Paper Faces

by Rachel Anderson

  “It’s too big here,” said Dot.

  She looked up at the curved glass roof overhead, so high and with pigeons on the inside, fluttering among the iron girders, trapped inside. The roof was too high and was partly made of glass. Dot didn’t like the glass. Some of it was broken. When glass shatters, it leaves jagged edges.

  “They’re trying to get out,” Dot said. “They can’t.”

  “Who can’t?”

  “Them birds up there. They’ll cut themselves.”

  “Course they won’t. They like it up there, it’s cozy for them. That’s their home, where they live.”

  “Let’s go back,” said Dot, tugging at Gloria’s hand.

  Crouching by the gas fire in the basement, staring into the redness of the flame until your cheeks burned and the shilling ran out, was safe. Listening to noises outside, yet not being part of them, was safe too. Here was not safe.

  “But we’re going on a trip, lovie. You’ll like it when you get there, honest. Come on, big smile now, give your face a joyride.”

  Dot tried to smile, but it wouldn’t come. “I don’t like it here,” she said.

  “But we ain’t even there yet. It’s only a railway station, pet,” said Gloria. “That’s just the noise of the loudspeakers.”

  Dot knew about Underground stations. Once or twice they’d had to sleep down there, though not often because Gloria said it wasn’t nice to be all pressed up against people you didn’t know. And you might catch tuberculosis from their breath. But Dot couldn’t remember ever being in a place like this. So high. So noisy. So much confused rushing about. Dot knew that when grown-ups started scurrying purposefully, something bad was about to happen, specially if you hadn’t heard the siren.

  “Course you have, pet,” said Gloria. “That time we came down from Winfarthing-Fersfield, after seeing your old man.”

  “Wasn’t like this,” said Dot. She couldn’t remember it at all. She just knew that a basement room was for sitting in, a children’s ward for visiting, and railway stations had been prime targets for being bombed. She held more tightly to Gloria’s hand.

  “There’s nothing to be frightened of, ducks. Not when there’s all these nice people about.” So long as they weren’t too close and breathing their germs on her, Gloria liked there to be people about. “And she’s ever such a nice lady we’re going to see.”

  “Who?”

  “I told you. Mrs. Hollidaye. Where I used to live, when they evacuated me the first time.”

  Dot couldn’t remember her.

  “Course you can’t remember, you was hardly even born when we was there. But you remember me telling you about it.”

  Dot shook her head.

  “Her husband was a real gentleman, ever so brave. I liked him. But then he went and jumped out of a plane in France. He hadn’t never even done it before. Got a medal for it.”

  “Did he have his gas mask on?”

  “How should I know? What kind of question is that?”

  Dot wondered why it was braver to jump out of a plane than to lose two fingers in a factory.

  “Mr. Brown must have been quite brave,” she said. Why hadn’t he been given a medal?

  “Who’s Mr. Brown?”

  “He didn’t have to do it, did he?”

  “Course not. He done it because he wanted to. He done it for his soldiers, to show them what they had to do. He was their padre like. Had a parachute on his back just like the rest, and holding out the holy cross in his hand. But the Germans went and got him.”

  Dot wondered. Perhaps it was dying that was the bravest thing a person could do? So was Baby brave when he died? Or could dying only be brave if you were shot at?

  “Derek’s brave, isn’t he?” she said.

  But Gloria didn’t hear, or anyhow didn’t answer.

  When Dot began to cry, she wasn’t sure if it was because of thinking about poor Mr. Brown’s two missing fingers or because she couldn’t remember what her father’s face looked like, or merely because of the alarming new orders about train departures cackling from the loudspeakers.

  “I tell you what, pet, let’s pop into the buffet and get a nice cup of tea before the train goes. How about that, then?”

  Dot liked sharing a cup of tea. Gloria drank first, from the top where it was scalding hot. Dot spooned up the bottom from where it was cool and milky.

  5

  A Trip on a Train

  The compartment was fitted out with everything they would need to live there forever. It was like having a perfect home of their own. They had their own windows with dark blue oilcloth roller blinds through which Dot could see into the compartment of the train alongside, just like looking over at a next-door house.

