The Odd Flamingo

by Nina Bawden

  I said, “I believe you know Rose Blacker. I want to find her.”

  The boy stepped backwards; in his voice there was a high note of alarm. He said, “I dunno who you’re talking about. Are you a copper?”

  I said, “No, I’m not a policeman. You’ve no reason to be afraid of me.”

  He said, contemptuously, “’ Course I’m not afraid. What d’you take me for?” He swaggered a little, throwing up his chin, his hands in his pockets.

  I said, “You know where she is, don’t you?”

  He said, “If I did, I wouldn’t tell you, see? Why should I? Anyway I ain’t seen her in weeks. Now get away from my boat or I’ll let you have it where it hurts.”

  I said, “I think you can tell me something, can’t you? I’ll make it worth your while.”

  The boy laughed. “Not’alf you won’t. I can’t tell you anything, see? Now get away from my boat.”

  I hesitated a moment. Then I said, “What did Mr. Stone have to say to you this afternoon before you left London?”

  Callaghan said nothing and then he spat out a foul word with extraordinarily concentrated vindictiveness. After that he said, “We had a row. He tried to take the mickey out of me. I don’t let people take the mickey out of me, see? He won’t do it again in a hurry.”

  I said, “What did he want?”

  “I’m not telling you, see? It ain’t none of your bloody business, Mister long nose. You get away from my boat. I’m not telling you again.”

  I said, as equably as I could, “Why did he hit you?”

  The boy made an odd, animal sound, like an angry whimper. He made a swift movement in the half-dark and I saw that he had an automatic in his hand.

  He said, “If you don’t get away from my boat I’ll blow a hole in your guts.”

  The sensation of unreality grew stronger. I might have been in the middle of a gangster film; the boy’s words had just that kind of feel about them. I found, and it surprised me, that I was not in the least afraid.

  I said, “It’s silly to talk like that. It would be murder, you know.”

  He spat. He said, with a self-conscious air, “Go on, get out of it, brother. Or I’ll let you have it, see? I’m not afraid of the cops.”

  I said, “What have you got in your boat that you don’t want me to see?”

  He said, “Get out,” in a high, goaded whisper. He raised the hand with the gun in it and I half fell, half threw myself forward and tackled him round the legs. I felt his knees buckle and we toppled together on to the hard little beach. The boy gave a small, sobbing cry as his head hit the stones; it was with enormous relief that I realised the gun had not gone off.

  I was heavier than Callaghan and in good condition but I was neither so young, nor so agile. We struggled clumsily for a moment or two and then I got a grip on the boy by both arms, holding him just above the elbows. The bones of his arms felt astonishingly fragile beneath my hands and I felt, exultantly, that I had him where I wanted him. Then he twisted like a snake beneath me and wriggled one leg free of my weight. The blow caught me in the stomach and for a moment the pain left me helpless. There were scarlet blotches in front of my eyes; I rolled clear of the boy, doubled up and gasping, and slipped half into the water. I wondered, in spite of the pain, what had happened to the gun and whether he would really use it. For a brief moment I did not care very much whether he did or not.

  The cold water eased the agony a little and I crawled on my hands and knees out of the river. I vomited on to the gravel and felt better. When I looked up the boy had gone. For a moment I felt only relief and then I was afraid that I would lose him. I managed to stand upright and I went along the path a little way until I could see the boy dimly, running across the fields. It was, by now, almost entirely dark, but I could see the loose, light-covered coat. He seemed to be making for the caravans.

  In my present state it was useless to go after him. I doubted whether it would be much good anyway; my encounters with him to date had been almost ludicrously unsuccessful. I went back to the beach to look for the gun; I could not think that he would have bolted if he had not dropped it.

  I had a fountain-pen torch and I searched the gravel with its needle beam but there was no sign of the gun. I crouched by the water and felt in the river; at the edge the bed sloped gently and it was quite shallow. I found it after about five minutes’ blind groping and took it out of the water and dried it on my handkerchief. I took out the magazine and pulled back the bolt. Both the magazine and the chamber were empty.

