MORNING SERIAL
FOR Wolfi had said, Anyone who would do that to you was not worth a hair of your head. Never cut it, he urged. Grow it all down your back. Promise. Shame was a figment of other people’s diseased imaginations. It was their own guilt and littleness they unloaded onto you. Wolfi and she would dive clear of all that, together. The tap on the door broke up her reverie. ‘Please, miss, Rachel Goldman’s had an accident, miss.’ ‘Well, is it urgent? I’m not on duty, you know. Oh, all right, I’ll come,’ she grumbled, piqued that the petty troubles of kids should interfere with her self-absorption. ‘Just hang on a minute while I get my keys.’
Pandemonium in the dormitory. A Fraulein shrieking. Girls’ uproar.
‘It’s not my duty,’ Issie asserted, before the matron had had time to open her mouth. ‘Mrs B’s on duty.’
Fraulein said in German: ‘The little Jew has jumped off a wardrobe.’
Issie pushed past. Rachel was clenched in a ball at the top of her bed, dark hair in greasy waves all that could be seen of her head on the pillow. A child was leaping on a bed near the window, shouting some slogan about Singapore villages in an exultant blare that increased the vicious atmosphere of hysteria to near frenzy.
‘Silence at once! You – get down from there. Now, who has done what to whom?’
The roaring girl seemed relieved to have her fit summarily aborted. She instantly became quiet and climbed down from her bed.
‘Rachel, what is the matter?’ Issie’s testy voice, void of sympathy, bore the message Why have you interrupted me with your unimportant plight? as clearly as if she had spoken it aloud. Ashamed, she modulated her tone. ‘Are you hurt? What happened? Can I see?’
The foetal child attempted to disappear into herself, skinny legs brought up as far as they would go, disclosing inches of thigh beneath the pleated grey skirt. Issie pulled down the skirt and saw the child’s tremor of reaction.
> The Element of Water by Stevie Davies is published by Parthian in the Library of Wales series www.parthianbooks.com
CONTINUES MONDAY