Paper Faces (10 page)

It came and went in swirling waves that rushed down from the ceiling and swallowed her up. She forgot who she was, how long she had been here.

They told her she was lucky, but Dot couldn't understand how.

Four times a day the nurse came toward her across the wide spaces of lino with the shiny basin containing the rattling metal syringe. Four times a day, the nurse pulled back the white cover, turned Dot on her side, pulled up the gown, and thrust the needle in with the savage pain of a bayonet.

The first time, Dot cried out at this new kind of hurt. Later she knew not to make any sound; otherwise the nurse said, “Don't you
want
to get better?” Then she told Dot, “You're a lucky little scallywag! Ten years ago and you'd have died!”

Sometimes she saw nurses whispering about her and wanted to hide.

When Gloria came, pattering across the ward in all her best, Dot couldn't bear to see her pretty face and turned away on the pillow with shut eyes.

Why did you let them bring me here? What have I done? she wanted to say. When can I get out?

Each bed had a locker beside it. On top of some were displayed heavy glass bottles of fizzy pop, or colored postcards, or jigsaws, or rag dolls with floppy arms. Dot didn't mind about the toys and she knew she couldn't ask for ginger pop because that cost money, but she would have liked to have had her victory token back. Gloria had told her she'd got to keep it forever. It had been in her coat pocket when they took her clothes away. Now it was gone forever.

Dot managed to attract the attention of the girl lying in the next bed.

“Want to play a game? Film stars?”

The sick girl nodded.

“You start, then,” said Dot.

But the girl didn't know how to play, and Dot hadn't enough voice to explain. By the time she had, they'd moved the girl away to another ward. Dot didn't see her again.

Gloria came every day, just as she had for Baby.

“Mustn't stay long,” she said, giving Dot's hand a little squeeze. “I've started this little job, see, pet. Ooh, your hand, it ain't half skinny. I'll have to call you spindle-shanks if you let yourself get any thinner!”

She was usherette at the Essoldo cinema, showing people to their seats. “Matinees only. I get to see all the films. Well, it helps pass the time. I'm saving a bit up for when your old man gets home.
To Have and Have Not,
that's showing now. Ooh, it's a lovely one!”

Gloria's lipstick was brighter than ever, and she had a fitted red two-piece with E
SSOLDO
embroidered in cream on the top pocket.

“Being a good girl, aren't you, ducky? Saying please and thank you? Don't want to hear no tales told about you from them nice nurses. You eat up your dinners, too.”

Where her tooth had fallen out a sturdy new one was forcing its way up, with frilled edges and ridged from top to bottom. Dot asked Gloria for the powder compact she kept in her bag. When she looked in the little round mirror, she saw that she wasn't falling to pieces. She was turning into a different person with a different face.

After Gloria had gone, lying in her cot with nothing to do, nothing to look at, Dot told herself about the hens laying in the country. She went into the henhouse and looked at their eggs. She thought she saw the Germans still working in the fields, and now they were picking up potatoes from the muddy ground. But perhaps she'd never really been there at all. Perhaps she'd just imagined it, like she'd imagined the pallid papery men buried in the walls.

Since she no longer had her own victory brooch to hold, she thought about Mrs. Hollidaye's, pinned to the lapel of her hairy jacket. Its design, like Dot's, was of crossed flags, but it wasn't made of scratchy tin with rusting edges. Hers was shiny jewels, blue, red, and diamond bright, which twinkled when they caught the light.

“Gloria said you was ever so posh, bit like our king and queen. You don't look that posh. Except you got them jewels. I ain't never seen jewels like that before.”

“Yes, they are rather grand, aren't they, my dear? The red duster, the white ensign, and the Union Jack.” Mrs. Hollidaye glanced down at her brooch and touched it like Dot used to touch her token. “My sons gave it to me. And d'you know, I've worn it every day since. It helps me think of them.”

“I knew Gloria got it wrong. I never thought you was that posh. You ain't got no servants.”

“Well, my dear, we can all be servants, one to another, depending on the need, can't we?”

What strange things she said. But now, lying in a cot while a nurse washed her all over and patted her dry, she saw what Mrs. Hollidaye might have meant.

