The Fringe Dwellers

by Nene Gare

  ‘Yes, I like these,’ Mrs Green said raising and lowering the blades. Her face was full of pleasure.

  ‘Now come out an see the rest,’ Mrs Comeaway ordered, again preceding Mrs Green. ‘This here’s the place where I wash, an there’s a tub fa baths. Anyone can have a bath that likes,’ she said proudly. ‘Get the water hot in the copper.’

  Mrs Green amused herself turning on the taps. They all worked. Both women watched in a kind of trance as the water spattered in a strong stream against the cement.

  On the other side of the veranda were the bedrooms, two long rooms with a connecting door, louvred on one side.

  ‘And that other door on the front veranda leads to another room,’ Mrs Comeaway said. ‘Three places ta sleep, not countin the big middle room. We gunna keep that room fa eatin in.’

  The men came in and out, piling furniture in the centre of the main room. Mrs Comeaway extricated two chairs and she and Mrs Green sat in them.

  ‘You reckon Trilby’ll like it down here?’ Mrs Comeaway asked, a little anxious note in her voice.

  There was a scuffle at the back door, and both women glanced over. Round the frame of the door appeared the head of a child. It withdrew and another took its place. Mrs Comeaway rose in surprise and the sound of the stifled giggles gave away to the sound of scampering feet.

  ‘Young devils,’ she exclaimed, smiling as she again lowered her bulk to the chair.

  For a moment, both women watched the door, their faces amused.

  The next sound came from the roof. And at the same instant a childish treble of voices called, from a little way off, ‘Nigger!’

  ‘They threw a stone,’ Mrs Comeaway said slowly. The expression of amusement had faded. Her bulk melted. She looked smaller than she had.

  ‘I think,’ Mrs Green said, and her voice was firm, ‘I think Trilby will love it here in this nice house.’

  ‘What about—that?’ Mrs Comeaway said after a while. She waited with a sort of polite interest for Mrs Green’s answer.

  It was not long in coming.

  ‘I can’t see anyone saying that to her,’ Mrs Green said with composure. ‘Not twice.’

  ELEVEN

  Bartie was happy. He liked the new house, and with his freedom restored, his world opened up for him again. At the mission the days had been neatly sectioned off—meal times, school times, bed times, Sunday services—the little patches of leisure time had never lasted long enough for him to lose his feeling of being hurried—of having to get things done quickly or not at all. He had been lucky only in that he had never been bored as most of the others had. The overworked staff had little time for organizing games or any other pleasurable pursuits. The feeling was that the least the children could do in return for all they were getting was to amuse themselves.

  Mostly, the children proved ungrateful. Instead of organizing themselves they stood around picking their noses or they crouched over the ground and poked holes in it with a stick, or they gawped and giggled and followed, with their round brown eyes, the perambulating excursions of visiting patrons. But whereas the bored ones had also a sturdy endurance, Bartie was never free of a panicky fear that this state of things would go on for ever.

  Sometimes, now that he was home, he would remember the emptiness of the days after Noonah had gone. If it was night-time, he would hold his breath and listen anxiously for the gentle reassuring snores of his mother and the heavy regular breathing of his father that told him he was back again, part of the warmth of living that made up a family.

  Here, every day brought possibilities of joy. Of long expanses of time which he could fill as he wished. Even school could be escaped if he went the right away about it. Just keeping out of the way until it was too late worked most times. With so many people about the house his mother could not be blamed for overlooking one small boy in the morning’s sorting out.

  At the mission he had slept in one of a long line of beds. Another line faced him from the opposite wall. He preferred the big sagging bed in which he and Stella slept together. It was not even necessary for him to make his bed. Mrs Comeaway might remember to smooth the big grey blankets. More often than not he crept straight into the nest he had made for himself the night before.

  At home the state of his teeth and his hair and his fingernails was a matter which concerned only himself. Noonah, when she had leave from the hospital, might make a laughing, joyful matter of a big steaming-hot bath for him and Stella. Less often, his mother might regret that little use was being made of the fine big tub in the laundry—and do something about it. He might clean his teeth and smooth a little water over his face if Noonah were due home. At other times, only his hands caused him much concern. Dirty hands left marks on the drawing paper with which Noonah kept him plentifully supplied.

