Rock Me Gently (14 page)

Our Hebrew teacher Teliela came into the room.
‘Boker tov,’
she said. Several Americans replied, ‘Hi there, Teliela.’ She sighed and said in Hebrew for the umpteenth time, ‘No English in class, please.’

I could feel Rick watching me. After a moment I looked at him quickly. Some significant unsmiling message passed between us. Rick continued to stare. I was aware of his face. At last he said in a whisper, ‘I’m Rick, by the way.’

I became tense and still, realising that in a moment he might touch me. He placed his hand between us, very polite and direct.

I put my hand in his and he shook it with a firm hold.

‘Hello Rick,’ I said.

I tried to take my hand away, but Rick held on, as if he was waiting for more. Cold raced up my arm and into my stomach, and met between my shoulder blades. I sat there frozen, revealed to myself. Is this what I’d been angling for, with my notions of rescue? I laughed a quiet laugh and told him my name, and then he let go.

‘Great to meet you again too, Judith,’ he said.

There were too many people to avoid, and no place to avoid them. Remembering Miriam’s offer, I began skulking over to her house like a criminal to play her records when I knew she wasn’t at home. It was my only escape. It made the weight of my problems bearable.

I leaned back in one of her chairs listening to Mozart, discovering a new world:
Cosi
Fan Tutte, The Marriage of
Figaro:
comedies in which cries are torn from the heart. I sometimes thought that my own sense of fun was rooted in an earlier age: 1771 rather than 1971. Flipping through the dusty album covers gave me a strange feeling of time past, like an old calendar.

I wondered what it would look like inside my brain. All green and mouldy from neglect, I bet. I took down one of the books from Miriam’s shelf and read blindly until the words began grouping together, forming small patterns of reason and sense. I skimmed through other books on her shelves - biographies, fiction, poetry, non-fiction - many of them by writers I’d heard about but never read.

Perhaps if I devoted myself to them now, I could stave off my sense of despair, find some answers to my problems. Deep down I had no real hope that all that reading could bear fruit for me but I was determined to persist in my efforts. Persist, though with the same sense I’d had all my life, that anyone coming from my childhood circumstances stood no chance. Inside, I was still the skinny, helpless little girl hiding red welts on her body. It was the great wall-like fact against which, nonetheless, I persevered.

Light shimmered through the vine leaves overhanging the porch. I lingered there, contemplating the hypnotic stillness, absorbing its colours, shapes and fragrances. I felt the balm of the place close round me. It was quiet and cool, with the smell of baking bread in the air. The feeling that joy could exist came over me - I could feel it: a tentative, tangible force just out of my reach. Perhaps it was possible for me to be happy. Never mind all the people who pigeonholed misfits like me with their wisecracks, their amused, superior smiles.

I heard a confused music within myself - of memories and names of which I was almost conscious, but did not want to capture even for an instant; then the music seemed to recede, and from each receding trail of hazy melody there emerged one long drawn-out note. The record had got stuck in the groove. Two notes went on insisting, reminding me over and over: weirdo, weirdo, weirdo. I sat helplessly under the noise, pinned to the spot, accused. Weirdo, weirdo. Suddenly it stopped in mid-note. The silence that followed seemed to pulsate: big, solid, an object in its own right.

A familiar voice said, ‘That record always gets stuck.’

I started, whirling around. Miriam was back earlier than I had expected. She stood behind me, wearing a large straw hat shielding crow’s-feet etched hard around her eyes from years of squinting in the Israeli sunlight. She smelt of vanilla and jasmine.

‘How are you?’ Her smile was open and friendly. It invited me to relax.

I took a deep breath. ‘OK. Fine.’ It was not a lie really, just the safest thing to say for the time being.

I had dreaded meeting Miriam again, even while I felt drawn to her house. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that I would eventually end up talking about my childhood memories, knowing that I no longer had control over them. Press a button and one day out it will all come.

