The Fringe Dwellers

by Nene Gare

  ‘What about a job? Minding children, praps, or something like that.’

  ‘Can’t!’ Blanchie said flatly. ‘I already tried to get a job like that but they don’t want Tommy. An Tim don’t like me goin off an leaving im.’

  ‘Does Tim send you money too, Blanchie?’

  ‘E gives me some, when e comes down. E don’t send me none because e knows bout that other.’

  Noonah sighed. ‘What about Audrena? Couldn’t she take the job you nearly got?’

  ‘Mrs Milton won’t ave er. Audrena’s a bit cheeky, an she don’t like workin too hard neither. What’s more, she says nobody’s gunna make her stay in every night when she wants ta go out. The woman doesn’t like that. She only lets ya go out once or twice a week an even then ya gotta be home early. Not like Audrena.’

  ‘Where would she go every night?’ Noonah wondered. ‘What’s there to do?’

  Blanchie shot her another look, opened her mouth to speak then closed it again. She shrugged.

  ‘I might try and talk to her,’ Noonah frowned. ‘We need girls like her up at the hospital, taking round trays and things like that. She’d get good pay, too.’

  ‘You could try,’ Blanchie said indifferently. ‘Wouldn’t waste me breath if I was you. That Audrena—she gets all she wants thout workin for it.’

  Noonah felt burdened with care. But at home she forgot it. Trilby was in labour.

  Outwardly calm, Trilby kept her eyes on the little wrist-watch Noonah was using to time her pains. They came at ten-minute intervals now, and as each one surged like a giant comber throughout the length of her body Trilby relaxed like a sawdust-filled doll and let the pain take possession of her.

  Everyone was looking to Noonah, their own first-hand experience considered a trifle when set alongside the booklore that was in Noonah’s head. Trilby heard Noonah issue orders—Blanchie to go for a taxi, Hannie to finish packing the two battered old cases she would take to hospital with her. Trilby looked once at her mother’s anxious face then rested her heavy head against her folded arms. She was drenchingly glad that Noonah was here to look after her.

  ‘You’ll stay with me all the time, Noonah?’ Her voice was a thin thread. She had to strain to make it more than a whisper.

  ‘Yes,’ Noonah said briefly.

  Trilby lifted her head to smile. She was afraid, but she hoped nobody would know just how much. It was not the pain. She could bear that, grindingly slow and exhausting though it was. It was the thought of Phyllix and what he might do—after the baby came. Trilby was blaming herself bitterly for having let him hang around her while she was pregnant. She should have snapped that tie—driven him off from her by some means or another. She could have done it—somehow.

  She thought of the days when she would have to stay at the hospital. It would be like jail again. And outside, Phyllix might go ahead with his plans. Noonah and her mother might help him. They would try to stop her from going away and leaving them.

  On the hard high bed in the labour ward, her head turned restlessly from side to side. She determined to rid herself of the baby the moment she left the hospital. And not only the baby. She would rid herself of the whole family, even Noonah. Step out of this life like she would step out of a dirty dress. In Perth everything would be different. It must be! And she would go soon. Neither Phyllix nor anyone else should stop her.

  A nurse gave her an injection. After a while it was difficult for her to think clearly. She strove to identify herself with the fierceness of her desire, but her body was soft and weak. A while longer and not even the pain was real. She knew that Noonah’s warm comforting hands held her own tightly and for that she was overwhelmingly grateful. Someone else was pushing down on her stomach with relentless urging strength, helping her weary body to push forth the weight inside it. How kind! How wonderfully, surprisingly kind.

  ‘Here it comes now. Push! Push hard, that’s the girl.’

  Trilby put the last ounce of her strength into the straining muscles of her belly. She did it gladly, uplifted to the heights from sheer love of those kindly, helping hands.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Again, surprising her, she found herself back in a perfectly ordinary world. She looked from her sister to the nurse, half-embarrassed, wondering if she had behaved like a fool—if these two would presently laugh at her.

