The Mask and Other Stories

by Nesta Tuomey

  Sister Luke said other things. ‘Don’t brood,’ she advised. ‘Keep your minds and your hands busy.’ Hands I understand. An extra pair can be useful where busyness abounds. But my mind now has never been anything but active. But it was to Rosa after all that she spoke. Only later she uttered to me in private the dispiriting, cryptic remarks which in essence denied the existence of my stillborn children. ‘There was no baby, dear. Not this time nor before. Believe me now, Mary, when I say there never was any baby.’

  All of which thoroughly cast me down. May God forgive her for saying such terrible things and denying me the hope of ever producing my perfect child, my dream child, as if he had no right to life.

  As for Rosa, she became cheered enough to dance for us, her straining bodice showing signs she was lactating, twin constellations in the Milky Way. On proud stamping feet she belaboured an invisible tambourine, ululating plaintively, while all about her the women applauded her wild dervish. Following the success of this performance they made Rosa their special pet and she became a familiar sight with outstretched hand, trudging from bed to bed, ‘For the love of Jesus,’ she’d beseech, showing her gold fillings in an earnest grin, ‘Please, for the love of Jee-sus!’

  When she ran little errands for them they rewarded her with small coins from the change; Sadie, mother of the insatiable twins, and other nursing mothers, her best customers. ‘Pretty Rosy-Posy,’ they praised and ‘Romany Rose’ although no one could say for sure where she had been born. She could equally have hailed from Lithuania or, further still, Estonia. But it pleased them to be gracious.

  Ah, beware the fickle favour of the mob. Even then her star was in its descent. Sister Luke, always short of nurses, gave her little jobs to do. On discovering that Rosa could take temperatures and keep ward charts, talents learned under the tutelage of the DoctorDocs, Rosa no longer trudged from bed to bed in subservient attitude but with authority. When singled out once again for her dextrous use of a hypodermic syringe, the mood in the ward grew spiteful and the women dubbed her Rosa Klebb. Gleefully, the hospital orderlies took it up, even old death’s head, the porter, whose idea of fun was visiting the morgue, cackled moistly at the joke.

  Men can be very cruel but then so can women. Putting poor lactating Rosa in a ward full of new mothers and she with no infant of her own. At night the sight of Rosa in penitential position tearfully expressing her milk into the bath – so much creamy liquid spouting from those swollen coffee-coloured breasts – moved me strangely and inspired a dream in which all of us, women and children, were drowning in great vats of milk. Only dream child and I managed to escape. This I felt was a good omen and so I told Sister Luke but still she continued to deny all that I had endured. Ah, but what does she know of sorrow and suffering for once you have set your sights on the perfect child no other will do.

  All too quickly Rosa lost her bloom and the sheen faded from her skin. She might have been merely pining for the men who made good babies but I blamed the malice of the ward. Alas, the situation turned out to be more crucial for Rosa’s decline stemmed not from persecution but guilt.

  ‘I have done a bad, bad thing,’ she sobbed, when I came upon her in her usual penitential position. ‘Jee-sus is punishing me for giving away my babies.’

  I knew then what had sent Rosa fleeing into exile. Picture the scene. Her latest baby bought and paid for while still in the womb. With the adoption papers signed and the couple eagerly awaiting delivery of the child Rosa decides too late she wants to keep this one. Escape is her only avenue. Only death, not legalities, had cheated her in the end.

  The word soon got around and, in high moral indignation, the ward women refused to allow her near them. They even began calling me names, ‘Dipso’ and ‘Cocaine Mary’. It was the price I knew for having befriended her. Indeed, we might have been half-sisters, Rosa and I, just like her little daughters long since auctioned on the market and gone their separate ways.

  In vain was Sister Luke’s appeal on behalf of ‘the poor unfortunate in your midst used and abused all her life,’ for it merely confirmed what they had already suspected, that Rosa was blighted with more than ill-luck and would infect them all. If they only knew what I knew they would have had even greater cause for alarm. But did I warn them? No, I did not, for between me and Rosa existed a certain bond, them I owed nothing.