I cleared my throat, my gaze fixed on the table in front of me. I was on the point of making some stumbling gesture of apology, when the coward in me leapt up and closed my mouth. Be careful, it cautioned me. You are a loner; you must not tie yourself. Even as I surrendered to that prompting, I regretted the surrender. I knew that for a few minutes I had been happy here listening to Miriam’s records.

‘Would you turn that lamp on beside you?’ she asked. ‘Make this room a bit more cheerful.

When I switched on the lamp I turned and saw Miriam watching me. Joy and pain were both moods able to pass lightly across her face without disturbing the permanent thoughtfulness of her eyes, which seemed to regard life with a gaze devoid of emotion.

‘I’m pleased you’re here,’ she said, ‘we’ll have tea, although I never quite understand why English people like tea. I’m glad to have someone to talk to - even you.’

I stared at her in amazement. Her remark came to me with the force of a wise suggestion. I decided I should make a little effort, for her sake.

‘There’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you,’ I said. ‘I owe you an apology for my behaviour when I first visited you. I’m sorry.’

‘It doesn’t matter about that.’ She was obviously hesitant to say more.

I came to the point. ‘I’m afraid I ran away.’ I smiled. ‘It didn’t do me any good.’

She glanced at me while she removed her hat. ‘I wasn’t surprised. All those questions. Let’s make that tea.’

She led the way into the cluttered kitchen and began to take out plates, cups, a loaf of bread and some butter, a kettle that she filled and put upon the stove. With proud and careful fingers she drew a caddy from the cupboard, handling it as reverently as a gold casket. I watched her as she made the tea, all wrong of course: the water not on the boil, the teapot unheated, too many leaves. A plain white tablecloth was laid on the table, and the door stood open as we sat down and looked across the Carmel Hills. I drank my tea quickly like a medicine and watched her sip at hers cautiously. For a long time we remained silent in the hushed sunlight. A pleasant drowsiness crept over me.

‘Well, this is certainly more relaxed than the last time we were together,’ I said. She gave a deliberate cheery laugh like releasing a little bird.

In the distance the noise of a tractor revving up, the splutter of the engine. I brooded over the thick china cup. ‘Teliela said that ... um, that you think we have a lot in common.’

She smiled, a loose strand of her reddish hair winding about her face. ‘Oh, I suspect we do. I see you walking about, hiding behind your jokes, your shoulders up like this -’ she demonstrated. I grinned sheepishly through a pang of painful recognition.

‘You’re acting just as I did when I first came to this kibbutz as a refugee from Germany thirty years ago.’ She refilled my cup with tea. ‘When you first arrived in this room, it was like meeting a ghost of myself.’ She sighed, a sound that ached with regret.

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘I had lost both my parents in the Holocaust. Years later I also lost both my husband and son within a short time of each other. My son died young from a heart attack. I learnt to hide behind a smiling mask when all I felt inside was resentment, guilt and rage.’

She did know. She really did. When I looked at her it was as if my own unhappiness recognised a friend and signalled. I cleared my throat. ‘That’s terrible. I don’t know how you managed to live through it all.’

Her blue eyes shone gently as she shrugged. ‘Did I have a choice? You live through what life gives you, that’s all.’

I didn’t trust myself to speak more, but there were still things I needed to say. I took a deep breath, the first since I had arrived here. In a careful monotone I said, ‘I know what you mean, but... Sometimes I feel like my insides are bundled up in a parcel tied up with a piece of string. A tightly packed parcel filled with grainy photographs. It’s as if no one can get in there with me and I’m waiting for someone to unfasten the string that binds it, take a picture out and ask for an explanation.’

She nodded slowly. ‘Who’s in the photographs?’

I started to say ‘lost children’, but stopped myself. She searched my face, trying to understand. I looked away. An overpowering sense of disorder weighed on me, my mind adrift in terrible disorganisation. The drone of the distant tractor went from high to low, as if it was running out of steam, and then cut out completely.