A brown paper parcel arrived by special delivery. The other children on the ward didn't get parcels by post.

“It's for that little slip of a thing at the end.”

A nurse sat on Dot's bed and unwrapped it and Dot knew it was from Mrs. Hollidaye.

“What in lawks name is this!” said the nurse, holding it up.

Dot wanted to say, “It's one of Mrs. Hollidaye's babies!” but because of her throat, the words stuck like plum stones. Instead, she managed to croak, “Eat it. Vegetable.” Or had it been a fruit?

The melon was boiled and brought to Dot next dinnertime with her chicken broth all around like a shattered building surrounded by deep trenches full of murky rainwater. Mrs. Hollidaye hadn't said anything about cooking it. Slice the top off, scoop out the seeds, and a drop of Oporto, is what she'd said.

The doctors gathered round her bed. They measured Dot's legs with wooden measuring sticks, and they prodded her ribs while a nurse stood by and held her hand. They didn't usually speak to her, only about her.

They told Gloria, “This child is malnourished. She has anemia and first-stage rickets.”

An old man in a dark suit with a light strapped round his forehead like a rescue worker's lamp came next and pushed wooden sticks down Dot's throat.

He told Gloria, “The sooner we get them out, the better. But she's got to be A-one. So we're sending her home to fatten up. Liver, spinach, cheese, green leaf vegetables.”

“They want to do an operation, pet,” Gloria explained at visiting time. “Make you fighting fit again. Get rid of them nasty things down your throat what's harboring the germs. When you're asleep.”

When Dot was asleep was when the dreams came with limbless, fingerless, thumbless, faceless men marching through her head. She didn't want them to do anything then. They must do things when she was awake.

“They can't do that, ducky. That's not how the doctors like it. It would hurt you too much. You have to be asleep.”

Gloria brought some clothes in a carrier. But Dot had changed, and so had the skirt and cardigan. They hung strangely, too loose, yet too short as well. Her wrists stuck out. Her legs were bare to way above her knees, and her legs felt cold and so thin, they'd hardly support her weight. She had to clutch on to Gloria's arm.

“Here, put this on too,” said Gloria. It was a pixie bonnet. “One of them nice ladies at Mrs. P.'s, middle floor, knitted it up. Said I was to take extra care to keep your ears warm, specially with this wind. Unraveled one of her own woollies specially.” It was a mixture of strange colors and the knitted ties felt scratchy where Gloria knotted them under Dot's chin. “You'll have to say thank you.”

At first, Mrs. Parvis pretended to be pleased to see Dot.

“Oh, my! And hasn't she grown tall! So that's what lying in bed all day does for you. I should try it myself if only I had the time.”

But to Gloria she said, “She's all skin and bone. If you looked at her sideways, you wouldn't never see her at all.”

After that, everything was just the same, with Mrs. Parvis still complaining as much as ever.

“They gave us that big buildup. The new Britain, that's what our boys been fighting for. Work for all, health for all, that's what they promised.”

“And a good home for everybody,” Gloria agreed. Mrs. Parvis glared at her and carried on.

“And now look at us! Right back where we was. Noses to the grindstone. In fact, I'd say we're worse off than what we was at the start of it. They can't even tell us what to do with our gas masks. I'm sick to death of them cluttering up my hall like that. Reminding us of things we don't want to think about.”

The gas masks hung on their pegs in the narrow hall. Inside each brown case waited the empty skull face, folded flat, with a flappy rubber nose and hard cylindrical snout, though they frightened Dot less now than they used to.

“At least we never had to wear them,” said Mr. Brown quietly. “We can be thankful for that.”

Dot had worn hers once during a practice. It was smelly inside, made you feel as though you were choking to death, and the eyeholes so small, you couldn't see out properly.

They'd issued one for Baby, too, a gasbag like a cradle with a porthole on the top. It was too cumbersome to hang on a peg in the hall with the others. So Gloria had shoved it out of the way under the bed.

When Gloria went off to the Essoldo, Dot couldn't go with her. She wasn't allowed in crowded places where there might be germs. She wasn't allowed to get cold. She wasn't allowed to mix with other children.

