Lilian's Story (31 page)

I was preparing more words, enjoying this feeling of having an audience, and turning all this theatre onto myself, but the policewoman with meaty cheeks was opening the gate of the dock and pulling me out, and piping words were coming from the tiny head up there, and a gavel banged on the bench, and all at once I was out of the court, deprived of my audience, being hustled with no gentleness back down the hallway of the murmuring souls, and back into the world where faces were made of wood, and did not hear no matter what you said to them.

He has given you hard
, a policeman said to me as he propelled me into a van.
Your big fat mouth has got you two weeks of
hard.
I thought I must be losing my grip because his words made no sense to me, although I understood each one, and they were not the strange words of the smiling man who sold me oysters, but there was no time to ask him what he meant, or to ask anyone anything, because they were pushing at my bottom again, and I was sprawling again on the metal bench of the dark van, familiar now, and smelling of the piss of someone else's fear, greater even than mine.

Hard

I found out what
hard
was in the laundry of the jail, among steam that made me melt, and the hissing and churning of great vats. When I first entered, pushed by a warder with hard hands, I was bewildered by this huge echoing space full of cream-painted machinery and gleaming stainless steel. Above the din of the machines the voices of the women were as shrill as sea-birds, and their cackles, when one of them shouted something they found amusing, frightened me. I was confused by the chaos of such volumes of water, such a roaring and hissing of gas under the vats, such powerful blasts of soap and the smell of starch.

The warder shouted something at me and I shouted back,
What? I beg your pardon?
but she turned and left behind a clanking of locked doors, and I stood alone among the steam until a muscular woman in the coarse green prison clothing poked me in the stomach with a hard forefinger and pushed a broom into my limp hand. I saw her mouth move, and heard a vague roar of words, but could not understand.
What?
I shouted again.
I beg your pardon? What?
The muscular woman stared at me with contempt, as if I was an imbecile given into her care, and she grabbed the broom in my hand and shook it, so hard my teeth rattled together. She shouted again, and I could not understand, but she had vanished now behind something that spurted and bubbled dangerously, and I stood with the broom, confused, until I caught a glimpse of her among cream pipes, and she made violent gestures at me, so I tried to oblige and began to sweep.

It was hard here, I was beginning to see, and I had to learn very quickly how to do things I had never done. All the other women I could see seemed to know how to do everything: how to fold sheets in pairs, walking gravely into each other and exchanging their corners, how to sweep, and how to scrub floors. I could see women doing all these things. I could resist feeling foolish in most situations, but was reduced to feeling contemptible when I realised my life had been privileged.

Here, Miss Fancy-Pants
, the muscular woman said, suddenly at my side again, snatching the broom from me as I was fumbling with it and making the mess on the floor worse.
Here, see what kind of a botch you can make of a bit of
scrubbing.
She pushed me down on my knees like a cow and thrust a scrubbing-brush into my hand, and I began blindly to scrub, baffled by so much shouting and hostility. The women in green all knew each other and shouted familiarly, slapped each other, touched each other's faces, pushed back the hair on each other's cheeks gone lank with steam. They called and laughed and I could not follow what they said, as if I had suddenly become foreign, or truly mad at last.

I was dizzy from being on hands and knees for so long, and was becoming anxious about the amount of water I had spread on the floor around me, when a siren pealed out suddenly. The muscular woman was nudging me with the toe of her shoe, and, red in the face and wrinkled with rage, she pointed at the wet and soapy floor I was kneeling on with my knees and skirt sodden. She mouthed in fury at me and all I could do was stare open-mouthed back at her, close to tears at all this rage, and at my own confusion and incompetence. With a great hiss and clank, the machinery around us suddenly closed down and in the blessed silence the muscular woman, cords standing out on her neck with the force of her shouting, roared at me.
You
,
Miss High-and-Mighty, how dare you, how bloody dare you, you
will clean up this disgusting mess or get no bloody dinner, Miss bloody
Smart Aleck.
I tried to say
But how?
but she had turned away and my voice was lost in my throat, came out nothing more than a croak. I was left kneeling in my puddle of dirty water, and had not felt such despair for years, and such an emptiness, having someone shout so harshly at me for no sin I could see. I knelt like a sick cow, my head bowed in my bewilderment, and heard all the laughing women clatter out of the room towards their dinners, and when I heard the laughter fading down the hallway I recovered myself enough to feel angry, and stand up, a person again, Lilian Una Singer, not an animal.

