Girl, Balancing & Other Stories

by Helen Dunmore

  His voice is telling her that his life is elsewhere, not here in these rainy parks he soon won’t see again. Better his family don’t come too close, get too real. Would they like her? What would they think about Frederick going with a white girl? A Brit, that’s what they’d call her. She’d be foreign to them. The brother is going to college one day. If my brother don’t study hard my mama will whup his ass and then I’ll come home and whup it a second time. Frederick smiles as he says it. Rose guesses that there won’t be too much whupping required. Frederick has confidence in a brother who doesn’t need to be driven, in a future that’s burning its way out of the past. What would his family say to Iris, and Dad, and Auntie Vi?

  Elsewhere is nowhere, Rose thinks. These days are what we’ve got. You have to take what you can.

  Quickly they get dressed like strangers, back to back. But at the last moment, late as they are, he wraps his arms around her again. Soon he is rocking her and they are cheek to cheek.

  ‘Cold,’ he says. ‘I ain’t been warm since I left home.’

  She tries to remember where Chicago is on the map. ‘Is it warm in winter, where you come from?’

  He laughs. ‘Uh-uh. But it’s a different style of cold back home. I never been bone-chilled like here. We better go now, Rose.’

  ‘I want to live near the sea,’ she says abruptly. ‘The noise of it.’ Another thing she has never told anyone.

  ‘That’s why you joined the Wrens?’

  She laughs. ‘No, it was because of the buttons.’

  ‘The buttons?’

  ‘Yeah. Wrens don’t have brass buttons. If you have buttons, you have to polish them and they have to shine all the time.’

  ‘You worked that one out before you joined up?’

  She nods, feeling her head move in the hollow of his shoulder. But then her voice comes again, muffled. ‘It was the sea. I’d never seen the sea.’

  When you are slack with love you get careless. Rose and Frederick step out of the park, but nothing outside their two bodies touches them. By the rank overgrowth of privet at the park gates she hears rustling, snuffling, and thinks of badgers though there are no badgers here. The gates are shut but with the railings gone it’s easy to climb over the stone wall studded with stumps of metal. She goes first, with Frederick holding her hand to steady her, and then he follows. Down on to the pavement under the street lamp with its muffled blackout glow. But they’re all right because they know where they are going. This is their place.

  ‘Nigger lover,’ says a voice by her ear. She’s so far from herself that for a second she thinks it’s a joke. It’s a Yank voice, like Frederick’s.

  ‘Fuckin’ nigger lover,’ says a second voice, and then another. They are coming at her from everywhere. Then shadows pull away from the dark. Three men, four, five. They don’t wait, don’t say any more, don’t shape up for a fight. Just fall on Frederick, banging Rose to one side so she slams into the stone wall.

  She grates against the rough stone as she falls. She is down on the ground. She touches the side of her face where it hurts and her fingers come away slimy with blood. But Frederick is gone. She wants to call to him but cunning sits on her tongue, holding it down. They mustn’t know that she can move.

  She looks along the wet pavement to where it’s happening. There is a mess of dark, jostling shapes, on the ground. They’ve got him down. She knows that in a fight you mustn’t fall. You have got to stay on your feet. She heard Dad teach Dickie that. If they get a boot to your head you won’t get up again. She clambers painfully on to all fours, pushes herself off the wall, begins to stagger towards them. But one of them turns casually, sees her coming, and throws her off easily as if she’s nothing. The back of her head hits the pavement.

  She lies there looking up. There is a taste of vomit in her mouth. Maybe she has been sick without remembering it. Her ears are noisy, as if they’ve got water in them. The moon is still up there, looking at her more brightly than she could ever look at it. She can’t remember why she is down here looking at the moon, and then she can. She raises her head but it won’t hold up; she raises it again and heaves herself over and begins to crawl forward with her head down. But they are too far and she can’t get to them. The fight is moving down the pavement away from her, taking Frederick with it. There are terrible noises coming out of it that don’t sound like anyone she has ever known. She is crying out now, trying to reach the bodies that sway and lunge. They have got him on the ground, she knows it, and she can hear him grunting and groaning as if they are on top of him and his life is being pushed out of him like the little ones being pushed out of Mum while Rose sat in the yard and played with pebbles.

