Short Story Written to begin with the words “The Bend in the Road”

The Bend in the Road

The bend in the road must have caught Thomas unawares.  He swore under his breath as he righted the Land Rover.  I was wrecked, my head pounding and my vision hazy, too much whisky in too little time, but I have tried my best to concentrate and help navigate through the heavy blackness of the African night and the endless dust clouds.

The brakes squealed again and I saw there was something in the road: a dead animal?  It could be an ambush.  We were returning to the Convent with food and medicines.  Tempting cargo.  But it just looked like a pile of rags lying in the road.  Thomas took up his gun, climbed cautiously from the Land Rover and moved quietly towards it.  The rags moved and he tensed, his finger on the trigger.  But it was a child that moved into the dim ray of the headlights, a poor weak child carrying a heavy bundle.

He gathered her up and laid her on the seat between us. He tried to ease the bundle away from her, but she clung to it with her little strength.  She did not scream or cry, she was silent, determined.  And then we could see the bundle was not possessions it was a baby, a heavy, cold burden, a dead baby.  She slipped out of consciousness, and Thomas let her lean against him.  He drove slowly and carefully, with one arm supporting the sleeping girl.  I could see tears streaking the dust on his rough dark cheeks.  He was a kind man after all then.  He had a heart.

The Convent was closing down for the night when we got back.  The little girl was laid down on a bed, still fast asleep, and one of the sisters settled down beside her for the night.  Another went over to the hospital and fetched a tiny white muslin nightgown, a little cot with white covers.  Mother Veronica set silently to work washing the little body, easing the rags away from the ravaging sores, too late to give any relief.  Gently she closed its eyes, and for once I didn’t turn away as she held her wooden cross and said her prayers.  We laid him in the cot beside the sleeping girl.  And all this was done without a word of command.  We all knew that never mind the climate it had to be that the little boy, it was a boy, should be beside her when she woke.

“I had a little brother once”, I heard myself say into the silent room.  Mother Veronica looked at me enquiringly, but I could say no more.  She didn’t press me.

I was losing it.  As we quietly tidied up the room it began to move around me.  I held on to anything I could to steady myself and tried to stop my mind from the scream that I could feel coming.  What I needed desperately was a drink to steady the nonsense whizzing through my head.  I  thought it was only in my mind that I was chanting over and over the meaningless old rhyme “the other night upon the stair, I met a man that wasn’t there, He wasn’t there again today, I really wish he’d go away”. Over and over, around and around, but I must have said it out loud, because Mother Veronica was looking at me oddly.

“Sorry Matron, it’s just a silly rhyme my father used to say to us when we were children.  A nonsense thing …”.  My voice trailed away in embarrassment, but she still continued to stare at me. “No, not nonsense Marie, the man on the stair is Our Lord, and he waits there patiently for you to invite him in.” I needed a drink! I   heard myself laughing, high pitched, nervous.

“I suppose you must see him every day then Matron!”  There was a long pause.  In the glow of the dim failing electric power I could see the beads of sweat on her tired face, and the look in her eyes, even behind the thick glasses.  And I knew that look, I had seen it before in someone else’s eyes: my father’s. “No, Marie,” she said, “I don’t see Him any more”. That look, the look of loss.

I thought I would sleep like the dead, but something drove me to keep awake.  Anger at first, at my father’s hypocrisy, the Good Vicar, blindly carrying on when he couldn’t believe any more.  And then sadness, and pity, for his lonely pilgrimage, trying to do the right thing and staying with the thread of hope.  A thread as thin as a spider’s web, but maybe as strong. I wondered then, did that hope spread to the daughter who had disappointed him and dragged him through the mud.  The daughter who had stolen from him,  The jailbird daughter, the drunkard.  Does he still hope when he thinks of me? For all he knows I am dead.  Maybe that’s best.

That night I tried to write home.  Crumpled it up and threw it away.  How can you undo years of pain?

It took me two weeks before I finally posted a stilted report; that I was well, living in Africa and working in a Convent.  that would give them a laugh I thought.  I tried to cover the chasm of time lost by talking about the Convent and its work.  At least they would understand that.

They must have answered by return of post.  No recriminations, no pleas, just family news and love. Love. They had moved to a small town parish in the Midlands, but their successor at St. Jude’s had forwarded my letter,  A photo of themselves, and two pictures of snotty little brother Peter, now a tall bearded man with his arm around a smiling woman, and holding a little round pink bundle who was called, it seemed, Rebecca Mary. Mary, after me.  After me.

Another letter followed almost immediately.  Money was being raised for the Convent.  Could I send some photos, maybe children in the Parish could sponsor children in the orphanage?  God Almighty the full force of Protestant Middle England was about to hit this ramshackle outfit held together with glue and safety pins.  Would it be able to stand it?

Another letter, my father had done the unthinkable.  He had used a credit card to buy plane tickets.  They were on their way.  My mother and father, on their way, here.

The plane touched down in the capital yesterday morning.  One more short hop inland, and now they would be making their way cross country.  Bumping over dusty roads in a Land Rover.  On their way.  Here.

I’ve paced round and round the compound, checked the guest room, smoothed the sheets and counted the towels over and over.  All the time I have the voices arguing in my head, one glad, one terrified, and one, the loudest screaming “Go, Go, Go, disappear, stay dead, you’re no good to anybody”.  But I can’t do that anymore. There is the child.  She follows me, watches me wherever I go, silent, unsmiling, desolate.

My anxious footsteps have lead me here to the kitchens.  I put on a gaudy overall and tie up my hair in a coloured turban.  Ignoring the puzzled looks I set to work in the sink, wading into the piles of dishes.  It won’t be long now.  I lean against the big steel sink and feel the warm dampness of my overall seeping through to my skin.  Still the kitchen women toil on, chanting as they work.

A harsh grating scrape of metal on tiles, and the child is dragging a heavy chair across the floor.  She climbs on to it and plunges her thin little stick arms into the warm greasy water.  I look at this little figure beside me and am answered for the first time with a smile.  A child’s smile, gappy white teeth glowing against the warmth of her brown skin.  And I can’t stop the thought, though I do try hard to stop it pushing its way in to my mind, that perhaps there is the possibility, just the possibility of hope.