by Gee, Maurice
At school next day Ellie came top in a short-answer Social Studies test, which seemed a step towards a place where things might work out. She stayed behind to talk with Mrs Nimmo.
‘Can I ask you a question?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘It’s private.’
‘It won’t go any further than me.’
‘Well –’ it was hard – ‘is there something you can take if you’ve missed your period?’
‘Oh Ellie, Ellie,’ Mrs Nimmo whispered.
‘No, it’s not me. Truly it’s not. I promise.’
‘Which one of the girls?’
‘No one here. That’s a promise too. It’s one of the nurses at the hostel.’
‘Ellie, do you mean it? It’s not you?’
‘No, Mrs Nimmo, I’ve never done it. I’m not going to either, for a while.’
‘Don’t. Please don’t.’
‘I don’t want to get pregnant,’ Ellie said.
‘Good girl. That’s good. But – who is this other person? Why did she tell you?’
‘I’ve got to keep it a secret. But she’s upset. So if I can just tell her something to take …’
‘Have you told your mother?’
‘No, because –’ she almost said ‘Dolores’ – ‘this girl, she’d get kicked out.’
‘How late is she?’
‘Not much. A couple of weeks.’
‘Tell her to wait until next month. It might be all right.’
‘I did.’
‘Ellie –’ Mrs Nimmo ran her hands through her haystack hair. ‘I’m not supposed to talk to pupils like this. I’d get the sack.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I really would.’
‘I won’t tell anyone.’
‘Go to your next class. I need some time to think.’
‘Don’t worry, Mrs Nimmo. You can just forget it if you like. She’s a Catholic, by the way.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘I wish things could be simple,’ Ellie said.
She felt a hunger for simplicity, it would smooth things out and narrow them, instead of all the widening and mixing taking place – like a river rolling silt and trees and boulders down its length.
She went along to English – another test. One of the questions was: ‘Oh —, —, wherefore art thou —?’ Fill in the spaces and say who is speaking. She felt sorry for Juliet, who had problems like Dolores, and did not like her being used in such a stupid way. Came top again, and was glad she would have good news for her mother that night. It did not seem there would be good news for Dolores.
Mrs Nimmo caught her by the gates after school.
‘Ellie, come here.’ They stood close together with overlapping bikes. ‘Tell your friend – and this must go no further.’
‘Yes, Mrs Nimmo.’
‘I don’t know how to get it and I don’t know how much – but tell her to try stil boestrol.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I don’t know. Ellie, I know nothing. And that’s all.’
‘How do you spell it?’
Mrs Nimmo hissed. She leaned close. ‘S-t-i-l b-o-e-s-t-r-o-l. I’ve got to go now. Ellie, I’m trusting you with my job.’
She rode away. Ellie felt like yelling ‘thank you’ after her. She wanted to tell Mrs Nimmo that her job was safe. And she felt that she should ask if stil boestrol was dangerous with a name like that.
She rode to the library and looked it up in a dictionary. All it said was: Powerful synthetic oestrogen derived from stilbene.
Stilbene was: Aromatic hydrocarbon forming phosphorescent crystal.
That was no help, although aromatic sounded nice.
Oestrogen was: Sex hormone or other substance capable of developing and maintaining female characteristics of body.
She could not see how it would help Dolores, who didn’t need developing in that way. There must be chemical things she could not understand.
She borrowed some romances to celebrate coming top in English, but changed her mind about a travel book for her mother, who would have to stay home now that she was getting married.
‘Top in English, top in Social Studies,’ she sang when Mrs Crowther came in.
‘Ellie, that’s wonderful. Where in Maths? Where in Divinity?’
‘They’re next week. I just come top in the important things.’
‘I must tell George. He’s clever too, Ellie. He’s very clever with his hands.’