  There were other things he liked about living at home. The food was different—nicer. Sometimes there was a big plate of fried meat with onion rings festooning its rich brownness. Or he might be handed a twist of newspaper containing crackly fried fish and a handful of crisp chips. There was always spongy new bread to spread thickly with jam and often a whole packet of biscuits sandwiched together with cream. Fruit in tins was not the luxury it had been at the mission; nor was the fizzing drink in bottles. And at home he was allowed to collect the bottles and sell them back to the shop.

  Some mornings when he left for school, his mother gave him two whole shillings to buy his lunch with—and that meant the warm steamy interior of Colour Mary’s shop with its pyramids of buns and stacks of sandwiches and soup in little bowls and the hot penetrating breath of pies and pasties. For two shillings he could buy a pasty and two buns and a bottle of orangeade. Or six buns and a Coke. And often Colour Mary slipped a banana or an apple into his bag before she handed it to him. She called him her ‘good boy’.

  All the children knew either from experience or from having been thankfully-innocent bystanders that Colour Mary would not hesitate to come out from behind the counter to the children who were not good.

  Outside the shop and away from her hearing, some of the children complained resentfully of discrimination and occasionally forced some of the fruits of it from unwilling hands, but there was no other shop near the school, and the township was out of bounds, so Colour Mary’s shop continued to be well patronised.

  School, with the exception that there were more teachers, was much the same. But there was after-school to look forward to and Bartie rarely went straight home. He went often to the beach at the back of the town. That was his favourite place. He had come upon it by accident one day when he had felt a longing to follow up his thoughts undisturbed. A curling road, following faithfully the curling line of the beach, had enticed him on. He had walked much farther than he had intended.

  Bordering the beach was the grey-green salt-bush, and to his left were spreading acres of it—stiff, small, unyielding cushions. A lighthouse, remotely tall, shot from their midst. Beyond the border on his right sparkled the sea, restless, fretting at the reefs, which guarded the shore, surging triumphantly at last to the base of the sandhills that formed a second barricade.

  The wind swept round and past him, carrying the tops of the waves that stood in its path, spreading them in a mist over the road and the grey-green salt-bush. It swished sand from the beach and sent the particles flying in a whirlwind dance and they struck against Bartie’s face and tried to find his eyes. He licked his lips and tasted salt and he raised his face to the still-hot sun and felt the coldness of the wind rob the rays of their warmth.

  He walked on past the lighthouse, slowly, his school-books under his arm. Around the next curve he stopped, a small boy spellbound into stillness. His greedy eyes absorbed the sight before it could vanish.

  The sea rolled lazily in from the horizon—the palest clearest lime-green streaked with soft dark sapphire where banks of seaweed floated just beneath the surface. Towards the shoreline two streams slapped lazily together and spilled in transparent green circlets on the clea
n slope of the beach. Wet seaweed clung to wet rocks, darkly richly red. And nothing Bartie had seen was so free-flowing and graceful as the sandhills that swept through the sea in a long sweeping curve.

  Bartie came to this place often. There were days when the water deepened to jade; when the foam cresting the waves matched the snow-white sandhills, and he saw the sandhills when the setting sun touched them to warm, cream, beckoning curves.

  There were stormy days, when tossed seaweed turned the whole bay to turquoise, when waves smashed angrily up the steeply-sloping beach and reached with lacy fingers for the purple pigface that grew high beyond their reach. Each time he came, Bartie worshipped.

  ‘Where you been, eh?’ Mrs Comeaway would demand sometimes, if Bartie came within her orbit. But she did not stop for an answer, nor would Bartie have given her anything but his wide and secret smile if she had. Yet he loved her for letting him alone and because she laughed with him.

  For Bartie, there was something irresistibly appealing yet humorous in the sight of his mother laboriously spelling out some of the words in his school-books. He had a child’s sense of achievement in knowing something still hidden from his elders, even though at these times, in some unaccountable way, he felt more love for her welling up into his heart.

