The Day They Shot Edward
Page 4
‘Didn’t I tell you that I’ll be there to share decisions?’
Matthew sobbed louder. Evasion, not sharing, was safer.
‘Matthew, didn’t I tell you?’
He shook his head at her insistence.
‘Matthew, bullies triumph because their victims are weak. Miss Loyal Empire Woman can’t hurt you while I’m there. Come now, be brave.’ She shook him a little. ‘Be brave.’
He didn’t feel brave. His grandmother was so small. One of the little people, he was certain. What if she had to crawl on the floor?
‘Edward could come. Can we take Edward?’
‘No!’ His Grandmother’s voice was hard. ‘I don’t need a man to help me look after my grandson.’
‘But Edward’s big. She couldn’t make him creep around and push the chariot wheels.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but nobody is going to push any chariot wheels, although I would like the chance to run over some people. Come on. We’ll tidy ourselves.’
Gran cleaned his shoes, ironed him a fresh shirt, wetted and combed his hair. She changed her own blouse to a pale-pink silk and put on a black straw hat, a single pink rose on its brim.
‘People respect clothes. And the way you speak. Drop your aitches, fail to finish your words—say comin’ and not coming—and you’re fighting from the back line. That’s why you need to go to school. We may not have much money but I won’t see you deprived of education.’
Matthew held her hand as far as the school gates. He planned to let go of her once they entered the school grounds. He was divided by his need for her protection and his horror of being seen clinging to her. But as the school battlements loomed over him he clasped her tighter.
‘What a dismal place,’ Gran sniffed.
She mounted the steps unhesitatingly and marched along the corridor.
‘It’s like a wooden coffin and as stuffy. No wonder children hate school.’
Halfway down the corridor the door to Matthew’s classroom opened and his teacher stepped out. She halted. An ingratiating smile reserved for adults began to shape her face at the sight of Gran. It froze into the mask of a comic character when she saw Matthew. Her hand went directly to her cheek where a thin red line still remained, a stain faintly visible through the white powder. Matthew tugged Gran’s hand but she had no intention of scuttling past.
‘We are here to see the principal. Please direct me to him.’
Matthew waited for the face to thrust into Gran’s. What would he do? Gran was so small and so was he. The face would blow up like a balloon. A huge soft red balloon would engulf and suffocate Gran and leave him alone. The teacher remained silent. Her eyes full of hatred as her hands fondled the chain of clasps nervously.
‘Never mind,’ Gran snapped. ‘We’ll find him ourselves.’ And she thrust past the other woman pulling Matthew to keep pace with her.
Matthew heard a door snap behind him. ‘She’s gone,’ he whispered.
‘Of course. What else would she do?’ Assurance was catching and Matthew felt a shiver of excitement.
‘The principal’s door is the one at the end of the corridor,’ he told her in a low voice and was quite surprised that he no longer wanted to whisper.
‘Good. We’ll introduce ourselves.’
Gran knocked briskly and they entered a room which might have been a monk’s cell for all its bare, comfortless furnishings. No sun penetrated the little wooden hole and only the dimmest of outside light filtered through the small window two thirds of the way up the wall. The single pane of glass scratched and opaque with age had dark hairy little corners where spiders had long nested without disturbance. Ledgers lay on a wooden table and a couple of old wooden cupboards propped themselves against the wall. On a stiff wooden chair behind the table sat a short grey-haired man with a soft grey furry beard and rimless spectacles. He rose as they entered and placed the one other chair in the room on the opposite side of the table for Gran.
He looked at Matthew who was still standing, allowing his gaze to wander a moment uncomfortably around the room, and smiled a little shyly and helplessly as if there was a secret to share. Then he patted him on the head, lifted his shoulders in the barest shrug and returned to his seat.
‘Mr Werther, my grandson has been bullied by one of your teachers. I am here to make a formal complaint. He had no money for the “contribution”, I believe she calls it, to the war effort and she subjected him to both physical abuse and public humiliation. As a result he struck at her with one of her clasps and scratched her cheek. I consider this entirely self-defence.’
