The Fringe Dwellers

by Nene Gare

  He cast a hot, angry look about the room. Mag, mag, mag. Yap, yap, yap. And nobody else getting any warmth out of the stove with those two sitting almost on top of it. He hesitated, toying with the idea of pushing his chair between the two Mrs Comeaway and Hannie occupied, disturbing them from their seeming content. Then he grunted, rose and stamped over to the doorway, where he stood looking gloomily out at the slicing silver rain. And then a figure sloped up the street and turned in at the gate.

  Mr Comeaway’s face brightened. It was a man, anyway. And who? The figure reached the shelter of the porch and lifted its head.

  ‘Phyllix Barclay!’ Mr Comeaway welcomed warmly. ‘Fa Gawd’s sake come in an dry yaself off a bit.’

  Phyllix moved over the veranda, smiling and shaking water from the coat he was taking off. ‘Trilby home?’ he asked eagerly. ‘Thought I’d come down an see her for a bit.’

  ‘Trilby?’ Mr Comeaway said vaguely. ‘Trilby’s here, of course. Too wet ta be anywhere else, ain’t it?’

  ‘Course she’s here.’ Mrs Comeaway came over to the door and examined the visitor curiously. ‘Bit wet, ain’t ya? Better come in an dry off a bit.’

  ‘Where’s Trilby?’ Phyllix asked, looking round the room.

  ‘Layin on er bed readin, I spose,’ Mrs Comeaway told him. She raised her voice: ‘You in there, Trilby?’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Trilby called back. The door of her room opened and she stood peering out. Moving over to the doorway of the living-room she caught sight of Phyllix and her face went ash-grey. Phyllix started towards her, but Trilby backed quickly, slamming the door shut in his face.

  He stood there for a second stupidly, then turned back to the wondering Comeaways. ‘What’s the matter with her?’

  ‘Don’t take no notice a that,’ Mrs Comeaway shrugged. ‘She’s actin funny lately. Gunna have a baby; that’s why, I spose. Maybe she feel sick today.’

  ‘Maybe all you women might get up off ya behinds an make a man a cuppa tea or somethin,’ Mr Comeaway said testily. ‘Shiverin cold e is, an ya don’t do nothin but stand there an mag.’ He winked at Phyllix. ‘Get on ya ruddy pip, these old womans. Always having ta keep em up ta the mark, a man is.’ He swept a clutter of clothes from a chair-seat and swung the chair over to the stove. ‘There y’are.’

  ‘There goes ya good coat,’ Mrs Comeaway told Hannie, glaring at her husband.

  Hannie looked hazily over at her daughters. ‘Jus pick up me coat, will ya?’ she asked. Blanchie reached down to the floor and yanked at the coat. She settled it round her feet and went on with her reading. Audrena sat back on her heels and looked boldly over at Phyllix, but Phyllix was unnoticing. ‘Trilby married?’ he said hoarsely.

  Mr Comeaway looked back at him, surprised at his tone. ‘Not yet she ain’t.’

  ‘You mind if I go in her room? I gotta message for her. Friend a hers told me ta be sure.’ Each sentence was jerky.

  ‘Won’t get no change outa that one,’ Mrs Comeaway said practically. ‘Go in if ya like.’

  Shining-eyed, moist-lipped, Audrena watched Phyllix as he went quickly back on to the veranda. She swung her feet over the side of the bed as if to follow him.

  ‘No ya don’t,’ Mrs Comeaway ordered. ‘You stay outa her room. Ya know she don’t like ya in there.’

  ‘What’s e want, anyway?’ Mr Comeaway asked of nobody in particular. ‘Ain’t e actin a bit queer?’

  ‘An you keep ya nose out things too,’ Mrs Comeaway said firmly. ‘She don’t want im in there, she don’t ave ta ave im. You leave that to er.’

  ‘If she don’t want im in there, e’s gunna come out with a flea in is ear,’ Audrena snickered.

  Mrs Comeaway swept the girl with a look of dislike and irritation, but she said no more.

  There was something going on here which she did not entirely understand, but she was not going to buy into it until she had to.

  Phyllix tried a soft knock at Trilby’s door but this brought no response, so he quietly turned the handle.

  Trilby was lying across the bed with an opened magazine before her. She looked up at him, and for a moment eyed him with a steady gaze. Then she bent her head to the magazine again.

  Phyllix moved farther into the room. ‘They said ya gunna have a baby,’ he said slowly.

