Union Belle

by Deborah Challinor

He set the bucket between her feet and stepped well back. She let go and an arc of vomit—pale orange, Jack noted—shot out of her mouth and into the bucket, making a dull ringing sound as it hit the bottom. Then another lot came up, and he winced at the strangled groans coming from Ellen’s throat. He moved behind her, collected up her hair and held it back off her face so it wouldn’t get in the way.

  ‘Mum?’ Davey stood at the door, clutching a half-eaten sandwich in his grubby hand.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Jack said, ‘she’s just having a bit of a spew.’

  ‘Did she eat something yucky?’

  ‘I’d say so. Outside now, there’s a good boy.’

  Davey retreated.

  After a minute or two more of unproductive retching, Ellen stopped heaving and moved her head away from the bucket. Jack stayed where he was, stroking her hair and patting her shoulders, which felt slight and insubstantial under his big hands.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ellen said eventually, then she sniffed violently, coughed and spat into the bucket.

  Jack pulled a face; it was a killer when spew went up the back of your nose. He called out to Neil, who appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Where do you keep your towels, son?’

  ‘In the hall cupboard.’

  ‘Get a clean one for your mum, will you?’

  Neil tiptoed past Ellen, giving her a wary look as he went. She didn’t even look up, she was so ashamed of herself.

  Jack moved over to the sink, filled the kettle and set it on the range. Neil came back as he was spooning tea leaves into the pot, silently handed his mother a fresh towel and went outside again. After a moment Jack could hear the two boys running around on the lawn, kicking a ball and arguing about who was going to be the striker and who was the goalie.

  By the time the kettle boiled, Ellen had shifted in her chair and had her arms on the table and her head down. Jack poured the water over the tea and sat down next to her.

  ‘Feeling better?’

  Ellen shook her head, her face obscured by her hair.

  ‘Not used to the whisky?’

  ‘No. I feel foul.’

  Jack nodded in sympathy. He always felt bloody awful, too, after a heavy session on the whisky.

  ‘Do you want to go to bed?’ he asked, and almost smiled. He’d rehearsed asking her that question so many times in his head over the last fortnight, but never imagined she’d be half unconscious and stinking of vomit when he finally got up the nerve to do it.

  When she said yes, he wasn’t quite sure what to do. It was all very well helping out, but he didn’t think Tom would appreciate him stripping his wife down to her underwear and tucking her up in bed.

  He went to the back door. ‘Neil! Come and give us a hand, will you?’

  Neil turned away from the soccer ball he’d been lining up for the goal of the century between the feijoa tree and the lemon tree, and trotted up the steps.

  Between them they got Ellen into the bedroom. Jack resisted the urge to have a good look around, at the heavy dark furniture and the lace runner on Ellen’s dressing table and the toiletries and trinket boxes scattered across it, and concentrated on sitting her upright on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Pull the covers back,’ he suggested, and waited while Neil folded back the quilted bedspread and the smooth cotton sheets beneath it.

  ‘I’m sorry, love,’ Ellen said to no one in particular.

  ‘We should probably take her shoes off,’ Jack said.

  While Neil was crouching on the floor unfastening the buckles on his mother’s sandals, Jack undid the belt at Ellen’s waist, feeling disconcertingly guilty with the boy only inches away.

  Satisfied now that she would at least be able to breathe, he urged Ellen to lie down. She rolled onto her side, facing away from him, and let her eyes close.

  Neil pulled the blankets up and tucked them around her shoulders, as she’d done for him almost every night of his

  life, then stood back, unsure of what to do next. He looked upset and Jack felt sorry for him.

  ‘I’ll get the bucket,’ Jack said, speaking from personal experience.

  He took it out to the washhouse, emptied the contents into the tub, ran the tap to wash it away then rinsed the bucket thoroughly. On the way back to the bedroom he stopped to grab a fresh towel from the hall cupboard.

  ‘That should do the trick,’ he said to Neil as he put the bucket on the floor near the head of the bed, and arranged the towel over the blankets in case she missed. ‘We’ll leave her to it now, shall we? I’d better be off.’