Mr Werther sighed. He had said nothing except ‘Good morning’ to them but his quietness held no antagonism. When he sighed Matthew raised his head from staring at the floor.
‘She is very loyal to the Empire,’ he said sadly. ‘A good woman but fanatical, yes?’
‘There is no such thing,’ Gran snapped. ‘Good people are rarely fanatical, particularly if their fanaticism hurts others.’
‘You think so?’ His words were non-committal but behind the grey beard Matthew sensed assent.
‘She has had a hard life—an only daughter ruled by an autocratic father. Nothing of her own. Some women—very difficult. Soured. I think, you know this place, the soul needs a little sunlight. Yes?’ The softly spoken words tiptoed around the room before they vanished into shadowy corners or floated upwards to disappear in the obscure recesses of the ceiling.
‘So she bullies children,’ said Gran, ‘the bullied becomes the bully. The world’s full of them. Mr Werther, you and I, we’re immigrants to this country, forced from our own to live in another. Bullies satiate their own unhappiness with the blood of others. I don’t bully and I believe you don’t, Mr Werther.’
‘No, but I do try to fit in. An immigrant should be loyal to his new home. Yes?’
‘Not to the bullies in it.’
‘No, not to the bullies.’ He paused, looked at the boy. ‘Do you like music, Matthew? In Germany every Friday night we played music—Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, so beautiful. My father played the violin, Mother the flute and I, I played the piccolo.’ He giggled, a little timid scale of nervous explosions that burst through his beard into the air. He caught a hand to his mouth to stop his laughter.
‘It would suit me, the piccolo, wouldn’t it? Such a little chap.’
Gran began to smile.
‘You can return to school, Matthew. Nothing will happen to you.’ Mr Werther rose. ‘I’ll stop the contribution system. Perhaps a little box in the corridor, all quite anonymous, for those who wish to give.’ He saw them out, smiled at Matthew and patted him on the head again.
‘I try to make school not too bad for them. I must try harder. Yes?’
‘Well,’ said Gran when they were out on the street, ‘that wasn’t difficult, was it?’
‘No.’ Matthew was uncertain. He couldn’t understand how his problem had been solved. Very little had been said about it at all.
Mother sewed her own clothes. Occasionally she made shirts and pants for Matthew but it was usually only after Gran reproached her about his appearance.
‘It’s bad enough for him to be poor, Margaret, but to be poor and look poor is to be the devil all over.’
‘You make him something then. Haven’t I enough to do?’
‘No more than I and usually not as much.’
At these times Margaret sulkily got out the small hand-operated Singer machine. Digging into her basket she would thrust aside first one piece of cloth then another. Sometimes a discarded fragment would slide over the edge of the basket and drop in a small shining heap on the green linoleum. These bright spots reminded Matthew of coloured seaweed—crimson, purple, lettuce-green spattered in rocky recesses in green pools. Colour to Matthew belonged out of doors.
On most days the light within the house was muted by blinds drawn two thirds of the way down the windows. When Gran had her way she pulled them up and light blaz
ed in revealing mangy patches on the carpet, and chairs with shiny balding headrests. Margaret as quickly drew them again, fussing over the net curtains which required equal numbers of gathers on each side.
‘For goodness sake, Margaret, do we have to live in perpetual gloom? Let a little sun in.’
‘It’s vulgar to let the neighbours see into our rooms.’
‘What neighbours?’
‘From outside our house looks charming, quite charming; coloured sandstone, Cloth of Gold roses on the walls, marigolds beside the path. Friends frequently tell me, “Such a charming house, Margaret. Golden. Warm.”’
‘I don’t suppose you tell them who does the garden?’
Margaret dug deeper into her basket and dragged out a fragment of crumpled flannelette, sparrow-egg blue with navy stripes. ‘This’ll do. Serviceable and warm.’
‘And ugly. You made that into pyjamas for Victor before last winter.’
‘Did I? Well, there’s enough for a shirt. Come here, Matthew.’ And she held the piece first across his back from shoulder point to shoulder point and then from the base of his neck to his waist.
