The Girl Who Couldn't Smile (7 page)

‘You want us to do
what
?’ Susan asked. She uttered the last word in a whisper that seemed so closely to resemble a shout that I wondered if it could technically be classified as anything else.

It was lunchtime, and we were sitting at various points in the outdoor area. The kids were all eating their sandwiches – I had made some for Tammy, who had brought none with her.

‘I want to go on a nature walk,’ I said.

‘Where?’

‘There’s some fields and woodland about half a mile north of here,’ I said. ‘I think it’d be great for the children to see some real rabbits in the wild.’

‘And wouldn’t it be great for us to lose four or five of them into the bargain?’ Susan said. ‘And it’d be even more great to get sued by their parents and lose our jobs.’

‘Am I detecting sarcasm in that last statement?’ Lonnie asked, without looking up from the book he had open on his knees.

‘Whatever gives you that idea?’ Susan snapped.

‘Oh, there it goes again,’ Lonnie muttered absently.

‘And how are we going to get there?’ Susan asked.

‘I thought we might walk,’ I said. ‘You know, walk, nature walk – they sort of complement each other.’

‘Now who’s being sarcastic?’ Susan asked.

‘Don’t you think it’ll do them good?’ I was annoyed at her reaction.

‘Of course I do, but weren’t you the one this morning saying we should expect an explosion? I’m a big believer in keeping such things contained, if at all possible.’

‘I can see where you’re coming from, but I also reckon we should start as we mean to continue,’ I said. ‘If we ever want to be able to take this crowd for trips into the outside world, we have to start somewhere. Why not now?’

Susan glowered at Lonnie, who still had his head stuck in the latest George R. R. Martin book, a tome that looked as if it weighed as much as he did. ‘What do you think, newbie?’ she asked him.

‘I’m with him,’ Lonnie said, still not looking at either of us.

‘What do you mean?’ Susan retorted.

‘I mean,’ Lonnie said, shaking his head in vexation, folding over the top corner of the page he was reading and closing the paperback, ‘that I came here to work with the hippie there. If he wants to bring us on a nature walk, or a moon walk, or a cake walk, I’ll go along.’

‘What if he’s wrong?’ Susan said. She sounded despairing.

‘Then we’ll deal with that and make fun of him afterwards,’ Lonnie said, smiling.

‘Can’t we just make fun of him now and be done with it?’

‘That’s not how it’s done.’ Lonnie chuckled.

‘Things would be a lot easier if they were,’ Susan said.

‘But so much less fun,’ Lonnie riposted.

The kids filed along the road two by two, each holding the hand of a partner.

The only fly in the ointment was Mitzi, who simply could not walk more than ten yards without a rest. For her we brought a wheelchair, but I insisted that she walk at least some of the way, which meant that Ross could use the chair if he needed to during the periods when she was not squeezed into it. The problem with Ross, of course, was that he didn’t want to use the chair at all, even when sweat was trickling down his face in rivulets and he was nearing exhaustion. I admired his spirit – as far as he was concerned he didn’t have a disability – but it wasn’t practical to let him walk all the way: at times he needed to rest.

The result was that Mitzi plodded doggedly along the road in front of me, holding hands with Gus, who tolerated her grimly. She panted heavily, muttering threats in her sing-song, baby voice: ‘Oh, yes, children, he might get pushed out under a car, if he’s not careful.’ Or: ‘Spit in his lunch, I might. Yes – get some poop and put it in his sandwiches. We could do that.’

Knowing that she was not beyond such things, I decided to check my food carefully in future.

Lonnie was beside me as we walked – we’d decided not to hold hands – and he found Mitzi’s smiling tirade of abuse hilarious.

‘You’re a secretive sonofabitch, aren’t you?’ I said, as we strolled along.

‘How so?’

‘Wouldn’t you say that keeping the fact that you speak Polish like a true-born fucking Pole might come as something of a surprise to me?’

Lonnie sniffed. ‘Oh. That.’

‘Where’d you learn it?’ I was fascinated.

I had been under the impression that throughout his childhood he had never left the old town house his mother and aunt had shared, and had then moved to his tiny cottage on the mountain and been a veritable hermit there. I could not see how the opportunity to learn a foreign language – much less one as unusual as Polish – had ever presented itself.

‘Did I ever tell you about when my mother sent me to the home?’ he said at last.

‘An institution of some sort?’

‘I suppose you academics might call it an industrial school.’

‘No – I don’t think Tristan’s aware of it either.’