  Trilby’s body stiffened, but she would not speak.

  ‘Trilby, what’s wrong? What’s the matter with ya?’

  ‘I suppose I can lay on my bed if I want to, can’t I?’

  ‘Trilby, is it—was it me?’

  Trilby raised her head again. There was scornful detachment in her face and a jeering at the back of her eyes. Whether directed at Phyllix or at herself even Trilby did not fully know.

  ‘Not you,’ she said carelessly. She laughed and leaned back on one elbow. ‘What made you think it might be you? You’re not the only pebble on the beach, are you?’

  Phyllix’s face was different now. He took Trilby by the shoulders and shook her. ‘Who was it?’ he asked softly. ‘Who was it?’

  Trilby tried to free herself. ‘Leave me go,’ she demanded indignantly. ‘How do I know who it was? It wasn’t you, that’s all I know. You think I’d have a baby of yours? You get straight out of my room, you hear?’

  ‘You been muckin round with other fellers,’ Phyllix said, still in that quiet voice. ‘Been muckin round with anyone liked to ask?’ His fingers dug deep into the soft skin of her upper arms. He shook her again.

  ‘Get out,’ Trilby screamed. ‘Mum! Dad! Come quick, he’s hurting me.’

  Phyllix slapped her across the face, not once, but several times. The pain of the slaps shocked Trilby into violence. Springing off the bed she went for him, kicking, biting, scratching, sobbing and screaming in turn. ‘Don’t you dare to touch me, you beast. I hate you, see? And I’ll do it with whoever I like, but never, never you.’ Like a cat, and as quickly, she avoided the hands that tried to pinion her and stood with her back against the wall, panting and fierce-eyed.

  Her father, with the rest of the family solidly behind him, stopped open-mouthed on the threshold of the room, then he dived at Phyllix. ‘For Gawd’s sake,’ he said, ‘what’s goin on in here?’ He gripped Phyllix and swung the boy away from Trilby. The three were panting now. ‘Whatya wanta do a thing like that for?’ Mr Comeaway asked again, a mighty puzzlement outweighing all other emotions.

  Phyllix switched his attention to Mr Comeaway. ‘Who done it?’

  ‘Who done what?’ Mr Comeaway said irritably.

  ‘Ya mean the baby?’ Audrena said slyly from behind him. ‘Why, we thought it was you, Phyllix. We all thought it was you.’

  Trilby uttered a choked cry. Her face was grey again. She made for Audrena with upraised, clawing hands. Audrena yelped shrilly, with Trilby’s hands twined tightly in her skimpy hair.

  ‘You liar! You liar!’ Trilby kept saying in a thin scream, and with each word she wrenched at Audrena’s hair. Audrena recovered her wits, drew her finger-nails down each side of Trilby’s face, leaving stripes of blood behind.

  Phyllix’s eyes went mad. He tried to get at Audrena. Mr Comeaway warded him off with one hand whilst he tried vainly to separate the two girls. ‘You—get—out—of—my room,’ Trilby said wildly, her fisted hands beating at her cousin’s face. ‘Dad, make her get out of my room.’

  Mr Comeaway, comprehending no reason for the uproar, was out of his depths entirely, but his wife bounded into the fight with a wild cry, pulling Audrena off Trilby by main force. Trilby staggered, and Phyllix tried to steady her, but she flung him off.

  In the background Hannie set up a wild caterwauling of her own.

  ‘Fa Gawd’s sake,’ Mr Comeaway begged. ‘Will everyone stop it.’

  ‘Charlie,’ he called desperately, ‘Charlie! Come in ere an give me a hand. Charlie!’

  Charlie, wakened from a sound sleep, made Trilby’s room in four jumps, pulled up sharp in the doorway and stood there pop-eyed with amazement.

  ‘Don’t
just stand there,’ Mr Comeaway puffed testily. ‘Get that lot a yours quieted down, will ya?’ He was having his work cut out holding Audrena back from a second attempt at Trilby. Phyllix was holding Trilby’s struggling figure. Hannie had dropped her voice to a lower range and was yowling like a tired tom cat, and Mrs Comeaway was issuing orders to everyone in sight.

  Bartie watched fascinated from behind a veranda post. Stella stood alongside him, holding two dolls by their legs. Blanchie had grabbed up Tommy and fled with him into the backyard.

  Against the dividing fence, Mrs Henwood stood craning her neck, her mouth pursed and disapproving, her eyes, naked of their heavy lids, showing pleasure and awe.

