Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

She asked, ‘Well?’ because his silence was a protracted one.

‘That’s the way we pass our lives — a mouthful o’ pumpkin loaf, a quick draw or chew at the crow-minder’s bacca, a try at catchin’ sight of what’s inside the shifts of a gang of Dublin and Cockney molls. In between the ’ard labour. Or ’arder still when they strip us naked and string us up at the triangles — for the good of our moral ’ealth.’

She flinched.

‘I fell down once. I reckon I must of fainted, but I’m still not sure. The surgeon that was standin’ by — this was for our general physical well-bein’—kicked me to see if I wasn’t dead. I oughter been. When they pulled me to me feet I could ’ardly stagger. This was the worstest experience I ever ’ad of a bastin’. I would of said the bones was showin’ through me hide, whether or not. Anyways, the flies got to work on the cuts. I was turned septic. Yairs, I was a brake on the chain-gang, whether at the mill or the stone-bustin’. So this same surgeon — great-’earted, considerin’—ordered me to ’orspital.’

She was clinging to him in horror and disgust: the smell alone, of putrefying flesh (or rotten teeth). But either from abstraction or from conjuring this Irishwoman, he showed no sign of appreciating her sympathy.

‘I was deleerious at first. I would not of knowed nobody. The chaplain prayin’—very thoughtful — was about the first thing I saw. One Sunday, as a special treat, the Commandant visits the ’orspital. By now I can take notice — and hate. I can see ’im lookin’ at me, out of the corner of an eye like. ’E’s brought ’is missus, a pretty little piece with pink roses inside of ’er bonnet. You can see she’s off colour, like the patients from their own stench — some of ’em layin’ on the boards in their shit, that the nurses is none too willin’ ter dispose of. “It’s pitiful! What — oh, what can we do for them?” the lady squeaks from be’ind ’er ’ankercher. I felt downright sorry for ’er. Well, you did! She’s whisked away pretty smart though, soon as ever she give tongue.’

He remained mumbling awhile on the situation.

‘This Irishwoman would wipe my arse. She’d a rough hand. But the eyelashes. “When me strength returns,” I tell ’er, “you’ll help me, wontcher? Sooner if you ’ear ’em talk of dischargin’ me.” She made no promise, but I could tell by ’er stance she was dependable. An’ that is ’ow I bolted for the last and most successful time from Moreton Bay.’

Her throat had grown bitter from thirst. She would have gone outside to quench it, regardless of whether he had finished his story. Were her promises equal in his mind to the Irishwoman’s silence? It tormented her.

‘One evenin’ she distracted the guard afore they was due to be changed. It’d been a hollycaust of a day. They was leanin’ sweaty on their muskets, only thinkin’ to be marched off to the barracks to their grub. I climbed the wall with the ’elp of a barrel I’d ’ad me eye on. Even the spikes was of assistance. Though I’ve a scar or two ter show for it.’

From his tone of voice she thought this must be all, when presently he all but crushed her in what she knew to be gratitude: she was acting as proxy for this Irishwoman of gummed-up lashes; she must not, she did not, feel resentful; she returned his embraces as though she personally deserved them.

It was the woman herself who might have resented, and hearing this Mrs Roxburgh when the fever was abated, ‘Well, now you are free Jack, and will remain so if I have anything to do with it.’

He did not answer, perhaps did not hear for the silence which had built up around them.

It did not prevent her hearing the feet approaching from two directions at once. Converging on her, so it seemed. She was lying stretched on the scrolled couch. The striped cerise silk blazed in a sunlight such as Cheltenham had never seen, the gilding of the scrollwork bronzed and blistered by unnatural heat (the gold leaf was in fact peeling like sunburnt skin). She shaded her eyes and rearranged her neck on the bolster as though expecting an assignation. She had shed, she noticed, the fringe of leaves which was her normal dress, and the hair in her thighs appeared to have been formally curled in the same style as the scrolls of the daybed on which she was waiting, on cushions melting into a dark cerise sea.

All around, dust was proliferating amongst the stones. To one side, where the gutter would have lain had this been a street, an evaporated creek had left behind wrinkles of curdled mud. A pair of heifers in milk too early for their years meandered past her, snuffing at the dust for the odd blade of grass until goaded into a lurching run by the flies stinging their rumps.

All this while the feet, she realized, had been approaching.

It was the contingent of women marching under guard from their quarters to the hospital. Their frocks of a coarse, grey-green cloth fitted them shamefully about the breasts and buttocks; their boots were designed only for plodding.

She lay smoothing her nakedness, it could only have been waiting for her lover, under her neck the bolster in sweating cerise. Soon after, he did approach with an assurance which her promises must have stimulated.

But she thought it as well to remind, ‘I am the one on whom you depend,’ before taking possession of him.

He affirmed, by word as well as physical ardour, that it had not been any but herself, never Mab, and least of all this Irish moll.

As she covered him with her breasts and thighs, lapping him in a passion discovered only in a country of thorns, whips, murderers, thieves, shipwreck, and adulteresses, the gilded day-bed refused to yield, nor yet when one of its legs screamed.

And as the party of women reached them, the gang of male felons, she noticed from round the corners of her kisses, came shambling from the opposite side with an almost sensuous rustle of chains. The women began murmuring. One hostile voice suggested that a poor whore could open her legs as wide as any wealthy harlot. She would listen to no more. And smother her lover rather than allow him to be drawn back into the ritual of chains and licence. But he wrenched his head free just as the fly-ridden Irish lashes paid flickering tribute, not to himself, but to his double in the chain-gang. She was so incensed she started banging against the suddenly petrified bolster the head she had been cosseting.

‘Mab!’ he screamed in agony.

The light was increasing around them, putting on the iron greys she most dreaded in that they made her more aware of her rags of flesh and physical exhaustion. His grey face was turned towards her, supported in the absence of a pillow by the wishbone of an arm.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

It took her by surprise, because she had thought him still asleep.

‘You must have been dreaming,’ she replied uneasily.

‘I would of said you was the one.’

‘Both of us then. Mine was a dream I shall try to forget. Do you also forget yours,’ she advised in what sounded like an echo of Mr Austin Roxburgh at his most cranky and most rational.

She lay a little longer in hopes of being allowed to doze, but knew that he would rise at any moment and announce that they must prepare themselves for the day’s march.

Whether today’s or tomorrow’s or yesterday’s it was all one by now, a continuous seamless tapestry, its details recurrent and interchangeable. Giant, wooden birds stalked the earth, or paused to consider the similar movements of the apparitions confronting them, or flumped towards safety if some more than usually grotesque gesture destroyed their sense of security.

There was an occasion when she fell down, scattering skywards a cloud of ashen parrots. She would have continued lying on the ground and perhaps become her true self: once the flesh melts, and the skeleton inside it is blessed with its final articulate white, amongst the stones, beneath the hard sky, in this country to which it can at last belong.