“They say she's very susceptible,” Gloria explained to Mrs. Parvis when she went to borrow an extra shilling for the meter to light the gas fire in the basement room. “She could catch anything that's around.”

“Mollycoddling,” said Mrs. Parvis under her breath. “That's what it is, she ought to be back in school, a big girl like that. Besides, what if all my lodgers was asking for favors? I'm not a lending bank.”

In the afternoon, when Gloria had left for work, Dot pulled out Baby's gas mask to look at it again. It was covered in gray dust. Seeing it, and thinking of him safely in heaven with no risk now of being zipped into this airless rubber gasbag, made Dot start to cry. She didn't understand why. She hadn't cried about him before. She sobbed so much that Mrs. Parvis heard through the wall and came in and told her off. She made her get into bed and said she was sending for the blue ladies right away.

She must have told Gloria off too, for the very next day, Gloria said, “You got to go off to the country, ducks, health visitor says. For your convalescence.”

Dot didn't know what her convalescence was.

“To get you in the pink. For your operation. Like the nice man said. We don't want you hopping the twig.”

“I
am
in the pink,” said Dot, though she knew she wasn't or she wouldn't have allowed herself to weep the day before.

“Can't you come too?”

“I dunno, pet. It's dull down there. There ain't nothing for me to do.”

“What if it's all changed and they don't know me no more?”

“Listen, pet, she's said she'll have you. So what more d'you want? Jam on
both
sides? I'll put you in charge of the guard and you'll be as right as rain.”

Dot felt she was an unwanted item of luggage being sent away.

14

Miss Spindle-Shanks

Mrs. Hollidaye met Dot at the train with the Ford drawn right up to the station exit.

“My dear, I won't kiss you. Just in case of the germs. We've got to treat you like best bone china. But don't mind the dogs. They're just longing to see you. Dogs have different germs, can't possibly harm you.” She was wearing her felt hat and her tweed jacket with the jeweled brooch pinned to the lapel. Everything was just as it should be.

“I decided I really
must
bring the motor. And if that nosy old constable asks about petrol, I shall tell him it's an emergency. And if he doesn't believe me, well, we shall have to see what we shall see, won't we?”

She bundled Dot onto the front seat with rugs up to the chin. The wool gave off a friendly smell of the dogs who had been lying on it.

“And here's the hot water bottle for your feet, my dear,” said Mrs. Hollidaye. “And there's a flask of tea if you need it. Though we'll be home before you can say Jack Robinson. And Dorothy dear, I must warn you, you're hardly going to
recognize
Miss Lilian! All new teeth! Top and bottom. That's the new welfare.
Do
tell her how nice she looks, won't you? Of course you will. Only she's rather self-conscious at the moment.”

Loopy Lil's new smile of regular gleaming teeth was the only change. Otherwise everything was reassuringly the same. The yapping of the small dogs, the smells of musty dampness, of jam and paraffin and welcoming wood smoke, the vase of flowers on a polished table in the hall.

“Now you're not to lift a finger, my dear, is she, Lilian? Until you're quite better.”

“I
am.
I'm fit as a fiddle!” Dot said. “Skinny as a whipping post, that's what Gloria says, and sound as a roach.”

But the journey in the guard's van like lost luggage had exhausted her, so she didn't protest about going straight up with Loopy Lil, being changed into one of Mrs. Hollidaye's pink flannel nightgowns and tucked into a cocoon of pillows with a hot stone bottle wrapped in a worn silk vest at her feet. There was a fire burning in the grate, and a china chamber pot painted with birds and flowers beneath the bed.

Her supper was on a tray, a plate of yellow buttered eggs, pink rhubarb with cream, a glass of milk, and a tiny glass vase of flowers.

“I'll put the snowdrops just here,” Mrs. Hollidaye said. “So you can see them. I do like a person who likes flowers. I believe, my dear, that seeing beautiful things around does so help a soul to feel strong, wouldn't you say? The Ministry did tell us not to waste effort growing flowers, but somehow one always felt they were not quite as right as they might have been on that one. Now you've found the chamber, haven't you, under the bed, so you won't have to go far in the night.”