
‘Gee!’ The man gaped as he searched under the blanket and found the cache of stones. He took them over and dumped them outside the room in the passage. ‘Where the hell did she get them from?’ he marvelled.
Trilby screamed. She was flung back on the bed and the door banged shut again. One round-eyed face shoved another round-eyed face from the hole at the top of the door. Then both officers went back down the passage.
Trilby ran to the door as soon as they had gone. She banged on it with both fists. She screamed through it. She hurled names up the length of the passage. Names which she had heard but which she had never used in her life before. Nobody came near, and she went on screaming. It wasn’t really herself screaming. A little calm spot in her brain told her that. The screaming came from a Thing inside herself, that squirmed, terrified and beaten, and used her voice. Her whole body shook. The bones in her legs turned to jelly. Just above her eyes and back of them was a place that was stabbed with knife-like pains each time her body tensed itself to scream. After a while she stumbled to the bed and lay face down. She let the bed take the whole tremendous weight of her pain. She sank down and down so that the bed absorbed her. She was part of it. Not a girl at all but a rusty iron bed with a tossed blanket on top of it. And nothing would ever happen to her again.
‘Ahoy there! Someone to see you.’
Unwillingly, Trilby came out from the twilight of peace. She heard a door closing. And that meant it must have been opened again. She tried to raise herself so that she could see but she could not care enough to make such an effort. She felt a weight settle itself alongside her. She waited wearily for the next thing to happen. And was unprepared for the sound of her mother’s voice.
‘Trilby! Wake up!’
‘Too late now,’ Trilby’s thoughts formed themselves, slowly, achingly.
‘Trilby, you look real sick. What they done to ya, love? Sit up an tell ya ole mummy, will ya? Ya daddy said fa me to tell ya e’s comin later if ya wanted im to. Noonah’s comin too, and Bartie. Don’t worry, Trilby.’ The heaviness at the side of her removed itself and her mother’s voice spoke near her ear.
Trilby wanted to respond—to pour out the whole wretched story, beginning with someone called Phyllix. But things were all tangled up in her head. She dragged herself away from her mother, her stomach knotting at the movement. What was the use of words? Especially with someone like her mother. With anyone! Nobody would understand why she was here if she must fit the things she had done to words.
When her mother placed a timid hand on her shoulder she moved restlessly and it fell away.
‘Dearie!’ Her mother must be crying. Her words were choked. ‘They want to know, outside, why you done it. Be a good girl and tell Mum why you broke their old glass, come on.’
Trilby wanted to laugh but she had no energy. A broken glass! As if a broken glass mattered. That was the end, not the beginning.
‘Go away!’ she muttered. ‘I don’t want anyone. Not anyone.’
‘They’re waitin,’ Mrs Comeaway said in a frightened whisper. ‘Ya got to tell em something, Trilby. They might keep ya here if ya don’t.’
Why couldn’t they just leave her here on the bed, Trilby thought desperately. She twitched away again as her mother moved closer to her. And to blot out the sound of Mrs Comeaway’s pleading whispers she buried her head in the blanket.
After a while the bed creaked and her mother’s weight was gone again. There were more voices—her mother’s and some more. Then the door opened and shut and she was alone.
She had brought this aloneness on herself, but that did not stop the bitterness flowing from her aching throat into every part of her body. She pressed her hands over her eyes and tried to clear her mind.
She was taken from her cell to another little room behind the court and left to wait. She had but one dreary victory to contemplate. With everyone who had questioned her she had maintained a stony silence. The police, the man from the department, a woman welfare worker, her mother and Noonah—she might have talked with her sister if she had not suspected that Noonah would take the tale straight back to the police and the others who wanted to pry into her affairs. And Trilby had decided recklessly that she would rather stay at the jail for ever than give strangers the right to shake their heads over her.
She paced the tiny room restlessly, her impatience growing as the minutes passed. After a half-hour spent entirely alone she felt urged to one
more act of revolt against those who held her a prisoner. A chair had served her before. It should serve her now. She snatched up the one she had been sitting on and swung it over her head. The crash of wood against wood broke the numbing silence. Breathing quickly, her grey eyes slits beneath her frowning brows, she waited.
The door of the little room opened. A strange startled face peered round the edge of it. ‘Hello! What’s going on in here?’
‘Mind your own business, stickybeak,’ Trilby snarled, and the face, looking even more startled, withdrew. Trilby did not recognize the man. She did not care who he was. But her act of violence calmed her a little. When finally she was led into court by one of the officers, she felt almost cheerful. The sight of her mother and her father sitting at the back of the courtroom added to this. She gave them her brilliant dazzling smile and watched their expression change from tired bewilderment to glad recognition.
Her part of the business was over quickly. She was a minor; it was her first offence and, moreover, the magistrate was favourably impressed by her slim uprightness and the smile that had given such beauty to her face. In justice, she could not be entirely spared, but the seven days she had already spent in the little jail was considered sufficient. She was free to go home with her parents.
Mr and Mrs Comeaway did not come off so well. Both were brought to stand before the clear-eyed magistrate and listen to his sternly-delivered homily. They were too confused and embarrassed to understand more than that this whole sorry affair might have been avoided if they had taken better care of their daughter. Neither was disposed to argue, and apparently the magistrate was satisfied to accept their wondering silence as agreement. With a curt nod he dismissed them. They were free to collect Trilby and to take her home.