That annoyed Ellie. She went to her bedroom and sat on her bed, where she sketched George with a tiny head and apish hands. He was tying a complicated knot. It was cruel and she crumpled it up when it was finished. She was sorry for her mother, having to find good things in George and point them out. Then she drew Dolores pregnant, dropping tears as fat as bantam eggs on her swollen stomach, but she tore it up and carried the pieces out to the boiler-room fire, as much because it was too sad to look at as from fear that Dolores would arrive unexpectedly.
She watched out her bedroom window as the nurses came down the ramp from the overbridge; and there was Dolores, striding in front as though leading, or as though pursued. Why must she always be alone? It was not just from her sense of superiority, but surely from something in her that said, or only whispered, the opposite. Her determination was so hard, so unnatural, and her contempt so overdone. Ellie felt a hunger to know the rest of Dolores’ life, not just whether she married Hollis and had a baby and settled down, but how she grew old, how she turned into someone whose life had been happy or sad. She felt on the edge of knowing her own life, as though she might step through with Dolores, through a door, and find it there, wide and endless, on the other side.
Yet she was going to lose Dolores in a month, when this intake of nurses moved to another hostel and a new batch took their place. She would not even have her for the last few weeks of her own stay in House 4. Dolores had become, in only five months, the closest friend she had ever had. Now events were turning them out of each other’s lives. The door that they might step through closed with a non-reverberative thump.
Dolores came in. ‘What’s this, an ambush?’ She was flushed and windblown and out-doorsy, not the least bit like a goodtime girl. ‘Oh, my feet,’ she said, kicking off her shoes. ‘I don’t think I’ll be a dental nurse, standing up all day.’
‘No,’ Ellie said. ‘Did you have any luck?’
‘No, I didn’t. Just forget it, Ellie. I don’t want to be asked.’
Ellie swallowed. This was hard. ‘I talked with someone today,’ she said.
Dolores turned sharply from the wardrobe. ‘Not about me?’
‘I didn’t say any names. I just said I knew a girl who was late.’
‘That’s stupid. People can work things out … Not your mother?’
‘No.’
‘God, if you tell her –’
‘I won’t. This was someone who said – stil boestrol. I can spell it if you like.’
‘Bugger you, Ellie. Just bugger you.’
‘It changes your hormones or something.’
‘Everybody knows that stuff. It doesn’t work. You’ll be saying gin and hot baths next.’
‘No I won’t.’ She wondered what gin and hot baths did. ‘I was trying to help.’
‘Well, don’t.’
‘So – what can I do?’
‘Just be my friend, that’s all.’ Dolores lay down. She turned her face to the wall.
‘I am,’ Ellie said. She sat on the bed, wishing she could hold Dolores’ hand. After a while she said, ‘I’ll go away if you like.’
‘No.’ Dolores turned her face, pale and sharp. ‘You don’t understand. I’m a Catholic.’
‘I know.’
‘Doing things like that, taking stuff, it’s a mortal sin. I’d go to hell.’
Ellie felt her mind shrink. Everything she might answer went away. She stroked Dolores’ shoulder, and tried to picture hell, which hardly ever came up in Divinity. Jesus descended there in the Catechism, th
at was all. Ellie had not thought people really believed in it, just that it was something old, kept to add interest. Dolores’ warm shoulder should be – was – a total denial of devils and all that horror stuff.
‘I’ve got a headache now,’ Dolores whispered.
‘Shall I get you some aspros?’
‘Yes please.’
Ellie fetched them from her mother’s room and a glass of water from the bathroom. She watched while Dolores swallowed – her throat, the way it worked. There was no hell, she was sure of it; and she knew she would remember this moment all her life: Dolores, teary, beautiful; the water in the glass; and hell contracting to a point and vanishing. Was there any way of getting rid of it for Dolores too?
‘What will you do?’
‘Wait.’
‘How long?’
‘Until next month. Then I’ll know.’
‘You’ll be gone next month. Dolores?’
‘What?’
‘Make him marry you.’
Dolores gave her the glass and closed her eyes. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Turn out the light.’
Ellie got up and turned it out.