  Neil nodded, and followed him out into the kitchen. Awkwardly, he stuck out his hand. ‘Thanks for your help, Mr Vaughan.’

  Jack shook and said, ‘She’ll be right, son,’ although he wasn’t sure whether he meant Ellen, or things in general. He had no idea if he could guarantee this solemn-faced young boy either.

  Outside in his truck, Jack sat with his hand resting on the keys in the ignition, trying to make some sort of sense out of how he was feeling. Normally a scene like that would have warned him very smartly off a woman.

  But it hadn’t. Not at all.

  FIVE

  Tom refused to speak to Ellen until mid-morning the following day, even though she forced herself out of bed at seven as usual to cook breakfast for him and the boys. She’d gone through the motions while Tom deliberately ignored her and the boys snatched glances in her direction as she worked at the bench, too frightened by their father’s stony silence to say anything. She’d almost vomited again over the fried eggs, but gritted her teeth and held it down. And, Jesus, her head hurt, and she’d had a terrible attack of the runs when she’d first got up.

  Worse than that, though, was the absolute mortification she felt about having made such a spectacle of herself, more or less in front of the whole town. Thank God she hadn’t staggered all the way up Joseph Street, weaving and lurching and probably throwing up all over herself on the way. Thank God Jack had come along.

  After the dishes, she lay down on the couch in the sitting room and allowed herself to feel miserable. What on earth had he thought of her? He would probably never speak to her again, and she couldn’t blame him. What a fool she’d made of herself. She had vague, fragmented recollections of him picking her up off the grass outside Lorna’s house and bringing her home in his truck, and of sitting in the kitchen with her head in a bucket, but that was it. Had she actually been sick on him? She couldn’t remember. And what the hell might she have said to him?

  She slept then, for several hours, and woke only when sunlight began to burn into her eyelids. She whimpered and rolled over on the couch, moving a cushion so that it covered her face.

  ‘Do you want me to close the curtains?’

  It was Tom. She moved the cushion an inch and squinted up at him. The light was excruciatingly bright, but at least he’d finally said something to her. He was holding a cup of tea, with a piece of unbuttered toast cut in half and balanced on the saucer.

  ‘Yes, please. Is that for me?’

  ‘If you can keep it down,’ he said.

  She ignored the jibe, and sat up slowly while Tom went around the room closing the curtains. When he’d finished he sat down on the end of the couch and fixed her with a look.

  ‘What the bloody hell did you think you were doing?’

  Ellen felt herself going red, as she invariably did when he told her off.

  ‘I don’t know. I just…I got carried away, I suppose.’

  It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him what he thought he was doing whenever he came home with a bit much under his belt, but she knew that would only make matters worse.

  ‘I’m sorry, it won’t happen again,’ she said, aware that she’d never meant anything more sincerely in her life.

  ‘I bloody well hope not,’ Tom said. ‘Who else was there?’

  ‘Lorna, Milly, Avis and Val, and Dot, too, for a while.’

  Tom frowned—he didn’t approve of Valerie Mason. Stan was a rea
sonable sort of bloke, even if he did get a bit aggressive when he was on the booze, but Val could be a real shrew. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘I was talking to Bert before.’

  Ellen thought angrily, then why did you ask? She felt ghastly enough as it was without Tom interrogating her.

  ‘Bloody lucky Jack came along and scraped you up,’ he added, ‘otherwise Christ knows what might have happened.’

  They both knew nothing would have happened, apart from the possibility of her making an even bigger fool of herself, but that seemed beside the point as far as Tom was concerned.

  ‘And as for the boys,’ Tom went on, ‘Neil was beside himself when I got home. Poor little bugger, having to pour his own mother into bed.’

  Ellen winced; she would have to talk to Neil later on, on his own, and try to make it up to him. And Davey She must have given them a hell of a fright.

  They heard a knock then, and a familiar voice called out, ‘Ellen? Thomas? Anybody home?’

  Ellen closed her eyes in dismay—her mother.

  Gloria marched into the sitting room and stood looking down at Ellen. Her mouth was doing its famous cat’s-bum impersonation, and Ellen knew she was in for it.