‘Plenty. It’ll do. You like it, don’t you, Matthew?’
He shook his head.
‘I think it’s nice. Manly. Your father liked it.’
‘He’s dying.’
‘Don’t be silly, Matthew. Of course he’s not.’
Gran snatched up the piece of flannelette and threw it into the basket. ‘It’s all right for a dying man. It’s not all right for Matthew. Have some feeling for him.’
A little ashamed, Margaret flushed. ‘Oh, very well. If you have to be so pernicketty. We can’t really afford to be choosy, but if you say so.’ She searched again and held up a piece of emerald silk, but as she turned it towards the light from the door a rainbow of indigo, purple and violet shivered across its width. Matthew gasped and reached for it. His mother caught it away from his grasping hand.
‘Now what about this? Fit for a king, eh? A Teddy Woodbine coat—not a cloth of gold but of emerald.’ And she held it against her face so that her eyes turned the green of bright shallows and her hair blazed with ruby lights. ‘For Matthew, eh? You’d like to wear this to school? A little prince and all the other boys would kiss the ground.’ She giggled. ‘What about a shirt of this? Matthew? Mother?’
‘Now you want to give him stolen goods.’
‘It wasn’t stolen. Just borrowed by Clicketty from his friend at the wharf. It was a damaged bolt. Seawater had stained it.’
‘There was a lot seawater hadn’t stained. You got a new dress out of it.’
‘I know.’ Margaret’s eyes were dreamy. ‘Green is my colour.’
‘But not Matthew’s. Put it away. Do you want to make him look foolish among the other boys?’
‘But he won’t.’ She turned to her son. ‘You’d like it, wouldn’t you, Matthew? This silk is better than old flannelette. It could match Mother’s dress. We’d be like brother and sister. I’ll make you a shirt out of this.’
‘You’ll do no such thing, Margaret. Your perversity is tiresome. If you can’t make him clothes out of appropriate material then don’t make him anything.’
Margaret pouted. ‘Very well. Gran’s such a spoilsport, Matthew. She thinks I’m teasing you. Am I?’
He nodded.
‘What a wicked mother I am.’ She laughed and jumping up gave him a hug. ‘And now if I don’t have to make you clothes you may have to be the Devil all over.’ With a quick kiss she handed him both pieces of cloth but her eyes longingly followed the green silk.
Gingerly he picked up the flannelette, holding it from him, but the silk he clasped against his body where it nested cool and warm.
He didn’t really care about new clothes. Gran could patch and darn the ones he had, then wash and iron them. He had a pair of shoes for school; at home he went bare-footed. Although Gran worried about the way he looked he was confused about its importance. Once, some months earlier, a boy had come to play with him. He had a new cap on his head and his leather shoes shone.
Gran had been pleased. She had given them a slice of her fresh bread and treacle and they had sat on the step with sticky faces and fingers grinning at each other. Matthew did not know what to offer his visitor for entertainment but it didn’t matter because his self-appointed friend had a pocketful of knuckle bones and they played jacks.
Then Mother had come home. One look and she shouted: ‘Off with you! Don’t come here! We don’t want your type around!’ And she took her feather duster from its hook behind the kitchen door and shooed him off the step, following him down the path shouting and shooing as if he’d been a stray cat in the fowlyard.
The boy had looked surprised and confused, then embarrassed, angry.
‘Don’t want to stay here. Hate your old place.’ And as he reached the gate: ‘You silly old woman. You two silly old women.’ And he stuck out his tongue before he ran off.
‘Oh, Margaret.’ Gran, with shocked face, had hurried after her to the gate. ‘Oh, Margaret. He has no friends.’
‘Not that sort.’
‘What sort, Margaret?’
‘Not good enough. Touch tar and you’ll be defiled.’
‘Defiled? Touch tar? What are you talking about?’
‘His mother’s a half-caste.’
‘His father’s a decent man who works with Edward.’
‘And consorts with barmaids like he does.’
‘No. And nor does Edward. Your snobbery is both farcical as well as painful. The boy was better dressed than our Matthew.’
