The Fringe Dwellers

by Nene Gare

  There were two who sat on the steps of the schoolhouse in the late afternoon, and the faces of both were bleak and still. All the comfort Noonah had to give had been given, and the boy Bartie was not comforted. Sitting on the step below her he pressed himself against her legs, empty eyes watching the antics of a group of small boys rolling over and over in the red-dusted sand. Tomorrow Noonah would be gone. There was no thought more important than that. And so it was for Noonah. Tomorrow she must leave Bartie and Stella behind to get on as well as they could without her. And the more she thought of the little things she had done for them, which nobody but an older-sister-turned-mother would ever think of doing, much less have time to do in this crowded and busy mission, the more desolate grew her thoughts. They would miss her so! And how cruel that she, who loved them, should be forced to withdraw herself from them and leave them alone. She slipped an arm over Bartie’s shoulders and when the boy looked up at her inquiringly she smiled at him—the unutterably tender and reassuring smile of a mother for her child. Bartie questioned her with his eyes, and the girl searched swiftly for words that had not been said before.

  ‘What you have to remember is that it isn’t going to be for long, see? I’ll ask them as soon as I get down there and tell them you and Stella have to come down too. And if there isn’t any room where they are, I’ll make them shift somewhere or build another little place just for you and Stella. See?’ But ten is not a looking-forward age. Nothing the future held had power enough to drag Bartie’s mind off the present. Mourning, Noonah watched his dark eyes fill and brim until the boy dropped his head in shame and she could see only the curling black hair. Unable to bear his misery she scrambled to her feet. ‘Bartie, I have to say good night to Stella again. I want to see her just once more before—,’ she stopped. ‘Come with me,’ she begged, ‘before the bell goes for you too.’

  Bartie nodded, blinking his eyes. The two walked off, and as they walked their hands brushed and would have clung. But not here. Not until they had left these others behind them.

  ‘Mrs Gordon cut our hair, mine and Trilby’s, and she let us use some of her shampoo,’ Noonah said cheerfully. ‘It smelt nice, too.’

  Bartie cast a brief look at Noonah’s hair, swinging like a bell over her thin shoulders and cut in a thick fringe across her forehead. Every hair glinted with lights that had nothing to do with its rich black. The glow of the setting sun was on her face, too, ripening the amber skin that belonged to all of these Comeaways.

  ‘You look pretty,’ Bartie discovered shyly, his eyes lingering.

  ‘Go on!’ Noonah’s oblique glanced mocked him.

  They were approaching the large central building where they ate and sometimes played if it was wet, and where they gathered together to sing in their clear sweet voices. There was always one mission employee to grow enthusiastic about the way these coloured children sang, and to coach them in hymns and old-time favourites, and to bring them on as a star turn on the occasion of important visitors.

  A few of the bigger boys and girls came clattering down the steps as they passed. The fly-wire door crashed behind them and there was Trilby, long slim legs dancing; her hair, fresh-washed, springing alive and springing round her face. She caught sight of Noonah and Bartie straightway and came over to them. There were no doubts about these three and their relationship to each other. Wide low brows, broad and slightly flattened cheek-bones, strongly modelled noses with flaring nostrils and then the clear sweet curve of lips that parted on square white teeth. Only Trilby had those strange light eyes. The others’ were warm brown with jetty depths, the whole of the iris showing between wide-open lids. Only Trilby’s hair had that sun-struck look. The others had hair the colour of coal, coarse hair that curled softly round their faces.

  ‘Still grizzling?’ Trilby questioned, teasing Bartie with a glance.

  Before Noonah could answer a man in a pair of knee-length khaki shorts appeared, brushing the palm of one hand rhythmically across his fat thigh with each brisk step. This was Mr Norton, the superintendent of the mission. He bent an attentive look on the girls. ‘One more night for you two, hey? Well, early to bed so you’ll be fresh for the trip. It’s a long trip, mind you, down to where you’re going.’

  ‘Yes,’ the girls murmured submissively.

  The man nodded approvingly, switched his attention to a boy who lounged indolently against a veranda post. ‘Better give that kikuyi grass another sprinkle tonight, George. Can’t have it dying on us, eh?’

