Between My Father and the King (13 page)

Do you remember your twenty-first birthday? The party, the cake, and cutting a slice of it to put under your pillow that night, to make you dream of your future beloved; the giant key; the singing:

I'm twenty-one today!

Twenty-one today!

I've got the key of the door!

Never been twenty-one before!

Trivial, obvious words. Yet when the party was over and you lay in bed remembering the glinting key and the shamrock taste of the small glass of wine, and perhaps the taste of a sneaked last kiss in the dark, then the song seemed not trivial or obvious but a poetic statement of a temporal wonder. You had, as they say, attained your majority. You could vote in the elections; you could leave home against your parents' wishes; you could marry
in defiance of all opposition. You had crossed a legal border into a free country, and you now walked equipped with a giant tinsel key, a cardboard key covered with threepenny spangles.

Or perhaps your twenty-first birthday did not happen that way. Perhaps there was no party, no cake, no wine, and no kiss? I would like to tell you about Naida's twenty-first birthday.

Naida was a dwarf, which is not really a rare thing. I suppose in our lifetime we see many dwarves: first, perhaps, at the circus, where they are advertised as the tiniest people in the world and we pay to watch them moving about in their almost walnut-shell or matchbox beds. Sometimes we pass them in the street and stare hard for a moment, then pretend we haven't seen them, until they have passed us and we look back, saying, ‘It must be strange, how strange it must be, such tiny folk, and us out of reach, like tall trees!'

Now dwarves are people in their own right, who move among us, and below us, and are usually bright people, and kind — living in a place where staircases are mountains, and streets are caverns; they are brave to walk menaced by cliffs of brick and peaks of polished snow.

But Naida didn't live in what was called ‘the world'. Since her tenth birthday, she had lived in a mental hospital, in the ward where they put people who were strange in shape and ways — where old frail women were tucked under thin frayed bedspreads, waiting for the time when their jaws would drop suddenly in the night; where curious bland children with slit eyes and lips bubbling with saliva played with rag toys or a red wooden engine in a yard that was hidden from the outside world. Sickly yellow grass curled up through the cracks in the concrete, but no geraniums blossomed there. Should not children have geraniums, the dry, sturdy, dusty flowers with the red stony-velvet smell?

Naida grew up in that yard until, on her fifteenth birthday — because she was beginning to take too much notice of the male
patients and was writing notes to the baker and the pig boy and the farmhands — she was put in yet another ward where, it was said, people stayed forever. She was the youngest patient there, and the smallest; everyone felt sorry for her, and was kind to her. On Sundays, the minister sometimes let her choose the hymn: ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers', ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd' or ‘Shall We Gather at the River'. On Mondays, the sister of the ward took her to fetch supplies, or through to the matron's office for the mail; and every morning at eleven o'clock Naida went with the nurse to collect the bread. She was also taken up by the group of women who came each month with string bags full of yellowed magazines — the Ladies' Committee — and who had frightened looks on their faces, for they did not know how to talk to the patients but leaned forward and whispered to them, as if trying to share guilty secrets, and addressed them as ‘dear', talking as they might have talked to children, which was a sad approach, sad also for the committee women, who were attacked by the self-proclaimed goddess who resented being asked, the week before Christmas, ‘And what would you like Santa Claus to bring you, dear?'

Now, although Naida did not really remember much of any other world, she always talked of the day when she would be twenty-one, and free. She knew what happened when you were twenty-one: you were given a key and allowed to do as you pleased. She saw no reason to imagine that this would not happen to her; she believed that she would be in hospital only until she was twenty-one, at which point she could fend for herself, making her own way in the world, perhaps as a filmstar, a tapdancer or a ballerina. How she looked forward to her twenty-first birthday! It was coming closer and closer. She ticked off the days on the calendar, and she sent a request to Uncle Henry of 4KN Radio, asking for ‘I'm Twenty-one Today' to be played over the air on the Friday that was her birthday — and also the song that she liked Nat King Cole to sing: ‘Too young to really be in love . . . '

For Naida was in love. She was in love with the pig boy. He passed by each day on the carts collecting the pig food, and each day he pushed a note through the window of the dayroom. He and Naida were going to run away together into the hills; they were going to dance every dance together forever; they would be married and have many children, and Naida at her wedding would have a long white dress and carry orange blossoms, and they would go to Hollywood or to Mexico City — it wasn't decided which — for their honeymoon. The pig boy had arranged everything.

The night before Naida's twenty-first birthday, the ward sister called her into the office. Naida's eyes were glistening with happiness, and her pale face was puckered in a smile that yet contained something of the expression you might see on children who had known death too young, or were making daisy chains when the bomb fell. She held under one arm her wax doll, Margella Lucia, which one of the nurses had bought for her and dressed as a bride; in her other hand she carried a lit cigarette, which she puffed on now and again, then withdrew, smeared with lipstick, from the vermillion cupid's bow of her lips.

‘I'm twenty-one tomorrow,' she said to the sister.

The sister sighed and finished signing her report book. She looked up, frowning.

‘How often have I told you about cigarette ash? You'll burn the place down.'