  I stood up and something tinkled by my shoe. It was a small padlock key. I weighed it in my hand for a moment and then I waded into the water and climbed on to the boat. The key fitted the padlock on the cabin door.

  Inside the cabin it was hot and dark and there was a strong, sickly smell. The roof was low, I hit my head and swore, peering into the thick blackness.

  I lit my torch and shone it round the cramped space. There was an oil lamp hanging from the roof and there was someone lying on the bunk against the wall.

  I said, “Hullo, who is it?” and stumbled across the cabin, kicking over a clanking bucket, and shone the torch on to the face on the pillow.

  For a moment I did not recognise her and then she opened her enormous eyes and stared at me. The eyes were blank and unseeing, she moved her head fretfully on the pillow as if the light was hurting her.

  I said, unbelieving, “Rose,” and she gave a long, tired sigh and closed her eyes again.

  I lit the lamp after a great deal of trouble; the wick was nearly worn down and had to be coaxed before it would ignite. When it was lit at last it filled the tiny cabin with a clear, soft glow. There was a table by the bunk: with a glass of water on it and an empty cup with tea dregs in it. The whole place was quite clean and the linen on the bunk looked fresh and comfortable.

  I went up to the bunk and I was shocked to see how ill she looked. Her face was an odd, greyish colour and her lips were parted and pale with a yellow line round the mouth. She was breathing lightly, so lightly that the bedclothes barely moved. The hand that lay outside the cover was frighteningly thin; I took her wrist and tried to feel her pulse but I wasn’t quite sure how to set about it. I called her name and she opened her eyes and looked at me. Without the light shining on her face, she looked more normal.

  I said, “Rose.” She moved her lips as if she were trying to say something. Then she turned her head on the pillow and looked at the table by the bunk.

  I raised her shoulders gently and held the glass to her lips. She drank a little of the water and the rest ran down her chin on to the bedclothes.

  I said, “Rose, who brought you here? Who’s been looking after you?”

  She said, with a pitiable effort, “Jimmie. He’s here. There was a woman.”

  I said, “Have you seen a doctor?”

  She shook her head slowly, “I lost my baby,” she said.

  Her skin, when I touched her, was hot and dry; when I laid her back on the bed she looked completely exhausted and even more grey. She was quite unlike my memory of her; she no longer looked young and she smelt like a sick animal.

  I put my head close to the pillow. I said, “Rose, listen to me. We’ve all been looking for you—your mother and everyone else. I’m going away now but I’ll come back and take you where you’ll be properly looked after.”

  She gave no sign that she had heard what I said and she did not move. Then, after a moment of silence she looked at me with desperate appeal and said, “No. No, you mustn’t do that. They’ll do for me. I want to stay. Go away now. Go away.”

  The last words were a high, wailing cry; she half-raised herself from the pillow, gasping and clutching at my sleeve with her thin, hot hand. There was extreme terror on her face and in her eyes. I was frightened for her.

  I said, “Of course I’ll go away. There’s nothing to be frightened about. Go to sleep now, there’s a good child.”

  She sighed and fell back on the pillow. I wondered if ther
e was anything I could do for her but it seemed almost as if she had gone to sleep. Her eyes were closed and the breath came through her lips in a staccato fashion. I pulled the bedclothes gently round her, turned the wick of the oil lamp low and left the cabin.

  I fastened the padlock and put the key in my pocket. Standing on the creaking deck I knew that I did not want to leave her there alone. I wished that I knew how ill she was and then I wondered if she were going to die.

  I swung myself off the boat into the water and ran along the path, forgetting the ache in my head and the pain in my stomach.

  The moon was coming up and giving a little light so that I saw Jimmie Callaghan quite clearly as I ran towards the lane that led from the Nissen hut to the road. I had made for the lane because it was the quickest way back to the car; I had not thought that Callaghan might be waiting for me there. He was standing quite motionless in front of the dark hedge, his hands in the pocket of his light jacket.

