Lilian's Story (30 page)

It was the work of a moment to open the door and step in. There were folk who did not understand the importance of making a journey every day.
Get bloody out
of it, Lil
, some of them shouted, and clamoured until some policeman or other arrived and looked solemn. Many of them threatened, but their shouts and feints were empty, because I was stronger than almost any of them. Men got out of their taxis and pulled at my arm, but their bulk was from too much beer and bluster, while mine was from years of practice, and the strength of a simple life.

Once I was in that front seat, settled in all my massiveness beside them, the wise ones decided it was easier to take me somewhere, and tell me we had arrived. I did not much care if they drove only a block or two before they told me we had arrived, because the arriving was not the important thing.

There were those, too, whom I met this way and recognised as fellow-souls. There was a young man, who although so young looked as if he might be nursing a history of some sad past, a young man with a sad cross face who seemed pleased to be joined in the front seat of his car.
Hop in, Lil
, he said, although I had already done so, and he drove until he decided that I had arrived, and went on his way looking less cross.

They could become objectionable. One man, whose brilliantined hair was combed back so fiercely that his forehead looked scraped and angry, congested and stood over me looking nasty, but silent. His moustache was like Father's had once been, heavy and dark, hiding his mouth. Like Father, this man gave nothing away. I was used to a lot of shouting, liked it for the chance it gave me to shout back, and this man's silence frightened me. In the face of that silence I stopped being a woman of independent means and fighting spirit, and became that weakest of beings, a mere daughter.

I sat on the front seat of his taxi and in silence this man seized my ear and began to twist it until I could not move fast enough to get out of his taxi, but once he had hold of my ear he did not seem to want to stop twisting it, until he had me doubled over, trying to twist my whole body with my poor ear, and I was reduced at last to tears and shrieks as I had not even let out in the worst of the old days with Mother's belt against my skin. This loathsome man remained silent, and when at last he let me go, and I could straighten up and look into his face, he was as expressionless as a mask. He stared at me as if I was something that was not worth spending an expression on, serene in his nastiness. My ear burned in my head, I panted, I ran at the nose, and I had to watch this cold man get into his taxi and prepare to drive off and leave me defeated and destroyed.

But although this man was like Father, he was not Father, and I could find it in me to fight back. I wrenched open the passenger door and with the pain of my ear filling my head I jerked that door backwards with all my considerable strength. The hinges held, but something creaked in a strained way, and I felt that a few more heaves would snap that door straight off its hinges, and then this man with his plastered hair and fat moustache would finally have to pay attention, and be touched by the chaotic hand of emotion.

Of course, long before those obstinate hinges could snap, strong policemen's arms were holding me, and plenty of people were shouting. I liked the feel of those strong arms around me, longed to be held even tighter, and struggled so that a second policeman had to be brought along, and finally I stood with the arms of two powerful young men around me, and that was a kind of love, and consoled me for the chill that had entered my heart in the face of this silent contemptuous man. I stopped struggling then, and laughed at the way the door hung, bruised like my ear, and how that brilliantined man's mouth was opening and closing at last under his moustache and making loud sounds of grief and fury. This was his property, and property called forth feeling.

Taken Away Again

I loved the feel of the policemen's arms around me, and knew now that I was past the point where any man's arms would cling to me, except to stop me doing something people disapproved of. I loved it, and struggled against those four young arms, and felt myself writhing against them, as my life had never let me writhe against any man in passion.

But when they brought up a grey van, and thrust me into it, their hands unsympathetic on my bottom as they shoved me up the metal steps, I did not enjoy it any more, and the glee drained out of me like water from a sock. There was a metal bench in this van, that I crouched on, and a shutter that let only enough light in to see how dark it was, and how small. I could not move my bulk in this space. My arms were trapped by my coat, caught up under me, my legs were cramped by the metal bench opposite, my head was crushed by the metal roof, and I could hear frightened gasping, the breathing of someone close to panic, and knew it was myself locked again in the kind of space that was as suffocating as a nasty death.

I was much older, now, though, and had learnt a few things. I did not let myself be suffocated, and I would not let the poisonous air of panic engulf me.
It is all right, I
will be all right
, I repeated to myself, but the van jerked and roared, the air hummed in my ears, my stomach heaved, and when we stopped with a jolt and I was flung sideways and scrabbled against smooth metal without being able to find a way to get upright again, I grew hot and mad as if with the old fears.

The door opened, though, before fear seized me, and when I saw sky, and sunlight on a corner of building, I was calmed and remembered who I was, and that I was someone enjoying life and its experiences, not someone who could succumb to the first sweat of fear.
Who do you think you are?
I asked the policemen, no longer warm embracers, as they came towards me.
Young men, who do you think I am, some
lifeless criminal or other?
But their young faces were closed now under their caps and they did not speak, did not look at my face, only at my fat wrists as they seized them and hurried me into the building and jammed me against a counter like a counter in a shop, but there was nothing to buy here except a fat policeman with a greasy yellow face like a pocked cheese, and I did not wish to buy him.
There
is nothing I want here
, I said in my grandest manner.
There
has been an error made, and I will leave now.
But the policemen beside me gripped my arms above the elbow, in the flesh that hurt, they knew how to hurt as well as hug, these men safe in their serge, and I could not move, only feel my book bag slip out of my hand. I felt crooked and twisted in my coat, felt the hair slipping into my eyes, felt chaos might not be far away. The man like a cheese pushed his cap back on his head and scratched his scalp so that dandruff floated down and thrust his big yellow face at me.
There is nothing
you want here, eh
, he said, mimicking the way I spoke, and mincing in a way I never did.
Nothing you want, eh, well, we
want something, dearie, we want a few of your particulars.
He leered at me across the counter and I drew back at the contempt and lechery in his face, and my instinct was to clutch at my particulars and not let him have them.