The sister still remembered the fire years before, when she was just a junior nurse in pink, a new nurse carrying coal, emptying ashes, polishing corridors. The whole ward had burned down then; the women were burned, too. You could still see the rotting wood and the rusty iron, the patches of nourished grass, brighter
and more rich in colour than the small jaundiced blades that struggled up in other places, through the concrete and the trodden park.

‘I'm twenty-one tomorrow,' Naida said again, impatiently.

The sister smiled. ‘I heard you,' she said. ‘Tomorrow you're going to town, to talk to some men. You'll like that, won't you?'

Men! Naida's eyes glittered. Then she pouted.

‘What kind of men?'

‘Doctors, Naida. They want to talk to you.'

‘Why?'

‘Well, they know you're twenty-one, I suppose.'

‘Is it because I'm going out in the world?'

The sister did not answer. Naida suddenly jerked her doll upright and the long-lashed blue eyes of the wax bride opened with a snapping sound, and stared, meltingly, coquettishly, at the sister.

‘I know,' Naida said. ‘It's because I'm twenty-one and going out in the world to be free. I've got my life to live, you know that. I can't stay here forever.'

The last two sentences were ones she had heard the heroine of her favorite radio serial, Margella Lucia, speak.

‘Now, we won't talk anymore about that,' the sister said, ‘but you'll have a bath tonight, and I'll have clean clothes for you tomorrow. And you'll have a nice ride in the hospital car with Nurse Edgwood. Good night, Naida.'

By the next morning, the whole ward knew that Naida was going to town for her birthday, to see the doctors about being free and making her way in the world because she was twenty-one; it was pretty definite that in a few days' time she would be saying goodbye to the hospital. Naida spread the news breathlessly, even stopping the doctor who was hurrying to the treatment room. The doctor smiled.

‘I see. That's good news, Naida,' he said.

He was only two years out of medical school and still believed that patients should be spoken to and smiled at.

Dressed in a skirt from the sewing room and a twinset that the matron had bought, and with a red ribbon threaded through her already greying hair, Naida waited for the car. She was not taking her doll with her. ‘Dolls!' she said contemptuously, and laid Margella Lucia on the sofa in the dayroom, asking Mary, the nun who was praying in a corner nearby, to look after it for her. Then she picked it up and kissed it goodbye, leaving traces of bright lipstick on its face: Allure Velvet. She tucked it down on the sofa again, and its beautifully ordered eyes shut in sleep.

Then the black government car, spitting and snarling gravel from its wheels, stopped outside, and the driver, a heavy man with a dark-blue suit and cuffless trousers, opened the door, like a chauffeur. The sister led Naida out of the ward.

‘Hello, Naida,' Nurse Edgwood called from the car. ‘Happy birthday. This is for you.' She held up a small silver brooch in the shape of a key, inset with a milky imitation pearl, the kind Woolworths made, glowing secretly to itself. ‘I was going to buy a bird brooch, Naida, but you said you wanted a key. I'll change it if you want me to.'

Naida panicked. ‘Oh, no. You've got to have a key for your twenty-first.'

The nurse said nothing. The sister said nothing, either. The staff were forbidden to give presents to patients, but in Naida's case — because Naida had no visitors and no letters and no other home — an exception could be made. The sister gave Nurse Edgwood a folder of papers and shut the car door. Naida was engrossed with the key.

‘I'd much rather have a key than a bird,' she was insisting. ‘Silly old bird. Silly old bird.'

The car moved forward. Everybody waved and smiled, and Naida waved and smiled back, not only at the sister but at the patients who were pressing their faces up against the windows, taking it all in, for not everybody had a chance to go to town — it was only when you needed an X-ray or a head operation. Naida had considered this in a waking moment of fear, in the night, for she had dreamed that it was her wedding day, and she had changed out of her wedding dress and into her going-away suit, and was waiting, up close to the pig boy, for the plane to take them on their honeymoon, not to Mexico City or even to Hollywood but home — to where Naida used to live, in the small square house with its wooden latticed eyebrows and the straggled lupins in the garden and the rusty old pump with dirty water pouring out. And, in the dream, the doctor, saying goodbye to them, had given Naida a small box with a half-naked filmy lady on the outside and what seemed to be chocolates inside — small silver squares. She unwrapped one of them, and it was her hair tied in silver paper; it was all bits of hair tied in silver paper. She put her hand to her head, to feel the perm she had been given for the wedding, but there was no perm there, for her hair was gone. Then the plane came out of the sky, and it was an ambulance to take her to town for a head operation, and the pig boy did nothing about it; he did not even speak. She pushed him, and he fell over stiffly like a rubber man, bouncing slightly on the ground. He wasn't real, nothing was real: the going-away suit was a nightie with a number, in red chainstitch, on the pocket. And then it was afterward, and the nurse was shining a torch in her eyes, to see how big the pupils were, and writing it down on a chart. Naida started to cry, waking up, and saw the night nurse with her torch, walking through the dormitory. So it was all a dream, really; and, besides, she would be twenty-one, and no one could deny that being twenty-one made
a difference. The journey to town was to see the doctors about being free, and not because they wanted to come at her quick with a head operation.

As soon as the car was clear of the hospital, Naida turned to Nurse Edgwood, who was one of her favorite nurses, and held out her left hand. On the third finger was a ring that sparkled and shone and showed the world sapphire in its mirrors.