Rock Me Gently

by Judith Kelly

  The lobby was decorated in the intense colours of the Middle East - azure and brick red - as well as the creamy beige of Jerusalem, illuminated by a soft yellow glow from the Art Deco lamps. Marble floors and tapestries on the walls all combined harmoniously into the perfect backdrop for intrigue, the tough political negotiations and lively parties that were part of the King David Hotel’s mystique.

  I luxuriated in a hot bath, my first in six months, and used all the toiletries the hotel had provided. Cydney and I were sharing a room and I tried to get some rest while she roamed around the hotel. A knock on the door awoke me. Rick. He was wearing a fresh new shirt with the collar turned up. We grinned stupidly at one another for a long minute. I wanted to stroke my fingers through his tousled blond hair. Bad, scary thought. I put my hands behind my back.

  ‘Want to take a walk around the hotel grounds with me?’

  ‘Urn, OK ... a walk, yes,’ I said.

  I was nervous. The words came out of my mouth all mixed up. He’d think I was hopelessly stupid now. A flush crept up my cheeks as I locked the door behind me. But before I had time to worry properly about how inane I had sounded, he snaked his arm around my shoulders - no one had ever done that. There was something so familiar about it as he steered me down the corridor. I tried to walk naturally, relaxed. Yes, this happens to me all the time.

  Why he was interested in me was a mystery. Of course, he didn’t know anything about me. I hadn’t told him my background. Too serious. Too sad. Too weird. Besides, where would I begin to tell a story like mine? I swallowed hard, and walked like it was totally normal to have this man’s hand flat on my back. I felt, as if I were a different person completely.

  Cydney was passing through the lobby. ‘Hey, you two,’ she said in her singsong voice. I scrunched my whole face at her.

  ‘Hey,’ Rick called.

  She gave me a little wave of her hand, her eyes all round and exaggerated behind her glasses, as if she couldn’t wait to hear all the gory details.

  ‘Let’s sit in the sunshine,’ said Rick as we wandered outside into the hotel garden. It was beautiful there in the gardens - the tall fir trees, the blue swimming pool with sunlight shimmering on its surface. Rick sat with his knees wide, face without any kind of expression. I pushed my hair off my face and sat on the ground, my back against a tree trunk, Rick’s knee next to me.

  We became silent for a moment, a strange, distant silence. Rick turned to me, his shadow blocking out the sun.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘Cydney tells me you were brought up in an orphanage.’

  He said it so suddenly, I felt I had been stung. Perhaps it was the quiet of his voice, or the simplicity of statement. I put a hand up to my mouth. My lips were pressed together. To my horror, my eyes filled, as if indeed I had been stung. I couldn’t speak for a moment. I was afraid to blink, afraid to move. He reached up and took my hand away from my mouth and held it.

  The water in the pool lapped, slow and lazy. A chlorine dream. I took a deep breath, ready to fall into the abyss ... but instead I found that the thought of telling him didn’t panic me now.

  ‘I wasn’t an orphan,’ I said to the water. I let out a long breath after I had said it. I could feel his questions in the silence. He pushed his hand through his blond hair. He was going to ask me, ‘Why were you there, then?’

  He asked the questions, and I answered them. As I spoke, terrible sadness, dread, an agonising desire for happiness swelled in my heart. I watched his face and felt anxious. Would he still look at me the way he did? Would he think I was different, damaged? I searched his hazel eyes for some sign that he was being put off by my story, but he just nodded and listened, watching me closely, as if he could see something with every gesture and inflection. His hand hadn’t moved; it was firm on mine.

  Finally I finished. He looked into my eyes, smiling. ‘So what do you think?’

  It made me laugh. ‘Isn’t that enough?’

  He laughed too and in his eyes was a look something like admiration.

  ‘Wow,’ he whispered.

  ‘It was a lot worse than I could ever describe,’ I said, flicking nothing off my knee. ‘But it was a long time ago. Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you all this.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because of what you must think. It’s strange, I still feel ashamed. Yet I don’t know why.’

