Hunger Town (12 page)

I stared at him, bemused.

‘People in the square. They're running everywhere. Someone yelled at me that the bloody police had raped a girl. Your clothes, Judith. You look …' He choked.

Now I understood his fear but it was unimportant.

‘No,' I answered wearily. ‘Of course not. I screamed rape to try to save Harry. He's dead, isn't he? And my father? I couldn't find him. He must be dead, too, or he would have come searching for me.' Tears of abandonment sprang into my eyes and ran down my cheeks. ‘Just leave me, Nathan. I don't want to go home and tell my mother my father's dead—and Harry. She'll be so sad. It's all my fault. I lied to her, you know about going out to stick up those posters. If we hadn't done that we'd never have gone to the meeting.' Now I was sobbing.

‘Please, Judith,' he begged, ‘please.' He shook my arm gently. ‘Neither your father nor Harry are dead. Your father has been arrested, that's all, and Harry was spirited away by Bernie-Benito. He's taken him to the hulk. We can protect him there.'

‘Not dead. Neither of them.' Relief surged through me. My father was alive and Harry was safe with my mother.

‘Taken him to the hulk. But what have they told my mother? She'll be frantic about me.' I was shouting at him, although it came out a poor croak. ‘Has anyone been stupid enough to tell her I've been raped?'

‘No, of course not.'

‘Well, I haven't and she ought to be told.'

‘Yes,' he said, ‘but I must get you home. Please help me. You must …' he hesitated, ‘you must dress yourself.'

‘I am dressed. Don't be silly.'

‘No.' And I detected the embarrassment in his voice.

I ran my hands down my body.

While I had screamed rape I had thrashed around on the ground to keep the police attention away from Harry. My calf-length skirt was scrunched up around my thighs. Just for an instant an irrelevant and amusing thought took the place of the night's carnage. This is the third time that my meeting with Nathan has been a humiliating experience for me. Then I was annoyed. Why should he be embarrassed? If he's so timid as to quail at the sight of a half-dressed woman then there's not much hope for his courage in a revolution.

I wriggled and wrenched my clothes into place. ‘I'm ready,' I said.

He took my arm and helped me to sit up. The world spun.

‘Don't rush it, Judith.'

‘That's not likely.'

I sat for a few minutes, my head in my hands. Then again he took my arm and helped me to my feet. My legs trembled as if bones in them had dissolved.

‘Try a few steps.'

I tottered. It was a very strange sensation. He put his arm around me, supporting me. ‘Thank you, Nathan. But how are we to get home?' I giggled a little. ‘I can't walk all that way.'

‘A friend of Frank's has a car. He has been helping people home or to the hospital.' He stopped.

‘The hospital?'

‘Yes.'

‘What a terrible night,' I groaned. ‘Why, Nathan, why? It was only a meeting.'

He didn't answer. He helped me out of the square to where Frank's friend Pat had parked his car. Pat saw my faltering steps and Nathan supporting me and sprang out of the car to help.

‘Oh, me darlin', me poor brave darlin',' he crooned, ‘have they hurt you? You're all right, then?'

What silly questions people asked in their anxiety. ‘Yes,' I said tiredly, ‘I'm all right.'

‘She's all right,' Nathan repeated.

Vaguely annoyed, I looked at him. All right? What a stupid assertion. I didn't think I'd ever be all right again.

The drive to the hulk was quiet. It was hard to believe that there had been such a desperate affray so short a time ago and in this peaceful city. It wasn't so late that everyone was in bed and there were lighted windows with shadows of people moving within. How safe the houses looked. My terrible memories had the unreality of a nightmare. I dozed a little in the car. Nathan and Pat talked in low voices in the front. I wasn't interested in what they said. Harry was not dead and my father, though arrested, would come home. It was enough that they were alive.

They helped me limp along the wharf. Now I was aware of pieces of me I had hurt. The sour salt-water smell and the oily reek of moored boats were comfortingly familiar. The sea slurped against the pylons, its rhythm an eternal and tranquil refrain that would chorus long after our deaths.