  The boy gathered up his languid body and moved away, unresponsive but obedient.

  Trilby curled her lip after the man. ‘Always so damn cheerful,’ she muttered. ‘Treating everyone like they were children. Gee, I’ll be glad to get away from this place.’

  ‘It isn’t too bad,’ frowned Noonah, reminding her sister of Bartie’s presence. ‘Lots of kids like it better than where they come from.’

  ‘Like to know where they’ve come from, if they like this dump,’ Trilby said shortly.

  ‘All you kids are going out in the ute tomorrow, aren’t you?’ Noonah asked Bartie. ‘Into town, Mrs Gordon said.’

  Bartie nodded lifelessly.

  ‘Now don’t start howling,’ Trilby warned him. ‘You gotta stay here if you like it or not. We had to when we were your age. And we were younger when we came, too.’

  Bartie tried a valiant sniff but a few tears chased each other down his cheeks. A couple of boys around his age stopped to stare.

  ‘Lookatim cry,’ the bigger one jeered. ‘Ole Cry-baby Comeaway.’

  Trilby turned on them furiously. ‘Get, you kids. Go on! And don’t forget Bartie isn’t the only one around here cries. What about you two an the way you cried when your mummy come up to see you. Thought she wasn’t ever going to get away from you, I bet.’

  Her grey eyes sparked as the two children made sulkily off. ‘Never can let anyone alone,’ she fumed. ‘Always someone around to stick their noses in someone else’s business.’ She swung round on Bartie. ‘An you! You make me ashamed you’re my brother. You’re the big one, aren’t you? That has to take care of Stella. Don’t you understand that?’

  ‘Shut up!’ Noonah spoke sharply. ‘Bartie’s coming down with me to see Stella. He’ll be all right if you just leave him alone and don’t bully him.’

  ‘Us two are leaving early tomorrow morning,’ Trilby said gruffly to her brother. ‘If you want to say good-bye you’d better do it now.’ She bent towards the boy and gave him a hug. Her thin fingers with their oval nails and perfect moons, like delicate shells against the dark skin, slid into the black curly hair. She gave it a tug, a rallying gesture to him to keep his emotion out of sight. Nobody ever saw Trilby in tears. Her world was peopled with enemies waiting to pounce on any such weakness and turn it to their own account, and every observation she made confirmed this fact more fully in her mind.

  ‘Come on, Bartie,’ Noonah said gently. Trilby looked after them, undecided about accompanying them, then she shrugged and turned in the opposite direction, chin high and eyes narrowed.

  Bartie had caught some of his sister’s fierceness. ‘I am not a cry-baby. I hardly ever cry, do I, Noonah?’

  ‘You’re all right,’ Noonah said affectionately. ‘Trilby just said that because she felt like crying herself. She was all worked up, and she doesn’t know half what’s she’s talking about when she gets worked up.’

  ‘About once a year, that’s all,’ Bartie still smarted, and his cheeks were still a bit wet.

  A woman in a canvas deck-chair looked up in surprise as the two approached her. She was accustomed to Noonah’s nightly visits, but the girl had already tucked her small sister into bed and kissed her good night.

  ‘Can we have just one more look?’ Noonah begged. ‘I’m going tomorrow and I just thought—Bartie and I thought—.’

  ‘They’re all asleep in there,’ the woman said doubtfully. ‘You’ll have to be very quiet. One wakes the lot sometimes.’

  ‘We won’t mak
e any noise at all,’ Noonah promised.

  ‘Go on then,’ the woman said. ‘But no noise remember! My feet are killing me today.’

  Noonah pulled her brother after her into the children’s nursery. Usually, only the children under five slept here, but Stella was small and delicate, prone to chesty colds and barking coughs, so she slept in here with the babies where supervision was night-long. Noonah went over to the far corner of the room where she knew her sister slept. The little girl had tossed off her sheet, and her nightgown was twisted round her waist so that her small round bottom and relaxed limbs showed dark against the white cotton sheets. One small hand dropped over the side of the bed; the other cradled her head. She was breathing lightly and evenly, her soft mouth parted.