  Rick moved over to sit closer to me, and made me look at him. I was not responsible for what happened to me in my childhood, he said. Only the person who had put me in that position was responsible. Did I understand that?

  I tried to shrug my shoulders under the weight of his arm. I didn’t understand. His closeness terrified me. Being friends was OK, friends I could just about handle, or at least I was learning to. But this -’It’s got to be difficult,’ he murmured, ‘for you to understand that it wasn’t your fault and that you’ve nothing to be ashamed of.’

  He began to stroke my arm with the tips of his fingers. I might have pulled it away, but I couldn’t move. It was the first time someone had touched me this gently, this kindly, and I was nearly paralysed with gratitude. I felt his breath on my face. ‘I mean, it was difficult enough for me as a kid, but maybe I’ll tell you about that some other time.’

  Rick seemed reticent by nature, not used to sharing thoughts and feelings. I thought that in this way we were alike. But although still guarded, I knew that if you cannot talk about the thing that is at the centre of your life - cannot let anything slip out for fear of revealing the entire story - you develop what might pass for natural reticence, a habit of listening rather than telling stories yourself.

  The stroking of his fingertips was soothing and rhythmical, like a warm wave washing over me.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ I said.

  ‘I know, but you shouldn’t be.’

  ‘I’ve never done anything like this before,’ I said. ‘Never really liked people touching me.’ It was something I’d been thinking all day - yet was it now just an excuse to push him away?

  He kissed me once, simple and careful, lips against my lips and then away. He looked at me, a question in his light brown eyes. I shivered, staring at him. When you’ve told someone all the worst things and they still want to kiss you ... what does that mean? Does it mean that everything is wonderful, or that they have problems of their own?

  Rick put his hands behind his head, not a care in the world, and then looked at me, one eye closed against the sun.

  ‘I’ve wanted to do that many times,’ he said.

  I moved my fingers over my mouth and turned my head to look at him. I wanted to say, ‘Me too,’ but somehow I couldn’t make the words come.

  Chapter 12

  I7 March

  Sister C. hit Janet yesterday in class because she wet herself. She had to mop it up.

  26 April

  Some ladies came into the playground today. Sister M. called me over. She said they liked my drawing on the classroom wall. Sister M. smiled at me. I didn’t say anything.

  10 June

  Frances said I was shouting in my sleep last night: No, no, no. She said I was sitting up and banging my fists on the bed. I can’t remember it.

  Sister Mary called me to the front of the class. ‘Judy Kelly, why were you sitting instead of kneeling at Mass today?’

  ‘Don’t know, Sister.’ Hearing my own robotic voice made me want to cry; I didn’t understand anyone any more, myself least of all. The lack of thought, the lack of will, I had felt their approach on and off during this time. Not too near, but on their way, like the vague droning echo that comes from the lowest key on a plano.

  I was beginning to believe what the nuns kept telling us: we were nothing. Now it became a word I associated with myself.

  During Mass that day I had seen tiny pinpoints of the altar candle lights dancing around, then rushing away from me. A faint waspy buzzing hummed in my ears. I knew that religion didn’t agree with me. I whispered to Ruth, who was kneeling next to me, that I thought I
was about to faint. Without moving the muscles of her face, she said, ‘Judith! You’ve gone a funny colour. Sit down or you’ll pass out.’

  Then with my head on my knees I was looking at the backs of the other girls’ shoes. I battled with every bit of energy I had not to faint. I didn’t want to step out of my own body and lose control. Not here.

  Now, standing before me in the classroom, Sister Mary’s jaw tightened. ‘Why were you sitting instead of kneeling?’ The final hiss in her voice warned me of her feelings. She picked up her cane and brought it down on my arm, which shot up instinctively as the hard wood shivered through my elbow.

  The sinking feeling in my stomach overcame me. Nausea soured my throat and I wanted to be sick, but an antidote of dull anger kept me going. When I tried to speak, my mouth clenched. It was as if my words had swallowed their tongues. I couldn’t hear anything except a deep quivering pulse in my head taking on a fiercer rhythm. In a whirlpool of queasiness and fever, my forehead burning, I suddenly felt so weak I could hardly stand. My lips were dry and I longed for water.