‘Now lie down with me. No, not on my bed, just on yours.’
‘Like this.’
‘Yes, that’s right. Don’t go away for a while.’
‘I won’t.’
Presently she heard Dolores sleeping. She got up and let herself out of the room and went to dinner.
She still thought stil boestrol had been a good idea.
The best part of living in Brooklyn was travelling to school on the tram. It swayed down out of blue or rainy skies into streets that turned away her loneliness – footpaths full of people and cars with honking horns. Back home her mother tidied the house, moving with exaggerated care while George slept after his late shift. ‘Make as much noise as you like,’ he told them, ‘it takes an earthquake to wake me,’ but Mrs Crowther – Mrs Brownlee now – had turned caring for him into a principle and morning silence into an activity. Her fingers stood at her lips, making it hard for Ellie to kiss her goodbye.
She liked her new school, close to the station and the harbour and parliament. The sound of trains shunting and coupling in the railway yards made her think of her father, whom George had not driven out but set more firmly in place. The ships leaving harbour blew rude noises that made the girls in the playground giggle and smirk. They were no different from Willowbank girls, and Ellie made friends with her classmates easily. Give and take, chatter, confession, sharing, sympathy had always been straightforward for her. Her only regret was not having taken Art for School Certificate. The art room was better than the one at Willowbank and the teacher believed in colour as well as pencil lines.
Sometimes in the afternoon she walked up Lambton Quay and Willis Street before catching her tram. She turned down Mercer Street to the library, and read magazines at a table, then borrowed novels and art books to take home. One was about an artist called Modigliani and she kept it in her room so her mother would not see – the nudes were so naked and someone had written alongside one: Modigliani painted this from the cunt outwards, which shocked her at first but then grew interesting. She had not known you could think about art like that.
She caught the tram at Perretts Corner, not wanting to walk past the dental nurses’ school. Girls she had known stood inside the windows, drilling in children’s half-open mouths, and none of them would ever be Dolores. They had hugged each other, stood at arms length, hugged again, and Dolores had patted tears from Ellie’s cheeks with a handkerchief. They had promised to keep in touch, meet at weekends, telephone – and after a week Ellie had phoned.
‘I’m sorry,’ said the woman on the switchboard at Kelburn Hostel, ‘Miss Wood doesn’t live here any more.’
‘Where is she? Where’s she gone?’
‘We can’t give out addresses. She didn’t leave one anyway.’
‘But, do you mean she’s left the dental school?’
‘I understand from the other girls she has. Who’s speaking please?’
‘I’m a friend. Has she gone home?’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know. She only stayed here two or three days.’
Ellie waited for a call. It never came, either in her last week at Woburn or in Brooklyn. She found herself trembling at what might have happened to Dolores. She imagined that the Primes had locked her up, or sent her away on a white slave ship, even that they had murdered her – and when she was more sensible, imagined her living alone in a little room, working as a waitress, waiting for her baby to be born. That made Ellie tremble even more, and made her angry with Dolores. They had promised to keep in touch.
Perhaps, she thought, she’s run away with Hollis Prime. They might be living in Auckland or in Christchurch. They might be married. Mrs Prime! Hollis would have to learn how to be a Catholic. But why hadn’t she written to tell Ellie?
The orange ceiling shone like the sun but the blue and green walls were oppressive. How long did she have to live with her mother and George, who pressed on her and smothered her and already, she was sure, were calculating: where would a new baby sleep? It was not yet the new baby, but from the way they kissed hello, goodbye, smiled with complicity, rubbed and touched each other, and the sounds that came from their room, sex was off to a good start and it – the – wouldn’t be long. Ellie supposed she should be glad for them, for their happiness; but in fact she felt disgusted about a man in his forties and a woman of thirty-five being so eager for all that newly wed stuff. She felt they should be cool with each other and sedate, almost that they should shake hands. How could her mother sit on his knee and rub her palm on his bald head the way she did? Once she had seen her wet a bit of it with her tongue and polish it.
