Once We Were Mothers Page 5

  ALI: (Hugging her.) Never if you don’t want to.

  FLORA: I can stay here with you?

  ALI: Of course.

  FLORA: And Dad?

  ALI: Yes.

  FLORA: For always?

  ALI: Yes. We’ll always take care of you.

  FLORA: For ever and ever amen?

  ALI: Flora!

  FLORA: Okay, let’s go. Don’t want to be late do we?

  ALI: I believed I was telling her the truth.

  Scene Seven

  Milena’s Story (6)

  NEVENKA shows MILENA into her flat.

  NEVENKA: My parents are fine, thank you.

  MILENA: And your brothers? Simo doing well in Sarajevo?

  NEVENKA: Sarajevo suits him. Why are you here?

  MILENA: It’s my birthday. The children want to see you. Can you come?

  NEVENKA: Okay.

  MILENA: You’ll come round to us?

  NEVENKA: Sure.

  MILENA: They’ve made you baklava. Well, sort of.

  NEVENKA: That’s nice.

  MILENA: The Princess has been playing that tape you sent her over and over again. When she thinks no one’s looking she dances to herself in the mirror and sings with a hairbrush.

  Silence.

  They miss you.

  NEVENKA: I miss them.

  MILENA: So, six o’clock?

  NEVENKA: Okay.

  MILENA: Nevenka, why have you been avoiding us?

  NEVENKA: I’ve been busy. six then.

  MILENA: I’m sorry, about you and Tajib. That I implied that…

  NEVENKA: It doesn’t matter.

  MILENA: I was upset. I know that you never, I mean that you never would. That it’s past. You two.

  NEVENKA: Have you heard anything?

  MILENA: No. That night, I was out of my mind. I’m so sorry. I can’t do without both of you.

  NEVENKA: Don’t –

  MILENA: Why didn’t you tell me to shut up? Why did you let me, why didn’t you say don’t blame me bitch, this isn’t my fault, why just walk away? Nevenka?

  NEVENKA: I was ashamed.

  Beat.

  MILENA: Of what?

  NEVENKA: I was meeting Tajib.

  MILENA: Yes.

  NEVENKA: He called me at work. He wanted to talk about a surprise for your birthday.

  MILENA: I don’t understand, why didn’t you say?

  NEVENKA: I didn’t mind you hating me. I’m so sorry.

  MILENA: What?

  NEVENKA: The soldiers, the soldiers who took Tajib, the soldier who beat Adil. It was Dusan. It was my brother.

  MILENA and NEVENKA stare at one another.

  Scene Eight

  Kitty’s Story (8)

  KITTY climbs down off the chair and addresses the audience as she smooths out the piece of newspaper very very carefully.

  KITTY: They took what they’d found in the earth away in a bag. It wasn’t her. It was someone else’s daughter. They wouldn’t give me details, though it was in all the papers the next day. Ten-year-old found murdered by railway line. And underneath a picture of her in her school uniform, all gappy teeth smiling and tight pigtails. Not a bit like Susie. I start to shake whenever I think about her parents. About her being found. I can’t help it.

  KITTY folds the piece of newspaper up very carefully and tucks it into her pinafore front pocket and rests her hands over it.,

  Scene Nine

  Ali’s Story (8)

  ALI and GWEN are walking in the woods.

  ALI: Every season I look out at these birch trees and think, this is how I like you best.

  GWEN: Spring is always hopeful. Most years.

  ALI: Jim and I had a plan.

  GWEN: Do you mind if we rest a moment?

  They stop.

  ALI: I can’t believe he’s actually come up with it. After all these years.

  GWEN: He wants another child.

  ALI: Of course not. I’m too old.

  GWEN: Yes, it’s such a shame.

  ALI: Anyway! You know we always meant to go to Florence?

  GWEN: Did you? Why?

  ALI: I told you.

  GWEN: I don’t think so.

  ALI: Mum! We were going to go there on honeymoon only of course we couldn’t…

  GWEN: I’m sure your father would have waited for his coronary if he’d known how important it was to you.

