Rock Me Gently (27 page)

‘There’s going to be hell to pay even if we return to the convent today, I can tell you that!’ I said.

‘If it could only be just like this for ever and ever amen.’

We started walking. I was scared, scared for Ruth as much as for myself. Scared for the girls we’d left behind in the convent. Would Sister Mary go back to her old bullying ways without Ruth there to shield them? By running away we had put the girls in peril, laying them open to retribution from the nuns who had power over them. This was a thought so agonising that I almost had to bend over with the pain. A blast of wind swept into my face and I shivered at the remorseful accusing thoughts that buzzed in my mind. What kind of reception would await me at the convent when I went back? How would the nuns treat me? What would they say to me about this piece of irresponsible lunacy? Ruth squeezed my shoulder firmly as I walked with her to the railway station, expecting a policeman to loom up with a pair of handcuffs at every step. But nothing happened. Ruth bought me a platform ticket and we sat on a bench and gazed at the empty oil-spotted tracks.

‘Don’t forget to write, Judith,’ said Ruth huskily. She took another swig of lemonade with shaking hands.

‘Yes, Ruth. I promise I’ll keep in touch somehow.’

She gave me a sharp look. ‘You might feel different when you get home. I suspect your mum missed you. Probably why she didn’t write much.’

I nodded.

A cloud of smoke drifted upwards from a clump of trees in the distance. We watched it getting nearer and heard the sound of the approaching train grow louder. We stood up. The train rounded the corner like a clattering caterpillar.

‘Now, don’t let the nuns get you down before your mum comes to get you.’

I nodded, and my eyes became misty. I blinked. Tears fell down my cheeks. I gave a sniff and brushed them quickly away.

‘Thanks,’ I said. I swallowed the lump in my throat.

‘I’ll miss you,’ said Ruth.

‘Me too.’

The sound of the approaching train vibrated on the still air as it drew into the station. A crowd of children and parents were hanging out of the window. The guards in their dark blue uniforms went to and fro, opening, closing, locking and unlocking the doors. Ruth opened the door. One of the mothers caught sight of the anxious look in Ruth’s eyes and helped her on board.

‘You can sit with us,’ she said kindly.

Ruth thanked her and hung out of the door window. A whistle blew and the train began to move away.

‘Abyssinia!’ yelled Ruth and we waved to each other till the train and platform were out of each other’s sight.

It was past seven o’clock in the evening when I walked into the front entrance of the convent. I was in a daze, covered with dirt, my eyes swollen. The building seemed empty. I walked about aimlessly, scarcely aware of where I was or taking in my surroundings. Only the cold inside me was a reality. It cut through me like a knife, turning my blood to ice.

I made my way to the church. A faint, familiar waft of incense drifted out of the door as it creaked open. The interior was dimly lit. I walked with echoing steps. All around me the shadows stretched into an infinity of gloom. Alone. Unconnected.

How can I bear it, I thought, how can I go on bearing it without turning mad? I saw my future life flash past. I’d always be on the move, restive, without a single connection to family or friend of any kind. A drifter. The light was fading outside the windows. The red sanctuary lamp winked and glinted from the altar. Candles burned low in the nuns’ area of the church, casting shadows over the statues lining the walls. They looked like living people making beckoning gestures in the gloom. Why am I here? Where am I going? I walked heavily forward like a statue might move, half-flesh, half-stone. It seemed a gigantic effort to place one foot in front of the other, as if I were wearing iron weights under my shoes. Around me the shadows leapt and grew. I prayed for pardon for being the cause of Frances’s death. I uttered the words meekly, kneeling in the darkness. I did not bother my head about God’s wrath or indignation, I knew there was no such thing. All I cared about was the burden of hurt and damage and remorse I had inflicted on the other girls.

I vowed then that I would never allow anyone to get close to me again. That way I wouldn’t get hurt, nor could I hurt in return. There were no tears now. No pain. Just that strange icy coldness inside me.

I leant back against the wall of the church and slid down to the floor, my face in my hands. There were no thoughts at all, just a black hole pulling me down and down. Everyone had either disappeared or died. There was no Dad, Nana and Pop, Frances or Ruth or even Mum. How could I bear it, I wondered, and how could I bear it
alone?
I was the only one left in this awful life that felt worse than hell. And no one from now on would ever know what it was really like to be me.

Sister Cuthbert found me in the church when she came to lock up. I don’t remember much about it. I was holding on to one of the wooden handrails near the altar and seemed to have got stuck there. She had to force my fingers open. She asked me what I was doing, but I wouldn’t answer her. I felt curiously unwilling to speak; it seemed so difficult. Or maybe it was just that I didn’t see the point of talking any more. Eventually she managed to put me to bed in the isolation ward.