  Noonah was smiling. And the little nurse took up something and held it before her eyes. A white-wrapped bundle with a red wrinkled face at the top of it. An almost featureless face capped with damp, black curls.

  It was Trilby who laughed.

  When she woke again she lay in bed in a ward, of which she appeared to be the only occupant. There were two more beds, and their fresh virgin white, the neat and wonderful angles of their quilts enticed her to look again and again. It was enough, for a while, to see those beds or to watch the thin voile curtains blow in the soft breeze. It was happiness to move a slow hand over the flatness of her stomach and know that she belonged only to herself again.

  Later, while she was still under the spell of the blowing curtains, the neat white beds and her own flat stomach, her mother came into the room. She disturbed its peace, breathing loudly, glancing nervously at the doorway behind her, whispering enquiries. But she did not stay long and Trilby watched her vanishing form with pale and complete satisfaction.

  Noonah came, to lean over her and kiss her, and to tell her she had had a daughter and that it looked exactly like her. ‘I bet you feel happy now, don’t you?’ Noonah added. ‘Now it’s all over?’

  That last remark roused Trilby’s dreaming mind as nothing else could have done. When Noonah went she was alert again and on guard. Phyllix would come soon. She must be ready for him.

  She never doubted that he would come, even though he had taken a job twenty or thirty miles out.

  The baby was brought to her and she was made to suckle it.

  ‘And what are you going to call her?’ the nurse asked pleasantly, showing Trilby how to feed her baby.

  Trilby looked down at the minute head, at the unbelievably silky black curls and the little mouth fastening so knowingly on her nipple. She laughed, and the nurse laughed with her.

  ‘You’ll have to find a really pretty name for such a dear little baby,’ she said in her cheerful friendly fashion.

  Trilby’s face was hidden by her hair, but the nurse saw the quick movement of rejection. The baby, losing the comfort of its mother’s breast, moved its head blindly, mewed protestingly.

  ‘Did she hurt you? Are you tender? I hope you’re not going to have trouble with your breasts,’ the nurse said anxiously, bending down to guide the baby’s mouth once more to the nipple. This time the child fastened small hands in the softness of Trilby’s swelling breast, kneading it, thought its amused mother, as a kitten might knead the belly of a mother-cat.

  She felt detached, as if it were almost an imposition for this small creature to expect nourishment from her. And she was relieved when she could cover herself once more.

  The regular visits of her baby brought nothing but a slight embarrassment until one day the baby refused to feed. It lay against her, sleepy and uninterested. Again and again its tiny mouth slipped unheeding from her breast. The nurse murmured vexedly, one hand cupping Trilby’s full bosom, the forefinger of the other parting the baby’s lips by pressing downward on its small chin.

  To Trilby it seemed obvious that the baby was not hungry. She could not understand why the nurse persisted in her efforts to make it drink.

  Suddenly the nurse gave her baby’s leg a slap. The child woke and sobbed, and at the sound Trilby hugged it to her and swung it away from the nurse. ‘Why did you do that?’ she asked, her eyebrows almost meeting over her narrowed grey eyes.

  ‘Here, let’s try her again before she goes off to sleep,’ the nurse said, trying to get at the baby’s head.

  ‘Don’t you touch my baby,’ Trilby quivered. ‘Go away! Go on! I’ll feed her myself.’

  The nurse
straightened and laughed.

  ‘Good gracious, that didn’t hurt her,’ she scoffed, ‘a little bit of a smack like that. That’s what we have to do to wake them. They must be fed regularly, you know.’

  ‘This is my baby,’ Trilby scowled. ‘She won’t be smacked.’

  ‘Okay.’ The nurse gave up, her pleasantness undiminished. ‘See she gets enough though, won’t you?’

  Trilby watched her walk from the room, and only then did her cradling arms relax. She looked at the bundle as though she were seeing it for the first time. And before the nurse came to take it back to the nursery, she had unwrapped it and taken off all its clothes and examined it minutely. She handed it to the girl with the greatest reluctance, and when she lay back against her pillows the mother in her was dominant over the girl. Her thoughts were of her baby.

