The Flight of Gemma Hardy (10 page)

chapter eleven

T
he next day Matron gave me breakfast and sent me back to Primary 7. I think she was a little sorry to lose me. She patted my shoulder, told me to come back if I felt poorly, and allowed me to borrow the book I was reading about Milly, a music teacher, and Edward, a postman. I smiled my thanks. What had I needed speech for? The first period of the day was arithmetic. When Mrs. Harris started to go round the room, asking girls for their answers, I readied myself to go to the blackboard to write mine, but she skipped over me as if my desk were empty. Miss Bryant must have warned her.

In the Elm Room that evening the working girls pretended to ignore my return—they were playing a noisy game of snap—but as I undressed I caught Findlayson eyeing me uneasily, then Drummond, then Gilchrist.

“You all right?” said Gilchrist.

I went to brush my teeth. No one followed.

For a few days the girls questioned me at odd moments, jumped out from behind doors. Once, when Findlayson sprang up beside my bed, I screamed, but otherwise I managed to remain silent. Soon they lost interest and I became what I had wanted: almost invisible. In assembly I did not pretend to sing although I silently repeated the Lord's Prayer, which my uncle had laboured to teach me during those early months at Yew House. Only Cook was concerned. One afternoon she took me into the larder and said, “Hardy, tell me what's wrong. Did those brats bully you? Are you hurt?”

In the notebook I had started carrying I wrote,
Thank you. I'm fine!

That evening I hid in one of the bathrooms and wrote my long-rehearsed letter to Mr. Donaldson.

Please tell everyone it's all my fault and I would be happy to tell them that too. They won't give me a letter from you but if you write to Miriam Goodall, my best friend at Claypoole, she will pass on whatever you say.

Then I wrote,
Please forward if necessary
, on the envelope.

The next afternoon, as I washed rhubarb, I kept a careful eye on Cook. Half-a-dozen times a day, when she was sure Mrs. Bryant wasn't around, she would nip out for a cigarette. So when I saw her put down a colander and head for the door, I followed. I found her standing near the flowering currant, puffing smoke towards the nest. I held out the letter in both hands.

For a few seconds she studied my offering with the same expression she wore when a sauce curdled. She was going to refuse me, report me. Then she smiled. “Aren't you a sly one?” The next thing I knew she had slipped the envelope beneath her apron. “I'll make sure this sees the inside of a pillar-box tonight.”

I bowed my thanks. Then I pointed out the nest with the bright-eyed bird. Cook stepped forward to look more closely. “So this is what you and Ross are in such a state about. I shouldn't be blowing smoke at the poor thing. Hard enough being a mother without that. How many blackbirds does it take to make a pie?”

I held up my hands and flashed two tens and a four.

Cook sighed. “I suppose you'll talk when you're ready. Well, back to the salt mines.”

P
ublicly, like the other working girls, Ross ignored me, but when we were alone, she pelted me with uneasy questions. Did people who couldn't talk hear better? Was I cross? Had something happened in the infirmary? I shook my head, or shrugged, and eventually she too was lured into speech by my silence. As we were carrying slops to the pigs she told me what had happened the night of the ambush.

“One minute you were screaming bloody murder, then suddenly you passed out cold. Even when I pinched you, you didn't move.”

So that was the bruise on my forearm, I thought, stepping around a thistle.

“I was scared you'd kicked the bucket,” she went on, swinging the actual bucket she was carrying. “In our street once a bloke fell over, digging a hole. He never got up again. So I lugged you down the stairs and fetched Matron.”

Of course Matron wouldn't have found me on her own; she never left her domain after lights-out. To hide my confusion—I didn't want Ross to be my saviour—I ran ahead to the pigsty. As I tipped the scraps into the trough, Thumbelina shoved Heidi aside. If I'd been alone I would have told her to mind her manners.

A few days later, when we were on our way to clean the gym, Ross finally revealed why Montrose, my predecessor, had had to leave. They had pretended, just for a laugh, to throw her out of the window; she had struggled so hard she'd broken her wrist. “She told Miss Bryant it was our fault. Of course she couldn't stay after that. As soon as she was better, Miss Bryant fibbed about her age and got her a job in a hotel.”