She missed her mother riding in and parking her bike and sitting across from her in their tiny lounge reading from travel books: Canada and Tibet and Brazil. She felt she could not tell her about the girls and teachers at school, and clothes she would like to buy and jobs she would have, and worries about being fat and about her ankles – too thick – and the new cold sore on her lip. Her mother had changed her focus and Ellie had somehow lost her right to speak.
She missed the hostels: the screams and tears and laughing, piano playing, community singing, the practising of dance steps, the hostel dance, the ping-pong tournament, the dining room, women who said grace while others winked, stampeding footsteps on the stairs, girls blowing kisses from bedroom windows, cars full of boys honking by, the exodus in the morning and invasion at night, and running through the rain to the Prince Edward, a dozen of them like a hockey team, and walking back in the dark saying how the picture had been dreamy or scrumptious or a waste of time. She wanted House 4 back, and wondered if she would be allowed to shift to a hostel when the baby was born. It – he, she – would be happy in her room, with the orange ceiling keeping it warm. And she would be away from her mother, whom she loved – whom she loved – but who was driving her crazy with George.
She worked hard to get to the top of her class in Social Studies but couldn’t beat half a dozen other girls in English. Thank God there’s no Divinity, she thought. No one seemed to mind the voice she had learned at Willowbank so she became unconscious of it, until the English teacher complimented her on her vowels. That took a bit of getting over. There was no one at the school like Mrs Nimmo. ‘I prefer Charles Dickens to Jane Austen,’ Ellie wrote, ‘because he was on the side of the common man. The servants in her novels remain invisible.’ The teacher wrote: An original thought beside it, but did not give her a high mark.
One day she saw Barry Abbot the tennis player crossing Willis Street in his Scots College uniform. She got off the tram and walked back casually to meet him.
‘Oh, hello.’ Her cold sore was gone. She felt like kissing him from pleasure at seeing a Hutt Valley face.
‘Hey, Ellie. How’s it going?’ he said.
‘OK.’
‘I heard you’d changed schools.’
�
�Yes, Wellington Girls’ College. I like it there. They don’t make us wear gloves.’
‘Ha,’ Barry said. ‘Do you still play tennis?’
‘I might start. What about you?’ He was thinner, he was losing his fat. She hoped he would ask her to the pictures. They walked down Willis Street to Lambton Quay. She was finding him quick and humorous, and tried to think of funny things to say.
‘Is Angela still going out with Rex who loves himself?’
‘No,’ Barry said, ‘she’s going out with me.’
‘Oh, well,’ Ellie said, ‘très bon.’ Her voice seemed to turn up at the edges. ‘Give her my love.’
‘She said you used to go out with her brother.’
‘Just once. He’s a bit of a pill.’
‘He’s had polio.’
‘Yeah,’ Ellie said. ‘Who needs Limpy?’
She wanted to ask if Hollis lived at home, if he had a girlfriend, but knew it would get back to Angela. The Primes took up a lot a space. They took what they wanted. She said, ‘Does Angela wear a proper bra yet or only singlets still?’
‘Hey, go easy,’ Barry said.
‘I thought you’d know.’
‘Come off it, Ellie.’
She could see that she had interested him. You could get any boy with a bit of sex. But so what? She would catch the next Brooklyn tram that came along.
‘Do you want a milkshake?’ he asked.
‘No thanks. I’ve got to go.’
‘Things have been pretty grim,’ he said.
‘With you and her?’
‘No, at school. You remember Robert?’
‘Who?’
‘He was umpire in our tennis match.’
‘Oh, him.’
‘He hung himself.’
The footpath lurched and she put out a hand to steady herself. Watches in the shop window jerked into a time where she did not want to be.
‘Are you all right?’
‘What happened?’
‘His father found him in the garage. He had some rope tied over a beam.’
‘But why?’
‘He was shy,’ Barry said. ‘I think he was mixed up about – stuff. I liked him though.’