At the hulk they helped me balance on the gangplank. I moved slowly across the deck. My mother was in the saloon. Harry lay stretched on the couch. Dr Banks, our family doctor, leaned over him. He was a bald-headed rotund man with a brisk manner when arriving and leaving but he never hurried his visits. He had attended all my childhood ills—measles, chicken pox, sore throats—always with concerned advice. He was short but he still blocked my view of Harry, so it was a particularly homely and reassuring scene.

Frank and Bernie sat on the other side of the saloon. They looked an odd pair: Bernie garbed in funereal black, Frank, a wizened whipcord of a man, a ‘meagre man' he once told me ‘with a body that doesn't require much feeding. Such a body was handy to have in Ireland'.

They saw me first and glanced quickly from me to my mother. They half rose, then sank back again, their relief enclosing me in the conspiracy. Bernie put a light finger to his smiling lips as if to wipe something away. It was a secret gesture, warning me that he knew who had screamed rape but would never tell. He nodded as if in casual greeting. Bernie, I thought, had had a lifetime of keeping secrets.

‘Mum,' I said.

She looked up, startled. Shock at my sudden appearance, then relief, then joy transfigured her face. I noticed how exhausted she looked. ‘Judith,' she screeched. The bowl she held clattered to the floor, spilling a stream of reddened water. She dropped the cloth she had been holding and rushed at me. ‘Judith.' Her arms enfolded me and crushed me against her. ‘Judith,' she repeated, ‘Judith.'

She pushed me away, grabbed my shoulders and shook me vigorously. ‘Where have you been? I've been beside myself with worry. And your father?' She looked past me to the darkened deck. ‘Where's your father?'

‘They've arrested him.'

‘Arrested him?' She stared at me blankly. ‘What for?'

‘I don't know.'

She fixed her eyes on Nathan, who was standing hesitantly behind me. Pat had retreated into the deck shadows where he couldn't be seen.

‘And this is all your fault?' she rounded on Nathan. ‘My daughter looking as if she has been dragged through a garden hedge, Harry half-dead, my husband arrested. This is all your fault.' Her voice crescendoed until she was shouting. ‘Look what you have done. You with your stupid Bolshie ideas.'

‘No, Mum,' I protested, ‘no, it wasn't Nathan's fault. It was the police. Please don't shout. There's been so much shouting tonight.' My voice shook. ‘I don't want to listen to any more shouting.'

She took a deep gasping breath.

‘And Harry?' I pleaded. ‘How is Harry?'

Now angry at me for defending Nathan, she swept back to Harry's side dragging me with her. ‘See for yourself, my girl.'

Harry looked terrible. Both his eyes were shut and the swelling round them was red and angry. Purple and black bruises had erupted under the skin of his cheeks, neck and arms. His lips were broken and bleeding. His hair was matted with streaks of dried blood my mother had failed to wash away. He didn't move.

‘Harry,' I whispered, cradling his hand. My shock was too great, even for tears. I turned to Dr Banks, mute with fear. He patted my shoulder. ‘He'll live. It looks worse than it is. No structural damage. He's lucky. Young people are tough.'

No, I thought resentfully, no they aren't. The cemetery is full of the graves of children not tough enough to withstand diphtheria, measles, whooping cough, even typhoid. Whole families of children gone in one month. Doctors weren't always right.

‘They bashed him,' I said angrily. ‘They didn't need to.'

His mouth tightened. ‘No, but I daresay I'll also find a few young policemen waiting for my attentions in the hospital.'

‘We weren't armed with batons,' I said wearily. ‘They had the advantage.'

Then I recalled seeing the flash of Bernie-Benito's knife. What if he had used it? The thought of what might have eventuated filled me with terror. There was nothing in my life that had prepared me for such visceral conflict.

Dr Banks insisted on having a look at me. Regardless of my protests he felt the back of my head, pursing his mouth when I winced. ‘You've got a good-sized abrasion there. Your mother will clean it.'

He shone a bright light in my eyes, twisted my neck this way and that, ran his fingers down my spine, tapped my knee, examined the scratches on my leg and asked what I had been doing with myself. Had I, too, been part of the affray?

I lied that I had run and fallen, skidded on a small stone, and that's when I had lost Harry. From the corner of my eye I saw Frank and Bernie lower their eyes to examine their hands. They had rested them on their knees and did not move or look up.

Dr Banks grunted disbelievingly. He left some prescriptions for Harry, some pain killers and a sedative to help him sleep. He said he would look in again tomorrow, put his medical equipment back in his bag and snapped it shut.