Father Holland came, asked me a lot of questions and called me his little roaming Catholic. I made an effort to speak, opened my mouth and began ‘I’m -’, and could go no further. Mostly I just nodded or shook my head. The next day the Mother Superior arrived carrying a tray. She smiled nervously, peering at me through her cracked spectacles. I watched her with uneasiness; I wasn’t going to be drawn into answering any questions.

‘Glory, glory,’ she said sitting on the end of my bed. ‘Here’s our little wandering Jew. Why don’t you try a bit of this nice pudding I’ve brought you? If you like, I’ll bring you up some jam for it.’

I shook my head.

‘You ought to eat something,’ she said, taking hold of my hand.

It wasn’t right for her to look so merry. It made her seem human in the way that I was human. I didn’t want any grownups in my world. It was enough that they came at me in dreams: the faceless witch who stepped out of the trees, the man with a knife who chased me.

Eventually, she shook her head and hurried away with her tray. I listened to her soft, determined footfalls disappearing down the stairs.

Father Holland returned. More questions, over and over again. I lay on the bed with my back to him and said nothing. It was amazing how easy it was not to react. Easy - and somehow safer. I was afraid that if I let go I might fall completely to pieces. So I said nothing and felt nothing. Then they left, abandoning me to the two holy pictures on the walls; from one the Virgin looked at me with an expression of detached pity, in the other an angel was arrested in mid-act of announcing the good news to the maiden Mary.

I tried to keep Frances’s face clear in my memory. The pure tone of her voice, soaring effortlessly above the others in the choir. If I could only die, I could be with her, I thought. I tried placing my hands around my neck and squeezing hard. Really hard. It didn’t work. So I tried to end it with sleep, black deep sleep, if only for an hour, and lay shuddering by dawn’s blue light until fatigue and fear, hunger and shame, wore me out and closed my eyes.

When I did fall asleep, my dreams were desperate. A black sky and galloping waves, like wild ponies tossing their tumbling manes, hurtling along the beach. I awoke trembling, damp with sweat. The salt smell of the sea haunted me. I longed to forget, but the bubbles broke to the surface and I couldn’t stop them.

Frances dead. Janet dead. At least Ruth got away in time. I clung to the thought; it warmed me. But later I heard that her godmother had sent her to a different Nazareth House orphanage in the Mumbles in Wales.

It was a grey and blue day when they buried Frances and Janet, with a wind blowing and rain clouds banked on the horizon. Mourners formed a circle around the small hole in the ground. As they crammed the two small coffins into the damp earth, there was a weird sound. We girls turned sharply. The nuns stood stiffly in a row. Behind them was the figure of a woman who looked like an older Frances. She was swaying, bending forward and putting her hand to her mouth. I thought for a moment that she was overcome by tears, but then I saw that she was laughing. Monstrous giggles convulsed her from head to foot, turning, as she tried to stifle them, into wet spluttering gurgles. Tears of laughter wetted her cheeks. The graveyard echoed with it.

‘Schizophrenic,’ I heard one of the scandalised nuns mutter. Suddenly the woman rushed forward pushing the priest out of the way. She fell on her knees, clawing at the earth with her bare hands and tried to embrace one of the coffins, her face twisted and contorted. She let out a high-pitched, doleful wail, rising at first like a tendril of smoke into the sky, gathering momentum as it rose.

I put my hands over my ears. Sister Mary was yelling, ‘Get rid of her, get rid of her!’ In a hurry to bury. Frances’s mother was quickly removed from the scene.

The next day Mum turned up. She stood in the visitors’ parlour clutching her handbag, staring at me. ‘I saw the newspapers,’ she said. ‘Judith, I’ve come to take you ...’ she hesitated at the word ‘home’. She put her hand on my head and peered at me like she was trying to get me in focus. I was so cold that I couldn’t stop shivering. She kept asking if I was all right. She said: ‘You look so different, altered.’

I told her a few things about the nuns and she burst into tears.

‘Why didn’t you tell me all this before?’ she asked.

‘I didn’t want to leave my friends.’

‘I left you here in all good faith believing that the nuns would take care of you,’ she said, wiping her eyes. She had a thousand questions to ask, she said, but they could wait.

When I said goodbye to the girls in my class, they were polishing the refectory floor with dusters under their feet. The swishing to and fro movement stopped when I appeared. The room was motionless as they numbly returned my gaze. They seemed shy of me. A shock of despair ran through me. Not mine, but theirs. They knew I was leaving for good, and I knew I’d never know friends like them again. But I had to leave them. The convent was killing me.

Later, when Mum and I walked down the path away from the convent, she clutched my hand so tightly it hurt. ‘Poor little souls,’ she said. ‘I wish I could take them all with me.’

