The Girl Who Couldn't Smile

by Shane Dunphy

  At what sounded like a hundred miles per hour Arga rattled something back.

  ‘Powoli,’ Lonnie said, patting the air rhythmically with his hand: slowly.

  ‘Został pozostawiony sam sobie,’ Arga said, tears streaming down her face now.

  I waited with bated breath – this was wholly unexpected. It was as if Lonnie had just produced a rabbit from a hat.

  ‘She says that he has been left all alone,’ Lonnie translated.

  ‘Do you speak Polish?’ I asked disbelievingly.

  He turned to look at me with a halfway grin on his face. ‘And the prize for asking the most obvious question imaginable goes to the long-haired gentleman. Yes, I speak a bit of Polish.’

  ‘Umm … when were you going to tell me that fascinating little nugget of information?’

  ‘When were you going to tell me you had a child here who speaks Polish fluently but has not one word of English?’

  I stopped for a moment. ‘I thought I had.’

  Lonnie shook his head impatiently, then turned back to Arga. ‘Znasz jego mammy znajduje go.’ You know Peter’s mammy finds him.

  ‘Może nie na długo,’ Arga said. ‘I on będzie smutny i przestraszony.’

  ‘But maybe too late,’ Lonnie relayed to us. ‘And he will be cold and frightened.’

  Lonnie spoke to her, turning her to face him. I saw a kind of relief spread across Arga’s face: someone finally understood her and was taking the time to reassure and comfort her.

  ‘Nie chciałbym do tego dopus´cić do ciebie, kochanie. Jesteś bezpieczny, teraz.’ I wouldn’t let that happen to you, sweetheart. You’re safe, now.

  The child threw her arms around Lonnie’s neck and hugged him tightly, sobbing loudly. He hugged her back, then picked her up in his powerful arms and went back to his chair, Gilbert following them like a lapdog. As he settled back into his place, I saw that tears were running down his cheeks, too. Lonnie sat for the rest of the session with Arga on one knee, and Gilbert perched on the other, the latter obviously uncomfortable with the physical contact, but determined not to leave his friend.

  It was not until I got home that evening and pondered the events of the day – and it would prove to be a long and eventful one – that I realized just how much Arga and Lonnie had in common: she an abandoned, semi-feral child; he a modern-day and very real fairy-tale character, whose family had, in a slightly more benign way, abandoned him, too. He had been locked in the attic room when his mother died and his aunt, finding the body, had died of shock. It had been days before a workman had called and found Lonnie, terrified and half starved in his prison. I thought about them both, that night, as I lay in the darkness and felt the hours tick away: unloved children in a difficult, cruel world. And wondered if there was anything anyone could ever do other than extend friendship and hope for the best.

  It is a question to which I do not think I have ever received an answer.

  Another question without an answer was Tammy: she was by far the hardest of the children to read. Milandra was the firebrand; Gus the joker; Julie the vulnerable waif. Who, then, was Tammy?

  It took hours of close observation to grasp that she did not really have a role, other than that of outsider. The other children (who barely had time for one another as it was) ignored her, and she generally behaved as if they weren’t there either, unless she wanted something – a toy or book, usually – that someone else had. Then her violence could be truly shocking. Children can be cruel, and rough-and-tumble is a daily occurrence in any crèche, but Tammy’s assaults on her peers could border on the psychotic.

  She thought nothing of using weapons, and the other kids had become adept at getting out of her way when they saw her coming – if they saw her coming. Tammy never spoke and hardly ever cried out in anger or pain, but she also moved with little or no sound. I once watched her running from one end of the playroom to the other when the other children were out in the yard; I interpreted it as a rare physical expression of joy, but knew in my heart that she was just as likely to be burning off energy. During this outburst of activity she never made a single noise. Had I not been watching her closely, I wouldn’t have known she had budged an inch.