  ‘Lazy good-for-nothing child!’ Sister Mary’s eyebrows drew together as she scrutinised my face. I stared blearily back at her, wondering if she was going to whack me again. She babbled on, but I didn’t know what she was talking about any more. I just nodded my head mechanically when I thought she was asking me a question.

  ‘Well, answer me, do you feel poorly?’

  I nodded my head again and everything spun about me. I lifted my hand to my forehead. I tried to find the words in the mist that shrouded me.

  ‘The whites of your eyes have turned yellow,’ she said. ‘You’d best get yourself off to the sanatorium.’

  As spring approached, poor hygiene and insanitary conditions backed up by rat-ridden dormitories and clogged drains permitted a bacterial infection to creep into the orphanage and breathe its foul breath into the kitchens and refectory. The girls’ lowered resistance to the infections had primed the majority of them to fall victim to a jaundice epidemic and the senior classrooms stood empty.

  It had all begun one morning a week or two before, after we had finished washing down the walls of the corridors and classrooms. I noticed with a start that Frances’s face had turned yellow - copper yellow - even the whites of her eyes.

  ‘Frances!’ I grabbed her fearfully, shaking her slightly. ‘You’re all yellow!’

  She shook her head. ‘It could be just the dirt from the walls.’

  She leant back against the wall. ‘But I don’t feel very well.’

  This was the outbreak of the jaundice epidemic which the nuns termed ‘yellow fever’. With so many children ill, and the sanatorium filled to capacity, the girls were put in their usual beds in the dormitory when they became infected.

  Sister Cuthbert encouraged those of us left in the classroom to send letters to our friends, to tell them we were saying daily prayers for them and fifteen decades of the rosary.

  At last I joined Frances and some others from my class in the dormitory, as yellow and dizzy as they were. I sat on the side of my bed. I felt weak.

  Ruth, standing by the door with a broom in her hand, called out, ‘Welcome to the vomitorium!’

  That was to make me laugh. But even her jokes were turning bad and I could not laugh because my cheeks and lips were shivery; Ruth had to laugh by herself. She was still gobsmacked by my stupidity in returning to the convent after spending that weekend away with Mum: welcoming, as she saw it, the mad bugger nuns with open arms!

  ‘Sheer suicide,’ she’d said, shaking her head.

  I curled up between the sheets, glad of their coolness. My face and body felt very hot. It was as if a clock was ticking inside my head, which was held on by a piece of elastic. I was stretched to the point of exhaustion as I made the long tiring shuffle to the toilet, where the dizzy red floor tiles wavered under my eyes like chicken wire. Every time I lay down I wondered if I would have the strength to get up again.

  ‘Will the doctor come soon?’ I asked Frances. Her yellow pallor was beginning to wear off.

  ‘No, Sister Cuthbert says we don’t need one,’ she said weakly. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll only take about two weeks to get over the collywobbles and then you’ll turn pink again.’

  She tried rocking my bed, but the usually comforting motion just made my stomach feel dull and heavy, as if it were full of earth, and I had to ask her to stop. It was strange that the nuns had not given any of us any medicine. They usually gave you foul-smelling stuff when you were in the sanatorium. I wanted glasses of orange juice and ginger ale, the sound of a distant wireless. But these things seemed gone for ever. I was so thirsty that when Frances brought me water from the washroom it tasted like it had flowed through summer: all mown hay and lemonade. I filled myself to bursting so I wouldn’t be thirsty any more and she wouldn’t have to get out of her bed again.

  I had been in Nazareth House for almost two years. In that time, the nuns had beaten my body and had weakened my mind. All that was left was the strength of my spirit and I knew it wouldn’t take much more for that last part to go.

  I had begun to think I might never make it out of Nazareth House, that my life would end within its walls. Even when I was well, I had lost interest in the life around me and went through the routine of the days with shuttered eyes, closed to as much as possible. I saw it in Frances too. The yellow fever had made her face tired and worn, her movements slow and tentative. Frances, who had been my constant companion and support in the early days, had lately seemed to be slipping away from me. Her eyes would hollow out, so that I felt lonely even when she was sitting on my bed beside me. I hadn’t been able to talk to her about my uneasiness; sometimes she had seemed like a stranger.

