The Fringe Dwellers

by Nene Gare

  Walking along the crooked streets Noonah found time to ponder on her sister. Phyllix was almost one of the family now, though nobody, not even Audrena, dared to connect his presence with Trilby’s baby. He had simply been absorbed in the same manner as other long-staying visitors.

  Yet Trilby had certainly altered since he had come back. She was more cheerful and she took more care of her appearance. And she did not keep to her room so much as she had. She did not encourage Phyllix in any way that Noonah could see. Rather the opposite. Peremptorily, she made use of his services, ordering him to do this and that about the place, but rarely talking with him.

  Phyllix showed no resentment. He had money, that was certain. The financial outlook of the Comeaway family had brightened considerably. Noonah wondered how long the money would last, what would happen when it was all gone. If Phyllix would go on another shearing trip to get more. And if he did, would Trilby’s new cheerfulness disappear?

  It had surprised Noonah to find good fellowship developing between Bartie and Phyllix. Phyllix was so quiet. Yet Bartie had told her he knew all about the aboriginal artists his Miss Simmins had spoken of. And Bartie seemed charmed to find that Phyllix shared his feeling for colour and the shapes of things. Noonah had been amused as well as a little hurt to have her opinions of Bartie’s latest sketches brushed aside if they did not coincide with Phyllix’s.

  Noonah herself liked Phyllix. Gratefully, she had found a strength in him to add to her own. She felt that whilst he lived with her family nothing very bad could happen to them. Alone of the Comeaways, she doubted that the powers would allow them all to go on living in the house in the Wild-Oat Patch for much longer unless they paid more rent. Her thoughts swerved away from how much must be owing by now.

  And there was no doubt about Phyllix’s feelings for Trilby. Sometimes, watching his eyes as they rested on her sister, Noonah wondered how it would feel to have someone look at her like that. Her step had a different spring to it as she pursued the thought. How good to know you were important to someone, some man. And then she sighed. None of the boys she met ever looked at her except with wariness and distrust, as if she might bite them if they came closer. What was wrong with her?

  Again she turned her thoughts from such unrewarding channels. A nurse’s training was harder than she had thought. And she knew the reason for that. She could not concentrate as the others did. Stray thoughts of Bartie, her mother and father, Trilby, Trilby’s baby, a particular patient in the hospital, the girls with whom she was training, even a patch of blue sky with the lightness of clouds on it, any one of these things was enough to detach her mind from her work. She was good at practical nursing. She knew the reason for that also. She liked handling patients, making them comfortable in their hot and wrinkled beds, setting the pillows the way they wanted them, cheering them when they were miserable. It brought real happiness to her to know that many of them were getting well under her care.

  And guiltily, she knew that they appreciated her small departures from routine, the fact that she could be persuaded to pass over an early morning wash, skip a detail of diet, quickly rid their ash-trays of too many cigarette ends. She liked the other trainees, too. She was continually grateful to them because they got her out of trouble. One or two of them had even lied for her on the times when she had felt urgently that she must sleep at home instead of in her room at the hospital. She would have done the same for them, most willingly.

  Nobody could save her from examination time though, she thought ruefully. That was coming, even though it was a long way off yet. Her step brisked again. She smiled with relief. Examination time was a long way off.

  Bartie was waiting for her at the bottom of Heartbreak Hill. ‘Nobody home,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Thought you must all be dead.’

  ‘They went in the ute,’ Bartie chuckled. ‘And when they all got in there was hardly any room left for Horace. And it was him borrowed the ute. There’s a show over at Marytown, Noonah, and Mum’s gunna bring me back something from it.’

  ‘Nice,’ Noonah said as they struggled up the first steep rise. ‘Mrs Green know I’m coming?’

  ‘Yeah! I think she’s glad. Her leg’s bad. She’s been in bed and all us kids hadda get our own breakfast. Trilby made the tea and let me make some toast by the fire.’

  Noonah’s pace quickened. ‘Ah, poor old thing.’

