Дэймон Найт - Orbit 7

He looked up. She seemed to him, then, very tired, very weak.

“We could take him to one of those places. Where they … take care of them … for you.”

He shook his head, violently. “No, we’ve already discussed that, Mary. He wouldn’t understand. It will be easier, my way. If I do it myself.”

She went to the window and stood there watching it. It filled most of one wall. It was frosted over.

“How would you like to go for a walk after breakfast,” he asked the child. He immediately shoved the bowl away and said, “Bafroom first?”

“You or me?” Mary said from the window.

Finally: “You.”

He sat alone in the kitchen, thinking. Taps ran, the toilet flushed, he came out full of pride. “We go park,” he said. “We go see gulls.”

“Maybe.” It was this, the lie, which came back to him later; this was what he remembered most vividly. He got up and walked into the hall with the child following him and put his coat on. “Where’s his other muffler?”

“In the bureau drawer. The top one.”

He got it, then began looking for the stockingcap and mittens. Walking through the rooms, opening drawers. There aren’t any seagulls in London. When she brought the cap and mittens to him there was a hole in the top of the cap and he went off looking for the other one. Walking through rooms, again and again into the child’s own.

“For God’s sake go on,” she finally said. “Please stop. O damn Jim, go on.” And she turned and ran back into the kitchen.

Soon he heard her moving about. Clearing the table, running water, opening and shutting things. Silverware clicking.

“We go park?”

He began to dress the child. Getting his little coat down off the hook. Wrapping his neck in the muffler. There aren’t any seagulls in London. Stockingcap, Haha.

Thinking, This is the last time I’ll ever do this.

Now bump, bump, bump. Down the funny stairs.

When he returned, Mary was lying on the bed, still in the quilted robe, watching the ceiling. It seemed very dark, very cold in the room. He sat down beside her in his coat and put his hand on her arm. Cars moved past the window. The people upstairs had their radio on.

“Why did you move the bureau?” he asked after a while.

Without moving her head she looked down toward the foot of the bed. “After you left I was lying here and I noticed a traffic light or something like that out on the street was reflected in it. It was blinking on and off, I must have watched it for an hour. We’ve been here for weeks and I never saw that before. But once I did, I had to move it.”

“You shouldn’t be doing heavy work like that.”

For a long while she was still, and when she finally moved, it was just to turn her head and look silently into his face.

He nodded, once, very slowly.

“It didn’t …”

No.

She smiled, sadly, and he lay down beside her in the small bed. She seemed younger now, rested, herself again. There was warmth in her hand when she took his own and put them together on her stomach.

They lay quietly through the afternoon. Ice was reforming on the streets; outside, they could hear wheels spinning, engines racing. The hall door opened, there was a jangle of milkbottles, the door closed. Then everything was quiet. The trees across the street drooped under the weight of the ice.

There was a sound in the flat. Very low and steady, like a ticking. He listened for hours before he realized it was the drip of a faucet in the bathroom.

Outside, slowly, obscuring the trees, the night came. And with it, snow. They lay together in the darkness, looking out the frosted window. Occasionally, lights moved across it.

“We’ll get rid of his things tomorrow,” she said after a while.

They were learning all about history, the holy martyrs and Rome burning down and if you didn’t burn incense for Jupiter you had to go into the Colosseum while the pagans watched. Jupiter is a false god, but we believe in one god the Father Almighty. There was a little girl in the picture too, with a white dress for purity and white flowers in her hair, and Sister Augustine said the holy martyrs should be an inspiring example for every boy and girl.

They had waited all day, because the smallest children went last, but at last the Public Health man came and talked to Sister. He had a white dress with gold buttons, and his hair was gold, too, like tiny gold wires, because he was English. So they put on their sweaters and went outside to wait in line beside the medical unit in the wet gravel with puddles everywhere. Emma was the monitor. She stood at the end of the line in her red sweater and her little red polly boots, fingering the pink health card with her name on it. Her first name began with E and her second name began with an R , but she was slow in Reading—all the little letters looked the same. But if you don’t learn to read, you won’t know what the signs say on top of stores, you won’t know what street you’re on if you ever go to Dublin, and you can’t make a shopping list.

She went in the door and the man with the gold beard took her card and jiggled it in his machine, and then Mary Ellen Poorlick screamed like a banshee. The man who stuck the needles in tried to talk to her, but with his funny accent you couldn’t understand a word. Jamie Baro was next, then Emma, and she couldn’t look away from the needle, as long as her own middle finger. If she had to be a holy martyr, she knew she’d have run away when the lions came out of their cages instead of singing along with the others, but the door was closed behind her now, and the man said, “Try and relax now, Emma.” He was a fairy, because fairies have gold hair like that, and in any case all the English are bent as a pin. That’s what Leonard said. He put something cold on her arm, while the needle filled up with more white stuff, and she clenched herself tight all over, and he stuck it right into her arm.

She knew the very next thing after that that she must have done something wrong then, because she was in the Principal’s Office, and Sister Mary Margaret was putting water on her face, but worse than that her Cousin Bridie was there with one of the babies. Bridie was saying, “Oh, tension! Her mother is another great one for tensions.”

She tried to sit up in the day-nap cot, but Sister Mary Margaret pushed her flat again. “You’d better rest a minute, my dear. You’re not well.”

Emma touched her arm where it hurt. There was a band-aid on it.

Cousin Bridie said, “We’re taking up your time, Sister,” and Sister Mary Margaret said, “Nonsense,” and handed Emma a cone of water to drink.

“Say thank you,” said Cousin Bridie. Emma said thank you.

“You see, it’s all over now, and there wasn’t anything to fuss about, was there? The pain is always in the waiting, not in the thing we’ve waited for.”

Cousin Bridie sighed and rocked the baby. Her lips were unhappy, the way they got when she was cooking dinner, but when she listened to music her face was pretty, or when there was a funny show on the telly, and when she was like that you could talk to her and she was nicer than almost any other grown-up. But not when her lips were like that.

So she rested and then Sister Mary Margaret said, “Emma, your cousin is here to take you home with her for a little while. You have to promise to be very good. Sister Augustine tells me you’re one of her best-behaved children.”

Emma looked down at the band-aid. “Did I do something then?”

“What do you mean, Emma?”

“Something wrong—out there?”

“Oh, this is nothing to do with the polio shot. We can’t help things like that. It’s because your grandfather - or rather your great-grandfather, I believe?”