The Fringe Dwellers

by Nene Gare

  There was a crash and tinkle of glass and a great splash of water as the jug, too, fell from her nerveless hand.

  Trilby reacted swiftly, in terror now of authority. To wrap the baby again in its rug, to hold it tightly, not daring to examine it for hurt—to wait with her heart in her mouth for the sound of running feet.

  After a while she knew that the crash had gone unheeded. The nurses must be busy. Moving slowly and awkwardly, she picked up the pieces of glass and dropped them in the lidded tin behind the bathroom door. With the towel from the roller, she mopped the water from the floor as well as she could. She threw the soaking wet towel into a hand-basin and, on shaking legs, made her way back to her room. With the last of her strength she sank down on the bed, her clutching arms holding the baby tightly to her breast.

  She could not look at it. She told herself that it would be all right, and that nothing could have happened to it. Mothers had dropped babies before. She had seen them. Seen Blanchie drop Tommy—and not only once. It had always been possible to charm away the bruise—or the cut—with a teaspoon of sugar or a suck at a finger coated with condensed milk. Why should her own baby suffer more than a bruise—or a cut?

  All this she told herself while she waited with endless patience for the nurse to take her baby. And when the baby had been lifted from her arms she waited still, because she knew that what had happened to those other babies had nothing to do with this, and that her own baby would not have lain so quietly in her arms if she had not been hurt badly.

  The nurse came back, as Trilby had known she would. Refuge was to be found only in silence.

  The matron bustled in too, worried, perturbed, deeply shocked.

  ‘Your baby is ill. Seriously ill. The doctor is with her now and he wants to know what happened. You must tell us.’

  She waited for a reply, anger growing in her. Then she looked more closely at Trilby before turning to the little nurse behind her. ‘Tell the doctor to come quickly. Here!’

  So Trilby’s breaking mind grew quiet under anæsthetics and the gleaming slits of her eyes saw nothing but blackness.

  Noonah was there when Trilby woke. A Noonah who sat straightly on her straight-backed chair and whose knuckles showed pale on clamped hands.

  This was it, Noonah thought painfully. This was the thing she had feared before it had happened, only the thing itself was so much more dreadful. She could not have imagined anything so dreadful as this. How could she, or her mother, or Trilby or even Phyllix, overcome something so big and full of trouble?

  When she saw the dark lashes lift over the dreaming grey eyes she tried to smile and though questions sprang to her lips she fought them back, waiting until Trilby should be fully awake.

  After a while she leaned over the bed. ‘What happened, Trilby?’

  Trilby’s eyes opened wide and a wave of thankfulness passed over Noonah. Her sister’s eyes were clear, not shuttered, as they had been at the jail. But the look in them shattered Noonah’s composure and her tears would not be held back. She felt she could not bear that naked defenceless plea for help. That was the way Bartie had looked at her back at the mission the night before she left it. She dropped on her knees beside the bed.

  ‘Trilby, tell me.’

  ‘I didn’t do it on purpose, Noonah, but…’

  ‘But what?’ Noonah urged desperately.

  ‘You’ll hate me. You’ll go away.’

  ‘Oh!’ If Trilby only knew how far out she was, Noonah thought.

  At that moment she would have sacrificed anything, and gladly, to help her sister. ‘I won’t go away,’ she promised steadily.

  ‘I’d been thinking about it. It was in my mind all the time—that I could easily drop her and pretend it was an accident.’

  ‘Yes.’ Noonah kept her voice gentle.

  ‘And now I’ll have it to think about for the rest of my life. That I wanted her to die. So she wouldn’t be a nuisance to me.’

  ‘Trilby, tell me the way it happened,’ Noonah implored, and she took her sister’s hands in hers and held them tightly to stop their trembling.

  ‘I thought I’d end up like Blanchie—and those others,’ Trilby whispered. ‘And I couldn’t see that it was fair when—I wasn’t like them—not ever.’

  ‘I know.’

  Two tears showed between Trilby’s closed lids. ‘Blanchie’s still got Tommy,’ she said and her mouth twisted.

  ‘Tell me,’ Noonah begged. ‘Just tell me, Trilby.’