  The absence of sound was mirrored by a complete lack of emotional response. Tammy never seemed angry or frightened, happy or sad, amused or bored. She just … was. I knew from observing her that she liked books and favoured the book corner above all other spaces in Little Scamps, simply because that was where she went when not directed to go anywhere else, but truth be told, she displayed as much contentment sitting at the table doing art, or standing in the corner of the yard outside or hanging about in the kitchen waiting for one of us to give her lunch.

  Her reticence made forming a relationship with her extremely difficult. We base our own emotional responses on the feedback we receive from those about us. When we interact with another person, all our perceptions of how that communication is developing are rooted in what we feel our counterpart is projecting at us. When that reference point is removed, we have very little to go on, and this causes discomfort.

  I’m not ashamed to admit that a large part of me initially balked at trying to bond with Tammy. If she didn’t want to be friends with me, why should I make any effort with her? Almost as soon as these thoughts drifted through my mind, I recognized how childish and selfish they were. And I began to ask some important questions.

  Why would anyone go to such lengths to isolate themselves from their fellows? The only answer that presented itself was that such a person must have been so cruelly and harshly rejected that they harboured a deep-rooted terror of experiencing such pain again, and went to extremes to be unapproachable. As a childcare worker, it was very much my duty to break through this crust of antagonism and forge some links.

  It was unlikely to be an easy proposition.

  12

  ‘You want us to do what?’ Susan asked. She uttered the last word in a whisper that seemed so closely to resemble a shout that I wondered if it could technically be classified as anything else.

  It was lunchtime, and we were sitting at various points in the outdoor area. The kids were all eating their sandwiches – I had made some for Tammy, who had brought none with her.

  ‘I want to go on a nature walk,’ I said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There’s some fields and woodland about half a mile north of here,’ I said. ‘I think it’d be great for the children to see some real rabbits in the wild.’

  ‘And wouldn’t it be great for us to lose four or five of them into the bargain?’ Susan said. ‘And it’d be even more great to get sued by their parents and lose our jobs.’

  ‘Am I detecting sarcasm in that last statement?’ Lonnie asked, without looking up from the book he had open on his knees.

  ‘Whatever gives you that idea?’ Susan snapped.

  ‘Oh, there it goes again,’ Lonnie muttered absently.

  ‘And how are we going to get there?’ Susan asked.

  ‘I thought we might walk,’ I said. ‘You know, walk, nature walk – they sort of complement each other.’

  ‘Now who’s being sarcastic?’ Susan asked.

  ‘Don’t you think it’ll do them good?’ I was annoyed at her reaction.

  ‘Of course I do, but weren’t you the one this morning saying we should expect an explosion? I’m a big believer in keeping such things contained, if at all possible.’

  ‘I can see where you’re coming from, but I also reckon we should start as we mean to continue,’ I said. ‘If we ever want to be able to take this crowd for trips into the outside world, we have to start somewhere. Why not now?’

  Susan glowered at Lonnie, who still had his head stuck in the latest George R. R. Martin book, a tome that looked as if it weighed as much as he did. ‘What do you think, newbie?’ she asked him.

  ‘I’m with him,’ Lonnie said, still not looking at either of us.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Susan retorted.

  ‘I
mean,’ Lonnie said, shaking his head in vexation, folding over the top corner of the page he was reading and closing the paperback, ‘that I came here to work with the hippie there. If he wants to bring us on a nature walk, or a moon walk, or a cake walk, I’ll go along.’

  ‘What if he’s wrong?’ Susan said. She sounded despairing.

  ‘Then we’ll deal with that and make fun of him afterwards,’ Lonnie said, smiling.

  ‘Can’t we just make fun of him now and be done with it?’

  ‘That’s not how it’s done.’ Lonnie chuckled.

  ‘Things would be a lot easier if they were,’ Susan said.

  ‘But so much less fun,’ Lonnie riposted.

  13

  The kids filed along the road two by two, each holding the hand of a partner.