‘I’m certain he is,’ Lonnie said. ‘Just ’cause he never told you doesn’t mean he doesn’t know.’

I couldn’t argue with that, so I didn’t. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ I asked.

‘Not really,’ Lonnie said, stopping to pluck a blade of meadow grass from the roadside hedge. He stuck the end into the corner of his mouth to chew. ‘It was a pretty horrible time. Thanks be to God my mother visited regularly, and when she saw I was gradually becoming ill from starvation and various other forms of abuse, she took me home. It was a kindness I shall never forget.’

‘She did send you there in the first place, mate.’

‘Due to the advice of a lot of people she had been brought up to trust – the local GP, the parish priest, a psychiatrist … It was the done thing, back then.’

We walked on a bit. It was a glorious afternoon – when the weather is good, Ireland is the best place in the world to be.

‘Were you with priests or nuns?’ I asked, after a while.

‘Nuns.’

‘And they taught you to speak Polish?’ I asked incredulously. He snorted.

‘Not going to give up, are you?’

‘No, sir.’

‘It was in Dublin, a home for people with physical and intellectual disabilities. We were treated well enough, a lot of the time. I know I was lucky – some of the schools in Dublin used children for medical experiments and surgical trials but I was spared that. Food was withheld as a punishment, and we were beaten. There were some adults there – not all of them religious – who took pleasure in tormenting us, but the majority were not bad people.’

‘You’re far more charitable than I would be,’ I said.

‘Hate can eat you up if you let it,’ Lonnie said philosophically.

‘Yeah, I’ve heard that,’ I said noncommittally.

‘I’d been at the school for six months when Sister Angelica came. I don’t know what age she was, but she looked to me to be in her early twenties. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.’

‘And she was Polish,’ I said.

‘Yes. Poland has always been a strongly Roman Catholic country, even during the Communist occupation,’ Lonnie said, as if he was giving a lecture.

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. You know Pope John Paul the Second was Polish?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sister Angelica came to us because she had been on a foreign mission in the Congo and had become ill. We were never told, but I’ve always believed she’d had malaria. She was transported to Ireland because we have a temperate climate. To convalesce.’

‘And you had a crush on her.’

Lonnie grinned. ‘Anyone would have. She wasn’t a teacher, she was just sort of … about. She’d walk around the perimeter of the playing fields, saying her rosary or reading her missal. One day I plucked up the courage and asked if I could walk with her. She looked at me oddly for a second, then said, “Come, my
krasnoludek
.” That was what she always called me.’

‘What does it mean?’ I asked, curious.

‘There isn’t really a clear English equivalent. The
krasnoludek
is a sort of Polish forest creature, different from a dwarf or a gnome, although some of the books I’ve read depict it in a very similar way. It’s completely good, and will help people if it can. A sort of benign spirit of the wilderness, I suppose.’

‘Rather a pagan thing for a good Catholic nun to say, don’t you think?’

‘Angelica was from the mountains – she grew up steeped in the old folk tales and stories. I sometimes wondered if she really did think I was a
krasnoludek
, sent to look after her.’

‘How did she start to teach you her mother tongue?’ I wondered.

‘She didn’t have great English, so she would often use Polish words out of necessity. I started to ask her to say them to me slowly and point at whatever it was she wanted, or mime it out, and I’d give her the English version – so we ended up sort of teaching one other. I picked up quite a bit in
the six months I was with her, and when I got home I asked my mother to get me some Polish grammar and vocabulary primers. Like I told you before, she never refused me a book.’

‘When you left the school did you ever see Angelica again?’ I asked.

He laughed bitterly. ‘No. Despite everything that was going on, would you believe that I actually asked my mother to let me stay in the home?’

‘So even though you argued and begged to stay, she made you leave?’ I said. ‘I would guess she took a stand because she knew you needed to get out of there.’

Lonnie nodded. ‘I think about Angelica every day, though,’ he said.

‘The one who got away,’ I said.

‘That would suggest I caught her, even for a short while,’ Lonnie said.

‘True,’ I said. ‘But you did love her, and it sounds as if
she
needed a friend very much, and you were it. So I guess she loved you, too, in her way. Just because you didn’t go all Lady Chatterley in the woodshed doesn’t mean you didn’t care about each other. And it would have been highly inappropriate if you had done, anyway. Take it for what it was – you had a special relationship with this woman, and it was broken off before it had run its course. That’s a tragedy.’