  ‘Aaah!’ Mrs Comeaway would say, half-vexed, half in amusement. ‘Once I knew how to read a little bit. Now no good, eh? An you think you clever, isn’t it? More clever than ole Mum?’

  Bartie was never deceived by her vexation. He knew she liked it that he could read so much better than she could.

  ‘Read out some for me,’ she would demand sometimes, when she found him with his nose in a book. ‘Learn ya ole mummy something fa a change.’

  Obediently, Bartie would read a few sentences to her, but sooner or later she would stop him, a look of scandalized unbelief on her face.

  ‘You take your mummy for ole fool, eh? You think I believe in this little boy so big only as a thumb-nail? An he got arms an legs an a head still? That book so damn good, only tell lies.’

  If Bartie giggled, her suspicion of him would increase. ‘You tellin me that all writ down there in that book? Or you jokin? You tell me.’

  Bartie, choking with laughter, would roll over and bury his head in his arms, and Mrs Comeaway, giving him up as a bad job, would stand over him with the nearest thing to a scowl she could ever call up on her smooth and shining face. There were times when she doubted the wisdom of education. To her it was cloudy with mystery. Real things that you could see or feel, people, trees, the sun and the rain, good food and the comfortably distended belly that resulted from eating, the miserable gnawing feeling of hunger—all these she understood, they were part of the life she lived. Bartie’s primers—the glimpse he gave her of their contents—often there was unease in her spreading breast. Sometimes it was hard to throw off. More often, pleasanter things entered her mind, and she forgot it.

  Bartie began to trust his mother. Noonah was at home for only two days in a fortnight. When he had drawn or painted something he felt was good, he needed to test it through another’s eyes. He showed his things to Mrs Comeaway and here she was on firmer ground. These things were real and, in gratitude for this quality, she gave them her whole attention, dropping whatever it was she happened to be doing, taking up the drawing or the painting and retiring with it to where the light was better.

  ‘Aaah!’ delightedly. ‘That sea, eh?’ Or ‘Nice big tree that is. Pretty, too! You did that good, Bartie.’

  Her praise was not discriminating. She liked everything he showed her. Nevertheless, she sent him back to his work with a smile on his lips and warmth in his heart.

  There was a day when he ran home from school, jumping the little fence in his hurry. He went straight in to where his mother sat narrowing her eyes against the heat of her tea. He flung skinny arms round her comfortable waist and dug his hard little bullet head into her chest. And Mrs Comeaway’s cup of tea went back on the table quickly so that she could throw her protecting arms about her boy.

  She waited a while, smoothing his head, then she pushed him away from her. ‘You tell me now, eh?’

  ‘The kids blamed me. And it wasn’t my fault at all.’ Bartie shivered, wrestling to get close to her again. ‘I didn’t even know she was going to do it.’

  ‘An who did what?’ Mrs Comeaway asked patiently.

  ‘It was Trilby,’ Bartie said, quieter now. ‘I was in the play-yard at lunch-time and she went past and I waved to her and she came over to talk to me a bit. Then, when she was just going out the gate another girl came along, a white one. She was holding her nose and Trilby stopped an started yelling at her. She called the girl a white-faced bitch. An she smacked her across the face, all the time yelling. An then she rushed out.’ Bartie’s breath sobbed in his throat.

  ‘An what happened then?’ Mrs Comeaway asked dully.

  ‘An then a teacher come up, and the white girl’s nose was bleeding, and she said she was sneezing and was just trying to stop it by holding her finger against her nose. She said Trilby went and hit her before she knew it.’

  ‘She said Trilby’s name?’ Mrs Comeaway asked gently. ‘She knew who it was?’

  ‘She said “a coloured girl”, that’s all.’

  ‘An did they do anything to ya?’

  ‘Not the teacher, but the kids. The teacher took this girl away because her nose was still bleeding, and then the other kids started on me an called me a dirty black nigger. None of them liked me any more Mum an I didn’t do anything. Even Joe Wheeler that I was playing with, he wouldn’t come near me any more.’