  Beneath the window was a useful foldout table. There were brass ashtrays, coat hooks, a mirror where Gloria would be able to do her hair, an overhead net to store things. The two rows of upholstered seats facing each other were like a pair of matching beds, one for each so they would not again need to share except when they wanted to.

  “I like it here,” said Dot, stretching out along her bed while Gloria took off her hat and placed it carefully on the luggage rack. “It’s comfy.”

  “We ain’t there yet, pet. We ain’t even started.”

  Just as the train began to move, a soldier with a kit bag slung like a khaki corpse over his shoulder glanced into their compartment.

  “Oops-a-daisy,” he said. “No smoker.”

  Gloria pretended not to notice him. Usually she loved a good chat, specially with people from the services.

  Overhead Dot noticed a row of shaded lamps each with its own switch. Gloria would be able to read her Picturegoer as late as she wanted without keeping Dot awake. Between the lamps, just as in a proper home, was a pair of framed photographs. Mrs. Parvis had photographs in her parlor. Hers hung on picture hooks. These ones were screwed to the wall.

  “‘Brighton and Hove Southern Railway,’” Gloria read out.

  “‘The Royal Promenade, Eastbourne.’ That’s at the seaside. I’ll take you there. One day. Maybe. Other one’s Brighton. I never been to Brighton. Now sit still and stop hopping about, will you. Anyone’d think you was a flea on the organ-grinder’s monkey.”

  The windows were streaky like at the basement.

  “We’d clean them windows,” Dot said. “If this was our home, wouldn’t we?”

  First thing we’d do, she thought, with a cloth and a big bucket of soapy water. So they’d sparkle. So you could see out anytime you wanted.

  Gloria closed the sliding door, pulled down the blinds, and switched off the six lamps that Dot had just put on.

  “Can’t see!” said Dot. “I need to look out my windows!” She lifted the bottom corner of one of the blinds.

  “Oi, don’t lean out or you’ll get smuts in your eye! You don’t understand, it’s better this way, love. You will behave proper when we get there, won’t you? You won’t go letting me down. Oh, I do hope you don’t. Look at your face! You still got that hanky?”

  It was in Dot’s pocket, still scrumpled up, still waiting for its rinse through. Gloria wrapped a corner of it round her index finger, spat to make it wet, then dabbed at Dot’s cheeks till they were sore.

  “See, ducks, this Mrs. Hollidaye what we’re going to see, her clothes are that shabby, but she’s like a real lady. She has these pearls round her neck. Wears them all the time, even when she’s out digging. So I really want you to be like a proper sort of little girl. She’s ever so posh, but she’s ever so kind, too. I want her to think we’re nice people.”

  “You are a nice person,” said Dot, though she was beginning to feel unsure about it. Nothing in the world was ever certain or fixed; things changed easily and when least expected. She thought she’d found the perfect place to live, yet already it was slipping away and this cozy compartment was only a stage on to something else. So who were the nice people? Was the king a nice person, and the princesses?

  “Course royalty is!”
said Gloria, shocked. “Goes without saying. Now your socks.” She reached down to take off Dot’s shoes, then her socks, one long, one not so long, one grayish-white, the other a different kind of fawnish-white. She turned them inside out, returned them to Dot to put on with the insides now on the outside. White socks never stayed clean. It was all very well for the princesses. There probably hadn’t been much dust lying around in a palace.

  “Gray socks are better,” said Dot. They didn’t show scuff marks at all.

  “See, I don’t want Mrs. Hollidaye to go thinking you’re riffraff. I don’t want her to go getting any wrong ideas about what’s become of me.”

  The train was moving fast. Gloria said, “Come over here now. Lay in my lap. Suck your thumb, there’s a love.”

  Dot looked at it and was surprised to see how dirty it had become. She inspected the fingers and thumb on her other hand. These, too, had become smudged with dirt, and the velvet cuffs of her coat and everything in the compartment was flecked with specks of greasy black, which came off onto you the moment you touched them. She wondered if this coat had ever been on a train before, when it had belonged to the other child.