  Forgetting Bartie for a second, Noonah kneeled. She took up the tiny relaxed hand and pressed it gently to her cheek. Beside her, the boy bent his head to look at his small sister. His mouth curved upward. Hands on knees, his breathing carefully controlled, he continued to gaze. Then brother and sister exchanged a long look. Bartie nodded slightly, his eyes shy.

  When they were well clear of the nursery, Noonah spoke. ‘You couldn’t come with me and leave her behind, Bartie, could you? She’s so little, and she loves you.’

  She walked Bartie to the dormitory occupied by the smaller boys. Before he passed through the doorway he stopped and turned back to her. ‘Remember,’ he said expressionlessly, ‘you promised.’

  The door closed behind him, and it was Noonah’s turn to blink.

  They were in the train at last and Trilby was almost out of her mind with excitement, terribly afraid that it was all a dream. But the train gathered pace and the familiar things outside the window continued to pass from her sight one after the other. No dream sister could look as real as Noonah on the opposite seat, or the man and woman across the carriage from them. She could read the notices, too, that told her not to pull the communication cord and not to expectorate on the floor. She could even make out the inscriptions under the dusty looking pictures of tall timber. Convinced, she sat back in her seat and looked out the window again. It was all bush now. Miles and miles of wattles and drooping river gums vanished behind the line of the frame. She tried to stay their progress by fixing her eyes on one special tree but the train flew too fast. She gave up trying and fixed candid curious eyes on the other passengers.

  Noonah did not take her eyes off the view outside her window. For a long time she watched it unseeing, but gradually her brow grew lighter and her mourning mouth took an upward turn. The thing was done, the separation complete, and she was still too young to distrust the future.

  By and by the little train grew weary and its first fine burst of speed slackened considerably. It picked its way more carefully now and sometimes, though still between stations, it stopped completely. On the track, men walked up and down, intent and busy, and the passengers in the carriages rushed to watch them pass. Some complained, irritably and angrily. Others craned their necks and narrowed their eyes against the sun and passed low-voiced comments to their companions. The lucky ones were those at whose carriage the mechanics halted to peer and poke and get down on hands and knees to examine wheels more closely. Trilby and Noonah, politely flattened against the backs of their seats to make room for the watchers, waited patiently and trustfully for the wrong to be righted, and in the meantime they took the opportunity to observe unobserved.

  Trilby knew of only two types of white people. Those who did not care one way or the other about you, and the others who, like the white children on the school bus, waited wet-lipped and bright-eyed for your reactions to taunts dealing mostly with the colour of your skin. Towards the end, the mission had been given schoolrooms of its own and government teachers had come to teach in them, but in the beginning the mission children had attended the town school along with the white children. A school bus came out to pick them up and Trilby remembered well the twice-daily trips in and out. The mission children preferred to sit together but that wasn’t always possible and then they might have to share a seat with a white child. Pinched legs and hair-pullings Trilby could deal with and she did, very effectively. Remarks such as ‘Pooh! What’s the stink around here?’ and ‘Wonder if she et up all her nice lizards this morning?’ resulted in a win for the white children, most of them needle-sharp at detecting evidence of victory whether it were wet eyes and vulnerable soft mouths closing over sobs or the angry snarls and hating looks they got from some of the bigger mission children. Nearly always there were bumps and bruises and torn shirts and frocks. Half-smiling Trilby remembered the dreadful satisfaction of hearing a pocket tear away from the material it had been anchored to.

  Once, a girl sharing a seat with Trilby had cried, ‘Why, that’s my old dress you’re wearing.’ Warmth and happiness had flooded over her. She had turned to smile at her neighbour because she had thought, knowing no better at that stage, that here among her enemies was a friend. And then the girl had laughed, and in her eyes there was no friendliness at all—just a look that Trilby could not remember even now without feeling ashamed. The girl had turned to the others in the bus and told them, ‘The kid’s wearing one of my old dresses. My mum must have given it to her because it’s all worn out. See?’ She had pointed to a patch on the skirt, and those nearest had left their seats to examine the patch. So Trilby had learned.

