Owls Do Cry (21 page)

—Now now, my dear.

And with a sideways glance at Flora Norris, a curious look at the new flower growing on her right cheek, he whispered, pointing to Daphne,

—She’s dangerous. Give her a sedative.

Flora Norris, recovered and withered, said swiftly,

—Certainly doctor.

And both left the room, locking the door, and peeping finally with the eyes of the world, through the hole in the door, to see if any evidence of storm remained in the small mountain room.

And after they had gone Daphne crept to the door, and poking her finger through the hole, waited there, many hours it seemed, for someone to come and hang upon her finger, a gentian or snowberry or a penny orange, or one stalk of snow-grass plucked from as high as larks fly to sing.

In the morning at six o’clock, half-dark for autumn, the nurse gave Daphne clothes, a pair of long grey woollen socks like Christmas and the fireplace and Toby crying because he was sick and couldn’t look inside to see the presents; he was in bed, kept there until the doctor came to write his code writing in the black book and order the new bottle of pills; in bed, with a clean pillowcase and the only clean sheet, otherwise the doctor would notice, and ring up the health inspector from the corner telephone box where a man in a crimson coat and felt slippers, tore the directory in half, twice, to become the champion of the world, champion at tearing things to pieces. There are so many possible champions, you would think there is room for all people to be one and wear a medal and carry a certificate, rolled up, to be unrolled and the fancy writing pointed to with pride. And when the health inspector came he would have
the family turned out of their home to sit in the gutter, with a penny box of matches to sell in the driving snow, and no one buying them, and the whole family, mother and father and Francie and Toby and Daphne and Chicks looking up at the lights in the rich people’s houses, and seeing their feasts on the table, the white tablecloth and the candles lit upon the cake.

Yes, a pair of long woollen socks; and a pair of pants. Only

—There’s a pants for you, the Maori nurse said. And a striped blue smock, galatea, and a grey jersey.

—Put these on, Daphne. You’re to get up.

And there was a yard full of people hopping and skipping and dancing and crying and laughing fighting and screaming and dead. Daphne sat in the corner by the wall. There were nails growing, like flowers, out of the top of the wall, except they were no colour and there to hurt if you tried to climb over.

Daphne sat all morning in the corner, and spoke to no one, only stared at the people hopping and skipping and dancing and crying and laughing and screaming and fighting and dead.

There were two girls, young, but ageless now, twins, toothless, crawling their sixteen years back and forth across the grey crater, their sun-stained faces fixed toward nothing, unless to the time after the Bomb and the emptiness; and their throats gurgling and choking with the speech of idiocy; and their big brown eyes full of gentleness. Barbara and Leila. All day performing their dress and undress, submitting their clothes and body each to the other, crooning and
wailing their animal vision of domesticity and doom. And the Maori nurse watching, fat and smiling, her legs wide, her large feet cramped in the once white, now yellow, shoes; the cigarettes in her pocket, and the matches and keys; or frowning and calling in the mellow voice,

—Lavatory ladies,

grabbing the necks of the grey jerseys and the people inside them, dragging them to the door, pushing them inside; then, bawling at them, mocking them, happy with them, dressing them as a child will dress a world of witless blinking dolls that are wound for nothing save crying mama mama, and wetting; and walking half a dozen steps at a time, without direction or meaning; and the Maori nurse with creek-water eyes and paddle-flat nose, thinking —I’ll have a hundred babies for my granny to look after, eh, up north in the sun.

And so passed one morning and every morning and day but the people growing gentle and together, like old bulbs without promise of bloom, thrown to the rubbish heap and sinking in the filth and blindness to sprout a separate community of dark, touching tendril and root to yet invisible colour of maimed flowers, narcissus, daffodil, tulip, and crocus-leaf stained with blade of snow.

