A Descant for Gossips (24 page)

Vinny was interested. She could not help it. She wanted desperately not to be, but her love and her hatred tangled each other like tree and parasite vine, and she kept her eyelids lowered quivering over the questions in her eyes and stood in a waiting silence. Betty Klee gave her an irritable little shake.

‘Tommy's gone to Gympie,' she said. ‘He bust his father's truck late yesterday arv. He took it without permission and skidded on the wet road into a whacking great tree. It's a real mess now and he wasn't game to see what his dad said, so he hitched a ride up on Sid Ewer's van and said he was going to get a job.'

She paused to watch the effect these shreds of violence might have upon the other. They flickered a colourless lightning ominously through Vinny's mind. It's because of the baby.
Can't give you anything but love, baby, babee, babeeohbabee
… She jerked viciously away from the restraining arm and swung past them, past Rhonda Welch who saw fear scribbling its furrows on Vinny's face.

‘Ooh-er!' she said triumphantly. ‘Ooh-er! Bet I know why he was glad to go!'

How quickly the others seized the point. Betty Klee gobbled the feed line and spat it back nastily.

‘Didn't want to see baby Tommy. Bet he staged the whole thing.'

Vinny found herself crying, unable to stem the rage and shame that poured from her eyes. A violence of emotion took her away from them and she was free at last in the yard, hunted and doubtful where to turn. Finally the rabbit she had become crept to a lonely place near the woodwork block and sat there in the warm sunshine that had broken through the clouds. She sat there for the remainder of the lunch-hour, a geometry book open on her lap. And she did not read a word.

They left her alone for the rest of the day.

Home took her in with a union of safety and non-safety to the steady things, the reliable bladebone stew, the dried apricots soaked overnight and stewed ragged in too much sugar, the sweetened white sauce in the brown jug. All the things that had given the security to home for years and had gone unnoticed, now blazed their unalterable ordinariness across the fear-filled blank of her sky. She felt despairingly she could no longer touch or taste or enjoy these things in ever the same way again.

‘You're not eating,' her mother said. ‘You must be a bit off-colour. You haven't eaten properly since you went to Brisbane.'

‘She's in love,' Royce said between enormous bites. The words were chewed up with the bread. ‘Yeah. Know the symptoms. Good ole Vinny's got a sweetie.'

He hacked at her ankle jovially with his foot and couldn't understand it at all when she suddenly burst into tears.

‘You're always at her, Royce. Let her be. What's up, love?'

Vinny could not reply. Perhaps she was ill. She certainly didn't feel like eating. She felt more as if she was going to be sick. She rubbed her fists into her eyes with a final action and got up from the table.

‘I think I'll go to bed early,' she said.

But instead she went to the front sitting-room they hardly ever used now and rooted round amongst the old books on the shelf behind the door until she found the one she wanted. It was a plump medical tome for family use, suitably pruned of anything liable to stimulate unhealthy adolescent speculation. But it did so, all the same, with a minimum of factual information; and though all the family had been forbidden to read it as children, nevertheless it had been well thumbed by them at one time or another. Vinny slipped it under her cardigan and crossed the hall like a thief.

When she had got into bed she went quickly down the index to ‘Pregnancy' and turned to the section named. She was the only one who had not yet made use of the book, and now she read avidly, morbidly – but was not helped. The only thing it achieved was to give her a deepening dread of what might be happening within her, it did not tell her how conception actually took place. It was one of those soft-pedalled, broad outline books that omit half the relevant symptoms of even the more pedestrian complaints and keep all their human structure diagrams completely asexual. Her search, in fact, did nothing but accentuate her fear. It in no way relieved it. In spite of herself she read fascinatedly on, touching lightly on puerperal fever and post-natal haemorrhages. She felt deeply knowledgeable about the entire process of parturition except for that one important factor.

So much for that, she reflected bitterly. Tomorrow would be Thursday and she had lived through Tuesday and Wednesday. But time in this instance would be no softener. Time would bring the ultimate shame only closer. She slept finally, and she slept badly, opening the doors of one queer dream after another, gobbled up by situations that were terrible in their shapelessness. In the morning she felt as if she had not slept at all, her mental and physical fatigue crushing her under an immense weight. At first she lay drowsily, all thought of her problem gone, yet with a puzzled non-comprehension of her exhaustion; but as consciousness widened her eyelids and her mind it sprang on her tiger-fierce, more overpowering by its contrast with that one moment of untensed being.