  Mrs Comeaway’s voice was heavy. ‘There ain’t anything I can do, Bartie. That girl, the one that said about sneezin, she mighta been, or she mighta been holding er nose like some do when they pass ya, some a these cheeky bits a kids…I dunno! Trilby shouldn’t a hit er. She shouldn’t a took no notice. That’s just somethin they do—Gawd knows why. To make people laugh or something, that’s all.’

  ‘Why?’ Bartie’s expression was confused and beaten. ‘Why?’

  ‘I dunno,’ Mrs Comeaway said tightly. ‘Now what about I get ya a cuppa an we sit ere an drink it up an you don’t go back ta school fa today, eh?’

  ‘I’ll sit on your lap if you like, Mum,’ Bartie said carefully.

  Mrs Comeaway’s laugh hit the ceiling. But in her eyes was all that Bartie needed to see.

  They sat there in the dim cool room a long time. And Mrs Comeaway talked to him. For Bartie, she recalled the days of her own girlhood, when she had been as young and younger than Bartie. She told him how she had ridden on the back of a camel from one sheep or cattle station to the next, with her own father and mother, and how they had carried everything they owned on the backs of their two camels.

  They had stopped wherever there was work to be had, staying a week, two weeks, up to a month. And then they would pack up their things and she would take her place behind her mother on the camel called Daisy, who was so lazy she had to be switched often.

  ‘An often enough it was me got a good smack instead a Daisy,’ Mrs Comeaway finished feelingly, ‘when Mummy didn’t get er judgement right.’

  One look at Trilby’s closed face decided her mother to say nothing of the matter to her. She could understand the grief of a hurt child who ran to her for comfort. She was not brave enough to risk one of Trilby’s hurting and puzzling rebuffs.

  For her part, Trilby could not have told her mother of the sick dread that stopped her breath and weighted her legs when she walked through the gate to the High School next morning.

  She waited throughout the day for a summons to the room of the head teacher. More than once she was reprimanded for not paying attention. And then the head teacher actually came into the room.

  Trilby’s mind as well as her fingers, froze. She could not look up whilst her own teacher and the head teacher talked together.

  Her teacher’s voice brought feeling and movement back to her. ‘Trilby Comeaway?
Please?’

  Trilby stood, somehow pushed herself down the aisle towards the front of the classroom.

  She could not force herself to hardness. She felt only fear.

  Outside the classroom, following the head teacher down the wide echoing passage she felt better. A wind cooled her face and calmed her thoughts. Her head went back and her chin up.

  In his study, the head teacher slid into his chair, leaned his elbow on his desk, and looked quizzically up at her as she stood before him.

  Then he smiled. ‘I brought you in here, Trilby, because I’ve a word of advice for you.’

  Trilby did not return his smile.

  ‘You smacked a girl across the nose yesterday,’ the head stated. ‘I wanted to tell you that the girl’s mother wrote a note to the Primary School headmaster this morning.’

  Trilby waited. The thing she had been dreading was happening—and the feeling was much better than the one that had preceded it. She felt able to manage anything in the way of anger or abuse which this man might pile on her.

  The head teacher reached for his pipe. ‘I think she must be quite an understanding woman,’ he said almost casually. ‘She wants the thing dropped. She doesn’t want anything done about it. No punishment for you…,’ he looked up under his lashes. ‘You think that was a pretty nice gesture for her to make, Trilby?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Trilby said woodenly, a shade sulkily.

  ‘Okay! Skip off,’ the head said briskly, turning himself about to face his desk, beginning at once to riffle through some papers upon it.

  Trilby’s mouth opened and so did the narrowed grey eyes. She stayed where she was.

  ‘Well!’ the head said, looking up again, clear-eyed and polite.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Trilby said gladly.

  Only later she was ashamed. Not because of the hurt she had inflicted nor because the girl’s mother had acted so generously in the matter, but because this was the way any ignorant coloured girl might behave, to lash out with tongue and hands, to lose control. Never, she vowed, would she let that most despised half of her get the upper hand again.