  The only fly in the ointment was Mitzi, who simply could not walk more than ten yards without a rest. For her we brought a wheelchair, but I insisted that she walk at least some of the way, which meant that Ross could use the chair if he needed to during the periods when she was not squeezed into it. The problem with Ross, of course, was that he didn’t want to use the chair at all, even when sweat was trickling down his face in rivulets and he was nearing exhaustion. I admired his spirit – as far as he was concerned he didn’t have a disability – but it wasn’t practical to let him walk all the way: at times he needed to rest.

  The result was that Mitzi plodded doggedly along the road in front of me, holding hands with Gus, who tolerated her grimly. She panted heavily, muttering threats in her sing-song, baby voice: ‘Oh, yes, children, he might get pushed out under a car, if he’s not careful.’ Or: ‘Spit in his lunch, I might. Yes – get some poop and put it in his sandwiches. We could do that.’

  Knowing that she was not beyond such things, I decided to check my food carefully in future.

  Lonnie was beside me as we walked – we’d decided not to hold hands – and he found Mitzi’s smiling tirade of abuse hilarious.

  ‘You’re a secretive sonofabitch, aren’t you?’ I said, as we strolled along.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you say that keeping the fact that you speak Polish like a true-born fucking Pole might come as something of a surprise to me?’

  Lonnie sniffed. ‘Oh. That.’

  ‘Where’d you learn it?’ I was fascinated.

  I had been under the impression that throughout his childhood he had never left the old town house his mother and aunt had shared, and had then moved to his tiny cottage on the mountain and been a veritable hermit there. I could not see how the opportunity to learn a foreign language – much less one as unusual as Polish – had ever presented itself.

  ‘Did I ever tell you about when my mother sent me to the home?’ he said at last.

  ‘An institution of some sort?’

  ‘I suppose you academics might call it an industrial school.’

  ‘No – I don’t think Tristan’s aware of it either.’

  ‘I’m certain he is,’ Lonnie said. ‘Just ’cause he never told you doesn’t mean he doesn’t know.’

  I couldn’t argue with that, so I didn’t. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ I asked.

  ‘Not really,’ Lonnie said, stopping to pluck a blade of meadow grass from the roadside hedge. He stuck the end into the corner of his mouth to chew. ‘It was a pretty horrible time. Thanks be to God my mother visited regularly, and when she saw I was gradually becoming ill from starvation and various other forms of abuse, she took me home. It was a kindness I shall never forget.’

  ‘She did send you there in the first place, mate.’

  ‘Due to the advice of a lot of people she had been brought up to trust – the local GP, the parish priest, a psychiatrist … It was the done thing, back then.’

  We walked on a bit. It was a glorious afternoon – when the weather is good, Ireland is the best place in the world to be.

  ‘Were you with priests or nuns?’ I asked, after a while.

  ‘Nuns.’

  ‘And they taught you to speak Polish?’ I asked incredulously. He snorted.

  ‘Not going to give up, are you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘It was in Dublin, a home for people with physical and intellectual disabilities. We were treated well enough, a lot of the time. I know I was lucky – some of the schools in Dublin used children for medical experiments and surgical trials but I was spared that. Food was withheld as a punishment, and we were beaten. There were some adults there – not all of them religious – who took pleasure in tormenting us, but the majority were not bad people.’

  ‘You’re far more charitable than I would be,’ I said.

  ‘Hate can eat you up if you let it,’ Lonnie said philosophically.

  ‘Yeah, I’ve heard that,’ I said noncommittally.

  ‘I’d been at the school for six months when Sister Angelica came. I don’t know what age she was, but she looked to me to be in her early twenties. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.’

  ‘And she was Polish,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Poland has always been a strongly Roman Catholic country, even during the Communist occupation,’ Lonnie said, as if he was giving a lecture.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. You know Pope John Paul the Second was Polish?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sister Angelica came to us because she had been on a foreign mission in the Congo and had become ill. We were never told, but I’ve always believed she’d had malaria. She was transported to Ireland because we have a temperate climate. To convalesce.’