It was worse that day.

They made signs as well as comments. Betty Klee kept patting her stomach and thrusting it forward whenever she passed Vinny, so that she could have died of shame. All the senior school seemed to know; they giggled when she looked at them, and every pair, every trio, every quartet, she was sure, was discussing her and her agony.

The nagging worry, the fear hardly left her now. If it paused when she became involved in French translation or a geometry rider, the engulfing way in which it raced back was frightening. She felt really ill. Fear, loss of sleep, and hardly any food for two days were beginning to force a physical reaction from her. In the lunch-hour a sudden nausea forced an attack of dry retching that continued for nearly ten minutes. When it was over and she had the spasms under control she was too ashamed, too frightened to emerge from the lavatory, in case the accusing and meaningful eye of a classmate met hers. She sat there for the rest of the lunch-hour, pressing her foot hard against the door when anyone tried to open it, sweating heavily in the heat and becoming weaker and weaker.

She thought the lunch break would never end. As soon as the bell rang she wobbled to the lines, white as chalk, swaying slightly from dizziness. The others were watching her, but she was too ill to care; and, in addition, the fact that she felt so sick proved finally to her that what they said was true. She was going to have a baby. She was going to have a baby. She was going to have a …

Fear is the unexpected shape in the dark, the face across a room, the voice behind one's back. It was all these things to Vinny, who shrivelled inwardly to something smaller than nothing at all – at least that was how it felt. The thing was true, proven. She was to be a mother. In her body now she carried another that was growing inexorably every minute, every hour, bigger and bigger. She pulled her stomach muscles in with hatred and anger as she shuffled with the rest of the class into school and, edging to her desk, stumbled and almost fell. She knew Mr. Moller was watching her as they all stood until he gave the order to be seated. Momentarily her face raised its pallid disc to his, and he was shocked by the deadness of the expression.

‘Are you all right, Vinny?' he asked.

Two desks away Betty Klee's amusement burst from her in a giggle, but Moller quietened her with a glance. He noticed that there were a number of grinning faces as he repeated his question.

The child replied with lowered head.

‘Yes, sir,' she said.

‘Very well. Sit, everybody,' Moller ordered. The policy of England in her colonisation programme in eastern America continued uninterrupted for twenty minutes through degrees of boredom and clockwatching and stifled yawns. Moller was reading a note from a supplementary text when he heard a scuffle at the back of the room. He looked up in time to see Vinny Lalor flop sideways as the girl on her left tried to raise her from the desk where she had fallen. She was diving into deepness, into nothingness, into the whole heart of the world, tumbling round and down like a stone. Moller strode forward into a startled quiet and put his arm round the girl's shoulders. She stirred slightly, and half-dragging her, he edged down the corridor between the desks and then carried her out of the class into the staff-room. There he laid her gently on the sofa.

Helen had been sitting in a centre of grief, unable to work, and unwilling as well. She jumped up to help, but her grief went with her like a garment, and her eyes met Moller's with other queries in them than the one she asked.

‘What's wrong?'

‘I don't know, Helen. She looked pretty sick at the beginning of class but said she was all right. Do what you can, will you? I can hear that bloody mob starting to buzz already.' He kissed Helen quickly. ‘Buck up,' he said. ‘
Sursum corda
.' And raced out of the door.

Helen gazed down at the quiet face under its mop of red hair. The forehead and mouth were shining with perspiration. Helen quickly loosened the neck of Vinny's blouse, and then sat her up, swinging the child's legs down over the side of the settee. Then she pushed Vinny forward until her head drooped between her knees.

After a while a faint colour stained the girl's cheeks and she slowly raised her head. The rocking walls steadied down, the dreadful heat and nausea receded, and the centre of her world was Mrs. Striebel seated beside her, a look of anxiety on her face and one arm round her body.

‘Feel better now?' Helen asked.

‘Yes, thanks,' Vinny whispered. Her voice crept from her mouth, the untrue whisper of the sea that lives in a shell.