  ‘I hope you’re proud of yourself, young lady,’ Gloria said.

  Ellen didn’t respond, knowing from past experience that it would be useless to try to speak up for herself while her mother was winding up to one of her tirades.

  ‘The whole town’s talking about it, I’ve never felt so ashamed in my life!’ Gloria went on loudly, her voice crashing into Ellen’s skull like a hail of bullets.

  ‘Probably not the whole town, Gloria,’ Tom said. ‘Its Saturday, not everyone will be up and about yet.’

  Gloria turned on him. ‘You know what the gossip’s like out here, Thomas, they were talking about it at the shops just before.’ She glared at Ellen. At the shops, Ellen!’

  Ellen put her face in her hands; her headache was getting worse and she needed to go back to bed.

  ‘Who was talking about it?’ Tom demanded.

  ‘Nora Bone, to start with.’

  ‘Christ, it probably will be all over town, then, won’t it?’ Tom said, enjoying his mother-in-law’s discomfort. ‘Cup of tea? There’s one in the pot.’

  ‘Oh, go on then,’ Gloria said, sighing ostentatiously and subsiding into a chair. ‘I never thought I’d say this, Ellen, but this sort of behaviour suggests to me that you’re turning out to be just like your father!’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Mum, I am not.’

  Tom headed for the kitchen.

  ‘Yes, you are. What will everyone think?’

  ‘How should I know, and why should I care?’ Ellen replied, borrowing one of Alf’s favourite responses just to annoy her mother. She regarded her warily, waiting for what was sure to come next.

  ‘You should care, Ellen. Where’s your pride?’

  ‘Still in Lorna’s garden?’

  There was the tiniest twitch at the corner of Gloria’s mouth, but she stifled it before it could turn into a real smile.

  Tom came back with Gloria’s cup of tea.

  ‘Ellen’s having a lie-down now,’ he said.

  ‘Am I?’ Ellen was surprised and grateful.

  ‘Yes. And Gloria, the boys want you to go outside and have a look at their tree hut. You have to be impressed, it’s taken them three weeks to build it.’

  Gloria collected her cup and saucer and stood up. ‘Your father’s dropping in later, Ellen,’ she said. ‘He says he wants to congratulate you,’ she added witheringly.

  Unable to help himself, Tom laughed as he followed her out into the hall.

  Grim news arrived several days later. Encouraged by the government, in particular Bill Sullivan, a scab port union had been organised at Whakatane. It was a blow to solidarity, and it sent ripples of unease and resentment through the heart of the TUC. On top of that Holland had come up with a plan, which he believed would tempt the striking unions in the FOL, at least, to return to work. He was desperate—the unprecedented extent of this latest bout of industrial action was paralysing the country. He knew, too, that if the FOL accepted the conditions and went back, the watersiders would be more or less on their own. And so would the miners.

  Against the recommendations of Labour Party leader Walter Nash, who was negotiating on behalf of the watersiders, Jock Barnes rejected the conditions. Fintan Walsh, Barnes’ sworn rival, accepted them, and unions affiliated to the FOL began to return to work.

  When Tom arrived home from his committee meeting and broke the news to Ellen, he was voicing the fears of thousands of strikers around the country: now that a crack had appeared in the dam, more and more unions would trickle back to work and the whole thing could eventually collapse.

  He was still out of sorts on the following Saturday, as they walked down the street to the miners’ hall for the St Patrick’s Day dance. The boys were dressed from head to toe in green—or more correctly khaki, as the dye Ellen had used to transform their old shorts and shirts to a jaunty emerald hadn’t taken very well. Ellen was also wearing green, but Tom had refused to join in and wore his usual white shirt and brown sports coat, saying he was buggered if he was prancing about like a bloody leprechaun after the government had done such a dirty on the Whakatane wharfies.

  Ellen was wary about showing her face at the dance, worried that everyone might still be talking about her. They weren’t, though, according to Milly, who had predicted that Ellen’s fall from grace would be a one-day wonder. And apparently it was, because nobody had said anything about it when she’d arrived at the hall on Tuesday morning to pack and hand out the relief packages. She’d just got on with it, and so had everyone else.