  It all began the night Sadie - dead to the world - slept through the 2 a.m. feed. The twins were all set for a good rumbustious, ward-waking roar when in the gloom a stealthy movement caught my eye, and before long their whinging turned to greedy gusty sighing. Sounds of gratification that I was to hear again and again and always under cover of darkness for Rosa the Wet Nurse took great care to avoid discovery.

  Out of loyalty I kept my counsel about her nocturnal activities just as she kept hers about my forays on the drugs cupboard. Let me tell you even if my dream child had been involved I would have acted no differently, been proud even. And that’s saying a lot, watching her hour after hour in the shadows, selflessly nursing those infants in expiation for the sin of selling her babies, maybe herself too.

  Now whenever the ward women heap their petulance upon Romany Rose, or grumble about her immoral or unsanitary habits, I tell myself before long they may very well have more to contend with than dirty fingernails or body lice. For the way I see it the various strains coursing through Rosa’s milk are linking the ills afflicting Eastern Europe with those of our small island in the Irish Sea; microscopic and deadly they flow freely along the vast network of tributaries, impartially acquainting the older micro-organisms they encounter with newer, more virulent ones. In this manner that seemingly innocent milkshake continues to spread the malevolent strain which had its origins elsewhere.

  Stopover

  ‘Well, you can fend for yourselves. I’m off to bed,’ the Captain said, almost vindictively. ‘See you at pick-up time.’ He was a small dour man with a lined face and these were the first words of a non-official nature he had addressed to his crew since taking off from the airport that afternoon. He shot towards the hotel lift, toting a case so large it reduced the hostess’s vanity case by comparison to mere doll-size proportions.

  ‘Sociable old bugger,’ the First Officer remarked dispassionately. ‘Must have had a helluva night last night.’

  He and the hostess exchanged rueful, abandoned smiles behind the gold-braided back. Emboldened by the smile, the First Officer said, ‘Care to come out for a drink? I don’t fancy bed this early, do you?’

  The hostess blushed for the ambiguity of his remark and was about to agree that six o’clock was a bit early when he added with a grin, ‘Unless you were planning to wash your hair or something.’

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ she admitted, the clichéd joke releasing her from the paralysing self-consciousness which had begun to creep the minute they were left together. She laughed, showing small even teeth, like a child’s milk teeth. ‘I have no plans. I’d love to come.’

  She was pleased by the suggestion. It was what she had all along envisaged, if not with him, with the airline rep with whom she had gone out once or twice before on overnights, only tonight he was on late duty. Still, one man was as good as another, Anne told herself. Going somewhere, anywhere, on stopovers was what counted.

  Not that Anne had very much experience to date. She was not long on the line, was barely two months out of hostess training school. But before coming away she had heard great reports from the other hostesses about the fun to be had on Birmingham overnights. She had been hoping to visit an ice rink, now she instinctively ruled this out, recognising that it was the kind of thing you did in a crowd, not with just one member of your crew and one you hardly knew at that.

  ‘I’d love to,’ she told him again. She saw that he was nice to look at - brown eyes under straight dark brows, clear skin, a generous mouth. No blemishes that she could see. If she had she would not have gone with him for abnormality of any kind revolted her. She could no more have dated a man wi
th a squint as agreed to marry a man with a hare-lip.

  ‘Great!’ the pilot said in relief, aware that amongst the crews she had a reputation for being something of an ice-goddess. ‘Meet you down here in say... ten minutes?’

  Anne nodded gracious assent and moved towards the lift, her bag slung jauntily on the padded shoulder of her emerald jacket. She was glad now that she had packed her black dress, the one with the keyhole back and shoe-string straps. That dress could take her anywhere, she thought in satisfaction, even to a nightclub. It was a Dior model and cost a week’s salary and flight allowances; already it had more than repaid the money invested in it.

  As she waited for the lift to descend she looked back and saw the pilot lean close to say something funny to the kinky-haired receptionist. At least, Anne presumed it was funny for the girl responded with a great crack of laughter. ‘You randy devil you! I hope your wife knows the kind of perverted mind lurking behind that innocent face of yours.’