  She sensed danger in her changed attitude. She would need all her strength and energy to stand up to Phyllix and her family. She must not allow this tiny scrap to pull her from her purpose.

  She tried to woo back her old attitude of detachment but despite her reasoning looked forward eagerly to the times when the baby would be brought to her. And the baby looked up into her eyes with boundless trust and contorted its small face into grimaces which should have been hideous and were not, and the last of her clear-seeingness retreated before the evergrowing tide of her love for it.

  Nobody could have had a baby like this before. So perfect! Why was it hers when she had not even wanted it? Why could she not have had an ugly baby—or one deformed in some way? Here was no difficulty which she had overcome and left behind her. Here was a living breathing baby whose demands on her were increasingly hard to ignore.

  Phyllix came and brought her near to nervous collapse. He was harder to deal with than she could ever have imagined.

  ‘You want us to get married now?’ he asked, his eyes begging.

  Trilby would not let herself respond, not even in anger.

  ‘No. I’m going away. I don’t want to stay here any more.’

  ‘You taking our kid?’

  ‘I’ll put her in a mission. She’ll be all right.’ The contractions of Trilby’s heart did not show on her face.

  ‘That’s my kid, too,’ Phyllix said stolidly, resolutely.

  ‘I haven’t ever said that,’ Trilby reminded him, feeling the great thump of her heart lifting her bosom.

  Through stiff lips she told him: ‘I don’t know whose she is. There were others besides you.’

  ‘There was only me. I know that.’

  ‘You’re a fool,’ Trilby said tearingly. ‘If I say so, there were others. How would you know?’

  ‘I know,’ Phyllix repeated obstinately. ‘And I don’t want my kid in a mission. A father gotta sign them papers too, remember.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Trilby panted. ‘You’re just making that up to frighten me.’

  ‘I seen that department man about us. Told him we was gunna be married. Trilby!’ There was pain in his cry. ‘Couldn’t you just think about it a while, Trilby?’

  ‘Go away!’ Trilby said desperately. ‘I won’t marry you. Nobody can make me do that. Nobody! And I hate you. Do you understand now? Dumb idiot. I hate you, and if you don’t let me send the baby to a mission I’ll run away from you, anyhow. I’ll run away now. Now!’ She thrust her legs from the bed and stood up, shaking with fury.

  Phyllix was shocked. This was a situation he had no idea how to handle. In a flash he saw Trilby sick and ill, hurt badly perhaps because he had so excited and upset her. And perhaps, through her, the baby would get sick, too. He tried gently to force her back into the bed.

  Trilby flung him off, her grey eyes big in her ashy face.

  ‘I better go,’ he said at last, helplessly. ‘I’m sorry, Trilby. Sorry I made you angry. I won’t come back in here again.’ He dug into his pocket and dragged out two pound notes. ‘That’s all I got left,’ he told her. ‘I can get more if you want it but. For the kid or something.’

  ‘I won’t have it,’ Trilby cried in a fresh panic. ‘You want everyone to think it’s your baby. That’s why you’re giving me that. You just take it back. I won’t have it, see?’ She threw the money back at him.

  Phyllix ignored the notes. His look was both puzzled and sad. He went quietly out of the room.

  And when he had gone Trilby dug her head into the pillow and wept tiredly because she wanted peace so badly—and could find none.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Her sister’s behaviour was deeply troubling to Noonah. She had put up with Trilby’s moods of rebellion during her pregnancy, trusting that everything would come right after the baby was born. And here was her sister just as jumpy and irritable as ever—at one time showering her baby with loving attention, at another thrusting it into Noonah’s or the nurse’s arms as if it were something to be feared and disliked.

  If Noonah talked of the future, however lightly, sullenness swept Trilby’s face like a grey mist. She had not yet chosen a name for her daughter, and flared out at her sister in tempestuous rage when Noonah suggested names.

  Noonah was not the only one who was perplexed.

  Never had Mrs Comeaway tried so hard to please someone—and failed so dismally. Her bewilderment was the kind Bartie’s school books aroused in her. She supposed—pathetically—she was too far behind her different-thinking children. Just an old fool. Annoying instead of pleasing with her tremendous efforts to understand.