  “Yes, please do,” said Gloria.

  She pulled Dot onto her knee. Being cradled against her mother’s soft warm body, Dot tried to feel like a baby, to remember what she had seen through the crack in the double doors as Gloria had cradled Baby against her while the nurses gathered round with protective outstretched arms.

  Sometimes Gloria was so strange. First she wanted Dot to be nice, next she wanted her to put a filthy thumb in her mouth and suck it.

  Obediently, Dot did as Gloria asked, gripping her thumb between her front teeth to prevent it slipping out.

  “Where we going?” Dot asked, her thumb still lying firmly on her tongue like Gloria wanted it.

  “And don’t talk no more.”

  So Dot whispered it.

  “Shh. You gotta be like my baby.”

  Dot sat bolt upright. “I can’t be your baby! You said I was too big to be carried. I don’t want to be no baby! I don’t want to be blind and dead.”

  “Please, ducky. Be a baby for Mum. Just on the train, till the man’s been past. See, I didn’t have the money to get no ticket for you.”

  Gloria took from her bag a little blanket made of colored squares that a long-ago lady in a shelter had knitted for Baby before he was born.

  “Baby’s blanket!” said Dot in surprise. “You brought it!”

  Gloria wrapped it gently around Dot’s head and shoulders, pulling it well forward over her face.

  “Now I can’t even see,” said Dot.

  “Just till after the bloke’s been along. I told you, I haven’t got no ticket for you.”

  Although not exactly dark, nor scary because Gloria was holding her tenderly, it was stuffy under the blanket and irritating to be covered over when you wanted to look out. Dot sucked away on her thumb.

  “Can I come out yet?”

  “No, shh. He’s just coming.”

  Dot heard the compartment door open. A draft of cold air blew in. Dot heard the man ask for Gloria’s ticket, felt the movement as Gloria reached for her purse.

  “Taking me little one down to the country to see her nan,” she heard Gloria say, then the click-clack of the ticket clipper before the man closed the door and they were alone again.

  Dot said, “Who’s my nan?”

  “Your nan died years ago.”

  “But you said we’re going to see my nan.”

  “Oh, that. That was to stop him asking nosy questions, like how old you was. But it’s all right. I don’t think he was that bothered. You look small enough.”

  Dot pushed back the blanket, slid off Gloria’s lap, and moved back to sit by her window. She lifted the bottom of the blind.

  “That’s right. You take a peek. That’s the real countryside out there. Ain’t it lovely? Full of animals and that.”

  “What kind of animals?”

  “Aw, I dunno,” Gloria said vaguely. “Cows and bulls. That sort of thing.”

  The next-door train had been left far behind. The houses had all gone too. There was nothing out there now. No walls, no roads, no buildings. No red buses, no red letter boxes, no red telephone boxes. No iron railings. No pavements, no front doors, no streets, no nothing, and it was growing dark as the black nothingness dashed past the window.

  “I want to go back. I changed my mind. I don’t like it no more.”

  “Do stop that crying!” Gloria snapped. “It makes your eyes all red. And now look at your face. All messed up again after I just cleaned you up! Take a look at it!”

  She held Dot up to the mirror and Dot saw the grayish rivulets where tears had run down her cheeks and been smudged to gray by her hands.

  She wondered how clean tears could make a person’s skin go dirty.

  “I told you you’d got to try and keep yourself looking nice for Mrs. Hollidaye,” said Gloria. “You wash clean and dry dirty, that’s always been your trouble.”

  6

  A Walk in the Night

  “Wakey-wakey! Come on, pet, you’re holding up production!”

  Dot felt herself being nudged awake, saw Gloria seize their two paper carriers, and they scrambled off the train at a dark station in the countryside.

  Then they started walking. The track felt soft and slithery, but in the dark she couldn’t see what it was she was stepping on.

  “Come on, pet. Keep up. Or I’ll lose you.”