  It was a good ten minutes before Mr Comeaway and Charlie between them shouted the others into silence.

  At the end of it all, Trilby was drooping with exhaustion, her wrists gripped in Phyllix’s strong hands. From behind Mrs Comeaway Audrena still glared hatred at her cousin, her nostrils quivering, her hair a tangled whirl. Blanchie, with Tommy on her hip, ventured to peer round the doorway of the living-room. Hannie stood against a wall and examined with puzzled interest a foot that somebody had stamped upon.

  ‘Now!’ Mr Comeaway said. ‘What was all that about, if ya don’t mind?’

  A utility with a monkey-cage at the back of it came to a standstill outside the front gate, and the atmosphere around the group changed to wary watchfulness. A policeman jumped out of the cab and came with business-like tread up the front path. ‘Anything going on here?’ he enquired menacingly as he approached. ‘Neighbours rang to say you’ve been creating a disturbance. You better break it up or you can all come back to the station with me. Plenty of room in the cage.’

  Mr Comeaway stepped forward, his smile conciliatory, his manner polite and deferential. ‘No disturbance here. Just a bit of a quarrel between the family like.’

  The officer glared disgustedly round at the dishevelled ‘family’. He narrowed his gaze to the self-appointed leader. ‘Saw you last week, didn’t I? Weren’t you connected with that breaking-and-entering up at the club?’

  ‘We didn’t have nothing ta do with that,’ Mr Comeaway said with dignity. ‘Not us.’

  ‘H’m!’ The man’s eyes were sceptical. He gave the group another threatening look. ‘Come on, now. Out with it. What was all this shindig about?’

  Mrs Comeaway stood blank and frozen behind her husband. Charlie was as much in the dark as the officer and could only wet his lips and shuffle his feet. Audrena and Blanchie took slow steps backward, and Hannie took this new complication as one more mystery to be added to the rest. Trilby and Phyllix were half-hidden behind Mr and Mrs Comeaway.

  Mr Comeaway took a deep breath. ‘Ya don’t want ta take no notice a the neighbours,’ he said heartily. ‘Gee, that wasn’t nothin. Sort of a disagreement, that’s all that was. We worked it out a while back.’

  The officer took his heavy foot off the bottom step and placed it alongside its fellow. He seemed disinclined to relax any part of his monitory attitude. As if, now he had their undivided attention, his job was to hammer home his point so that they should never forget it. He grunted and swayed backward, still, however, holding them with a frosty blue eye.

  The Comeaways held their breath and hoped.

  ‘Look!’ Mr Comeaway inclined his head with even more deference. ‘I’ll let it go this once, see?’

  No one spoke a word.

  ‘But no more rows, see? You kick up any more fuss around here and you’ll end up at the station, the lot of you.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Mr Comeaway said meekly. He waited for a moment to allow his meekness to sink in before he added: ‘Only this wasn’t a real row, if ya get what I mean.’

  ‘Real enough to have someone lay a complaint against you,’ the officer said grimly. ‘All right now! You lot keep the peace, understand?’

  He flicked each face with his cutting look, swung round and stamped back down the path. The Comeaways waited like statues until the utility had pulled out from the kerb and gone off down the street. Then they relaxed.

  ‘There y’are, y’see.’ Mr Comeaway swept his group with a disgusted eye. ‘Nearly got us all in trouble.’

  ‘How the hell did e get ere?’ Charlie said, this last problem troubling him more than all the rest.

  ‘That was er,’ Mrs Comeaway said sagely, nodding her head in the direction of the Henwoods’ neat house. ‘Er an er pot plants,’ she added scornfully. She moved to the edge of the veranda and darted a piercing look at the curtains that swayed gently behind Mrs Henwood’s lounge windows. She took a deep breath, but before she could expel it in vituperation Mr Comeaway’s black hand reached forth and plucked her back.

  ‘You ain’t had enough trouble?’ he enquired fiercely. ‘You wanta bring that monarch back?’

  ‘None a her business,’ Mrs Comeaway fumed, sailing majestically past her husband and into the living-room. ‘An you keep them hands a yours off me.’

  ‘All you women get inside an stay there,’ Mr Comeaway ordered roughly. He turned back to Trilby’s room and stood just outside, addressing himself to Phyllix and Trilby. ‘An you two behave yaselves, see? Gawd!’ he added to the attentive Charlie. ‘I’m gettin outa this for a while.’ He turned back to the two in the bedroom. ‘An when I come back I don’t wanta find no rows going on neether.’