‘You know,’ I said suddenly, ‘for so long I’ve wanted someone to talk to, and now I’ve come this far and find it difficult to say more at present.’ I glanced at the red lampshade with its burnt spot. ‘Maybe I’ve come only to ... to learn that I can’t do it alone. Maybe that’s why I came to Israel.’

Her eyes were very bright, very blue. ‘To find someone to untie the knots?’

‘Yes.’ I traced a design on her tablecloth with my finger. ‘But sometimes I can loosen up, like today.’

‘Why? Did something happen?’

‘It’s not really important.’ I didn’t want to discuss the argument with Cydney. Or the way Rick held my hand. Small things, after all. To discuss them would be to make too much of them.

She got up and moved to the sink, filling the kettle again. ‘I’m not a mind-reader,’ she called out over the sound of the tap, ‘but I’m getting a feeling from you of heavy anger or guilt about something. Am I right?’

‘Yes, I ... I suppose so.’ I let out a shaky breath, and looked away as she returned. Resting my gaze on the opposite wall, I glared at the books, daring them to move from the shelves, daring the windows to shatter. ‘Miriam, I - I need you to be my friend.’

She looked at me with sombre amusement. ‘Am I not treating you like a friend?’

‘I can’t tell. I don’t think I’ve had one for years.’

The mere thought of people probing me, investigating my background and hatching theories about it normally made me shudder with disgust. The risks were always too terrible.

Here I suddenly checked my thoughts. Well, why not? I had a sudden wish to be myself with Miriam and tell her everything, from what I was avoiding to why, but caution and a growing feeling of peace restrained me for the moment. I wanted to forget myself and cling only to this growing closeness between us in these untroubled surroundings and watch the lamplight gleam downwards into the dark amber of the tea.

‘It’s strange’, I said, ‘how often I’ve longed for a tea like this. Tea seems to me a symbol of what home life should be like.’

‘Just a loaf of bread,’ she said, ‘no jam, no cakes.’

I felt then a curious anguish caused by this glimpse of the happiness I would have felt if only things had been different could be different - but somehow sadly were not.

‘The thing is, I think I can be myself with you, which I can’t seem to be with anyone else.’

‘Well, I’d also like to think of you as a friend of mine.’

‘You don’t have to say that.’

‘That’s right, I don’t. So I won’t.’

We looked at each other, and, abruptly, I relaxed, grinning.

‘You appreciate there aren’t many people in the queue.’

‘What a relief,’ Miriam said. ‘I wouldn’t want any rivals.’

Chapter
10

I2
February

Maureen’s got lice in her hair. Yvonne was looking through
it. I saw a big ant with wings running in it.

I5
February

Frances made me some chewing-gum from yellow crayons.
It tasted all right. The elastic in Janet’s knickers broke and
they fell down.

A bucket in one hand and a mop in the other, I pushed open the kitchen door. I had just finished washing the floor of the passageway next to the kitchen. Although it was getting darker outside, I didn’t switch on the lights. I didn’t like the shadows they made. Even in the daytime the convent seemed dark, and at night when the lights were on, the darkness pervaded everything, like a fog.

I looked into the kitchen and saw Ruth lying on the red tiled floor, scratching it with a needle.

‘All right with you if I come in and wash the floor?’ I asked. My words echoed around the kitchen.

‘All right with me if you drown yourself in the bucket,’ Ruth said. ‘All right with me if you drop down dead. I don’t care.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, and dragged the bucket and mop into the kitchen.

‘Thenks!’ She mimicked me, her voice mincing in a stuck-up tone.

I let it pass and worked in silence for a few minutes, twisting the mop through the wooden wringer as dirty brown suds dripped back into the bucket. Ruth whistled tunelessly through her teeth while scraping the floor.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘What does it look like? Picking crumbs out of the cracks. I’m starving.’