  But though the town might have forgotten about it, she hadn’t. She hadn’t seen Jack for an entire week, and had become convinced that he was avoiding her. She wouldn’t be surprised if he was; she’d behaved terribly and her face still burned every time she thought about it. She would never, she’d decided, drink anything stronger than shandies again.

  They were late, so the dance was well under way by the time they arrived. Vic Anscombe stood up and waved out to them, gesturing at the two empty chairs beside him. The boys raced off, looking for their friends. Everyone was here, except for Jack. And Lew Trask. Ellen’s heart sank, and she told herself not to be such a fool.

  When Bert offered to get her a shandy she accepted, then asked him where Dot was.

  ‘At home, resting,’ he said. ‘She didn’t want to come out. My mother’s got the kids.’

  Ellen looked at him, at his tired face and the dark bags under his eyes. ‘She’s really not well again, is she?’

  Bert sat down. ‘No, she’s not.’

  ‘Will it be a bad one, do you think?’ Ellen asked.

  Bert was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘She’s not eating and she can’t stop crying. It’s been going on all week. It starts the minute she wakes up and goes on all day until she goes to bed again. She won’t go out and she hides if anyone comes to the door.’

  Ellen nodded; she’d gone over to visit two days ago and had seen Dot through the sitting room window sitting as still as a mouse on the couch, even though she’d knocked for ages.

  ‘She won’t even brush her hair any more,’ Bert went on, ‘or have a bath or get dressed. I had to wash her myself this morning, she was getting that whiffy.’

  Shocked, Ellen looked at him as he fought back tears.

  ‘But I had to come out tonight, Ellen. I can’t sit and watch her like that twenty-four hours a day, I just can’t.’

  ‘Have you had the doctor in?’ This was awful; she’d had no idea Dot was this bad.

  ‘He was over yesterday.’

  Ellen waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. Finally, she asked, ‘What did he say?’

  Bert’s mouth quivered, and for a moment she thought he might burst into tears in front of everyone. But instead he took a deep breath and looked her directly in the eye, the expression
on his face a mixture of dignity, grief and resignation. ‘He said she might have to go away, if she doesn’t perk up soon.’

  ‘Go away where?’

  ‘Hospital. Tokanui, perhaps.’

  Ellen drew in a sharp breath. Tokanui mental hospital?

  ‘Just for a few months,’ Bert said, ‘just until she’s back on her feet again. And only if she doesn’t come right.’

  ‘Oh, Bert.’ Ellen felt tears stinging her own eyes. Suddenly, getting drunk and falling over in someone’s garden didn’t seem such a terrible thing to have to cope with after all. ‘What can I do to help?’

  He smiled gratefully. ‘Nothing at the moment, thanks, Ellen, we’re managing. Perhaps if we need someone to take the kids, say for a day or something like that? That would be good.’

  ‘Oh, Bert, you know we’d have them. Overnight, too, if that’s what you need.’

  Bert patted her hand, as if she were the one needing consolation, not him. ‘I know that, Ellen, you’ve always been a good friend to Dot. I’ll get your shandy.’

  As usual, the men were busy talking about the latest strike developments. Jack was conspicuous by his absence, to Ellen anyway. She wanted very much to ask where he was, but didn’t. He wasn’t at the dance, and that was that.

  But half an hour later, suddenly he was there, sauntering casually up with his usual broad smile and his jacket slung over his shoulder. His hair was damp and curling up at the ends, as if he’d recently had a bath, and as he squeezed past her towards a vacant chair at the end of the table, she caught the faint smell of soap coming off him.

  ‘You smell pretty,’ Pat said as Jack sat down. ‘Been having a nice long soak?’

  ‘No, a short one. Needed it, though. Me and Lew have just done that steer we got this morning. Big bastard it was, too, took us ages.’

  Ellen had a sudden vision of Dot stumbling out to the toilet and being confronted with Lew and Jack up to their armpits in blood and animal parts.

  ‘Not in Bert’s shed!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘No,’ Tom said, ‘don’t panic, at Lew’s place.’

  Ellen exhaled in relief, although she might have guessed that Bert wouldn’t have allowed it.