  A minute later, with Charlie in tow, he disappeared down the street, his old grey felt hat clapped on his head to keep off the last of the softly-falling rain.

  Left alone, Trilby turned smouldering eyes on Phyllix. ‘Well! You going to stay here all day long?’

  Phyllix eyed the girl reflectively. ‘You ain’t been going out with other fellers. Why did ya tell me you had?’

  Tears of weakness spurted into Trilby’s eyes, but she blinked them back. Audrena’s spitefulness had been a stab in the dark, she was sure of that. But she was equally certain that Phyllix would never believe, now, that the baby was not his. He could stand there and eye her with satisfaction and know that it was he who had done this to her—set a limit to what she could do, forced her to play a waiting game when she was so madly impatient for action.

  She looked at him through a haze of nausea, and Phyllix stood there and, most hatefully, smiled at her.

  With the quick dart of a lizard, Trilby spat in his face. ‘You think I’d have a baby from you?’ she asked, her eyes sick.

  Phyllix wiped his cheek with his sleeve. ‘I’m going now,’ he said evenly. ‘I’ll be back when you’ve cooled off a bit.’

  Trilby compelled her trembling legs to support her until he had gone, then she dropped on the bed. As she had done once before, she let the soft depths of it absorb her weight of misery.

  ‘Ya think it mighta been him, that Phyllix?’ Mr Comeaway asked his wife that night in the double bed.

  Mrs Comeaway frowned into the darkness. ‘Ya can bet ya boots I didn’t arsk,’ she said emphatically.

  ‘What’s gone wrong with er?’ Mr Comeaway worried, ‘ta carry on the way she did today? What’s she got against that young bloke? Ain’t e a nice enough feller?’

  A thought flashed through Mrs Comeaway’s mind, surprising her with the simple solution it offered to all Trilby’s queernesses.

  ‘She didn’t want im. That might be it. E made er do it an she didn’t want im to. Praps e hurt er. Gave er a fright. An then this baby started comin an frightened er worse.’ She sat up in bed, half-inclined to go to her daughter with this new-found knowledge. ‘Men!’ she said, with tired disgust. ‘Like animals the whole lot.’ And as her husband muttered defensively, she added: ‘I know. Ya can’t tell me.’ She still sat up. Her instinct was to gather up Trilby the way she would have gathered up any one of the others if they had been hurt. But Trilby was different. She frowned again in doubt of her ability to handle this thing. You never knew what was the right thing with Trilby. Might just snap at her.

  How about if she had a word with Mrs Green and got the old lady to talk to Trilby?
<
br />   As she sat there hesitating an icy wind blew through a broken louvre. That decided the issue. Mrs Comeaway lay down again and pulled the bed-clothes high up around her shoulders.

  Alongside her Mr Comeaway was deep in thought.

  ‘Ya know, ya might be right bout that,’ he said at last. ‘Seems ta me that stuff oughta be done the way it used ta be. Ole fellers takin the girls off inta the bush for a few days an gettin them used ta things slow an easy, so when they come back they know what ta expec.’ He chuckled wickedly. ‘Those times was here now I mighta got a few a them jobs meself, eh? Learnin the young ones round the camps.’

  Mrs Comeaway gave her spouse a good poke. ‘Ah, you!’ she derided. ‘Smoke stick better’n ugly ole bastard like you.’

  NINETEEN

  The house in the Wild-Oat Patch was locked back and front, and the silence surrounding it hit mournfully against Noonah’s ears. The thing she loved most about her home was its cheerful clamour. A memory lit her eyes with laughter. Last time her family had gone off on a trip to a neighbouring town they had left Red Cat asleep on one of the beds and he had broken a louvre trying to squeeze his way out. She reached on top of the fuse-box for the big key, opened the front door and searched through the house for forgotten animals. She found a jug of souring milk in the food safe and poured it into a saucer and carried it outside to the veranda for Red Cat.

  Then she locked the doors again and picked up her little case. She did not feel injured. She knew that her parents never missed a country show if they could help it. They liked to meet up with old pals, and at shows the card-playing was likely to be brisk and accompanied by real money.

  Probably Bartie and Trilby would be waiting for her up at Mrs Green’s. This would not be the first time Noonah had spent her days off with the old lady. The house on the hill was a second home to them all.