And the night. The dormitory, and the rigid, afraid and wandering people, knowing the mountain outside and the wild storms there, huddling into their bedclothes, all of them; save Florence, sitting up to comb her hair called argent, hidden all day with the red and blue handkerchief tied across it; Florence talking, like a spell, of the places up north, and of herself being an orphan alone there, working at two years of age in the city pubs, filling the beer for the
wild and bearded men; two years old, catching the tram to the city, struggling through the crowd, but travelling free because she was Florence, two years old, working as barmaid in the pub. And Florence, stroking the spell from her hair waist-long and called argent, is believed and loved and none laugh at her or contradict her dream; nor the dream of any, save the ungentle and aggressive, who wear their dream closer, the gentleness inside to the heart to keep it warm but not sharing.

And the grey crater of the long-dead mad lies empty enough to be filled with many truths together
.

The same time that Bob Withers was beating the puppet sinner to make it cry; and Peter Harlow in the early morning of Christmas was saying, Who puts the sun out? it was Christmas on the mountain where Daphne lived.

Christmas with a pine tree that died on the third day, put in the dayroom in the corner and hung with bells and stars, though only paper made to shine but
believed
stars; and a doll angel at the top, with painted blue eyes and blonde hair and a frilly silver ballet frock, as an angel wears. And strips of paper, all colours, spread across the room, through the mountains, the Remarkables, and in and out the trunks of the poplar trees.

And parcels coming from nowhere, with cakes like Everest, to be stripped immediately of snow, by the dancing jubilant people in the dayroom; and the black earth of cake rejected, crumbled and sodden, but mined of currants and
sultanas and crystals of cherry. And bottles of fizz popping, drunk through two straws or three, and the awful choice between raspberry and orange, the blood and the sun. And the night of carols, with the white tribe smiling and kindly, the chief benevolent, not wearing white, but a striped navy suit and a green tie, as chiefs wear, on the side of the mountain, at Christmastime. And the day with the red and cottonwool man, the cheat, they say in the world, a human being dressed up, an attendant with black suit and cuffless trousers and strong hands to grasp and wrestle with the bewildered men on the other side of the mountain; but real here, called Santa, smiling and giving presents, scent and powder and underwear, and for the old ladies a plastic apron each, all the same pattern, a red bird flying somewhere across a green sky. And the chief there with his fellow chiefs, all benevolent, indulgent and smiling. And Flora Norris standing between two of the chiefs and explaining things and pointing out people and smiling when Daphne, with one present in her hand, returns to Santa for another – and why not. But Santa, with the fixed smile and the hot face, tired now, speaks sharply,

—No, no. Don’t be greedy.

Daphne stands wondering and ashamed, half-turning to go back to her seat in the corner, yet not wanting to, her other hand still held out for the present, not pants or petticoat with blue ribbons or talcum powder or facecloth that the others have been given; nor the mauve and wavy-with-flowers box of lavender soap, four cakes in stiff twist of cellophane, which she holds in her hand, but something different, she cannot fully tell its name or shape or size
but she wants it, needs it, and waits for Santa, the red and white God standing in the middle of the room in front of the angel and the tree, to understand her need. But he cranes his human neck out of his heavy dress of blood and frowns annoyance and impatience.

—Don’t be greedy.

He pauses for her name, looking towards Flora Norris who supplies it, swiftly and neatly, punched in holes and handled like a transport ticket,

—Daphne Withers.

—Don’t be greedy, Daphne. Go away.

And seeing that the red and white God is no God, nor is there any gift nor any Christmas, Daphne begins to cry, softly, and throws her opened box of soap at the cottonwool God. The lid of the box falls off, and the undone soap spills and the room breathes of Ye Olde English Lavender, and Santa sneezes at the sharp, cheap perfume, and Flora Norris, ashamed before the chiefs, signals a nurse to take Daphne away, and her lavender soap too, for locking up.

—Greed, sheer greed, Flora explains to the highest chief.

—It’s people like that who spoil the whole day.

The chief nods, sniffing the dying smell of lavender, and another smell that no one has noticed before, and that causes Flora to whisper urgently to one of the nurses who removes one patient and another and another, all clutching their face-cloths and aprons and powder (lilac and rose), quickly, to the bathroom. And Christmas is over, or never was, and the angel on the highest twig of the dead tree becomes a film-star doll from Woolworths. And the three
wise men, said to have followed the wrong star, sit on the other side of the mountain, in little rooms with high-up windows and bolted doors; where they doze, dreaming the end of the journey, or wake, cursing and crying man’s ignorance of the human compass and where the hand of the star points him to follow.

