Читать книгу Once, Two Islands - Dawn Garisch - Страница 9

Chapter Three

Aunt Frieda held the small bundle of her niece in her arms, eased the bottle’s teat into the baby’s mouth and rocked her slowly to the rhythm of her grief. It came back to her like yesterday how she had done this very thing for Angelique, the last-born, the latecomer to the family, the angel. Frieda, the eldest, had had to look after Angelique as her own while their mother worked at the crayfish factory. The baby sucked hungrily, stopped and squirmed, torn between hunger and discomfort, sucked again, then broke her face into a grimace of complaint. Frieda stood, put the bottle down. She had been up all night like this, the night that she should have been keeping a vigil for her departed sister to smooth her passage into the afterlife. She’d lit a candle and had whispered the prayers of supplication to the ancestors while busy with the baby. It was the best she could do.

Frieda put the baby on her shoulder to wind her, the wails flailing against her ear, the tight gourd of the infant’s belly straining against the colic. She’d seen this before. She knew what the problem was, what she had to do. Poor child, she had enough to cry about – her mother disappeared into heaven, her father into his bedroom. Her own tears ran down her face. She knew what she had to do, but she was afraid. Surely her dear sister would understand. And the doctor needn’t know, it could be hidden from him.

She jigged around the room, patting the infant on her tiny back, trying to wind and soothe her. “Hush, now, hush.” No mother, no father, grandmother and grandfather gone too, the doctor’s parents and sister estranged and her other aunt away to the mainland, unable to get to the island to attend the funeral. What a story, what a beginning to a life! Aunt Frieda cooed and clucked over the poor young squalling thing while she changed her nappy, and told her stories of the island and how they came to live there, to distract them both from their great loss.

“Once upon a time, a sailing ship lost its way in a storm, blown away into the southern ocean while trying to go north. Oh yes, things don’t always turn out the way you plan them, you’ll get used to that fact.” The baby whimpered and sobbed, pulling her little frog legs up, looking into Frieda’s face with her deep, dark eyes. “That ship was a slave ship, stealing black people away from their homes and selling them across the ocean – those that survived, that is, for many died of dehydration and chest complaints and heartbreak, all crammed down in the hold like animals, though nowadays you’d go to jail for treating an animal so bad.” She cleaned and dried and oiled the baby’s bottom as she’d done for her own children, both grown up now, and shook her head. “Us humans, we’ve got a lot to answer for, we have.” She put the baby’s cap on – for she knew, like her mother’s mother before her, that a baby loses most body heat through the head, where all the thoughts, lessons and memories are stored, and there was a cold rain outside. It thrummed hard on the roof of the doctor’s house, reminding him in his bedroom at the end of the passage of his endless grief.

“This ship was due back home in the north, and after discharging her cargo, she set sail. The storm brought her south, and wrecked her on this isle, along with twenty survivors. They were both crew and slaves, for a few of the slaves, mostly favoured women, were being taken back to the old world. Already one was pregnant, for you know, slaves were forced to do whatever their masters told them. Oh, we have a lot to answer for! But good things can happen out of bad, look at me! Without all that I would never have been born, and neither would you!” And she laughed her gap-toothed laugh through her tears, and jigged and soothed her niece, and found some comfort there for herself.

The doctor was seated at his desk reading The Annals of Modern Orthopaedics, trying to concentrate on the diagnosis and treatment of osteitis, trying to block out the buffeting of the baby’s cries and his own turbulent mind, when he heard a car pull up. That could only be a council member, or the police. He sprang to the window, peered out through the deluge, and saw the blurred figures of the mayor and Officer Bardelli hurrying towards his front door. Seized with rage, he found himself with his pistol in his hand, pacing. After all he had done for this dump, the dogs now turn on him! He had done nothing, nobody could pin a thing on him. He heard Frieda let them in; ear to the door, he tried to decipher words, but the damn weather drowned everything. How long must he suffer this assault from the skies? He had a wife to bury in the cold, wet ground before anyone started talking about autopsies. He locked the bedroom door, noticing with irritation how his hand was shaking. Pacing, pacing, his body restless, his mind caged in his head, in this room, this island, this life, imprisoned by the stories people told about him, by what people thought of him. Bastards, the lot of them, wanting a funeral to gawp and gossip and make a scene.