  Mrs Green was sitting on the front veranda in an old cane basket chair; Gramma’s chair everyone called it, the chair nobody ever sat in because whilst it was empty there was always the chance that Gramma might come out on the veranda for a minute and sit down and maybe stay a bit longer than she had intended, watching them while they played, looking mightily surprised at their cleverness, encouraging the more timid, settling small fights, telling them the games she had played in her own childhood. And any game, if Gramma was there looking on, was more exciting.

  ‘A touch of the screws,’ she deprecated as Noonah climbed the sandy drive and sank down on the wooden step. ‘Thought I’d just sit out here in the sun an wait for you.’

  ‘You’ve got that wool wrapped round your leg?’ Noonah asked anxiously. She had bought the wool herself.

  Mrs Green gave her skirts a twirl. ‘So much wool wrapped round me I feel as if it’s shearing-time,’ she declared.

  Noonah laughed.

  ‘Bartie tell you about the trip?’ Mrs Green asked, amused glints in her eyes. ‘You should’ve gone. Might’ve got yourself a nice young feller up there. All come down for these shows, they do, from the stations roundabout.’

  ‘I wouldn’t get one,’ Noonah said frankly. ‘They are different when I’m around.’

  Wisdom was in the old lady’s face, and a little sadness mixed up with it.

  Noonah leaned against a veranda post and watched Bartie playing with the other kids. ‘Gramma,’ she asked, a small frown between her eyes. ‘Why would a boy sling off at me because I’m training? Isn’t it all right to train to be a nurse?’

  Mrs Green thought before she spoke. ‘It’s different,’ she said at last. ‘That’s about the only thing wrong with it.’

  Noonah looked her enquiry.

  ‘The different ones gotta pay a bit just to be different,’ Mrs Green said.

  ‘Why?’ Noonah resented.

  Mrs Green settled herself back with a sigh. ‘I don’t know how to make it plain, girl. It’s just something I know. You go off and do something different from what the mob does, they don’t understand. An what they don’t understand they don’t like. That’s a thing that’s true all round. You don’t understand something, you don’t trust it and you don’t like it.’

  Noonah rubbed with a forefinger at the splintered grey boards of the veranda. ‘When people –,’ she gave Mrs Green a swift upward look before she went on, ‘and it isn’t only the boys, Gramma—when people sling off at me for wanting to be a nurse, I feel the same way I used to feel with the white children on the school bus. As if I should be ashamed. As if I’ve done something terrible. On the bus it was because I wasn’t the same colour as the white kids. Now it’s because I’m doing my training. And there’s no sense in it, is there?’ Her eyes met the old lady’s. ‘Is there, Gramma?’

  ‘You’ve got to be strong enough to get above em,’ Mrs Green said steadily. ‘And not let em hurt you. They don’t want to hurt you, not really. It’s just—they don’t understand. Praps, I don’t know, they might feel you’re going over on the other side. Going against them. That might be it.’

  ‘I want to be like the other girls but,’ Noonah said a little forlornly. ‘They don’t see me, up at the hospital. When I come home, why can’t they forget all about me being a nurse?’

  Mrs Green shook her head helplessly. ‘Don’t ask me. An don’t blame them neither, Noonah, not too much. A lot of it’s jealousy. You’ve had chances. They haven’t.’ Her eyes went to the group of children playing in the front yard. ‘All these kids—I want them to get their chances too. That’s why I stay here. Why
I have stayed here.’

  The slight emphasis was lost on Noonah whose thoughts were following another path. ‘What would you think of the boy in the butcher’s shop, grabbing hold of my hand when he gave me my change?’ she enquired unexpectedly.

  Mrs Green’s eyes came alert. ‘I’d say you better keep your wits about you an count that change,’ she said drily.

  ‘I’ve seen him up the street a few times. Once he walked a little way with me,’ she told the old lady, her eyes round with questioning again.

  Mrs Green’s shoulders slumped a little in her chair. ‘Noonah, I can tell you only one thing. I had a girl here once, like you. She wanted to be a nurse, too. Started doing her training up at that hospital, got on real well for a while.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She had a baby,’ Mrs Green said heavily. ‘Like Trilby out there. But it was a white man’s baby. After it was born, you could see that all right. I knew, anyhow, because she told me. This white chap but, he wasn’t like Phyllix is. This girl told him about the baby an you know what he said?’

