The Silence on the Shore. Hugh Garner

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      She lifted her eyes from the book and watched some of the young office employees who were strolling along the paved paths across the garden. They were raised above the laundry workers and the maintenance staff by their lack of blue clothing. And raised above these, at least in their own estimation, were the starched-white figures of the nurses, who were snotty to everyone but the doctors and patients in the private patients’ wing. The hospital staff was as stratified as the inmates of a concentration camp, she thought.

      The June day was so balmy and beautiful that she laid her book aside and leaned backwards on her arms, letting the warm sun reach her throat. Lately she had noticed the merest hint of wrinkles on her neck, and some tiny vertical ones appearing on her upper lip. The sight of them had sent her into a panic. Was she, who had spent her youth and young womanhood working in a German munitions factory, then in a labour camp, and finally in a camp for displaced persons, going to become old before she had begun to live?

      But why think of that? She soaked up the warm sun and remembered the man who whistled in the room next to hers. She was sure he was young, but apart from that she had not let her imagination carry her. One evening, when she had heard him leave his room, she had spied on him from the front window as he hurried down the street. The brief view of his back had told her nothing but that he was fairly tall and slim.

      The man who lived in the back room did not interest her much. What had Mrs. Hill said, that he was an editor? It was a cultured position. She knew his name from hearing Grace shout it up the stairs when he received a telephone call. Walter Fow — ler. Walter Fowl. Walter Chicken. Walter Chickener. Did they have such silly names in English?

      The young Italian grabbed one of the giggling girls and passed his hand across her breasts. The other one watched him jealously, snickering to hide the fact. Sophia turned from the sight of them impatiently, glancing at her watch. It was five minutes to one. She pushed herself to her feet, brushed some dry grass from her smock, and walked across to the rear door of the laundry.

      It was hot and humid inside the one-storey building despite the open windows and doors. Wisps of steam rose from the wall pipes and machinery. Some of the men stood talking near the large shipping door, while small knots of women and girls stood against the washers and near the door to the toilet. It was true that they were all immigrants: Italians, Yugoslavs, three Hungarians, several Poles, and a Lithuanian girl. The foreman was also an immigrant, a petty tyrant, foul-mouthed, ignorant, and conscious of his preferred status as an Englishman. Sophia, with her knowledge of the British occupation forces in Germany, had long ago placed him properly as a member of the English lower classes, probably able through ambition or sycophancy to become an army quartermaster-sergeant but no higher. She loathed him almost as much as she detested the greasy young Italian they called Joe, but whose name was Giuseppe.

      When the ancient machinery began to hum and shiver on its beds, she took her place in front of the huge twelve-roll automatic ironer. On either side of her two other women stood before similar machines. They began their work, with movements as automatic as those of the machines themselves, passing the wet sheets into the padded rollers.

      The noise of the washers from across the room cut off all extraneous sound, and Sophia let herself sink into a train of thought that would carry her through the afternoon. It was a trick she had earned in the wartime munitions plant, and one that is learned early by all who work at monotonous and repetitious jobs. Soon she was miles away from the laundry building, attending a dance recital. Here she met a Polish widower who invited her to go with him to a concert the following week. She was immersed in her daydreams when Giuseppe approached with a load of laundry in his wagon.

      He leaned close to her and shouted above the noise, “You wanna screw, baby, eh?”

      It was something he had learned got a laugh when it was overheard by the other workers. Because Sophia was aloof and did not mix with him and his kind inside the shop or out, he tormented her with it at every opportunity. She had discovered that ignoring him was her only defence, for on an earlier occasion when she had reported it to the foreman he had asked, “What’s the matter, isn’t it a good question then?” He had not even bothered mentioning it to Giuseppe, believing as he did that all foreign women were sexual pushovers, if you liked that kind.

      As he placed a pile of wet laundry beside the machine, Giuseppe grinned in her direction and said something suggestive to her in Italian. She knew it was vulgar and sexually offensive by the way he said it. She turned her head away and concentrated on feeding the sheets into the machine.

      From the corner of her eye she saw him push the wagon into the wide aisle behind her and disappear from her immediate view. Suddenly without any warning at all she felt his stubby finger pushed hard between her buttocks. She bowed herself against the feed-board of the ironer, stiffing the urge to scream. This was a new trick of his, now he had discovered that the women left their girdles in the dressing room because of the summer heat.

      “You like goose, baby, eh?” he shouted, parroting something he had newly learned.

      Sophia felt tears of shame and frustration filling her eyes, but she held back from wiping them with her hand. She stared blearily into the rollers, letting her outrage and anger vent itself in her trembling flesh. Each sheet she pushed into the machine became the screaming bursting form of Giuseppe Mantia, and she watched his agonized crushing and ignored his piteous pleas with a joy she had never known before.

      The angry self-pitying tears overflowed her eyes and ran down each cheek to the corners of her mouth, as she tried to check them without lifting her hands to her face and giving herself away. Why was she forced to work among such animals? Even the gypsy whores in the concentration camp had been better than her fellow workers here. And even the German guards and block-leaders had shown some subtlety in their off-handed sensuality with the women prisoners.

      She was careful for the remainder of the afternoon, keeping her eye on Giuseppe as he moved around the floor with his wagon loaded with wash or laundry materials. The next time he came near her machine she raised her foot to him. He looked down at the cruelly pointed toe of her shoe, and though he grinned at her he stayed outside of kicking distance. She allowed her anger to end in fantasies of revenge. The hour between four and five passed like five minutes as she thought of the best way to permanently hurt and humiliate him.

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      Gordon Lightfoot awoke with the sun tracing the pattern of the curtains on the floor beside his bed. Without lifting his head from the pillow he looked beneath the covers at himself and found that he was wearing pajamas. So far so good. He felt one foot with the other and found to his satisfaction that he had taken off his socks. He could see his suit folded carefully over the back of a chair with his shoes placed neatly beneath it. Feeling reassured by these signs he reconnoitred the floor, first on one side then on the other, and was happy to discover no litter, no paper bags, no empty cigarette packs, no spilled money, and no empty bottles. He must have come home quietly the night before.

      He raised his eyes to the top of the dresser and fixed them lovingly on a bottle that was there. Because of the angle between the bed and the dresser, and that of his eyes and the dresser top, it was impossible to see more than the bottle’s empty neck and shoulders. For a long moment or two he lay there staring at it, afraid to raise himself and find that it was empty. Instead, he put off the moment of truth, content to believe it was half full, savouring the ecstatic moment when he would discover his foresight and would know that his present pain was momentary and of no real consequence at all.

      He had been drunk the day before. Yes, and the day before, and the week before that. It had been a good bender, as benders went. As far as he knew he had not been arrested, thrown out of a hotel, punched in the face, or carried into the house by a humanitarian, paid or unpaid.

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