‘I wonder where she is now,’ Lonnie said, and we spoke about it no more for a while.

I knew that the children would get a kick out of the rabbits for perhaps ten minutes, and that we had to plan something else to keep them amused for the other forty we would be in the woods. We had brought along a backpack with items for a treasure hunt, some bags for the kids to collect bits and pieces for a nature table I was hoping to establish in the playroom, and there was always hide-and-seek and chase if things got really bad.

The bunnies did not disappoint. Beatrix Potter would have loved the woods: a path that looked as if it had been created by rabbit workmen led to a small clearing, and as we made our way down this natural walkway I could already see a throng of rabbits playing, resting and eating in the open space ahead.

Of course they scattered as soon as we arrived, but Tush, who knew the area well, told us all to sit down quietly and have our juice (I had brought some cartons), and they might come back. To my utter surprise, the group sat in complete silence and waited, sipping through their straws. Within three minutes Gus hissed, ‘
Over there!
’

From behind a grey ash tree a little brown face was peering, its nose twitching.

‘
And over there!
’ Milandra shouted, which sent both animals scooting for cover.

‘You need to be as quiet as you can,’ Tush said. ‘That means no shouting, okay?’

Moments later Arga said: ‘
Tam!
’ There!

Soon we were surrounded, and not just by rabbits. Two grey squirrels, which seemed to be almost tame – or were much braver than Peter and his friends – ran about the children’s feet, looking for food, and a robin perched on a stump nearby.

‘Why does none of them have jackets?’ Rufus asked.

‘Well, I think rabbits only really wear jackets in storybooks,’ I said.

‘So is that book a lie?’ Gus asked.

I had not expected this line of questioning. ‘Well … it’s more like using your imagination,’ I said. ‘If you could understand what a rabbit said, what might that be like?’

‘So the Potty lady maked it up?’ Mitzi said.

‘She did, but all the animals she drew were based on animals she had as pets or who came to her garden. So Peter was a real rabbit.’

‘Was he her friend, then?’ Rufus asked, his face contorted in serious concentration – he was trying hard to make sense of all this.

‘Yes, he was,’ I said. ‘Beatrix Potter lived in the country, just like here, and she was fascinated by all the animals and plants she saw. She didn’t just draw and write stories – she used to write books about nature too, and scientists and teachers read them and thought they were very good. So she was a very clever lady.’

‘Why’d she write them kids’ books if she was so brainy?’ Milandra wanted to know. ‘If’n I was a real brainy woman I wouldn’ write no books for no dumb kids.’

‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘I have books at home that I’ve had ever since I was younger than you, and I still read them. They’re some of the most precious things I have. I’d much prefer to write books like that than some boring old science paper that people read because they have to.’

‘And you can learn stuff from stories,’ Ross said, his eyes locked on a big rabbit that was sitting, seemingly dozing, maybe five feet from him.

‘That’s very true,’ I said. ‘What did you learn from the
Peter Rabbit
story, Ross?’

‘If you don’t do what your mammy tells you, you can get in bad trouble,’ Ross said. ‘And not trouble like being gev out to, but trouble like where you can get hurt.’

‘Peter nearly got caught by Mr McGregor, didn’t he?’ Susan said. ‘And we all know what would have happened then.’

‘Dead,’ Ross said gravely.

‘Maybe Peter went into the garden
because
of what happened to his da,’ Gus said.

We all looked at him.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked him.

‘Well, when my daddy goes out, my gran always says to me, “Gus, you de man of de house now.” See, Peter is the only boy left in his house, isn’t he?’

‘He is.’ I nodded.

‘Maybe he was goin’ in that garden to get food for his mam and his sisters. Like his dad done.’

‘To be the provider,’ I said.

‘Yeah. De man of de house,’ Gus said. ‘But then he got scared, and he forgot to bring any food home.’

‘Do you think it would be scary to be the man of the house, Gus?’ Lonnie asked.

‘Well – you wouldn’t get to play much, I s’pose,’ Gus said. ‘You’d have to work and make money an’ stuff.’

‘Would that be fun?’ Tush asked.

‘It might be,’ Ross said. ‘If you was a soccer player or in a band.’

‘Yeah!’ Jeffrey said. ‘Me guitar!’ And he stood up and played a mean air guitar, providing some sound effects that sent every creature in the clearing scattering. None of us minded, though – in that short time the children had touched on some interesting and quite difficult ideas. I watched Jeffrey and Gus rock out, and it was then that I noticed Tammy had disappeared again.