  ‘I told you,’ Trilby wept, and her weeping was tired and hopeless. ‘I wanted her to die and she died.’

  ‘You didn’t do anything to her?’

  ‘I couldn’t—it was the baby blanket—it slipped and she just rolled out and her little head…Noonah, I can still hear the sound of it—her little head on that hard floor. Her hair was always so soft and warm, Noonah, against my neck.’

  ‘They let me see her,’ Noonah said after a while, her voice dragging.

  Trilby’s eyes were wide open, imploring. ‘And…’

  ‘Her eyes,’ Noonah said pitifully. ‘They’re crossed somehow. And she won’t take any food. They think she’ll die.’

  Trilby went limp again. ‘I won’t see her any more. Not ever. And I love her so much—now. I always tried not to, but I couldn’t help it. Noonah, this is all Phyllix’s fault. Why didn’t he stay away from me—leave me alone?’

  ‘Was the baby—is Phyllix…?’ Noonah stumbled on the words.

  Trilby turned her face away. ‘There was only him,’ she answered her sister’s question.

  A nurse came, quick-stepping and business-like, her expression grave and remote. ‘Matron would like to see you before you go,’ she told Noonah.

  Noonah was home, trying to quiet Mrs Comeaway’s boundless fears when her own worry clouded her every thought.

  ‘She’s dead,’ Mrs Comeaway crooned to herself, and her eyes were unbelieving. ‘The littlie dead already, before I even seen er close up. Noonah, did Trilby say—ya think maybe she went crazy?’

  ‘It was an accident, Mummy. She told me.’ She told her mother what Trilby had said. ‘But I had to see the matron after, and she said there’s bound to be a bit of trouble about it. Something they have when people die in accidents. An inquest.’

  Mrs Comeaway’s voice was full of melancholy. Her eyes darted, seeking comfort from familiars. ‘So much trouble ta come on us. It seem all the time trouble come after I get yous back. An now ya father away an nobody ta tell me anything what ta do. What we do, Noonah? What we do?’

  Noonah’s shock began to tell on her. She could give no comfort. She needed it so badly herself. With a little sob she sank to the floor at her mother’s feet and pressed her head into that warm and comforting lap. And her mother’s face cleared of its worry. This was something she could do; run her hands over her daughter’s hair, murmur soothingly, lift the hem of her frock and wipe away Noonah’s tears. The future, as always, must take care of itself.

  The sun rose as usual—they ate, slept and woke—the children went off to school and returned—in all of these unchanging things lay reassurance, and the thought of Trilby’s baby’s death began to hold less horror for them.

  Other things—visits from the department man and from the police, the questionings and their own reiterated answers, the quenched looks and quiet voices of Charlie and his wife and his children—had to be borne patiently until some decision arriving from unquestionable sources told them of change—for Trilby perhaps. Perhaps for all of them! Not even Noonah was entirely clear about what was going on.

  But, from Mrs Comeaway down to little Stella, each felt that his neglect of some fact must have contributed.

  ‘I just wisht I hadn’t of gone in an upset her,’ Phyllix said miserably to Noonah.

  ‘If you tell,’ Noonah warned, ‘they might think she did it on purpose.

  ‘I don’t tell nothing,’ Phyllix said, his face hard. ‘I might say something wrong, so I don’t say nothing. Not to anyone.
Except you.’

  ‘And it’s no use worrying about anything. Not now,’ Noonah said sadly.

  On the day of the inquest, put off until Trilby had been declared fit, it was the girl’s attitude, so aloof and uncooperative, which delayed the verdict for so long.

  The coroner was puzzled. He had thought it a clear case of accidental death, but surely a girl would not act as Trilby acted if she had just lost her baby. She seemed utterly indifferent to all that was going on.

  For the first time since they had come down from the mission, Noonah was seeing her sister defeated, without the fire of rebellion. Here again was a hurt that had driven deep and that would not be easily forgotten.

  And for a fleeting moment, as the enquiry dragged on, Trilby thought of the girl she had been—the unknowing and happy dreamer who had leaned against a tree and planned for her future.