  ALI: That’s a horrible thing to say.

  GWEN: Fortunately you don’t know what it’s like to be a widow.

  ALI: Anyway we never got to Florence and now Jim says why don’t we go.

  GWEN: Now?

  ALI: Yes.

  GWEN: But you can’t. What about…Flora?

  ALI: That’s what I’ve got to work out.

  GWEN: You could always put her in a home.

  ALI: She’s not a dog!

  GWEN: I do hope you’re not expecting…

  ALI: No, of course not. I was going to ask Clare. The girls spend so much time together anyway, they might as well live together for a week. What?

  GWEN: It’s nothing.

  ALI: You winced.

  GWEN: Sorry.

  ALI: Don’t be, just tell me what’s the matter.

  GWEN: We all get old Alison.

  ALI: Oh okay.

  GWEN: And our bodies start to fail, one way or another.

  ALI: Fail?

  GWEN: I knew I shouldn’t have said anything, now you’re just going to fuss over me and that’s the last thing I want.

  ALI: Because why? What’re you trying to say?

  GWEN: I didn’t want to tell you. Especially now you’ve got this expensive holiday planned.

  ALI: It’s not expensive and it can be unplanned. What?

  GWEN: It may be nothing. They’ll know when they get the results back.

  ALI: Why didn’t you tell me?

  GWEN: You have your life. Flora.

  ALI: What kind of tests this time?

  GWEN: One day you’ll be old.

  ALI: At this rate I doubt it. What tests? You’ve had most of them already.

  GWEN: Just a little biopsy. I’ll be fine.

  Silence. Then ALI puts her arm round her mother.

  ALI: I’m sorry.

  GWEN: I only ever wanted the best for you.

  ALI: I know.

  Scene Ten

  Milena’s Story (7)

  MILENA: A long time later my daughter told me how they came to our flat. Nevenka was playing with the children while I was out searching for food. If only I hadn’t gone out that morning. If only we had made do with what we had. But we had nothing so I left them. They were herded onto a bus. My daughter remembered the number as having two digits, then driven for what seemed to her like hours, the women trying to keep the children calm, Nevenka all the way telling them funny stories about when they were little. They had no food or water, only a small carton of juice my mother in law shoved into their hands as they left, which they shared, sitting on the back seat of the bus. As I hear this story I imagine my children’s faces looking back through the window searching for a last glimpse of home, of something familiar, of their childhood. As it was told to me next a convoy of jeeps drives past, the bus pulls off the road, rolls down towards the river, branches snapping against the windows and halts. Men are firing their guns into the air. Children are screaming. A radio crackles orders. The shriek of river birds as they rise off the water in flight. Then orders. Out of the bus, pushed and jostled, elbows and fists, stumbling into the air, Faruk falls against one of the soldiers who brings the heel of his rifle down onto my son’s skull. He crumples like tissue. Nevenka turns. He is gone. She is pushed, my daughter beside her, to the brink of the water, hands on heads, and the women stand poised, elbows like wings, the river lapping the hems of their coats and then they rise and run and fall in a spatter of bullets. Some only wounded running into the water as if they could rise like the geese into the air and away. And my daughter sees Nevenka’s coat beside her, whispy red
ribbons trailing from it. And in the coat is Nevenka who is dead, face down in a river of blood. And my daughter falls too, falls and dives down into the red brown water like a frog with a heron at its back, expecting at any moment the sharp beak to snap her spine. She swam. Not for her country, not for Yugoslavia, that was lost. But for herself, for survival.

  She stayed underwater, till her lungs swelled and the blood vessels were ready to burst through her eyes, while up above her guns spat rage till every movement in the water ceased. And then she did a remarkable thing as only those in danger of extinction will do when fear slows time. She opened her eyes, as if to see the world once more before she was swallowed by the river, and she saw amongst the debris floating above her on the surface of the water, an empty juice carton, and she smiled remembering the one they had shared in the back seat of the bus a lifetime ago when Nevenka told them happy stories. For what seemed like hours she lay submerged beneath the flotsam of the river and breathed life through a paper straw and only when darkness fell like a merciful curtain across another bloodstained day, did she dare to raise her head out of the water, and finding she was alone, drag herself up the bank.

