Water Gypsies

by Annie Murray

  Sweat soaked her chest and back. Grinding her teeth, she grabbed at the handle and tried to pull on it, but it wouldn’t come. She tried to get to her feet, easing forwards, the thing still in her, but her legs wouldn’t stand the weight and she nearly collapsed onto the stove. Sounds came from her mouth, whimpers, groans.

  Crouching half upright, she felt a hot surge over her hands, running down to drip from her wrists, over the handle of the screwdriver to the floor. It took her a moment to understand why her hands were red. From somewhere she could hear a baby screaming, and she knew it was the baby inside her crying out in pain, the tiny life to whom she’d done this terrible thing.

  ‘I’m sorry, little one …sorry…’ she managed to say. She slumped back across the bed and in seconds a thick, rubbery darkness had covered her face.

  Twelve

  Something was pressing on her eyelids. It was not painful, but warm, and seemed to have weight. Next she felt her left ear, that it was pressed down into a pillow. Maryann became aware of herself piece by piece, as if a thaw had set in throughout her body, each part of it warming slowly back to life. She could feel the air passing in and out through her nostrils. There were unfamiliar smells. Her head, the central core uniting her eyelids, ears and nostrils, was throbbing with pain.

  She moved her fingers and, somewhere far away, her toes. Pressure mounted inside her which it took a moment to recognize, its urgency increasing so rapidly that her eyes snapped open and seeing a bowl on the chair beside her bed, she grabbed it and leaned up on her elbow, suddenly aware as she moved, that there was a tube attached to her arm. Her innards contracted until a miserable spurt of liquid was wrung from her and she lay back, unable to control her moans. There was a sick banging in her head and in the lower part of her body raw, tearing pain.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for it to subside and struggling frantically to make sense of things. Where, from this white glimpse of her surroundings, was she? A hospital, that much was clear, but where? What had happened to her to cause this agony? Had she fallen in and been hit by the butty? She forced her eyes open, squinting, the bar of sunlight from the long window opposite still falling across her face. She saw the tube running into her arm, and then another bed next to hers. Panic flooded her. How did she get here from the cut? And where were Joel and the children?

  Gradually her life poured back to her. She’d been in the cabin, that much she knew. She remembered kneeling there in the lamplight, that she’d been alone. Then blackness. Lord above, what had happened?

  A face leaned across from the neighbouring bed, a skinny brown plait draped over the shoulder. Narrow grey eyes stared at her, unashamedly curious.

  ‘You’ve come round then?’ the young woman observed. ‘Took your time. You’ve been out for ages.’ She sounded neither friendly nor unfriendly. ‘Only had my appendix out, me. What’re you in for?’

  Maryann wondered if she could make her voice work. ‘Wh …’ she attempted. Her mouth was dry and sour. ‘Where am I?’

  ‘Where are you? Don’t you even know that! The Radcliffe, of course.’ Seeing Maryann’s blank look undispelled, she added, ‘In Oxford. D’you want the nurse?’ Self-importantly she called out to one who was not far off, sitting at a table in the middle of the ward. When the woman came she was tall and very thin, with porcelain skin and pale eyes.

  ‘Ah –’ she stood over Maryann – ‘you’re back with us. How’re you feeling?’

  ‘My head.’ Maryann pressed her hand against her forehead. ‘I’ve been sick,’ she added wretchedly.

  ‘I don’t suppose it’ll be the last time either.’ The nurse had picked up Maryann’s other hand and was taking her pulse. After a short silence she nodded and released her hand. ‘Good. Yes– it’s the after-effects of the anaesthetic. Makes everyone feel ropy.’

  She removed the bowl and Maryann watched her willowy figure go along the ward, before coming back with it empty and rinsed.

  ‘She’s not so bad, that one,’ her neighbour said during the nurse’s absence.

  ‘The doctors will be in to see you soon,’ the nurse told her. ‘Drink plenty of water.’

  Evidently it was morning. There was a flurry of bed-making and bed baths, although Maryann was left alone. Then the doctors came. The nurse drew screens around her bed and a middle-aged man, with a clipped voice and a moustache, and two very young men came and stood in a row at the bottom of her bed. Maryann lay looking up at them. The older man had papers tucked under his left arm. The two younger ones looked uncomfortable and their glance kept flickering towards her and away again.