‘You
must
be starving to be doing that,’ I said, pushing the bucket further down to the centre of the kitchen.

‘Clear off!’ She shoved the bucket away with her foot. ‘Don’t mop this area until I’ve done with it. If Old Double Dutch Legs could see me now, sparks would fly.’

‘Who’s Double Dutch Legs?’

‘Sister Columba.’

‘Why do you call her that?’

Ruth’s brown eyes gleamed conspiratorially, a hint of warmth seeping through her icy veneer. ‘Because on my first day here, she was teaching some of the kids a Dutch clog dance. She barked at them like a dog. Whenever they made a mistake, she whacked them on their bare legs with her cane. Whack, whack, clickedy-clack!’

The story didn’t surprise me. Nothing the nuns did could surprise me any more. They were experts at whacking us and calling us horrible names. I shoved the mop across the floor. ‘How long ago was that?’

‘That was more than six years ago, after both my adopted parents died,’ she said in a tone as tired as though she were speaking of six centuries. ‘It was my godmother’s idea to place me in the convent. Worse luck! She meant well, because how was she to know that I would spend my life like this?’ Her hand in its vague gesture included the stark kitchen, the cold night, fear and her faded tunic that smelt of onions.

‘All I can say is I hate the nuns’ charity, but nobody else wants me.’ She scowled, flicking crumbs in the air and trying to catch them in her mouth. ‘I hate needing them. I hate it. I can’t wait to do another bunk from this dump. I can’t wait to grow up.’

It scared me, not knowing what I’d turn into when I got older. What if I became something I really hated? How could I stop that happening?

I put the mop back into the bucket and ran it through the wringer again, hands on the top end of the handle, eyes on Ruth. This was great. The two of us alone. I had learnt not to watch her too closely, and above all to leave off from being soft in her company. So I swished the mop vigorously across the floor, letting my heart simply brim over with pure awe at having her to myself. Ruth’s antics were legendary within the convent. She believed that if St Lawrence could talk back to the Romans, she could talk back to the nuns. Sister Cuthbert said he was the martyr who the Romans tied to an iron gate, and grilled over a fire saying, ‘Now do you renounce Jesus?’ He said: ‘I’m done on this side, now do you want to turn me over?’ Sister Cuthbert said he was the patron saint of cooks.

Now, without moving her head, Ruth surreptitiously moved her eyes and looked at me. She had stopped scratching the floor and was lying with her head on one side, picking at her nose. Her eyes seemed forbidding and suspicious. I wondered if I dared ask her about the day she ran away. The excitement of being with her now made my stomach smaller; it hurt. I didn’t want to spoil this moment. Was it worth risking?

I said, ‘Ruth, when you ran away that day, where did you go?’

‘To the beach.’

‘What for?’

‘It was like this, see. One day I’d had enough. Strolled out of this dump to get some fresh air. D’you know what I mean? Saw the crowds in town. The lights. The noise. Look, if I tell you more, can I have a promise you’ll not say a word?’

‘I suppose so,’ I said.

She jumped up from the floor and glared at me with her fists half cocked. I picked up my mop defensively and laughed. Although Ruth was the girl everyone pointed at and stayed away from, and although even in a good mood she spoke like she was only half a step away from picking a fight, I knew she never really set out to hurt. She hid the ugliness of convent life behind a shield of hard-line lingo and jokes, but Ruth, more than anyone of us, was always in need of someone’s smile.

‘All right, all right, keep your hair on!’ I said. ‘I’ll keep quiet.’

‘OK, I’ll tell you,’ she said, taking one of the nuns’ sauce-stained plates from the draining board, pressing her thumb on the crumbs and licking them off. ‘It was like this. I got in with this bloke who had an ice-cream van on the seafront. He shovelled scoopfuls of free ice cream on to cornets for me with great swirly squirts of raspberry syrup. “Yum-yum, it’ll make you nice and sweet,” he kept saying and making kissing noises.’