  I slowed my pace uncertainly; the boy did not move or speak until we were perhaps twenty yards apart. What happened then was wholly unexpected; the blow that came from behind and knocked me sprawling on the ground took me completely by surprise. I felt, not afraid, but astonished and bewildered; it was unbelievable that this should happen to me in an English field so near to people and a town. Someone knelt painfully in the small of my back and tied my elbows together and then let me go and rolled me on to my side so that I saw the man who had knocked me down. He was a big man with a flat, angry face. It was the man from the band. The one the barman had called Stan.

  Callaghan stood beside the big man and looked down at me. His face was without expression; in the moonlight it looked narrow and mean.

  I said, through a mouthful of wet earth, “What the hell do you think you are doing?” I felt absurdly indignant.

  Callaghan said, “The same goes for you, mister. Messing about with my boat and my girl.”

  I thought that he sounded undecided. I said, “Your girl is ill. I think maybe she is dying. She should be in a hospital.”

  The big man swore at me and kicked me in the side so that the tears came into my eyes.

  Callaghan said sharply, “Shut up, Stan.” Then he bent down to me, the silver hair hanging lankly in his eyes, and said, “Don’t you try any funny business, see? I’m looking after her all right. She’s my girl.”

  He sounded both savage and uncertain. I said, “She can’t be all right in that boat. Do you want her to die?”

  The boy’s face twisted with an emotion that I did not understand. He knelt down and went, quite gently, through my pockets. He took out my wallet and threw it on the ground. He found the gun and put it in his own pocket and then he found the cabin key. He fumbled with the cord that tied my arms and jerked it free. He said, “Get out of here. And leave me alone or you’ll get a bullet in your guts. I’m warnin’you, see?”

  I felt that the words he spoke were not his own words but somehow second-hand. I was not clear why they were letting me go; later I realised that there was nothing else, short of killing me, that they could have done. And that, even then, they were not prepared to do.

  I got to my feet and stumbled away from them, towards the lane. As I squeezed through a gap in the hedge I heard them running. I was afraid then, not for myself, but for Rose.

  The car was where I had left it; it took me nearly a minute to get the ignition key into the hole because my hands were shaking so. I drove towards the town and stopped at the first telephone box and called the police. The operator put me on to the local branch; it seemed to me, in my agitation, that they were unbearably slow in understanding what I wanted them to do. In the end they said that they would come and that they would bring an ambulance. The officer at the station was maddeningly calm and unconcerned. I said that I would go back to the boat and wait for them there.

  When I reached the bridge I stopped the car and went into the field. It was very quiet and I could hear the thumping of my own heart. The cabin door was open sending a shaft of sickly light across the water. I climbed on to the deck and looked in. Bending over the bunk was a man in a long black robe.

  I had a long moment of nightmarish terror and then the priest turned towards me and I saw his mild, sane face and the worried, myopic eyes.

  What Callaghan had done seemed almost inexplicably out of character. After the police had come, and the ambulance, and they had carried Rose gently from the boat, the priest told me about it.

  Callaghan had stopped him in the road, near to the bridge. The priest had been on his bicycle; he had heard the boy shouting to him and then he had seen him, running along the white road, his jacket flying loose, stumbling as he ran. The priest had recognised him as he came closer he had been in the parish a long time, almost as long as the boy had been alive. He had a good memory.

  The boy had been choking and out of breath. It was some minutes before the man had understood what he was trying to say. Callaghan had got it out in the end; he said that there was a girl ill, perhaps dying, in a boat by the river. She was a Catholic and he thought that the priest should come. He had sounded desperate, almost in anguish.

  It was anyone’s guess, of course, why he should have acted like that. He was a Catholic himself but he had not been one in any real sense since he was a boy at his first school. And yet, there he was in his moment of extreme fear, clutching with superstitious fingers at the once familiar black habit.