  ‘An ya don’t wanta worry bout what e said at the end,’ Mrs Comeaway braced. ‘Main thing is, ya got off all right.’

  ‘I thought the matron at the hospital was so nice,’ Noonah said diffidently. ‘Saying all that about us loving our children and making more fuss of them than white people, and about you getting cross with that nurse for smacking the baby.’

  ‘The doctor seemed a nice understandable sort of a feller too,’ Mrs Comeaway added.

  Trilby looked round at her assorted family, and for a second her old impatient spirit seemed about to leap out at them. Then her shoulders slumped. Without a word she walked away from them all, towards her room. Her door closed softly and definitely behind her.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The affair of the eviction notice had been shelved, not forgotten. Noonah was at home on the day Mrs Comeaway received her curtly-worded reminder. She urged her mother to visit the department man and find out if she could have the little house Skippy had scorned.

  Mrs Comeaway applied to Horace for help, and Horace did not fail her. She returned from her visit to the department man with official permission to move straight on to the reserve.

  ‘Wouldn’t hear of Charlie an Hannie stringin a tarp from the side but,’ Mrs Comeaway commented, ‘so I spose they better move in with the Dickers till they find some place a their own. This place a one unit place, y’see.’ She grinned at her daughter. ‘I tole im we’d fit in smaller places an that an got on all right.’

  ‘What did he say about the children?’

  ‘I said we was gunna send em back to the mission after Christmas. By that time e mighta forgot about em.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Noonah worried. ‘He’ll probably write it down somewhere. Gee, I wish you could have got one of the big places.’

  ‘Don’t get worryin bout us,’ Mrs Comeaway soothed.

  ‘And there’s Daddy,’ Noonah revived. ‘When he comes back he’ll have enough money maybe to take another place for rent, and Bartie and Stella can stay down here.’

  ‘That’s right, too,’ Mrs Comeaway beamed. ‘We’ll jus put one over on that bloke—an serves im right fa takin back all that stuff e give us.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘Them beds an things we got with that forty pound,’ Mrs Comeaway said, with indignation. ‘Don’t you remember e said it was a present from the partment? An now every single thing gotta go back. Beat that, if ya like.’

  ‘Oh well,’ Noonah soothed, ‘you wouldn’t have room for it up in the camp. Not in one room. And you’ve still got the big bed and the two stretchers.’

  ‘Ain’t that. It’s the principle of the thing,’ Mrs Comeaway said severely. ‘Wastin our time goin an pickin it out an all the time it ain’t really ours.’

  ‘Only if we’d stayed here,’ Noonah pointed out. ‘Look, Mum, what say I help you get packed up before I go back?’

  Charlie and Hannie and the girls and young Tommy had been accepted philosophically into the shelter of the Dickers’ big camp, but they were not far from the reserve and Hannie spent most of her time hovering over Mrs Comeaway’s stove—a good thing, as it happened, because never before in her life had Mrs Comeaway had so much need of some living thing to talk at.

  Trilby was difficult and moody. She had been hard to get along with before. She was even harder to understand now that she had to share her mother’s bed during the night and either put up with Auntie Hannie or lose herself in the bush for the better part of the day. She would have nothing to do with the other young girls around the camp, and even kept apart from Bartie and Noonah. Her appetite was easily satisfied with a piece of bread and jam and a cup of tea, and she grew thinner.

  She was jerked finally into more awareness by little Stella. She felt she could hardly bear the child’s endless questionings. Stella had been looking forward to having a real little new baby as part and parcel of her family life. Aggrieved when this delightful thing had not come to pass she wanted to know the reason, and she asked not once a day but every time a fresh sense of her injury overcame her. Trilby began to think once again about leaving. And this time, she vowed to herself, nothing should stop her.

  Bartie had suffered not a pang at his removal from the Wild-Oat Patch. He saw much more of Diane now, and for the first time in his life he was learning the meaning of a completely satisfying friendship. Noonah was on another plane. He almost worshipped his sister. Diane dipped round and about his own level, laughing, enticing, mischievous and strangely, perfectly tolerant of his curious hobby. So long as she could see herself in finished drawings and paintings, she would not pester him, using her time as model for the brewing up of fresh plans for mischief.