The afternoon was warm, and when Ross stopped to wipe her forehead her hand left a smear of grime. I took pleasure in seeing the dirt, pleasure in not telling her about it. At last she gave up waiting for me to answer and spoke again.

“I don't know what she'd have done if you'd tattled,” she said. “I worried you might. You're such a Goody Two-shoes.”

As I swept the gym, I daydreamed about a kingdom of girls, a place where there were only girls, where none of the girls were bullies or idiots, and everyone studied harmoniously. If only such a place existed, Miriam and I would go there tomorrow.

F
or several days after I returned to the Elm Room I didn't see Miriam. Then one morning in assembly I spotted her, not standing with her class but sitting on a chair beside the teachers. At lunch, when I set her plate down, I noticed her inhaler on the table. That evening in the bathroom I wrote another note.

Dearest Miriam,

Are you all right? Your face is the colour of paper and I can hear you breathing. Have you seen the doctor? I hope, hope, hope I can come and stay with you in the holidays. Tell your father I am a good nurse. I will read to you all day long and take good care of you. I miss you.

Love, your best friend, Gemma

I carried the note around in my sock, waiting for a chance to deliver it. Finally on Saturday, as Smith and I were polishing the hall outside the library, Miriam limped towards us. I dropped my mop and, bending to pick it up, slipped the note into her hand.

That afternoon in the kitchen, Ross tugged my apron. Outside, in the flowering currant, the mother blackbird was no longer sitting on the nest. Four tiny beaks were visible above the rim of moss and twigs.

“They hatched,” she whispered. “Just like you said.”

I felt her arms go around me, and before I knew what was happening, she had lifted me up. I stared in wonder at the barely feathered heads with their filmy eyes and yellow beaks. Then I wriggled until she set me down.

“We'll have to gather worms for them. Maybe after supper this evening.”

I nodded.

“How long before they fly away?”

I wasn't sure but I held up four fingers.

“Four days?”

I shook my head, and moved my hands farther apart.

“Okay. So we have four weeks to teach them to be our friends.”

As she spoke, the mother bird appeared with a shrill cry. We stepped back and she flew down into the bush. I remembered my uncle telling me that birds fed their young with regurgitated food, which was why it was so hard to rear a fledgling. Even if we liked chewing worms, he had said, we don't have the right saliva.

M
iriam did not reply to my note, and two mornings in a row she was missing from assembly. There were rumours that Dr. White had been called in the night, that she was worse. Chopping onions, I angled the knife into my finger. In the infirmary Matron greeted me warmly. “Oh, Hardy, how . . . ?”

I held out my notebook with the note I had written earlier.

“Poor Goodall.” She dabbed something stinging on my cut. “She's very poorly.”

I seized the notebook and wrote,
PLEASE tell me more.

She shook her head and pressed a piece of cotton wool to my finger. “The doctor thinks . . . Hospital.”

For the rest of the day thoughts flashed through my mind like scenery rushing past the window of a train. Miriam had told me there was no cure for asthma, although a warmer, drier climate helped. That was why people used to go to the Mediterranean. “Your inhaler makes you better,” I had said. I was dusting the piano in the music room.

“It makes me feel better,” she corrected. “The asthma stays the same. And Dr. White says I mustn't use it too often. You need stronger and stronger doses.”

“But people don't die of asthma,” I had said. “Not like drowning, or the plague.”

Standing beside me, Miriam played a scale, first with her left hand, then her right. She had promised she would teach me some songs soon. “Most people don't die,” she agreed, “but when I can't breathe it feels as if I'm about to. Sometimes”—she played the scale with both hands—“I even want to. The only hope is that it will get better as I get older, and my lungs grow bigger.”

“So you have to eat lots,” I had said, “and grow quickly.” But as she limped across the hall, Miriam had seemed not bigger but smaller, only an inch or two taller than me, and as thin as my mop.

T
hat night I stole out of bed and down the stairs. I was tiptoeing past the bathroom when a figure in striped pyjamas loomed over me. “You're not sneaking around, are you?” said Ross.