  The priest had listened to him and asked no questions. He had left his bicycle by the hedge and tramped with Callaghan to the boat. He said that the boy was looking over his shoulder all the time as if he was afraid that someone was following him. The priest had asked him what was the matter and Callaghan had said roughly, “That’s none of your business. Your business is with my girl, not with me.”

  He had spoken with deliberate contempt but he had helped the old man on to the boat and stood aside so that he should enter the cabin first.

  Rose was lying quite still, her lips drawn back over her teeth, and for a moment the priest had thought that she was dead. Callaghan knelt by the bunk and put his arms round her and suddenly his voice was breaking and warm with love.

  He said softly, “Rosie, Rosie—it’s all right now. My love, my cherry flower.” She did not move and he looked up at the priest with bleak despair. He said, “She ain’t going to die?” He got up from his knees and stood back so that the priest could go near to the bunk.

  Then the boy said, “He’s gone for the doctor. You won’t leave her alone till they come?”

  His voice was suddenly submissive and pleading as if the memory of an old authority had come back to him. Then, while the priest was busy with Rose and trying to make her more comfortable, he went quickly and without any noise, so that when the man turned to speak to him he was no longer there. It was the last that anyone saw of him until the end.

  When the ambulance had gone I offered to take the priest to the police station in the car. I said, because it was bothering me, “I wouldn’t have expected him to mind about the girl so much.”

  He said, “Why shouldn’t he mind about her?”

  I said, “I don’t know. Do you know anything about him?”

  He said, “Not much. Is he in trouble? Are you from the police?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not a policeman. I don’t know whether he is in trouble or not. He is mixed up in something, I think. I don’t know how bad it is.”

  He said, “It is a bad family. The father is always in and out of prison. The mother is an honest sort of woman—or would be if she’d had a chance. I remember the boy.”

  He hesitated and went on, “He has been up before a juvenile court once, maybe twice. The probation officer came to see me about him. I saw him and talked to him but I don’t think I did much good. That sort of boy is hard to reach. Perhaps I didn’t try hard enough.”

  His voice was flat and weary; he took off his glasses and wiped them on his cassock.

  We drove along the road un
til we came to the place where he had left his bicycle. We strapped it on to the luggage grid. I realised then how old a man he was; his hands were coarsely veined and shaky and his movements slow.

  As we got back into the car, I said, “What had he done when the probation officer came to see you?”

  “He had stolen fruit off a barrow. There were other boys with him but he was the only one who was caught. I saw his mother and she didn’t seem to realise what her son had done. She said all the usual things—that it was just a boy’s prank and that he went to too many gangster films. It was impossible to make her understand that what he had done was really wrong. He went to the Labour Exchange after that and got a job in London. Quite a good job, I believe, for that kind of boy. He used to send his mother money, he was a good son. I think that I thought he was going straight and I put him from my mind. I should not have done that.”

  He had an irritatingly gentle voice; he sounded both helpless and very tired. He said, “Why are you interested in him? Are you sure you don’t know what he has done?”

  I said, “I can’t tell you. I don’t know. He may not have done anything. I wasn’t looking for him, but for the girl.”

  I drove in silence for a little while and then I told the old man about Rose. Enough to explain my own interest in her and then a little more because I found that I could not stop talking about her. She had become so real and important that Humphrey was, at that moment, a shadowy figure almost without meaning for me.

  I found that I was hoping that they would not keep me long at the police station because I wanted to get to the hospital.

  When we got to the station I made a statement but they did not keep me long. They told me that Rose had been taken to one of the big London hospitals and that there was a police officer with her. They did not know how she was but they offered to let me use the telephone. I thanked them and said that I would go to the hospital.

  I drove to London along the empty roads thinking about her and praying a little.

  When I reached the hospital I went into the casualty ward and asked about her. The nurse had only just come on duty but she offered to fetch the house surgeon. I waited for what seemed an interminable time, sitting on the hard bench and staring at the aseptic walls. They brought a drunk into the casualty ward and took him into an inner room. He was crying for his mother, the tears streaming down his dirty, tramp’s face, and he went on crying all the time that I was there.