Frieda at the door, knocking, always at the door knocking, why wouldn’t anyone leave him alone?

“I’m busy.”

“But Mayor Peters . . .”

“Not now!”

Frieda retraced her steps to the sitting room where the two waited, hats in hands. “He doesn’t come out except for the bathroom,” she apologised. “Eats in there too, what little he does.”

The mayor shook his head. “Terrible thing. Just wanted to pay my respects, you know. And to tell him there’s nothing . . . to worry about.” He looked at Dorado for help.

Officer Dorado Bardelli nodded. “Tell the doctor the police van is available for the funeral Saturday. I’ll drive her myself.”

She stared at the baby Frieda carried at her shoulder, amazed by how much noise could come out of such a tiny body. Every day she had a different feeling about babies; today she was glad not to have any and reminded herself to be more careful about taking her pill. Besides, the mayor had two of his own, both grown now; he wouldn’t consider more, not in his position. She glanced at him, hoping her hair was lying straight and right, but he was looking somewhere else, always looking somewhere else.

“What’s wrong?” Clarence asked, chucking the baby on the cheek with a bent forefinger.

“The colic,” said Frieda. That was all they needed to know. It was what the doctor had diagnosed, getting John Peters to bring antispasmodics over from the hospital dispensary. “She’ll grow out of it,” is what the doctor had said. Then he’d left it up to Frieda, burying his head under pillows when it got too much.

Mayor Peters glanced at Officer Dorado again; he wanted to escape, but she wished there was something more they could do. Dorado had never heard a baby cry for its mother like this: a shuddering wailing tearing at her ears. “Well, we’d better get going,” the mayor decided, making for the door, pulling Dorado after him in his wake.

They were not the only visitors. People came in dribs and drabs throughout the next few days, bringing presents for the baby: crocheted blankets and caps and knitted jerseys, milk formula, teddies for the bed and ducks for the bath. For the doctor they brought home-brew and condolences. Whatever they might say to each other in the confines of their cottages, they knew the right thing to do. They knew that, come an emergency, a slip on a rock or a gall bladder gone bad, your life could suddenly fall into the doctor’s hands. Who knows, if he already held a grudge against you, his hands might be too full to catch you.

But whoever came to the house, the doctor would not come out of his bedroom. The presents piled high on the table in the sitting room, presents wrapped in patterned paper blurring and sagging with the tear and pluck and wet of weather, handmade and shop-bought gifts resting and sogging, but still the doctor would not come out. Not even when Nelson Peters arrived to take instruction concerning the funeral arrangements. Not until the day Frieda answered a knock at the door and there stood Sister Veronica, braced against the gale, wearing her body like a corset.

“It is time,” she said to Frieda as she whisked briskly past her, past the wailing baby and down the passage (how did she know which was the doctor’s bedroom door?). She knocked. “Doctor,” she announced firmly to the wooden barrier, “Mr Arthur Bardelli has cut his finger to the bone with his fishing knife, and that Peters child, Sasha, has a bronchospasm I cannot break. And Katerina Schoones cannot stop vomiting, her sugar is off the scale. I have done all I can, but we need you, sir. I am sorry to disturb you in this difficult time, but I fear . . .” What she wanted to say was that she feared death might come again, but that could not be said, not with his wife still above ground.

Still no answer, but she knew what would rouse him. “People might start to turn elsewhere, sir, and you know what will come of that.” Already there was a queue outside Sophia’s door in the mornings, already people’s heads were being turned.

The door opened and Doctor Orion Prosper emerged, pale and unshaven, his eyes underlined with pain. Veronica’s heart leapt to see him. I’ll save him, she thought. I will make my body a raft for him to lie on, I will bear him away to tropical shores where the wind never blows, and the water is clear and still, and the sun will thaw his heart so he can love again.

The doctor shrugged his coat on, knocked back some pills. “Let’s go,” he said to Veronica, and went out of the door as though it was his idea.