  ‘Well,’ the older doctor said, ‘I hope you’re ashamed of yourself. You’ve managed to do yourself a great deal of damage.’

  Maryann tried to fight the tears which welled up in her eyes. Why was this man accusing her in this cold, cruel voice? What had happened? And where were her family, all the people she cared about and most wanted to see?

  He flicked through the notes, while the two students stared at the wall above Maryann’s head.

  ‘I’ll tell you, I take a very dim view of this sort of thing,’ the doctor went on. ‘You damaged your uterus beyond repair and we’ve had to carry out a complete hysterectomy. You’ve lost a good deal of blood in the meantime and we’ve had to transfuse you.’ He spoke as if these medical necessities had been a huge personal inconvenience.

  ‘Of course, there was no possibility of saving the child.’ Abruptly he pushed the notes back under his arm. ‘But then I don’t imagine that was what was required, was it? Anyway –’ for the first time he looked directly at her – ‘there won’t be any more babies for you, that you can be sure of.’

  To his two underlings, he said, ‘Ten-inch screwdriver – still in place when they brought her in. These women are beyond belief.’ Shaking his head, he pushed the screen out of his way and moved on without a further word to Maryann.

  Tears streamed down her cheeks. The way he had spoken made her feel lower than nothing. She hadn’t understood a lot of the words he used but he had made her remember what had happened. Of course. She was expecting …she remembered the light in the cabin, her legs bare to the air, the screwdriver … and then those dying cries of the child, which seemed to ring in her head. Oh, God above, what had she done? She covered her face with her hands. The screens had been taken away and there was no privacy now. She felt so exposed in the long ward with eyes all around her, when she was used to her tiny cabin. And she hadn’t meant any of this to happen! Not like this. No one was supposed to know. How would Joel ever forgive her if he knew she’d murdered their little babby?

  She pulled the thin covers over her head and lay weeping bitterly, her body hurting with each wrenching sob, but it was the thoughts which filled her mind that caused her the greatest agony of all.

  *

  That day was punctuated by sickness and misery and sleep. Maryann didn’t take in anything around her or notice time passing. All day her head throbbed. But when she woke the following morning, still very battered and sore but at least free of the thumping headache, she was more alert and able to take in her surroundings and she saw that the tube had gone from her arm. It was then she began to realize that, when the nurse had drawn screens round the bed for the doctor’s round the previous morning, the tiny enclosure of privacy had done nothing to contain the doctor’s booming voice. It soon became clear that the words ‘baby’ and ‘damaged’ and ‘ten-inch screwdriver’ had bounced the full length of the ward and into the ears of those occupying the lines of beds. Anyone who had missed the sordid details was soon informed, and there was a lot of whispering and looking. Maryann felt eyes staring at her with fascinated disgust.

  The tall nurse who had been on duty the day before treated Maryann with a professional detachment which was neither warm nor disdainful, but this was a good deal better than she received from a few of the others. That morning she raised one hand to attract the attention of a young nurse, who bustled over to her, looking irritated
.

  ‘Can I go to the toilet?’ Maryann whispered. She hadn’t been aware of wanting to go the day before, but now it was urgent.

  ‘No, of course you can’t!’ the nurse snapped. ‘You know perfectly well you can’t get out of bed. I suppose I’ll have to bring you a bedpan.’ Every line of her bearing implied that she resented having to do anything for that sort of person.

  When she brought the bedpan and drew the screens round, Maryann found the courage to ask, ‘I was wearing hoops in my ears before. Gold hoops. Please –’ she appealed. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to them.’ She’d missed them suddenly when she sat up that morning, their familiar feel.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that sort of thing,’ the nurse said haughtily, removing the bedpan. ‘I expect they’ve been put away for safekeeping. Why don’t you look in your cupboard?’

  Painfully, Maryann leaned round and opened the little cupboard by the bed. Inside she saw her clothes bundled up at the bottom and, on the shelf above, the gold hoops Nancy had given her. She reached in for them, her eyes filling with tears, and lay down again, holding them close to her.