  Noonah did not move.

  ‘He told her to go an find some other father to pin the blame on,’ Mrs Green said. ‘Went away about then, too. She couldn’t find out where.’

  Noonah’s eyes were wounded. So was her mouth. She had the feeling of being punished for something she had not done, had not even contemplated doing.

  ‘I didn’t say…,’ she began, her full bottom lip trembling.

  ‘I know you didn’t say,’ Mrs Green told her, and there was kindliness and a great depth of understanding in her voice now. ‘There’s a lot of things a girl doesn’t have to say, Noonah, to someone that’s as old as me. The trouble is, there’s so many ways a girl can take that’s wrong, and that won’t turn out the way she thinks. Trilby took one way. That girl I just told you about, she took another way. That’s two you know about, an there’s plenty more. What you want to be, my girl, is careful. Think what you’re doing. An if you think real hard, maybe you don’t do it.’

  She leaned forward to stroke Noonah’s hair back from her broad low forehead. Noonah caught the old hand in hers. ‘I shouldn’t have worried you,’ she said remorsefully. ‘I won’t any more.’ She jumped up. ‘I’ll cook the dinner instead.’

  They went down the passage together. ‘Where’s Trilby?’ Noonah asked.

  ‘Down the yard with a pile of comics. Ruthie an Betty went out somewhere. Couldn’t get her to go with them, of course.’

  ‘Sit there by the stove, so your leg will keep warm,’ Noonah ordered. ‘And tell me what you’re going to cook.’

  She pushed a chair nearer to the still glowing fire in the big black stove. ‘I should get up here more often,’ she said, ‘and I would if there wasn’t so much to do always, when I get home.’

  ‘You like being home, don’t you?’ Mrs Green twinkled.

  ‘Too right!’

  Mrs Green laughed.

  ‘Go on now,’ Noonah ordered. ‘Tell me what you want done. What you really should do is get to bed, and I think I’ll make you, too.’

  ‘I’m fine just sitting,’ Mrs Green declared, and when the girl was busy slicing vegetables into a big blue saucepan she added: ‘Soon I’ll have nothing to do but sit.’

  Noonah glanced at her over the saucepan.

  Mrs Green nodded. ‘I’m getting old, Noonah, and I get a bit tired.’

  ‘Ah!’ Noonah threw back affectionately. ‘Getting old now, eh?’

  Mrs Green stopped to regard with whimsical amusement this slim youngster who was such a stranger to old age that she could not even understand it in another person. And it would come to her too, the old lady thought, so surprisingly fast, as it came to everyone. One day your thoughts filled only with the future and the next knowing that only this present day meant anything to you.

  ‘Or maybe,’ Mrs Green said aloud, ‘it’s just the pain in my leg that’s troubling me.’

  ‘Of course that must be it.’ Noonah was perfectly happy with this explanation, Mrs Green could see.

  ‘Gramma, why would a girl act the way Trilby acts with Phyllix, and still get herself up nice for him?’

  Mrs Green smiled. ‘She wants—she must have right now—something that Phyllix has got for her. That’s why she dresses up for him. She doesn’t want him herself, any more than a billy-goat, but she doesn’t want anyone else to have him neither.’

  ‘If she knew the way he looks at her,’ Noonah said, cutting meat into thin slices.

  ‘She does,’ the old lady chuckled. ‘Don’t you make any mistake about that. Funny thing about Trilby. I’ve looked at those two many a time, and I thought a couple of times…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He went the wrong way about things,’ Mrs Green said seriously, as if Noonah was of her own generation. ‘For a girl like Trilby he missed the mark by a mile. Easy an gentle does it with that one. You remember what I said about trusting, out there on the veranda? Wouldn’t mind betting if he could get her to trust him—even now—!’

  ‘Go on!’

  ‘Ah, never mind,’ Mrs Green smiled. ‘Look, Noonah, I got something to tell you. I’m going away.’

  ‘Why?’ Noonah asked in consternation, dropping her work to gaze at Gramma Green.

  ‘Partly the government,’ the old lady went on. ‘They came up the other day. Said I couldn’t go on living here less I got that roof fixed.’