  ‘And you had a crush on her.’

  Lonnie grinned. ‘Anyone would have. She wasn’t a teacher, she was just sort of … about. She’d walk around the perimeter of the playing fields, saying her rosary or reading her missal. One day I plucked up the courage and asked if I could walk with her. She looked at me oddly for a second, then said, “Come, my krasnoludek.” That was what she always called me.’

  ‘What does it mean?’ I asked, curious.

  ‘There isn’t really a clear English equivalent. The krasnoludek is a sort of Polish forest creature, different from a dwarf or a gnome, although some of the books I’ve read depict it in a very similar way. It’s completely good, and will help people if it can. A sort of benign spirit of the wilderness, I suppose.’

  ‘Rather a pagan thing for a good Catholic nun to say, don’t you think?’

  ‘Angelica was from the mountains – she grew up steeped in the old folk tales and stories. I sometimes wondered if she really did think I was a krasnoludek, sent to look after her.’

  ‘How did she start to teach you her mother tongue?’ I wondered.

  ‘She didn’t have great English, so she would often use Polish words out of necessity. I started to ask her to say them to me slowly and point at whatever it was she wanted, or mime it out, and I’d give her the English version – so we ended up sort of teaching one other. I picked up quite a bit in the six months I was with her, and when I got home I asked my mother to get me some Polish grammar and vocabulary primers. Like I told you before, she never refused me a book.’

  ‘When you left the school did you ever see Angelica again?’ I asked.

  He laughed bitterly. ‘No. Despite everything that was going on, would you believe that I actually asked my mother to let me stay in the home?’

  ‘So even though you argued and begged to stay, she made you leave?’ I said. ‘I would guess she took a stand because she knew you needed to get out of there.’

  Lonnie nodded. ‘I think about Angelica every day, though,’ he said.

  ‘The one who got away,’ I said.

  ‘That would suggest I caught her, even for a short while,’ Lonnie said.

  ‘True,’ I said. ‘But you did love her, and it sounds as if she needed a friend very much, and you were it. So I guess she loved you, too, in her way. Just because you didn’t go all Lady Chatterley in the woodshed doesn’t mean you didn’t care about each other. And it
would have been highly inappropriate if you had done, anyway. Take it for what it was – you had a special relationship with this woman, and it was broken off before it had run its course. That’s a tragedy.’

  ‘I wonder where she is now,’ Lonnie said, and we spoke about it no more for a while.

  14

  I knew that the children would get a kick out of the rabbits for perhaps ten minutes, and that we had to plan something else to keep them amused for the other forty we would be in the woods. We had brought along a backpack with items for a treasure hunt, some bags for the kids to collect bits and pieces for a nature table I was hoping to establish in the playroom, and there was always hide-and-seek and chase if things got really bad.

  The bunnies did not disappoint. Beatrix Potter would have loved the woods: a path that looked as if it had been created by rabbit workmen led to a small clearing, and as we made our way down this natural walkway I could already see a throng of rabbits playing, resting and eating in the open space ahead.

  Of course they scattered as soon as we arrived, but Tush, who knew the area well, told us all to sit down quietly and have our juice (I had brought some cartons), and they might come back. To my utter surprise, the group sat in complete silence and waited, sipping through their straws. Within three minutes Gus hissed, ‘Over there!’

  From behind a grey ash tree a little brown face was peering, its nose twitching.

  ‘And over there!’ Milandra shouted, which sent both animals scooting for cover.

  ‘You need to be as quiet as you can,’ Tush said. ‘That means no shouting, okay?’

  Moments later Arga said: ‘Tam!’ There!

  Soon we were surrounded, and not just by rabbits. Two grey squirrels, which seemed to be almost tame – or were much braver than Peter and his friends – ran about the children’s feet, looking for food, and a robin perched on a stump nearby.