They still have one another, I thought. Yet I knew we would all carry something out of here that would still pulse in our brains come old age, linking us in a rare way and binding us to the same memories for ever.

Mum never asked me one more question about the convent, let alone the thousand.

* Don’t let the bastards get you down.

Chapter
15

My months at the kibbutz were over. Part of me wanted to stay in Israel for ever. Here there was no past beyond yesterday, no future beyond today. But no, my own future awaited me back in England.

The fresh, balmy air caressed me, and the stiff grass gave off a mossy odour. There was a rich newness everywhere. Overflowing with it all, my freedom and a floating sense of high, yet with everything sharp and clear, each grass blade, the buzzing gnats, I walked happily, inhaling the sweet air. It was the first time in my entire life that I had felt that way, my nerves uncluttered. No one to save, nothing to be, no one to escape.

I had spent the morning packing, and now Rick and Cydney were waiting on Miriam’s steps to say their farewells to me. They watched as I strolled towards them.

Rick pushed himself to standing. I tried to smile. I felt nervous at saying goodbye to everyone. Exposed. It was like meeting them again for the first time.

Cydney took in my outfit and grinned. ‘You look more American than I do now.’

‘You mean I’m just as hip and full of shit as you lot.’

It was true, I wasn’t so different from them now, at least in my looks. I wore a kaftan, bell-bottoms and several layers of beads around my neck. But in my case, I still didn’t give a toss about the Bomb or what happened in South-East Asia. I didn’t chant mantras, or read the right books - Kerouac, R.D. Laing, Jung. I didn’t sit around the volunteer camp and drink beer or chew the fat with the best of them.

In short, I was still weird. I knew I was still damaged in some places, ugly in others, but I didn’t mind. I no longer felt any shame in myself, nor any sense of judgment from the world in general. I was at peace with it, and with myself.

Rick didn’t say anything. He took long strides down the steps and covered the space between us, encircling me with his arms, pulling my face into his neck. He said my name, as if he were calling to me back across the years. My name, spoken in that way, made me laugh - not a real laugh more like a cough. I hid my face in the hollow of his neck, and for a moment, he rocked me slowly, gently in his arms. Gratitude came as a physical pain, and then I felt an easy tiredness that was pure joy. He sighed and looked at me with puzzlement.

‘You seem happy,’ he said almost accusingly.

‘No, just real. I can see a bit clearer now.’

‘Couldn’t you see before?’

‘No. When I first arrived on the kibbutz, it was like I had a black veil tied round my head. Now I’m able to see the world and love it.’

‘Yeah, that’s cool,’ and ducking quickly away, he turned and left. I watched him go, my whole body shifted by that hug. For a minute, I couldn’t speak. I felt suddenly relaxed, like someone who has travelled a long way and arrived. A feeling of intense happiness went coursing through my body in a dazzling quiet stream.

Cydney sat forward, wrist balanced on her knee and cigarette smoke curving a line up in front of her face.

‘Was that odd or is it just me?’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘He’s just freaked out.’

‘Freaked out? By me?’

‘He told me he was nervous about saying goodbye to you,’ she said. ‘The guy’s crazy about you.’

‘Me? Oh yes, I’m sure.’

‘He is. He told me he was. He said you were the only together person on the kibbutz.’

‘I can’t believe he said that. Why doesn’t he tell me himself?’

Cydney shrugged, and took another drag on her cigarette. The heavy smell of Miriam’s flowers hung in the warm air around us. ‘He’s shy. He has a bit of an inferiority complex.’

‘Tell him to join the club.’

‘You tell him.’ She grinned and waved her hand in the direction Rick had taken. ‘He’s too shy to tell you that he’s passing through England on his way home to the States next month.’

I don’t actually remember the moment I said goodbye to Miriam. Was it that morning? The afternoon before? I don’t recall, and it pams me.

But I remember one day towards the end of my time there. I was helping her sort the books in the library, as we had done together so many times before. The conversation was easy, laughing. I was trying out some of my hard-won Hebrew on her, and she was tutting at my pronunciation.

Suddenly - I remember this clearly - she stopped shelving books and put a hand on my arm. ‘When you go back to England, promise me something.’

‘Sure,’ I said, startled.

‘Seek out the other girls from the orphanage. Will you do that? You need each other. And confront the nuns, if you can.’

I slowly put down the book I was holding, keeping my eyes on her lined, freckled face.

She nodded to herself. ‘Go to the nuns and get some answers to your questions. And talk over your past with the other children, so that you can let it go and maybe some day understand. If you want to, write your story. It will help you. And more importantly, get to know your mother better. Find out about her past and discover the answers.’