She cleared her throat, but it was only to spit an immense dollop of phlegm on to the nuns’ plates in the sink.

‘Anyway, when he shut up shop, he invited me inside his van. I knew I shouldn’t have because I sort of had an idea about him. I’ve got a nose for people, d’you know what I mean? He started mauling me straight away. His red eyes were like a wild animal’s. Not an animal in a zoo, but a hunting animal. He bent down and tried to lick my mouth, like I was an ice cream. I said, “OK, drop your trousers and show us your willy.” , ‘What? Why?’ I almost yelled.

‘Well, that way I could run off and he could hardly chase me with his pants down, could he? I got away from that lickety old letch as quickly as I could. Fact is, I ran off to the nearest police station. The nuns said they couldn’t come and collect me. So a copper drove me back here. The nuns went mental. Took it in turns to ... Oh, I don’t want to talk about it! Hear me? I don’t want to talk about it!’

I had stopped mopping to listen. Now I resumed mopping and negotiated a tricky corner with a twist of the handle. Nobody knew what form of punishment the nuns had employed to keep Ruth under control at that time, but Frances had figured that she was kept tied to a bed in the isolation ward for a week.

‘Aren’t you interested in what I’ve just told you, or has the cat got your tongue?’ Ruth said, heaving herself up to sit on the kitchen table. She brushed back her helmet of hair to get a better look at me.

‘You said you don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Don’t be so polite! Can you just stop mopping a minute? It’s driving me mad. Ask me something.’

There was a slight pause as Ruth picked her teeth with her needle while I blotted out her footprints with my mop. I was dying to keep talking, to make it last longer. Say something, anything, so long as it wasn’t stupid. ‘Do you ever read books?’ I felt like a clot as soon as I’d said it. I knew that she couldn’t read properly because she’d been made to work in the kitchen and laundry for so long instead of attending class.

‘Thanks a bleeding bundle.’ There was another pause. She dislodged a crumb from her teeth on to the point of her needle and gazed at it intently. ‘The covers of books are too far apart for me,’ she said, staring at the end of her needle. ‘I’m not totally illiteral. I did try to read a book once, but it was like wading through treacle. Little black dots stuck to the pages that meant nothing.’

‘One day, when you’re free of this place, you’ll learn to read properly.’

‘Yeah, freedom!’ she said. ‘When I first walked into this dump, I was a child. Now I’m not sure who I am. The years here have changed me for sure.’

I gave the floor a few more strokes with the mop and wondered if I had changed. I had not been physically ruined like Janet, nor beaten as much as Frances. And I wasn’t the lit fuse Ruth had become. My anger was burning on a slower fuse. It was more controlled, mixed as it was with deep fear. In my time in the convent, I never could summon the sort of courage that Ruth found to keep the nuns at bay. I saw that there would never be an end to my imperfections in their eyes, or to my doing things the wrong way; even when I grew up, no matter how hard I scrubbed, whatever I did, I knew there would always be somebody looking daggers at me.

I sighed and stood back to survey the kitchen floor with my head on one side. In its silence, the kitchen appeared serene and glistening. I looked out the window into the playground. The sun had almost gone, but the sky still retained a murky orange glow, gleaming with a few feathers of pale cloud, against which the line of poplar trees appeared black and delicately clear. I stood there realising that this was the first moment of peace in my day.

Ruth sniffed as she continued to pick crumbs off the kitchen table with her needle while swinging her skinny legs with their red knees and heavy black shoes like two pendulums. She hummed cheerfully between sniffs. I thought about her bad lungs. What exactly was TB? I tried to picture her lungs hidden beneath the billow of her tunic, like two pale spongy things in the thick darkness inside her body. They would be covered with dark bruises. It hurt when I thought about it, but TB was fascinating, like a horrible treasure.