I gasped and swerved into the bathroom. She stood in the doorway. “We wouldn't want you trying to see your fancy friend.”

I managed to pee, washed my hands, and pushed past her, up the narrow stairs. Back in bed I listened as hard as I could. Although I knew how Findlayson whimpered, doglike, in her sleep, and how Gilchrist cried out as if she were being attacked, I could not identify Ross's night sounds. Her bed was on the far side of the room, and I was never sure if that grunting snore was hers. Or that melancholy sigh? How was it, I wondered, that night after night I sent messages to Miriam and was never sure they reached her but that Ross seemed to read my mind effortlessly? Or perhaps, I thought, she was simply paying attention. A few weeks ago, before the girls attacked me, she had remarked that Mr. Milne always parked squint after having a beer. “You'd make a good policeman,” I had said. Her face had lit up. “That would be grand,” she exclaimed. “Do you think they'd have me?” “No,” I'd said. “You have to be good at sums.”

Now I counted a hundred sheep, then two hundred. Just as I was about to try again, someone moaned, “No. No cabbage.” Reluctantly I lay back down. I pictured the bodies piling on top of me, and Ross urging them on.

T
he following afternoon I was dusting the window-sills in the front hall when the door flew open and a man in an old-fashioned brown suit strode in, bringing with him a faint, familiar smell I couldn't name. His momentum carried him halfway across the hall before he remembered the door and turned back to close it, leaving a double trail of muddy footprints. As he retraced his steps, I recognised the tang of manure. Near the sofa he stopped to remove his hat and looked around. His hair receded in an emphatic W and his eyes were shadowed. After his noisy entrance he seemed uncertain what to do next. Then he spotted me.

“Girl,” he boomed, “fetch Miss Bryant.”

I dropped my duster and hurried to the corridor where Ross was wielding the floor polisher. I stood in front of her, pointing at the hall, until she turned off the machine and followed me.

“Fetch Miss Bryant,” the man repeated. “I'm here to see my daughter.”

Ross hurried away. While I returned to my dusting, he stationed himself in front of the empty fireplace and surveyed the room, not with the appreciative gaze of most parents but rather as if he were measuring it for a carpet. Between one flick of the duster and the next, it came to me that this was Miriam's father: the stern man with no use for children. I longed to approach and explain that I was his daughter's best friend. If only he'd let me come home with her I could nurse her back to health. But even as I moved towards him, the door on the stairs opened.

“Mr. Goodall,” said Miss Bryant. “You got my message.”

Hoping to escape attention, I ran my duster over the wainscoting.

“Yes,” said Mr. Goodall. “I had a bull to see in Hawick. How is she?” His voice, like Mr. Waugh's, was effortlessly loud. It was easy to imagine him calling out prices to crowds of men.

Miss Bryant raised her voice to match. “Your daughter has never been a hypochondriac, but for the last week she's been so breathless she can't get out of bed. Matron and Dr. White both think she'd be better off in hospital.”

“I don't hold with hospitals.”

Their footsteps moved across the hall, and whatever came next was inaudible. When I risked a glance over my shoulder, I saw that there had been another witness to the conversation. Ross had followed Miss Bryant into the hall and stood by the standard lamp, watching me. I moved on to the next stretch of wainscoting. Don't speak, I shouted in my head. Don't say a word. I dusted, I polished, I straightened the magazines on the table by the armchairs. At last she walked away. Only then did I feel free to send my message: Miriam, I'll come tonight. I promise.

I
n bed while I waited for everyone to fall asleep, I had the awful thought that Miriam's grey, smelly father had already taken her away. But, however faulty my message-sending, I was convinced I would know if she were gone. She was still here, but tomorrow, unless she improved dramatically, she would be sent to the hospital. Around me girls snored and sighed. Findlayson got up to use the bathroom; so did Drummond. I tried to decide if it was better to leave during one of the surges of noise that periodically passed through the room or while all was still. Suddenly I sensed someone beside my bed. I opened my eyes, ready to scream. In the gloom I made out a young man wearing a white shirt and dark trousers.

“Miriam needs you,” he said. “Go to her now.”