  ‘Frederick!’ she screams. He doesn’t answer, but one of them leaves the pack and falls on her. He drags her up off the ground, he gets hold of her head, he is grappling for her mouth but his fingers miss and poke her right eye. She screams again. He is blinding her but she knows no one will come. She can smell the man, his sweat and something he puts on his hair and his uniform smell and his PX food smell. Some parts of his smell are the same as Frederick but most of it is strangeness. He pulls her head back and gets his whole right hand over her mouth, half over her nose too so that she struggles for breath, lashing out with feet and nails. She twists her head, trying to get a grip, trying to bite his hand. His left hand grips her throat.

  ‘You carry on like that, I’m gonna hurt you.’

  Her eyes are bursting in her head, hurting her. She can’t see the moon. All she hears are her own whimpers.

  They are gone. She’s down on the pavement. Her cheek is against the ground and the cold stone is greasy with rain. She lifts her head and looks in terror along the length of the ground, trying to focus.

  He is there. She knows it’s him though the shape on the ground looks smaller than Frederick, even when he’s lying down. She shuffles towards him, saying his name. The moon is weak now. She can see him but not yet name the parts of him. Slowly the shape thrust towards her becomes the sole of his boot. She raises herself on her knees to see him.

  He is on his back, arms cast up around his head. He looks as if he’s been thrown there. His face is sideways, his eyes almost shut but not quite. A strip of white shows. She shuffles until her face is touching his, and feels for his breath with her fingers.

  It’s there. She can feel it. She thinks she can feel it. But his face is split, pulped like a fruit.

  ‘Frederick? Frederick!’

  But he doesn’t answer. His lips are open. His top front teeth are gone.

  She looks down the long, shining pavement. At the far end, a hundred yards away, a shadowy couple walk, twined together. They are in a world of their own. They saw nothing, heard nothing. She begins to call and wave her arms as if she and Frederick are far out to sea, clinging to the hull of an upturned boat. The couple drift on, out of sight.

  ‘What’d they do to you?’ he asks her days later in the hospital. His voice is grating. That’s because his windpipe was hurt where they tried to throttle him. He clears his throat as if he’s got a cold.

  ‘Nothing,’ she says quickly. ‘They held me down, that’s all.’

  Suddenly she realises what he’s been afraid of. He thinks they raped her, to show her that she’s anyone’s. That’s why he hasn’t wanted to see her all these days. That’s why the nurses were told to say he was too sick to see anyone. The swellings are down and the stitches due to come out. He has had an operation on his jaw, which is broken in three places. They’ve put a plate in.

  ‘You reckon they’ll be giving me a medal?’ says Frederick. His voice is a thousand miles away from her. The gap in his teeth makes his words seem to stumble.

  ‘They didn’t touch me,’ she says urgently. But he just nods, neither believing nor disbelieving. She puts her hand on his arm and he lets it lie there. His face has changed so much, as if the doctors tried to put everything back right but did not know where the right places were. She knew: she could have told them.
Now she sees that the smallest change to a face makes it so that you can’t read it any more. Eyes, forehead, cheeks, mouth. She looks at them. His skin colour is different, ashen with what pain’s done to him. Deep bruising still discolours his face around the jaw line. They stove in three ribs; she knows that. The nurse told her. His collarbone had been dislocated. There are other troubles. A catheter line leads from the bed to a glass jar. Rose is afraid to ask Frederick about his injuries. She would have asked a nurse, but they are all in a hurry, clacking past as if the visitors are trouble they don’t want.

  ‘My mama wrote me,’ Frederick says abruptly, nodding towards his locker.

  This is the face that lay so close to hers that they seemed to share the same breath. The locker top is smooth and empty. He must have put the letter away. He didn’t want anyone to see it.