  ‘Gramma!’

  ‘One other thing they said. Seems this is a real good block of land this house is built on. Nice view and everything. They thought I wouldn’t have much trouble selling the place.’

  ‘They can’t make you,’ Noonah said indignantly.

  ‘One of em happened to be looking for a block right now.’ Gramma smiled a little. ‘Wanted to fix up a deal there and then. I said I’d think it over and let him know. And now I’ve thought. I’m going to write to Robby and tell him he’s got a buyer for his house and he can let it go because I want to go back home.’

  ‘The kids! And their education,’ Noonah appealed to what she knew Gramma held almost sacred.

  ‘I don’t know, Noonah.’ There was a quality in the old lady’s voice that made Noonah regard her more closely. She went swiftly over to the chair, took Mrs Green’s head in her hands and pushed it gently into the crook of her shoulder. ‘Yes,’ she crooned. ‘You want to go back to where you were born, don’t you? Mummy’s told me all the things you told her. She knows you love the north better than here. And the kids will be all right. Someone else will look after them. You don’t have to worry about anything, Gramma.’

  Mrs Green reached up and squeezed Noonah’s forearm. ‘I thought you’d understand without a lot of talking.’

  Noonah patted her shoulder and went back behind the long kitchen table.

  ‘I even had a white kid here for a while,’ Mrs Green meditated. ‘For a year or two.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘The mother asked me to mind it for a day—and there were some thought she’d never come back and I’d have that kid for always. I knew she’d come back. She loved that kid of hers. Pretty, it was. Had a lot of red hair—same colour as a little pony I had once when I was a kid myself. I got real fond of that little girl, the time she was here.’

  ‘She reminded you of your pony?’

  ‘Ah!’ Mrs Green laughed.

  ‘And what did the woman say when she came to get her?’ Noonah had finished making her stew and she came to sit alongside Gramma.

  ‘Don’t remember,’ the old lady said, her smile tantalizing. ‘Lot of silly things. Even wanted to pay me.’

  ‘Didn’t she say why she’d gone off and left it with you?’

  Mrs Green looked surprised. ‘Where else did she have to leave it?’

  ‘Gramma!’ Noonah slipped off the table. She turned to the door as Bartie came flying in. ‘What do you want? Getting hungry?’

  ‘What about you and me going for a walk—you know.’ Bartie gestured toward
s the valley and Noonah nodded.

  ‘All right!’ She wiped her hands on the side of her frock and carried the big saucepan over to the stove.

  ‘How’s your leg now, Gramma?’ she asked, whilst Bartie danced with impatience in the background.

  ‘I’m going to sit here and think,’ Gramma said. ‘About the sun all hot on me, getting right through to my bones, and how I’m going to soak it up and let it get rid of every pain in every part.’

  ‘We’ll miss you but,’ Noonah told her. ‘It’ll be terrible with no Gramma Green to stay with.’

  ‘Off an go for your walk,’ Mrs Green said briskly, ‘before Bartie drags your arm off.’

  TWENTY

  Bartie had a friend of his own age. A real friend who liked him better than she liked anyone else. And she lived in the valley below Mrs Green’s house.

  Diane was the same age as Bartie, but she was a class below him at school. In contrast, Diane was all cheek and cheerful laughter and she had a disregard for authority that stunned Bartie into lasting admiration. She arrived late at school nearly every day, her stiff curly hair bouncing in two bunches on either side of her round shining black face. Diane was much darker than anyone else Bartie knew, and that was because she was part negro. Diane was nearly always in trouble, both at home and at school. The man who taught her class was an emigrant under the teacher-training scheme. His nationality was a source of continual conjecture for the children he taught, and sometimes the conjecture became ribald, especially if Diane was implicated. Mr Jenzen was extremely slow-spoken and he had a passion for discipline. Once or twice a day he took Diane through her misdeeds and endeavoured, without success, to find out why she had erred.

  ‘You know that school begins at nine?’ His face was turned slightly, for this first question, his pale blue eyes fixed askance on Diane’s lively little face.

  ‘Yes,’ Diane would nod.

  ‘Then why,’ with the air of one springing a trap, ‘are you late?’