  All day she had to endure the knowledge that everyone was talking about her. She felt bathed in shame, as if her very skin was raw with it. She was glad she wasn’t allowed to move about the ward because she couldn’t bear the thought of people looking at her. No one said a friendly word, apart from the woman with the plait in the next bed, whose nosiness outdid any scruples she might have had. Every so often she leaned over and hissed questions in Maryann’s direction. These questions pierced her misery like wasp stings.

  ‘Where’re you from then? Not from Oxford, are you?’ She had a country accent and a village gossip’s manner. Maryann tried to ignore her, but she kept on.

  ‘Not a secret, is it? I’m only trying to be friendly, not like the rest of them in here. You come in from one of the villages?’

  Maryann shook her head, keeping her eyes closed. She definitely wasn’t telling this tittle-tattler that she was off the cut.

  ‘Sounds as if you’ve had a bad time of it. A screwdriver didn’t the doctor say? Dear, oh dear, there’s a thing. You must’ve been in a fine old state.’

  Gritting her teeth against the pain, hand pressed over the scar low on her belly Maryann eased herself over in the bed, presenting her back to her nosy-parker interrogator and pulled the covers over her head. In their darkness, trying to shut out the disgruntled complaint that she was ‘only trying to be friendly’, Maryann lay picturing her home, the boats with their woven ropework and Turk’s heads when they were scrubbed white, the shiny brasses. She longed to be in her cosy bed on the Theodore with the cats curled up on her feet, to see her children’s faces as they played on the bank or in the hold. Her whole being ached with the need to be at home instead of in this harsh, stark place among strangers who condemned her. Where were her family? Had they all abandoned her?

  But the thought of home only increased her pain and shame. If strangers condemned her, however was she going to be able to face Joel? You’ve killed his child, she repeated over and over again. You’re a murderer. And the thought of Joel’s face, of having to see him again after what she’d done, made her long for darkness, for the relief of not being able to feel, to be blotted out.

  Later on in the afternoon she sensed there was someone near the bed and opened her eyes. In front of her was the rough blue weave of a coat. A body bent over and a face appeared close to hers, which she recognized: blue eyes, features deeply lined by the years and squirrel-grey plaits coiled round her head. At the sight of her, Maryann burst into tears.

  ‘Oh, Auntie!’ She tried to hide her face in shame, but found her hand grasped between two tiny cold ones.

  ‘Now, moy dear, don’t you go taking on so!’ Alice Simons sat down and stroked Maryann’s hand. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, I don’t like seeing you in this state, I don’t at all.’

  ‘I’ve done such a terrible thing,’ Maryann sobbed. She tried to speak quietly, conscious of all the other people around them, but she was becoming hysterical. ‘I never meant it to be like this, Auntie, I promise I didn’t. Only I couldn’t manage. I felt so sick and worn out and now I’ve done the worst thing I could ever do …’

  ‘Shh, dear, ssh now,’ Alice said, clutching at her hand. ‘You don’t want all this lot in on your business do you?’

  ‘They are already,’ Maryann said despairingly. ‘Where’s Joel, Auntie –and all our little ones?’

  ‘They’re all safe and sound,’ the old lady assured her. ‘All the girls are at our house with Darius. I said that’d keep him on his toes when I came out to visit you! At his age he could do with a bit of young life around him. We’ve given Esther and Ada a bit of that form’la milk and they’re happy enough, dear. Joley’s gone down the mill with Joel and Bobby, but they’ll come up Juxon Street tonight, so he’ll be in to see you as soon as they let him.’ She grimaced over at the sister’s desk.

  ‘Oh, Auntie…’ Maryann couldn’t stop weeping. She felt wretched and ashamed, yet it was such a relief to see someone she knew, her family. ‘Is Joel very angry with me?’

  ‘I’ve never seen the boy in such a state,’ Mrs Simons said, kneading at Maryann’s hand in affectionate agitation. ‘ “My little mate,” he kept saying. “My Maryann.” Sat down in my house and cried like a child, he did, over you. “Why daint she say nothing to me?” he kept saying. Up and down, he was. Couldn’t settle. “I knew there was summat on her mind,” he said, “but she’d never say. And now look what she’s gone and done.”