‘Clothes aren’t everything.’
‘You’ll doom Matthew to a life of loneliness.’
‘He can find other friends. From nice families.’
‘Nice families.’ And Gran sighed again and went back to the kitchen with heavy steps.
At the end of the garden, under the passionfruit vine which held up a decaying woodshed, Matthew built a cubbyhouse. There he stored the few treasures he had collected: shells from the beach; marbled stones from the riverbank; leaves eaten to skeletons so that only the fragile veins remained interwoven like brown lace.
In an old biscuit tin with a picture of a girl on a swing festooned with roses he reverently laid the green silk. The light filtered through the vines in quivering spots of iridescent brilliance, dazzling where it hit the cloth and shattering into a kaleidoscope of colour at the edges. As he tipped his head this way and that to view the material the light changed and the cloth shimmered into an infinity of colour variations.
Matthew took up the cloth and held it so it fell in a green cascade fluttering at the edges. Then he laid it across his arms like an offering. The other scraps of cloth cast aside by his mother had been used to dress his collection of puppet figures, sticks or small pieces of wood he had made in the form of a cross. None had a head but each was draped in the pieces of cloth that Matthew deemed appropriate to it. An old piece of brown serge loosely attached so that it fell conical and empty represented his father. Gran was a neat figure in pale lemon with an overlay of white lace. His mother he had decked in royal-blue satin. A castaway rosette ornamented the neckline at the top of the stick. Usually he didn’t dress strangers but he had taken a piece of cigar-brown woollen cloth and wound it very tightly around one puppet. Then he had taken a scrap of elastic and twisted and twisted it about the neckline.
He had not added Edward to his collection. He had tacked two pieces of wood together, pieces chunkier than the others, but he could never decide how to dress them. He looked at the green cloth. He would need to cut it to fit the sticks. He couldn’t bear to do so.
He folded the cloth to fit in the tin and gently taking the unclothed wooden cross that represented Edward he laid it on the cloth. Then he put the lid on. He wished the tin had a picture of a ship on it. He didn’t like the girl. A ship with white sails spinning in the sun, flying across the sea, silver, sickle-winged like a bird, to match the lovely living eye of water in th
e tin. That would be right for Edward.
He glanced again at the puppet with elastic choking its neck. Only yesterday he had seen the man talking with Miss Pilkington outside the school gates. In her black coat and hat she looked like an angular shadow tossed away from the night before. Matthew knew she had seen him hurry past and it seemed that in the tiny gesture of her hand in his direction she spoke of him.
The puppet shouldn’t be there with Edward and Gran and his mother. It was as if he had set one of old Peter’s snakes on the table amongst the comfortable secure disorder of breakfast. He picked it up with the tip of his forefinger and thumb and threw it into a dark corner.
When Mother completed a dress for herself she would spread it on the settee in the front room and raise the blind so it could be seen more clearly. She would disappear from work in the kitchen to look at it and touch it. Sometimes Matthew would follow her and watch her straighten a cuff, adjust the stance of the frilled collar, align a fold where it distorted the hem. She itched to show it off.
‘We’ll go to the gardens on Sunday—all of us—Gran, you and me. And we’ll visit the pavilion and eat cream cake and drink lemonade spiders. You’ll like that, Matthew?’ And she smiled and kissed him and he felt warm because of her affection and because when Mother found friends to talk to at the pavilion Gran and he would be able to go to The Stump and see Edward.
It happened as Matthew anticipated. At the pavilion in the gardens Mother found friends who took her attention and he and Gran slipped away. The Stump was an open park area. Here gathered all the soapbox orators, the mockers and debunkers of moral rectitude, the bar-room wits and advocates of direct action, the sour or bitter looking for a target, the humorists looking for fun, aggressors hoping for a brawl, watchful police and the occasional spy searching out treason. The religious fanatics exhorted the ungodly to save themselves before it was too late and the flames of Hell engulfed them in eternal torture.
‘Repent!’ they shouted. ‘Repent and be saved!’