I found my way to the dining room by following the smell along the gloomy corridor and all my anger and bewilderment evaporated in the gigantic hunger I suddenly suffered. But at the door of the huge barn full of long tables, the muscular woman stopped me with a strong palm in my chest.
Well, Miss Prissy, have you cleaned up that mess you made?
and another woman in green yelled through a mouthful of cabbage:
Course she fucken hasn't, she's a fucken bludger, Lois.
Lois spun me around then and pushed me out of the warm room where everyone was filling themselves with warmth and chat, and pushed me back along the corridor to the laundry. There Lois saw my sad suds, and pushed me so hard I fell against a machine with a cry of pain that was not all physical.
Scum!
Lois shouted.
Wipe up that bloody slops
or there'll be no bloody dinner, and I bloody mean it.

I was numb now with the outrage and hurt of it, and used my ingenuity. There were no rags, no sponges, none of the things I had ever seen women wiping at floors with, so I took off my coarse green shirt and used that, kneeling in my singlet wiping up the suds, wringing them out clumsily back into the bucket, until the floor was damp but no longer awash. I was trembling now with hunger and unhappiness, and could not wring enough moisture out of the shirt in the end, but put it back on, seeing no alternative, and trusted to body heat to do its job in time, and dry me.

Back in the dining room, I was allowed in now and went to where the food was. There was no meat left, and only pieces of cabbage, and the carrots no one wanted, and sodden potatoes from the bottom of the pot. But I ate without caring, cramming it in, and the women left me alone until I had eaten. Then Lois came over and fingered my wet shirt, and made loud sounds of disgust.
She used her
bloody shirt, she is a filthy little miss, eh?
The women glanced over at me, sitting hunched up wet and dirty at the table, but they did not care, and looked away again and took up their conversations. Lois hissed at me with the muscles moving in her jaw:
You will learn, Miss Smarty-Pants, and we will see who will
have the last bloody laugh, my lady.
My cabbage rose in my throat to choke me, such dislike was in this woman's face, and I was without resource.

Later, four of us were locked together into a cell with bunks, and on that first night, confused and tired after that day of hard labour, I hoped I could restore myself by entering into conversation with these women.
I am
Lilian
, I said by way of introduction, for I could not tell if these three women had been scrubbing or folding with me, I found they all looked too much alike in their green garments.
I am Lilian
, I said, and smiled, and tried not to succumb to the soul-stealing effects of the walls of an institution, and indifferent faces. The three women looked towards me as I stood under the bare bulb: we all looked ugly under that light, and when they turned and looked at me without smiling or speaking I wondered if it was my ugliness they found loathsome.
Yes
, one of them nodded at last, and then they went back to talking among themselves in a way I was not invited to join, and I stood in the glare of the bulb and wondered if I existed at all, or if I were invisible.

I tried to remind myself that newcomers are never made welcome in small societies. It was hard to ache in every joint and to long for a bit of a laugh or to share a bit of a story, and to have women beside me who were as unreceptive as any wall. I lay on my tiny bunk, which sagged dangerously under me, and which was so narrow I could not turn over. I lay with the light raining down on me and felt tears sting under my lids and run warm down my cheeks. How many years it was since I had cried, I did not know, but it was years since I had been reduced, as I had been on this day, to being invisible.

There was not a soul here, had not been a soul since I had been thrust into the van, who knew or cared who I was. I was invisible, and how much difference could there be between being invisible and being dead?

I wept silently, and heard the brutal women in green laughing, not at me, I hoped, and whispering urgently. All I could hear from my bunk was
pss pss pss
, like a small dangerous fire.

Currying Favour

I could not seem to please the women here. There were women in tight uniforms that made their busts like small edifices, and there were others in shapeless green garments, but I could not make an impression on any of them.