  Scene Eleven

  Kitty’s Story (9)

  KITTY: Well that got rid of him! Council workers seem to forget we just fought a war to do away with fascism. Little Hitler cheeky bugger. I think some of them miss the uniform, truth be told. Dolly next door was in the ATS and got more respect in a jacket and tie than her pinny ever earned her. They wear uniforms in St Hilda’s too. Even the men. I suppose it’s the only way to tell them apart from the patients – us not having bandages or anything to show for it.

  JEANETTE enters.

  JEANETTE: Mum!

  KITTY: I’m better now.

  JEANETTE: We’ve been looking everywhere for you.

  KITTY: Not that I can remember being ill – they explained the blanks by way of the ECT.

  JEANETTE: Do you remember walking out of the hospital?

  KITTY: Er…no. Seems electricity’s all very fine when it comes to switching on lights but has the opposite effect on memory. I don’t like to think about it. It doesn’t sound dignified at all. I woke up once with a wet bed. I’m better now.

  JEANETTE: What’ve you been doing all day?

  KITTY: First I went to the school, then the bus station, the library –

  JEANETTE: (Weary.) I thought we were done with all this.

  KITTY: I know she’s not there.

  JEANETTE: Of course she’s not!

  KITTY: But I had to make sure I was. Here. That I knew where everything was.

  JEANETTE: And do you?

  KITTY: Yes.

  JEANETTE: Well I hope you know where the front door is cos we’re about to go through it and back up the hospital.

  KITTY: I’m better now.

  JEANETTE: Sounds like it.

  KITTY: I am.

  JEANETTE: We’ll let the doctors be the judge of that, shall we?

  KITTY: No. They’re all mad in there.

  JEANETTE: It’s a mental hospital. They’re supposed to be.

  KITTY: But I’m not.

  JEANETTE: You’ve got to get well. We need you, Dad and me – but you’ve not been here.

  KITTY: I’ve been at St Hilda’s.

  JEANETTE: Not just there, you’ve been gone, missing. You don’t know how you’ve been.

  KITTY: That’s the bit I don’t like.

  JEANETTE: They’re only trying to help you.

  KITTY: I’m not mad. I’m just unhappy.

  JEANETTE looks around.

  JEANETTE: Why haven’t they taken the table?

  KITTY: I told him to go away.

  JEANETTE: Mum, we need it at the flat!

  KITTY: He was taking my things.

  JEANETTE: We don’t live here any more.

  KITTY: I do.

  JEANETTE: No. It’s lovely, central heating, lifts, new electric cooker.

  KITTY: I don’t like electricity.

  JEANETTE: You’ll get used to it.

  KITTY: I won’t.

  JEANETTE: Wonderful views, eighth floor.

  KITTY: How many?!

  JEANETTE: Fully decorated, inside toilet…

  KITTY: I should hope so, eight floors up.

  JEANETTE: You made a joke!

  KITTY: Did I?

  Beat.

  JEANETTE: I missed you.

  KITTY: I miss my mum too. I’m sorry. Has Dolly been round?

  JEANETTE: (Suddenly angry.) Of course she hasn’t!

  Beat.

  You don’t remember do you? What you said. You started with Dad, then you went on to her John and then Mr Varney – accusing them of abducting Susie.

  KITTY: I’ll say I’m sorry. I suppose I just thought someone had to know where she was. I’ve never known time pass so slowly.

  JEANETTE: Where’s your coat?

  KITTY: When they first handed her to me I said that’s not my baby! I couldn’t believe I’d gone through all that pushing and pain for a skinned rabbit in a toupee. I’d expected a rosebud doll. But no, they said the rabbit was definitely mine. But not to worry she’d get prettier. So I brought her home and I waited and her hair fell out and she looked like your grandad. So I waited some more and everyone said oh she takes after your side or his side but I couldn’t see anymore. She was just Susie. My baby.