My mother accompanied him out of the saloon. Nathan moved out of the doorway to let them pass. I had forgotten that for all this time he had hovered irresolutely in the doorway. As in the gardens when he trotted after Winnie and me, he seemed unable to decide when it was time to leave. As Dr Banks passed Nathan I heard him say to my mother, ‘I don't care much for the company she keeps.'

I got up, gently replaced Harry's hand on the couch and turned to Nathan. ‘I'm sorry,' I said. ‘Everyone has been very rude to you and Pat. Please excuse us. I think it's the result of shock. My mother is so angry that she has to blame someone.'

I put out a tentative hand and touched his sleeve. ‘Thank you for finding me and thank Pat. Later, perhaps, we'll be more like ourselves again.'

He nodded, his eyes luminous behind his thick spectacles. I remembered how, when he had flashed his torch on me, I had seen pinpoints of light dancing in his glasses. How odd I had thought then that he has survived all this and managed to keep them on. He was also uninjured, but I didn't ask him about that. It was strange that a man so decisive about ideas was lost in a social situation. He didn't know the appropriate time to end a speech. He didn't know when or how he should leave. His vulnerability touched me. As well as finding me tonight he had defended me at the Chew It and Spew It.

He said that he and Pat would go now Harry was in good hands. Perhaps tomorrow or later he could come again to see him. Would he be welcome? He was tentative.

‘Of course,' I said, ‘but later.'

He and Pat passed my mother. She managed a brief but reluctant thanks.

‘Dr Banks had no right to speak to him in that way,' I said. ‘He wasn't there. Nathan and Pat helped me tonight. It wasn't Harry's fault. It wasn't mine and it wasn't Nathan's and Pat's.'

Frank and Bernie-Benito had also risen ready to leave. ‘We'll go, too, mum,' Frank said. ‘Harry's in good hands. Should we do anything else?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Could you tell his mother?' I found a piece of paper and wrote down her address. ‘Don't frighten her but she must be told. Ask her to please wait until tomorrow to visit.'

Frank took the paper. Bernie-Benito took my hand and held it lovingly. ‘Judith,' he crooned, ‘Judith.' And his eyes large and soulful reminded me of Winnie's Labrador resting his head on my lap. He had spirited Harry away, probably carried him. His rag-doll appearance was deceptive. There were balls of muscle in his sinewy arms. I reached up, kissed his cheek and whispered, ‘Thank you, Bernie, thank you for everything.'

The next morning my mother put on her hat and gloves to go to the union office. To dress respectably was her defence against the chaos our world had become. We had taken it in turns to watch over Harry during the night and anxiety and weariness had aged her. I made her a cup of tea and some oatmeal porridge, but although she drank several cups of the tea she only poked the porridge around and eventually left it.

‘I can't eat,' she said. ‘I must go to the union office. They'll know what has happened to your father. It's better I see them than front up at the police station. I don't see any of us being welcome there.' She looked spent and bitter. ‘I'm sorry, Judith, it's very hard on you. You need rest yourself. Are you all right?'

That question again. ‘Yes,' I repeated for the umpteenth time. How many people now had I reassured? ‘I'm all right.'

‘You don't look it.' She was doubtful.

I managed a smile. ‘Looks are deceptive.'

In another situation she would have been suspicious and pursued my assertion. Now at the limit of her endurance, she gratefully accepted it. ‘You're a good girl, Judith, a good girl.'

She left. I drank a cup of tea and forced down a few mouthfuls of the porridge. I hoped the food might warm me for I felt chilled. Harry still slept. Overcome with lassitude, I wrapped myself in my blanket and sat again in the uncomfortable chair by his side. In the morning light his injuries looked harsher, more cruel, the bruises uglier, the inflamed puffy swelling about his eyes discoloured and raw, his lips cracked. But he was still alive. I dozed. My head jerked forward. I slept.

Dr Banks' arrival awakened me. He hurried in, brisk and urgent. He had not shaved and his eyes were bloodshot with fatigue. He examined Harry. ‘Wake up, lad,' he yelled at him.

Harry stirred, tried to move and groaned.

‘He'll live.' He patted his shoulder. ‘There's many a lot worse.'