‘Me belly’s fair sagging,’ Ruth said rooting again with her needle at her teeth, ‘I licked half of my Gibbs’ toothpaste before Mass this morning. If I could have one wish at this moment, it would be for a plate of cornflakes.’

‘Or just a broth of spuds and bacon rind. Anything other than those onions boiled in their overcoats we had last night.’

‘Yeah, but them nuns got fried liver with theirs. I ate their leftover gristly bits that I was supposed to feed to Sister Ann’s pet pusscat. What’s in that blue enamel saucepan on the hob?’

I went to the ancient stove and peered at the bleachy water in the saucepan.

‘Knickers, I think,’ I said.

‘Crikey, is there nothing for us to eat? I could do with some baked beans. Trouble is, they give me gas. Talking of gas, have you heard the joke about the drunk who sat down in the confession box and said nothing?’ She laughed, the rumble of a cough starting in her chest. ‘Father Holland kept knocking on the wall to get the bloke’s attention. The drunk said, “It’s no use knocking, mate, there’s no paper in this one either.”’

I laughed. ‘You’ll have to go to confession and tell Father Holland you said that.’

‘Bollocks! Don’t be soft,’ she said, sucking at the crevice in her teeth. ‘He’ll probably give me a thousand Hail Marys. It would take me all day and night to finish them. Who is God, anyway?’

‘He’s a magician and he’s in Heaven, isn’t he?’

‘Do you believe in Heaven and Hell?’

“Course I do,’ she said with an inane smile. ‘Hell’s a house made of fire where millions and trillions of sinners growl like dragons and howl like dogs and above it all God’s angry voice thunders shaking the walls.’

‘But
Heaven
is fun, isn’t it?’

Ruth grinned, yawned and nodded all in one. ‘Ooooh, maybe, maybe. But if Heaven is going to be filled with the likes of the nuns, well, God can have them to himself.’

Sated by her yawn, she said with tear-washed eyes, ‘I wonder how much God weighs? If God is everywhere, then he’s in food. I don’t believe in Heaven, I believe in food.’

I looked forward to Sunday, when we had cast-off cakes and doughnuts that the local bakery donated to the convent all mixed together and baked into a big pudding. I loved it. It made a change from the daily rice pudding mixed with tea leaves plonked on the same plate as our first course.

Ruth concentrated on picking at the table and I went back to mopping the floor, moving the wet strands from side to side so that no dry patches remained.

‘Was your father ...?’ Ruth interrupted herself for an instant, and then said, ‘I don’t want to poke my nose into your business, but was your father rich? I mean, before he died?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

‘What was he?’ she asked after a pause.

‘My mum told me that he was ...’ Throwing my fist in the air and extending one finger after another, I counted, ‘A journalist, an aircraft fitter, a pub-owner, a gambler, a Catholic, a drinker, a story-teller, something in a factory, a football pools agent ...’

‘And now a corpse!’ A coughball of laughter rattled in Ruth’s throat. ‘The aircraft fitter sounds good.’

Speaking of Dad made my thoughts skitter back to Mum. I had still received no word from her. Maybe she hadn’t written after all; maybe Frances had just imagined seeing three letters from her in Sister Mary’s cell. Or maybe she had just said it to make me feel better.

I had been here for over a year. My head throbbed, thinking about it.

As if reading my thoughts, Ruth suddenly asked with a chirpy wag of her head, ‘Do you think your mum’s abandoned you?’

I hated it when someone cut in on your thoughts, like they’d been peeking about in your mind.

I shook my head. ‘No, I’ve never worried about her really wanting to leave me. Maybe that’s just me being big-headed but ... she wouldn’t. At first when I didn’t hear from her, I felt angry. Then I felt sad because I thought something might have happened to her, then I realized ... well, loads of things.’

‘Like what?’ Ruth asked.

I gulped. I didn’t want to talk about it because it always led to trouble when I did, or I’d start to cry. Crying just made things worse. It would be letting Ruth down if I were to crumple.