  ‘What sort of a girl,’ she asked Noonah indignantly, ‘not even to give the littlie a name yet. We gotta call it “she” still, same as if it was a damn cat.’

  ‘Trilby’ll be all right soon,’ Noonah reassured, as worried as her mother.

  ‘She got over them idears of ers yet?’ Mrs Comeaway probed. ‘Sendin that baby off ta some mission an trackin down ta Perth erself?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Noonah said helplessly. ‘She won’t talk about anything like that.’

  Mrs Comeaway regarded her daughter in a rich silence then, inevitably, went to the stove to fix a pot of tea.

  There was only one way out of the mess she had got herself into. Trilby could not recall when first the chilling thought had struck her, but each time the baby was brought to her—so small, so helpless—it leapt again to ugly life. No matter if she tried to crowd out this thought with others—if she withdrew in shuddering horror—it stayed in the deepness of her mind, festering with possibilities.

  To cover the baby’s tiny face with a pillow until it suffocated, to roll a pellet of bread and stuff it into the open pink mouth, to unclose her arms and allow it to fall; this last would at least be quick and she would not have to watch it as it struggled for air, or choked on something too big for it to swallow.

  Often Trilby lay with her eyes closed, the wind ice-cold against her damp and perspiring body, her hands clenching and unclenching in her anguish. Or she would gather up her child and stare into its face, her eyes tortured and wild.

  For the better part of the day and night she was alone with her thoughts. Noonah could not visit every day. Her mother had concluded and dumbly accepted that Trilby was better left alone. Nothing she said or did seemed to please the girl. Trilby snapped her up as if she were being purposely annoying.

  So in solitude the battle went on. With all that she knew herself to be, must she go back to the life she so hated? Because of this tie between herself and her baby which, despite the darkness of her thoughts, grew stronger every day?

  She saw nothing good in a return, just a further sinking, a giving up of the fight before it had fairly begun.

  For Trilby, the only good lay in this other life she would make for herself. Only when she had it firmly in her grasp could she walk proudly, consider herself the equal of anyone. She was so tired of fighting. With her whole heart she wanted to live in the certain knowledge that she was accepted completely.

  There was no room in her mind to consider her family. She recognised no kindliness in them, no warmth of good fel
lowship, no loyalty nor generosity, not even gaiety. Her pity was all for herself. She blamed them for the feeling of desperate loneliness which was with her every waking minute of the day, promised herself that soon, after she had escaped from them, it would vanish.

  The day was hot, with a careening wind picking up the dust from the streets and whirling it in through windows and down passage-ways. The baby had been fed and, whilst she had fed her, Trilby had drained her water-jug. Yet she was thirsty still and the skin on her face felt taut with dried perspiration.

  No nurse came to take the baby away. Trilby looked at its sleeping face, deliberating between setting it down on the bed and taking it with her to the bathroom whilst she refilled her jug. She was frighteningly aware of the thought so firmly established in her mind, and to reassure herself was doubly careful of the safety of her baby, as if by examining safety-pins, loosening too tight clothing, touching the child with gentle hands, speaking to it in a voice that was low and sweet—she could ignore evil and cause it to vanish.

  She made up her mind and, with the baby on her arm, took up her jug and left the room.

  The bathroom was two doors down the passage. Trilby pushed the heavy glass door and let it swing shut behind her. And then she found she would need two hands to fill her jug.

  She knelt and placed the jug at her side whilst she rearranged the baby blanket to allow a thick fold for the baby’s head.

  She filled her jug at the tap, feeling its weight grow heavier. Carefully, she balanced it in one hand whilst she bent to pick up the baby with the other. And in the act of picking it up the thought flashed across her mind that here was the time—and the place.

  The shock of revulsion that raced through her body hastened her movements. The white rug, already dis-arranged, unwound itself. There was a soft crack as the baby hit the floor head first. And Trilby, staring down at it in fear and horror.