Soon after Christmas it was picnic time, with Christmas just buried, the grave filled in, and no one out walking in the sun or dark to discover the stone had rolled away.

The picnic was to be Sunday.

—Provided the weather keeps up, said Flora Norris, consulting the ward sister in the small tight room that was Flora’s office, and part of her flat. She lived at the hospital, like a patient. There was nowhere else for her to live, and except that she had patients to make her bed and sweep her room and tidy her duchesse and bring her meals and papers; and polish for her; and arrange the flowers picked from the front garden; except for that, she could have been in prison herself, and was, really, in a kind of attendant and infuriating captivity, so that when her month holiday was due, every year, she felt afraid of where to go, because there was nowhere away from her prison. And sometimes she
wondered —What of when I retire? What of then? I have enough money, certainly, but no place. Or what if I go mad? They have been known to, but they take them away up north, but what if it happens to me?

And then, to quieten her fears and reassure herself, she would take a walk through the hospital, with nurses holding doors open for her, and standing to attention, and the afraid, bewildered young doctors asking her advice, and the cook in the main kitchen promising to make her some cream cakes filled with cream from the farm, for afternoon tea. She would visit each ward, and if it were mealtime she would carve the roast mutton, Wednesday, or help distribute the Belgian sausage, Sunday, or watch while the Tuesday or Friday saveloys were forked on to the plates. And except that she was not borne in a chariot pulled by six horses, dapple-grey, or not treading upon a velvet carpet laid out for her from ward to ward, or not bowing and smiling with a gentle lift of her hand to the waiting and respectful crowds, she could have been a queen; so she would forget her unhappiness and, remembering the kiss of thirty years ago and the wire coiled from the grave of her lover, she would smile like a melting nasturtium: then in her power undo the smile, reshape the withered flower and retwist the coil of wire set close in her skin that was fed each night with Delicia Skin Food for the over thirties – how far over Flora Norris would not have said, but she lay each night with the white oily mask of Delicia upon her face, her pillow stained and perfumed, and her eyes, oiled a half-hour with warm cottonwool; and she would stare through the window that was barred with iron, by
a frightening illusion of moonlight only, toward the slate roof of the men’s side of the mountain, and their vast empty dining room with its long scrubbed and scarred tables, and the floor of linoleum, where each day a patient with gaping idiot mouth waterfalled with slobber, would guide the electric machine that polished, revolving, whining, threatening; rebellious against effacing man’s day-after-day or ingrained year-after-year torture of directionless walking.

It was fine for the picnic, at first. The chosen patients, primped and sweetened, sat like dressed and dead Christmas dolls in a world window, for someone to choose and take them and turn the key to walking and talking and dancing and real. They wore lipstick put on from the make-up box that was kept in the examination room, on a shelf with bottles of urine and poison; and charts; and a pressed appendix, shrivelled, like a leaf placed between the pages of a family Bible or Thoughts for Shadowed Days. And they wore rouge and powder and facecream from the same box, because, thought Flora Norris and Sister Dulling, that sort of thing is the first step to leading a normal life; and once they learn which comes first and where, vanishing or cold cream, they move, as one of the chiefs expressed it, in a radio talk,

—along the path to sanity, toward the real values of civilisation.

So the women were primped. And dressed very fancily, for they were travelling in the bus, and behind the bus, where luggage is kept, Flora Norris and Sister Dulling stowed a ton of good things to eat, sandwiches, paste, and tomato,
and meat – trembling on the edge of a sniff of being stale; and pickle; why, so many sandwiches for the twenty people travelling, not counting the bus driver, and the attendant to light the fire and be useful in case of violence, and the nurse and Sister Dulling; why, so many sandwiches that the patients could have spread them out, like white and wholemeal squashy tiles, to make a path to walk some place, if there were any place in the world to walk to.