  Mrs Comeaway was just beginning to find peace when Stella took sick. She complained and whined and drooped about the house, spending whole nights in coughing even after Mrs Comeaway brought her in from the cold little veranda and warmed her in her own bed. And it was something more than bad temper which caused Stella to refuse bottles of cool drink, cream-filled biscuits and the little bags of lollies which Mrs Comeaway would send Bartie to buy. After a night when the child had exhausted herself in fit after fit of painful coughing, Mrs Comeaway dressed herself and set off for the hospital and Noonah.

  Noonah came, anxious-faced, to meet them.

  ‘It’s Stella here,’ Mrs Comeaway said in a whisper, her surroundings affecting her as they always did with their cold cleanness and the echoing quality of the walls. ‘She ain’t been eatin good for a week now. I dunno! Maybe I been a bit worried bout other things an didn’t take much notice. But now it’s cough, cough, jus on all night. I thought maybe you could get a bit a medicine for er.’

  Noonah dropped on one knee, her own conscience a bit uneasy. She took Stella’s hot little face between her hands, and the child’s dry skin burned her fingers. Bronchitis? she wondered uncertainly. Pneumonia? hearing the rales crackling in the little chest.

  ‘Mummy, you’d better take her to the doctor straightaway,’ she said, rising. ‘He’ll probably put her in hospital for a while. I’ll ask Matron if I can take care of her. And don’t worry, Mummy. She’ll be all right here with me. Just take her to the doctor straightaway though.’

  ‘If that’s what you think, Noonah,’ Mrs Comeaway said, with relieved obedience. ‘Gee, I’m glad you’re a nurse an all like that. Always get a bit scared less I know somethin’s real bad. Them doctors don’t like it if ya waste their time.’

  ‘Off you go then,’ Noonah said, infusing a note of cheerfulness into her voice for Stella’s sake. She bent to kiss the woebegone little face. ‘You’re going to stay here with me tonight, Stella. Won’t that be nice?’

  She gave her mother a quick hug, then stood to watch the two walk away down the drive, her mother self-conscious and dignified, with her old black hat pulled firmly down on her curly greying hair. And not until she was back in the ward helping with the afternoon sponges did she recall, with a throb of anger at herself, that she had forgotten just how far away from the hospital the doctor was, and how her mother and little Stella must already have been tired from their walk down Heartbreak Hill.

&
nbsp; Why hadn’t she given her mother the money for a taxi? And what change had been brought about in her mother that Mrs Comeaway had not, in her usually cheerful forthright fashion, asked for it?

  Stella was admitted to the hospital that same day. Slipping into the children’s ward as soon as she got the opportunity, Noonah was cut to the heart. On Stella’s face as she lay quietly in bed was the same patient look she had seen on the face of Trilby’s baby.

  This time, she swore, it would end differently.

  ‘We’re going to start her on oxygen straightaway,’ the little nurse said sympathetically. ‘But it all depends on her resistance. She’s not a very big child, is she?’

  Noonah thought back to the week-ends she had spent at home and blamed herself for being unwilling to disturb the happiness she had always found there. ‘I should have told her Stella is too thin. I should have told her what to do,’ she thought in wretchedness. ‘It’s right there in my books and I didn’t tell her.’ She remembered the grocery orders, and the biscuits and cool drinks and pasties.

  ‘This is my fault,’ she thought, her eyes frozen in misery.

  Noonah was not permitted to nurse her sister and, while she rebelled, she knew she could not have forced her little Stella to do the things she must do in order to get better.

  However, no order could stop her from visiting. At night she had to be pushed out by the sister-in-charge so that she herself could get some rest before going on duty again. But because she was Noonah’s sister, and because Noonah had made a place for herself in this great hospital, every little nurse who had anything to do with Stella’s care put extra effort into her work. And of course the child took comfort from her sister’s presence. Nothing could hurt her whilst Noonah was near. When Noonah nodded, Stella knew it was all right to submit to the prick of a needle or the paraphernalia of the oxygen-tent. Her docility under treatment endeared her still further with all the little nurses.