  ‘She don’t know nothin’ ’bout all this and she ain’t ever gonna know nothin’,’ he continues.

  ‘What’s her name?’ says Rose at last.

  ‘Lucile.’

  ‘That’s a nice name.’

  ‘Yeah. Pretty. She writes she’s prayin’ for me night and day, ’cause she knows I’ll be goin’ into danger soon. Mama’s a Baptist. Not my daddy though, he was political.’

  He is talking in the voice he must have had as a child. His eyes are turned away from her. He is back with them, not with her.

  ‘He brought us out of Georgia when I was eight months old,’ he goes on. ‘My daddy used to tell us stories. They weren’t fit for a child’s ears, my mama said, but he said we should know them; that way we would understand what the law was for, and why you have to get to a place that has laws the same for everyone. He used to say that we hadn’t reached that place yet and maybe we never would reach it. But we were on our way. ’Cause it ain’t right for people to do what they like. I used to wonder when my daddy said that. Used to think it’d be pretty good to do just what I liked.’

  She is tiring him. She takes his hand, but it lies slack in hers. She releases it gently, to rest on the boiled bedcover, palm up.

  ‘Frederick,’ she says. His gaze slides towards her, and then away. The whites of his eyes are still bloodshot and yellow.

  ‘I never was baptised,’ he says. ‘I never heard that call. I followed my daddy.’ There is a film of sweat on his forehead now. Soon the nurse will come and tell her that he needs to rest. Those doctors and nurses think they know everything. Dad wouldn’t let a doctor near Mum, because they’d have taken her away. Better she lay there, her toes poking up under the bedclothes and her face shut. She lay like that for weeks sometimes, and the bad times came more and more often until the good times were squeezed to nothing between them.

  That nurse is crackling her way down the ward towards them, twitching bedcovers and checking charts. Visiting hour is over.

  ‘Goodbye, Rose,’ he says.

  What’s left? There’s nothing left.

  ‘I’ll come again tomorrow,’ she says. She’ll come and come and each time he will be there, not here. She wants to seize him back, all of him, pull him back across the ocean from where he’s gone. She knows where Chicago is now. She’s looked at the map. Chicago lies on a lake as big as the sea, but it’s hemmed in by thousands of miles of land. The lake is so big that they even have tides there; it says so in the back of the atlas. But they are not real tides. You’d think from the size of the lake that it was the sea, and that you could sail away on it to anywhere in the world. But you never could.

  PROTECTION

  FLORENCE WAKES. THE bedclothes have slid to the floor and she’s cold. She sits up quickly and listens. Something woke her but she doesn’t know what. Perhaps it was her own voice. That happens sometimes, when her dreams are too strong.

  Is something wrong with one of the girls? They don’t come to her unless they are ill. There’s no need, when they’ve got each other.

  The house is still. It creaks and stirs but she’s used to that. A house this age is a living thing. It was nothing, she tells herself, but her body knows better. Her skin prickles. Don’t pretend. You won’t get out of it that way. She leans over the side of the bed, scrabbles for the sheet and wraps it around her.

  She never draws the curtains. She can lie in bed and see the stars. When there’s a full moon the wash of light is almost strong enough for her to read by it. She recites these facts, telling them to herself as she tells them to her London friends. Why live in the middle of nowhere and still draw your curtains?

  Her heart is still thudding. She’s cold, not because the night is cold but because of the start of sweat all over her body. Something frightened her, while she was still far down in her sleep.

  A streak of light travels across the window. Instantly she knows what it is and she ducks down, away from it. She reaches under the bed and picks up a length of pipe, heavy in her hand.

  Jack doesn’t know about the pipe. It’s only when he’s away that it comes out from behind her shoes at the back of the wardrobe. Everyone says there are no burglars here. This is the back end of nowhere. There are cottages and farmhouses, but not a big house for miles. Besides, even if a burglar tried, he wouldn’t find the way down the twisted lanes.

  ‘But all the same, you should have a dog.’ Her friend Rosamund said that, when she came to stay.