  His wife! The hostess got into the lift feeling slight shock at the thought of him having a wife. He looked so young, she thought. Not nearly old enough to be married. But then to be a co-pilot, she reckoned, he would have to be at least twenty-six, which was really quite old enough. Why, she reminded herself knowledgeably, in some Polynesian cultures children as young as twelve were joined in wedlock!

  The hostess was still a virgin; the only twenty-four year old virgin in the airline, Anne sometimes thought, as she listened to the other girls’ gossip. While hers was not a spendthrift nature she did not hoard her virginity with calculated miserliness but, rather, fastidiously preserved it like some pearl of great price. So she liked to believe.

  What Anne deplored was waste. She shuddered when she heard about casual deflowerments in the backs of cars, usually after a night of unwise drinking. It all seemed to her so tatty somehow, an unfair exchange, hardly worthwhile. But above all it lacked romance, surely the cardinal sin.

  It was true that once or twice Anne had been in similar fraught situations herself but no matter how far her passions led her she had always emerged - no, unscathed was not quite the right word - intact would be nearer the mark. Possibly because up to this there had always been some vital factor missing in her amorous encounters. Opportunity and desire had never quite coincided, man and circumstances been compatible. Anne was not unreasonable. Her partner did not have to be an Adonis, merely young and healthy, with no physical defects. Nor was she hankering after the honeymoon suite in a Grade A hotel. Definitely though, a bedroom and fresh, if not scented, sheets were an important adjunct. All constituents present, she told herself, she would yield her pearl without regret. She was not aware of any self-deceit; so far she had not been put to the test.

  In fact Anne was a helpless romantic, hopelessly in love with the idea of romance. In the airline she saw it all about her. It was in the other hostesses’ sparkling engagement rings, the pilots’ gold-braided uniforms. It was too, she considered, in the glittering strung-out rosary of runway lights, the candy-floss clouds close-pressing on the cockpit windows, the wings turned molten silver by shimmering auroras as they climbed up the airways. Even the flightloads of raucous holidaymakers embarking on their chartered forays to Ibiza and Lanzarote held for her a certain enchantment, though admittedly to a lesser degree than the legitimately wedded honeymooners. Discreetly studying their enraptured faces she felt tiny shoots of excitement stab through her as if they were all of them in it together, this conspiracy of romance, she as much as any of them.

  None of this was complete fantasy. From dreaming, breathing, anticipating romance, Anne had created her own romantic aura. With her creamy apple skin, her slender velvet-beribboned neck, her crowning glory of jet-black hair, she managed to suggest to the more artistic amongst her admirers, a work by Romney, perhaps his portrait of a young Emma Hamilton; the others of a literary bent discerned in her a resemblance to Nabokov’s Lolita. So they never tired of telling her. There was a demure, yet provocative quality about Anne’s beauty which prompted such comparisons. And it was not all sham. Despite her seductive appearance Anne was a very virginal girl.

  She showered and changed into the designer dress. With a thrill of anticipation, she looped a cool rope of imitation pearls about her neck, before joining the First Officer in the foyer. Could this be the night?

  ‘All set?’ On his arm Jim carried his pilot’s gabardine, the navy counterpart to her hooded hostess garment and, in which, Anne was convinced she looked like a member of some bilious Klu Klux clan. Not even if Sotuknang sent another Flood, she was fond of pronouncing, would she consent to wear it off-duty. Although invariably uttered with airy insouciance, her mother would have recognised the determined angle of her jaw. Now a trailing length of black chiffon was Anne’s only concession to climate as, throat and arms bare to the night, she left the hot-house atmosphere of the hotel foyer and went with him on to the darkening street.

  They were on their way to a jazz session in the Bull Ring, Jim told her, as they walked along. From two streets away Anne heard a saxophone, the sound soaring true and pure. Drawing near, she nodded in pleased recognition of Basin Street Blues. Already there was a crowd going in the door of the pub. Everything in England, she was discovering, began earlier than at home. Finished earlier too.

  It left you fresher for the main events of the evening, the other hostesses slyly hinted. Just what events Anne had still to find out.

  A new number was racketting away as she followed her pilot inside and queued with him under the pall of smoke mantling the bar.