But I was not an imbecile, and learned quickly. I learned where the sponges were kept, and how to sweep the lint and dirt neatly into a pile and get it into the dustpan. But even when, after a day or two, I had mastered these puny skills, the women still treated me as if I was reprehensible. My voice began to shrink and disappear. I heard it sometimes in the dining room, I heard myself piping to the hard-faced women who doled out the food:
Hello
, I heard myself,
How are you?
I heard myself speak to the woman next in line, with her smeared tin tray:
Looks good
, I would say,
I am hungry, too.
But they never answered, except with a look of contempt, and after Lois yelled at me one day,
Stop your bloody sucking-up, Singer, it will not work
here, none of your rich bitch tricks will wash here
, I stopped trying to raise a smile or a word from anyone. The woman next to me in line, perhaps seeing that I was on the point of tears, took the trouble to say,
You lot, you are
the f ly-by-nights, see, and us regulars cannot be bothered with you.
Then she moved away, just another woman in green, but I thought about what she had said, and saw how bitter it must feel for women who were condemned to fold sheets for years, to have someone like myself, prissy of accent and incompetent with a broom, coming in and leaving again in two weeks. I tried to tell myself that I, too, might be guilty of the same unkindness if I could see freedom being flaunted before me, as they could when they looked at me. And freedom was a relative thing, I saw: I was as free as a bird in their eyes, for what was two weeks, even two weeks of hard, in a sentence of years?

I understood, but it did not reduce the pain or the frightening emptiness, the feeling that my grasp was loosening with each lonely day that passed. I was slipping away from myself, and in the morning when the siren woke us up, I lay for a moment and reminded myself: I am Lilian Una Singer, student of life, and this is an experience. But the hours of being invisible and unheard wore away my certainty as the day passed, and by bedtime I was fearful, exhausted, fighting the panic of being no one at all.

It reminded me, of course, of that other place where I had lost myself. But I did my best not to remember that, because I felt myself close to slipping back into the grey canvas room where no being could prosper. Each morning I reminded myself of my name, and sometimes brought a little William to bear on the situation, my most faithful companion, always waiting in my memory for the hours of greatest need. To the warder with her stick hanging from her belt, who counted us into the dining room at breakfast, I said each morning,
What day is it today?
and when she told me, I comforted myself for the first hard hours with the thought that another day had passed, and that eventually all fourteen of them would have worn away, and I would be allowed to leave.

In the World

By the time the day of my release arrived I was wearied into lethargy by so much ignoring. I stood at another counter while they ticked my belongings off on a list and returned them to me, and when I stood again in my own clothes, some of my being and voice returned, although my voice sounded scratchy and strange to me now, the voice of someone who had been declared missing, and was not sure if she could find her way back.

Ah! What a greeting the street was, with Frank waving his bottle at me from beyond a tram, and the din and richness, the clamour and bustle, the colour and exuberance, all the life! How I loved it, coming out of a hell of silence! I almost knelt on the pavement and kissed it, for I saw now that this was my home, I belonged here. I was recognised, I had a part to play here, in the life of the streets. I swore I would never allow myself to be withdrawn again, but live always among these people, and be seen and heard, noticed and remembered.
Frank, Frank
, I blubbered, and hugged him so tightly I heard him grunt.
Frank, I almost
died in there, oh, Frank, tell me who I am
. And Frank, that true friend, hugged me back and cried in my ear,
Why, Lil, what
did they do to you, you are Lil Singer, of course, larger than life, and the
person who matters to us all.

Poets Abound

My life resumed, but on a more public level now, and always on the move.
Mobility is the key
, I told people in confidence as I stepped into their taxis. Inside I was queenly, waving from the wrist to those we passed, who sometimes stared, sometimes did not notice. Today my driver was a sad Slav of some kind with three deep creases in the back of his neck and a gold ring on his little finger. I chose to ride in the back, with a woman in lilac shantung. I had seen this woman before, her shantung was familiar, and so was the lacy hankie she held up now in front of her face. The driver did not argue with me when he saw that the woman in lilac did not intend to cause a fuss.
You are Lil Singer
, she said, informing me, and I could see and smell that she had had a drop or two.