  ‘“Well,” I says to him, “the girl’d had enough. That were a desperate act she done, if ever I saw one. She weren’t put on this earth to be a brood mare, anyone could see that by the look of her. There’s more to life than wearing yourself out with one child after another, Joel,” I said. “Look at your mother–and mine. You don’t want to lose her, do you, lad?” ’

  Hearing this, Maryann wept even more. After the doctor’s condemnation of her she had expected the whole world to turn against her.

  ‘I heard it crying.’ She couldn’t control her sobbing, however much she didn’t want to attract attention to herself. ‘It was crying when I … when I killed it.’

  ‘Oh no, dear.’ Alice squeezed her hand tightly and Maryann was more distraught to realize that the old lady was trying not to cry herself. Her voice was thick with tears. ‘That can’t be right. You can’t hear a tiny babe crying in the womb. I s’pect it was the twins you heard.’ She sniffed, then pulled a handkerchief from somewhere about her and briskly wiped her nose. ‘That’ll be it. Don’t think like that any more. What’s done’s done and you have to go on.’

  ‘He said I shan’t have any more babies. I’ve damaged myself.’

  ‘You’ve had everything taken away, dear.’ Alice Simons was whispering now. ‘I had a word with the matron. I’m not frightened of her. You’ve been foolish hurting yourself so badly, I won’t say you haven’t. But you mustn’t keep dwelling on it. You’ve plenty of children to care for – a good-sized family, and that poor young Rose. We must all make sure we take good care of them now, mustn’t we?’

  Thirteen

  Joel walked along the shiny floor of the ward, amid the sickly smell of human illness, overlain by onions and gravy. He held his cap clasped tightly in both hands. When he found his wife, he lowered himself onto the chair by her bed, oblivious to the eyes fastened on him all round the ward. For a time he sat leaning forwards, his sorrowful gaze fixed on Maryann’s sleeping face, mauve cresents of exhaustion beneath her eyes.

  She seemed like a stranger lying there, as if she had gone somewhere far away from him. Where was it she’d gone, his sweet little bird? What had possessed her to do this brutal act, which had nearly finished her as well as their child? Emotions he could not have named swelled up in him until he had to clench his hands into fists, then hold onto his cap to prevent himself from lashing out. He lowered his head and looked helplessly down between his legs a
t his boots. Their worn leather, shaped by years of wear into the exact contours of his feet, was pale from the repeated rubbing of mud and rain and cinders. They gave out a whiff of the earth compacted in the soles. It calmed him a fraction: the smell of the cut, of what was real and wholesome. And she was part of that, his little wife lying here in front of him.

  He took her hand, which lay outside the covers, and looked at it. The lack of privacy didn’t enter his thoughts: these strangers in the ward were nothing to him. He was too deep in his own concerns even to see them. He held Maryann’s hand between his own, feeling its hard-worked roughness, warming it, then pressed it cautiously to his lips.

  Maryann’s eyes opened. She looked bewildered until she turned her head slowly and, seeing him, gasped, trying to sit up. Her face creased with pain and she was forced to lie back again, whimpering.

  ‘Steady,’ he said, alarmed. ‘Don’t move. You just stay still, where you are.’

  ‘O-oh,’ she moaned, a hand covering her face, tears of remorse flowing at the sight of him. She was in too much distress to speak. Joel couldn’t say anything either. His throat was choked and the tears ran down into his beard. He leaned in close, pressing the back of her hand against his cheek. Feeling his tears on her hand, she gradually pulled herself over onto her side to face him, curling herself up tightly, needing his comfort but unable to look into his eyes.

  ‘How could you’ve done it?’ he managed to say. ‘I thought you was dead.’ He shook his head, shuddering at the memory. ‘When I came back and found you … You nearly bled to death – you was that close. How could you’ve …?’ He saw her hide her face again and he had to lean forward to hear her muffled voice. As he did so, he caught the smell of her body, of his woman. A pang of longing went through him. This was all wrong, her lying here among strangers. He wanted to lift her out of this cold white bed and carry her home.