‘Lie back,' Helen said, ‘and put your feet up. I'll get you a cup of tea.'

She prepared the tea, saying nothing more until it was ready and she had poured both cups, setting one on a chair by the child. For two days she had been unable to work, her whole person sick with the wretchedness of leaving; and her body and her mind travelled a monotonous plain of spiritual hopelessness that vanished before her into further miles of unrelieved flatness. After the first unavoidable discussion with Findlay, she had tried not to see him, had spoken to no one but Moller of her approaching transfer and awaited the oncoming-never-coming, too-soon-here week-end. This diversion in her afternoon was welcome because of the hiatus it created between this pain and that, because it gave her something to think of other than loving and being loved and the cessation of both those things.

Vinny's eyes had closed. Now and then, Helen noticed, a small muscle twitched in her cheek, but apart from that she lay perfectly still.

‘Here's your tea,' she said gently. ‘Think you can manage it?'

Vinny opened her tired eyes and squeezed out a tired smile.

‘I'll try.' She sat up and reached for the cup, held it between both hands and sipped. The heat made her jump back slightly and then she sipped at the tea again.

‘Better? You'll be able to stay here the rest of the afternoon in comparative privacy. I'm off until last and there won't be anyone else in here.'

‘Thank you, Mrs. Striebel,' Vinny said.

Clumsily she placed her cup back on the saucer, spilling some tea, and stared at the window, the coats, the briefcases. To have been here alone with Mrs. Striebel last week would have been an unplumbable ecstasy. She hardly cared now. Worship was failing her. Involuntarily she sighed.

‘What do you think made you faint?' Helen asked, swung in by the sound of the sigh from the roadways of her own pain to those of another. ‘Tummy upset?'

Vinny looked up quickly, wondering why she should ask just that.

‘No,' she said emphatically. ‘No. I guess it was the heat.'

‘Probably,' Helen agreed. She hesitated, then said, ‘Would you rather go home? It is too far to your place, you know, and I think you'd really be better off here.'

‘I think I'll wait a bit.' Vinny found herself moving through the groves of conversation as cautiously as a cat. ‘I don't think I could walk that far, anyhow.'

Sipping some more tea, she lay back. All the indecision of the past few days, the frightening worry, seemed to have been climbing towards this period of time when the emotional whirligig took respite in this quiet, safe corner of the school with her last friend beside her. The resolve taking shape in her mind was tiny now as a figure seen at the far end of a long avenue, moving towards her, increasing in size and hope and bearing with it the tremendousness of her own request. For a long while she lay silently, her eyes closed, hearing the soft sounds made by Mrs. Striebel's pencil as it made correction marks on the pile of books in front of her. Resolve flung its giant shadow down the avenue of trees on her face, her resting body.

The period bell rang.

Miss Rowan clattered in from the infants' department to get a song-book from her locker. She stopped short on seeing Vinny.

‘What's up, lovey? Sick?' She did not wait for an answer, merely rattled on to her locker and rummaged for the music.

‘Culture next step for the little souls,' she said over her shoulder to Helen, and sang ironically:

‘Swish, swish, I'm a tree,

Sway
–
ing, sway
–
ing.'

At this point she found the book and went out of the room still singing, and with exaggerated actions:

‘Swish, swish,
I'm a tree,

Swaying in the wind..'

Helen did not feel like laughing, but she could not help herself at the sound of Miss Rowan's unhappy voice. She glanced at Vinny, who had watched the scene indifferently. That is how I really feel, Helen told herself. Yet this child receives the impression with no visible emotion, but I, who am experiencing the worst week the years have given me, laugh. Perhaps because she is a child she misses the humour. Perhaps she is worried as I am. Perhaps. Perhaps. She had no wish, either, to continue marking books that after tomorrow she would never see again. All of those twenty samples of handwriting, the full, the flowing, the meanly cramped, the backhand, the semi-print, the really irritating style of Howard's with the curlicues on the capitals and final g's and y's, would become by some form of retroactive inhibition as if they had never existed. From the next room she could hear Moller's voice explaining a point, soft and rich – and male. Oh God, it was the maleness of it that made it hardest to listen. Quickly she closed her mind to its sound and flung a question at Vinny. Any question.