  ‘Vodka okay for you? ‘ Jim asked, as he handed her a glass of Smirnoff. Anne nodded. She had never tasted it before. She clasped it against the pearl rope and eased herself up on to a stool. Jim wedged himself into a space beside her, standing with his back to the wall.

  All around them couples huddled at tables, their faces contorting in a roar of applause at the commencement of each new number. With an aloof, smiling look, Anne sipped vodka and gazed at the band. For the most part ‘Hump’s Dwarfs’ were great hulking men. They wore tight-fitting pantaloons and short, high-waisted jackets, over which flowed long snowy beards, reminding Anne of Big Claus and Little Claus from Grimm’s fairy tales. She glanced at the First Officer wanting to share this image but philosophically accepted the impossibility of making herself heard.

  ‘They must be sweltering,’ she ventured at last, pressing her lips to his ear when he lowered his head to hear.

  Jim nodded and laughed in agreement. ‘They won’t die of thirst anyway.’ He indicated the tankards lined up behind the bandstand. The musicians mopped their foreheads and, as one man or dwarf, thirstily swigged their beer.

  The leader was balding and rotund. He clapped his hands over his head to announce the start of each new number and to show how happy he was. Maybe that’s his name, Anne thought. Happy! She wondered which were Dopey and Sleepy. Idly, she amused herself by fitting names on them all.

  As the vocalist sang an Ottilie Patterson number Anne swayed with half-closed lids and drooping shoulder strap. Every so often Jim lifted it, almost reverently, into place. It became a ritual to which Anne looked forward and even to precipitate, hunching one smooth shoulder. She shivered each time his questing fingers brushed her skin.

  ‘You’ll go another,’ he suggested, observing with satisfaction that the ice was melting.

  ‘What? Another wodka?’ Anne exclaimed in tipsy surprise as it appeared with astonishing regularity in front of her. She was silent in her calculations as Jim battled once more to the bar. Four, she reckoned, or was it five?

  By the time the dwarfs were trumpeting out their last number ‘The world is waiting for the Sunrise’ she had drunk two more of the same and was seeing Hump’s Dwarfs in triplicate (all twenty-one of them), white beards galore, waving and jigging like mad through a fog of grey, beardlike smoke. She giggled and squinted over her hand but still saw an inordinately large number of them.

  The leader gave his little rub
ber-ball bounce, clapped all six of his fat little hands over his bulbous heads, expanded sideways into three times himself, and the jazz session was over for the night.

  In the vault of the heavens diamond chips stabbed an indigo sky before swooping down without warning.

  ‘Feeling okay?’

  The cold air afforded Anne temporary respite. ‘Never better,’ she cried. ‘Great jazz, wasn’t it?’ She heard her slurry drunken laugh with horror. From tilting concrete she examined the swooping stars in wonder, blinked in awe when on a length of elastic they snapped neatly back into place. ‘God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world,’ she intoned piously.

  ‘You’re squiffy!’ Jim laughed with quiet amusement as he hauled her up; his hands, sensuously shaping the contour of her hips, were at once lingering and possessive.

  ‘Had a good evening, ducks?’ Arms akimbo, the receptionist watched their uneven progress across the foyer. ‘My, aren’t you the Bluebeard,’ she chided the First Officer admiringly.

  ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet,’ Jim joked back at her. From their nook beside the bar the elderly residents registered disapproval. The First Officer felt the additional weight as he supported Anne into the lift. ‘Now we’ve really given them something to talk about,’ he predicted with rueful accuracy.

  ‘Sad lot!’ Anne wrote them off gaily, but with an inward shudder. How terrible to be old and ugly and unloved, she thought, condemned to finish out life in a boring vacuum. Suddenly it became imperative to avail herself of every moment, worthwhile or otherwise. She grew cunning as they got out of the lift and staggered against him, pretending to an even greater degree of insobriety.

  Jim chuckled, confirmed in his earlier opinion that the ice was, indeed, melting. They lurched along the corridor, their progress further impeded by Anne’s giggling insistence on soft-shoe shuffling every blossom on the sprigged carpet.