  There were traps to catch them along the way. The heel of Gloria’s peep-toe shoe caught in a hole. Then the sleeve of Dot’s coat was clawed at by a long briar.

  Dot knew it was more dangerous than anything in London, even during blackouts and raids.

  Dot had heard often enough how careless talk costs lives, how even walls have ears. “It’s ever so dark round here,” she whispered. Somebody in the blackness around them was bound to be listening.

  “You can say that again,” said Gloria.

  “You said it’d be nice.”

  “Well, I was wrong, weren’t I? I must have forgot.”

  In London, the big plane tree stuck in the pavement outside Mrs. Parvis’s house had three white rings painted round its black trunk so people could see it even in the dark. Here you couldn’t tell if there were any obstacles in the way, and there were no pavements, either. Instead they were surrounded by ambiguous smells of unrecognizable growing things that had rotted and died, of living creatures that were scarcely human, hairy and fleshy. There were unknown sounds of subhuman things proceeding relentlessly forward, stopping, retrenching, to proceed onward again.

  Dot knew it must be tanks. She had never seen a tank close up. But she had seen them on the newsreel before the big film, creaking and groaning across the land, their great limbless, legless form crushing and grinding all that was in their way.

  Gloria said, “That’s never tanks. That’s trees making a noise. Or maybe the hedges.” But now she was whispering too, and Dot knew that she didn’t know what was out there with them either.

  Dot tried not to think of Hitler, nor of Dick Barton, Special Agent, nor of the fifth columnists, nor of those giant nuns with rifles and huge booted feet beneath their long black skirts who were enemy soldiers in disguise. Yet all the most unspeakably wicked men in the world, who caused havoc and lurked in dim places ready to pounce again, came surging into her mind. Mrs. Parvis said Hitler hadn’t really taken the poison in his bunker. She said that had been his double and he’d got away scot-free to come to live in the last country in the world where people would think of looking for him.

  “Don’t be silly, ducks, that’s all over now.”

  People were always saying things were over. But as Dot knew, it sometimes turned out they weren’t. And in a way, one didn’t want things to be over, for the uncertain future was more unsettling than the unexplained past.

  Dot wished that the metal caps on Gloria’s high heels wouldn’t make such a
tapping as they walked. She wondered what had been the use of all that trying to get clean on the train if they were now lost in a place where nobody would ever find them, not even when something happened and they disappeared forever. If only they’d stayed in the little home on the train. If only they’d never left the basement with the empty meat safe hanging outside the window.

  She heard heavy breathing like panting. It seemed to follow her like Hitler, Himmler, and the marching white faces of all the dead men.

  “Just an animal, I expect,” Gloria whispered. “You get all sorts. That’s what it’s for, the country. They live in the fields.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “How should I know? You’ll be the death of me with all your questions.”

  “They’ll have finished tea by now, won’t they?” Dot said.

  “Who?”

  “Back at Mrs. Parvis’s.”

  By now Dot would have had her dab with the damp corner of a towel at the sink on the landing. She’d be tucked beneath the blanket and the heavy coat and watching Gloria put on her makeup before she went out. Once in a while she went to a social club for air pilots who’d been in the hospital. She didn’t take Dot.

  “You wouldn’t like it, pet. Some of them don’t look too good, not after they been burned like that, specially when it’s their features what have gone. That’s worse than legs.”

  “Are we nearly there?”

  The thin string handles of the paper carrier cut deep into the palm of Dot’s hand. Gloria kissed it better and carried both bags.

  When Dot began to stumble and fall over with tiredness, Gloria gathered her up and carried her, too.

  Clinging piggyback to her mother’s back, Dot felt the curtain of bunchy black net on the side of Gloria’s hat flick at her face. She felt the two paper carriers swinging where Gloria had put them over her wrists. Dot’s eyes were growing used to the dark just like they had to in the shelter when the warden’s lamp went out. Now Dot could see the shapes of trees beside the track, of fences, of a white gate. There were no tanks, no fifth columnists disguised as Sisters of Charity. They were going up a stony drive. Gloria was walking faster, almost striding on her high heels as though she had finally refound her way.