But we all grew weary of standing at this counter, and I was sick of the way the policemen's thumbs were pressing into the flesh of my arms, and the way the counter was hurting the flesh of my chest. I gave them my particulars and held my head up, and tried not to feel belittled, crammed against this counter with the policeman breathing hard over each laboured letter, licking his pencil so that his tongue became purple. They wanted to know when I was born, and I let the words ring out proudly across the counter, and the cheese policeman thought, and leered some more, and used his fingers to count, and finally said,
Well, Lil, I would not have said you
was in your first youth, but here you are a woman in your forties,
you are old enough to know better.
His finger ran down the form again and he said:
Height,
but I had had enough of answering and being sneered at, and did not answer. I nearly fell as the policemen ran me backwards against the wall and straightened me forcibly against it. I stood proudly then, thinking of the executions of brave men against such walls, but when they had measured me they bundled me forward to the counter again and stood holding me crookedly. The cheese policeman, more pocked-looking than ever now his tongue was purple, made a great show then of leaning over the counter to look me up and down and said,
Well, Harry, what kind of build is it would you say, I would
say build stout, eh.
They all laughed, and I wanted to shrink in shame, and I was beginning to loathe these men, who were not just doing their job now, but taunting me and loving it, full of hatred for me, and what had I done to deserve all this?

Come on, dearie
, the purple tongue said,
come and we'll take
your picture, something for us to remember your lovely face by, and will
you autograph it for us?
The policemen on my arms sniggered, for this man had stripes on his sleeves, and his jokes had to be sniggered at, and they pushed me against another piece of wall and took my picture. How cross and fearful I must have looked, how despairing, how loathing of these men! I wanted to cover my face with my hands, but the policemen stood beyond the reach of the lens, holding my arms out stiffly like pieces of wood, so my naked face was laid bare to the black eye of the lens and a little of my soul was stolen from me.

When the camera had clicked and my fear was caught for ever in it, the policemen let me go for a moment, as if we had all gathered here just for the moment in which the camera had caught its truth. It was only a moment, but it was long enough for me to recapture a morsel of myself and my dignity in being who I was, a substantial woman of character. This woman, who they had tried to mock, still had life in her. I turned my back on the camera and the men, bent over, and pulled up my old black skirt, and there was silence behind me as these men confronted the fact of my large bottom in its large cotton underwear.
If you care to leer and mock, let me give you something to leer and
mock at
, I shouted, but when I was forcibly straightened up, and my skirt pulled back down over my bottom, there was no leering and no mockery on their faces any more. They had a serious look. I had wiped the laughter off their faces, and taken back the centre of the stage of my own life.

I went quietly with them to the cell where they locked me in with a blanket and a smelly dunny, but I was serene now, having silenced them and proved my power. There was a window in the cell, high up, and I calmed myself watching the blue until it faded into mauve and pink, and finally it was black and my neck was sore from staring up for so long, remembering heaven.

Their Honour

In the morning they took me to the court, and I was scornful of the way everyone whispered in the corridors, and the way they bobbed their heads as if under the axe when they entered. Up above us all, the magistrate was a tiny man dwarfed by his huge bench, another counter, but there was even less I wanted to buy here. The air was full of the murmurings of the damned, outside and at the back of the court where we all waited. We were crimes pressed together on a hard bench, in a murmuring that was all around us, although no one could be seen talking.

Names were called out in nasty flat voices and people went sheepishly or swaggeringly to the front to confess that they were that person. I watched and grew anxious, for those flat voices, and the flat grey light, and the hunched figures standing in the dock were making it hard for me to remember that I was Lilian Una Singer: no one cared, here no one knew my name, and the machinery of this court would roll on over any event or person, I felt, and I began to feel myself disappearing.

I hung on, though, repeating my name to myself, and reminding myself that out there in the real world there were people who knew me, even one or two who might be thought to care for me a little. I hung on, thinking of Frank and Zara, and the man from whom I bought my oysters, with an accent like a foreign language. I hung on, numb from the bench, and at last I heard my name called out in that flat nasty voice:
Lilian Una Singer.
I stood up so quickly, and so awkwardly after sitting for so long, that people began to stare, and I called out in a voice I refused to allow to be reedy:
I am she, I am Lilian Una Singer,
and proud of it.
Everyone stared and even the tiny magistrate peered down from beyond his counter: everyone stared, and acknowledged my large existence, and I was restored. Some policewoman of an age to match my own, and with large plain cheeks like mine, bustled me down into the dock, with no gentleness in her hard hands as she pushed at me.

Words began to bounce around in front of me, and I clung to the edge of the dock and tried not to be confused. I awaited my moment, for I had decided that I owed myself a moment in all this gabbled ritual.
Stands accused of offensive behaviour to wit the opening and closing
and slamming of car doors on the 15th day of June 1946 apprehended
and arrested by Inspector Lush and Constable Sparkman and brought
before this court.
All this was gabbled like a spell being cast, but I was a bigger witch than any of them and would not be outshone by their puny magic. I felt my magic threatened, though, felt myself ignored and made tiny again by uncaring men who did not know or care that I was Lilian, and had a soul. There seemed no point at which I could interrupt this spell, so I gathered my courage, which was leaking out of me into this grey room, and cut across it all:
I will not be spoken of like this,
I called out in a dignified way, and was gratified by the silence that fell around me, although I did not know what to do with it.
You are all travesties
, I called, rather wildly now, the words coming at random,
and offensive behaviour is wind in
company, and I have never been guilty of wind in company.
There was a tittering around me, then, and a mumbling of more animation than before, and I took heart, and felt myself expanding, and held the dock strongly, staring up at the pin-head of the magistrate behind his bench.