  There were other things. Waiting at the side of the road for the school bus, hoping this would be a good day, when the mission children could sit together. Bracing herself, just in case. Not joining in with the chatter of the others because she had been too busy cautioning herself against showing those tell-tale signs of a bull’s-eye for which her enemies waited.

  Trilby turned a narrow-eyed gaze on the wispy-haired woman who over-flowed the seat in the corner diagonally opposite. From the safety of today she took a cool look at the days of her first brush with education. She and Noonah had been with their parents then, living temporarily in a camp on the outskirts of a small northern town. Dad, Trilby remembered, sometimes let her and Noonah go with him to help burn off the great yellow stumps of the gum trees. Often they had camped alongside a glowing log all night, and the red glow would still be there under the pale silvery ashes when they woke next morning.

  At this particular town Mrs Comeaway had been seized with the idea of sending the two girls to the town school. She had had a little mission training herself, but in her case the training had been confined to kitchen chores, with an hour or two in the classroom whenever it was felt she could be spared. Maybe she would not have had the courage to break the ice, but there were other camps round about and other coloured children attending the school in the little township.

  The girls had fallen in with her plan for different reasons, Noonah because she was an even-tempered child who usually did as she was told and Trilby because she was curious.

  Trilby leaned her head back against the carriage seat. It had not been much of a school. A few little tables and chairs in a draughty old timbered hall. A square blackboard on three yellow legs with a shelf to take chalk and the yellow felt pad used for cleaning off writing. And a woman schoolteacher with wispy dry red hair that stood up in peaks, and peaky eyelids to match. From narrow shoulders her body had flowed down to enormous hips and the black shiny stuff of her apron had given off a smell of bitter peaches. There had not been enough of the little chairs and tables to seat the coloured children, so they had sat on the floor at the side of the classroom. One of them was expected to keep the blackboard clean. Trilby had hated the choking white dust.

  The teacher directed most of her attention to her white pupils, but she always knew if one of the coloured children wasn’t listening to what she said. A ruler across the knuckles or a stinging smack on the leg was her answer to that. Every day one of their number was sent home for any one of a variety of reasons. Too loud sniffing if a child had a cold but no handkerchief, torn clothes, dirty clothes, unwashed hands or hair, inability to answer a sharply-put q
uestion. Some of the coloured children, Trilby knew, committed any and all of these offences on purpose, wanting to be sent home, but she had not seen things this way. When her nose was wet she wiped it on the skirt of her frock, if she had overlooked her skimpy morning wash she sat on her hands, and because she listened with stony attentiveness to all that the teacher said, she was able to give satisfactory answers to the questions. Because it was so much nicer to play around the camp or to accompany her father to the paddock to help with the burning-off, Trilby had never quite understood why something in her rebelled at being sent away from the schoolroom. Even Noonah did not mind. They had all been sent away in the end. A policeman had come out to the camps and talked to the parents, and Trilby had learned, after sneaking close to him and listening, that some of the white mothers and fathers did not want their children to sit alongside coloured children because they had too many colds and they scratched their heads too much.

  When the policeman had gone Trilby heard her mother grumbling to her father. Mr Comeaway had only laughed, but her mother had been crabby for days. There had been painful scrapings of their scalps with a fine-toothed comb, and slatherings of kerosene and even dark suspicions directed at the other camps. That had been the beginning of the ending of the girls’ wanderings with their parents. The bug of education had established itself firmly in Mrs Comeaway’s head and, a few weeks after that, Trilby and Noonah had been dumped at the mission. ‘Where yous lucky to be at,’ was her final and firm admonition to them both.

  The long years that had followed! Half a dozen times since then the girls had seen their parents; the last time had been when Bartie and Stella had been brought to join them. Trilby glanced over at the corner seat. The woman sitting there was staring at her. Trilby remembered that same look in the eyes of her long-ago teacher. Curiosity with no warmth in it. If she had only known, that teacher. The distaste she had felt for the coloured children and shown so clearly had been equalled by the fearful shrinking they had felt for her and her white-rimmed eyes with their peaky lids. And her face which was the colour of the underside of a sleepy lizard.