  Ruth popped in three or four times a day to sweep the floor or bring us our meals. Janet’s bed was next to mine; her usually sallow complexion looked almost green now. Yet I wished I were Janet sometimes. I wished I had an interest like her frog, which she kept in a box and took care of, finding it food to eat. She said that when she was younger she broke a thermometer and ate some of the mercury in it to make herself sick so she could keep out of the way of the nuns. Or she’d stick her fingers down her throat and throw up, or she’d run and run around the playground to make herself hot in order to have a temperature. Sister Cuthbert twigged what she was doing and after that her ploys were harder to pull off.

  ‘How old were you then?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. About six or seven,’ she told me. ‘When I was about four years old, I used to sit on a chair facing the wall of the playroom. I used to think that if I kept very still and out of the way and didn’t say anything, I would be safe.’

  ‘Safe from the nuns?’ I said.

  ‘Just safe and sound,’ she said. ‘I used to get into trouble a lot with the nuns for wetting my knickers every day. They’d lose their tempers with me and make me stand with my wet knickers over my head in the dormitory. Sister Cuthbert would be all right, but you never knew when one of the others would blow their top about it.’

  Janet’s face dissolved, re-formed, and something in the sudden change in her expression made me feel sorry for her. She’d been here since she was two years old - throughout all that time when I’d known happiness with Mum and Dad and Nana and Pop.

  Suddenly it was unbearable to listen to Janet any more. It made me feel even more nauseous. I felt it everywhere around me, in the walls, in the very air I breathed. I closed my eyes. In my head there was a square of flickering darkness, in the centre of which was a bunch of broken purple flowers.

  Cold sunlight filtered through the dormitory. There would be cloudy grey light over the silent playground. I wondered if I could die just the same on a sunny day.

  What was death? Was it to melt in the sun or be blown away by the wind? Would it be like walking into a dark cellar at night?

  My boiling brain now seethed with these thoughts and of the day when I had proudly told Mum that I could now recite the catech
ism by heart. She had replied that she didn’t believe in brainwashing children. She said that when I was grown up I would be able to make up my own mind about religion, which was responsible for a lot of wars and unhappiness in her opinion, as well as unfairness and narrow-mindedness.

  That night Frances stayed by my bed watching over me. I wanted to jump out of bed and kneel on the cold floor and pray, but was too weak to move. I kept pushing the blankets away from my legs. They felt as scratchy as dry turf. The sweat trickled down me in never-ending streams. There was nothing Frances could do, except stay with me and try to make me drink more water. I grew increasingly hot and then I shivered as if I had cold slimy water next to my skin. At one point, Frances was tempted to ask Sister Mary to fetch a doctor. I quickly dismissed the idea. I didn’t want to cause any trouble.

  When food arrived, it consisted of large fibrous potatoes. One had the mark of a spade in it, which when cut oozed yellow juice from its sticky core. I was sure I would never eat another potato again.

  One morning, several days later, I awoke feeling better. A wonderful happiness spread through me like magic. I was alive. It would be nice getting better slowly. You could get a magazine to read then. The icing on the cake was that, for a short while at least, I would not have to carry out my daily chores and get whacked.

  Perhaps for others in the outside world, life was like this all the time - natural.

  In one of the tattered magazines was a picture showing a small boy dressed in a short coat and a cap, staring blankly at the camera, his arms raised in surrender as a soldier trained his machine gun on him. Beside him was a woman who may have been his mother; her arms were also raised as she looked anxiously over her shoulder at the boy.

  In another photo a pale, thin man clad in striped pyjamas stood vacantly looking at a pile of dead bodies.

  I stared at the grainy black-and-white pictures. I was living in a world of lies - lies that grown-ups pretended to believe in. I hated them for it. The horrible things that they did to each other were endless. I lived in a world where it was all right to kill people for no reason, but to climb through a nun’s cell window to read your own letters was a punishable offence. A world where landlords and landladies did not allow children to live with their mothers.