  The pipe is cold and smooth. She will cave in his skull if he comes near her girls. She has prepared for this moment in her mind, and now here it is.

  The light flickers across the window again. She knows exactly where he is: on the path that skirts the boundary of their property and then climbs the hill through the woods. He’s looking across to the house, shining a torch to see how big it is and whether anyone is awake. She even knows the words for what is happening. He is casing the joint. But that’s an American expression and she is English, in the heart of the English countryside, with her lead piping. Her thoughts jump and spurt like matches being lit one from the next.

  She must keep quite still. If she goes to the window to look out he will see the movement. If she had a dog it would be barking now. Florence listens. Her window is open a little at the top. She hears nothing and everything. The night is still. Not a branch stirs. A tawny owl cries softly; a male, she thinks, a locating cry. At night the wood sounds even closer than it is, as if it laps the walls of the house like water.

  The doors are locked. She runs through them in her mind. Back door: yes, she shot the bolt across. They never use the front door. She thinks its iron key is rusted into the lock. The downstairs windows are all shut, and at night she puts the catches across them. The girls always pull their upper window right down, but they are on the other side of the house. The torchlight won’t discover them.

  She is out of bed. She crouches on the floor, naked, the sheet fallen from her, and goes on all fours towards the window, until her head is below the sill. She creeps upward, head back, so that her eyes will see before her pale hair is exposed.

  There’s the bulk of the wood. He’ll have to come right out and cross open ground to get to the house. He can’t come any closer without her seeing. She waits but the torch beam doesn’t probe again. He’s gone, she thinks, and then another thought runs through her head, electric. He’s gone round the other side of the house, the girls’ side.

  Then she sees it. Another flash of light, but this time from deeper inside the wood. He is on the path. She knows exactly where he is and how the path twists as it climbs the hill. Now the light will come again. Yes. One light stabs, then another, another, another. There are four torches. Four men. Her breath goes out of her.

  They are following the path. Four of them. If they spoke she would hear them, they are so close. So why shine a torch at the house and give themselves away? Maybe they wanted to get their bearings. The house is a landmark because that’s where the path begins.

  They are going away, up the hill. They’re not interested in the house.

  If they’d come in daylight she wouldn’t have known they were there. It was o
nly the torches that gave them away. She could have been working in her studio while they passed within yards of her.

  So why come at night?

  She reaches for the sheet again, and pulls it around her with one hand. She won’t switch on the light. If they looked back they would see it pour through the window frame and they would know that they had woken her. They might guess that she had looked out and seen their torches. And they might not like that.

  Lights bobble and waver through the trees. As the path goes up it hides itself behind a fold of the hill. It’s very steep. They will trample the leaf mould and release the mushroomy smell of undergrowth in autumn.

  There are deer in the wood, and pheasant. Of course, she thinks to herself in huge relief: poachers. Even the word has something soothing and domestic about it.

  The wood goes dark. Whatever they’re up to on the hill, it’s not her business. She can go back to bed, but first she’ll make sure that the girls are all right.

  She takes Jack’s heavy brown woollen dressing gown off the hook on the back of the door and wraps it around her. Her fingers graze the light switch, but she doesn’t press it down. She’ll close her bedroom door and turn on the landing light, because that can’t be seen from outside.

  But I can draw the curtains, she thinks. She drags them across until there is no gap at all. She knows that never again will she sleep under a window full of stars.

  As always, Florence hesitates before pushing open the door of the girls’ room.

  ‘Twins!’ people used to say as they peered into their pram, as if Florence might not have noticed that she had two babies in there. ‘They’re lovely babies, dear, but sooner you than me. All that work!’

  What nobody said and nobody seemed to know was the loneliness of having them. With two beautiful babies, you never have to worry about them having someone to play with. No, thinks Florence, you never do. The only trouble is that every time you come into their bedroom you think you’re interrupting something. It’s like living with a newly married couple who are perfectly polite but have no real interest in anyone but themselves. But with her girls the honeymoon has gone on for years, fierce, secretive and so intimate that it seems to suck all the air of the room into itself.