  JEANETTE: We can’t go on like this. Jesus Mum, please!

  How long are you going to keep this up?

  KITTY: I don’t know.

  JEANETTE: And what about Dad?

  KITTY: I’ll still be here. I’m not dead.

  JEANETTE says nothing. Leaves.

  It would be easier all round, I do realise, if she was. People could understand that. There’d be a funeral and flowers and letters saying how sorry they were, what a lovely person she was, tragedy, one so young, everything before her. That sort of thing. But you have to live with reality, don’t you? That’s what they kept saying at St Hilda’s. Accept the reality. What I’d like to know is how d’you do that when you don’t know what it is? When you don’t even know what age group you’re mourning? And if she isn’t…you know…then why did she go? What did we do wrong? Did she have too little of this, or too much of that? I don’t know. But I do know that if she thinks she had too much, if we gave her too much, when we struggled for everything, if she thinks that, when she walks through that door I will give her such a slap. I will slap her and slap her and slap her!

  KITTY slaps herself as she shouts. She stops exhausted.

  That’s quite enough of that Kitty Annie Cornish. Now then, I think a small sherry would be in order, don’t you? Just the one.

  Scene Twelve

  Milena’s Story (8)

  MILENA: They told us, if you want to see your children alive, do as we say. They took some of us to the sports hall, others to the hotel. I went back to school to learn of hatred so deep it runs through generations, to learn that wars against women are fought with different weapons. They kept us in the basement, ten of us, sleeping on the floor. No blankets. Guards on the door. I recognised one of them. Goran, we went to school together. I plead with him to tell me what has happened to my children. He won’t look at me. When my turn comes there are eight of them, swearing, drinking. The officer orders me to undress, jokes I was lucky not to be thrown in the river with stones tied to my ankles. He is wrong. He rapes me first then orders the others to do the same. I am lost. My soul is being dug out of me with long spoons. I no longer exist. Except when I think of my children. Days weeks pass and each day they come with new pain and new humiliation. If I existed I would pray to die, except when I think of my children.

  I switch it off. Click and it’s gone. Erased totally. It never happened. I take myself to that place up in the sky that I can see through the window over their shoulders as they are raping me. One after another. Men I knew. The neighbour, the baker, the schoolteacher and his son. And more. I don’t know them all. But they know me. They know ever
y orifice. To them I am just a series of holes. But as I lie, bent backwards or forwards over the school tables while they rip and tear their way into the bleeding centre of me, I look at the sky and I am not there. I have gone somewhere they will never reach me. The neighbour, the baker, the schoolteacher and his son. I hear their zips and their belt buckles, I hear their swearing, gasping, grunting like pigs at the trough, I hear the tearing of my hair from my skull. But I feel nothing. I have gone somewhere they will never reach me. I go there now, often. There is nothing but blue.

  Beat.

  Then I am pregnant. One of them has lodged inside me, taken root and is even now drinking my blood. Growing like cancer. One of Them. The neighbour, the baker, the schoolteacher and his son. And more. A chetnik – another little Serbian soldier – I would dig out with a pitchfork if I had the chance. If I had the implement. Anything would do. I try to scrape it out with my nails, pushing my fingers up inside. I don’t feel pain any more. Scratching and tearing. I have evil growing inside me and I want it OUT! But they watch me, tie my hands, so pleased with themselves, all their pricks standing to attention to have bred another soldier for the greater cause. Their cause, their war. My body. They want this child to survive. They still come for me along with the others.

  And still the seed grows. It turns, it kicks, I punch it, trying to beat it out of me. It grows. A changeling inside me. One of them. Another soldier. Another Chetnik. I, who loved my children more than life, I am breeding hatred.

  Scene Thirteen

  Ali’s Story (9)

  ALI helps GWEN on and into a chair.

  ALI: How’re you feeling?

  GWEN: Better to be here.

  ALI: You should get out more. Make the effort.

  GWEN: I don’t think you realise how much of an effort it is.

  ALI: Well you’re here now. Talking of effort you should have seen me yesterday. You know Flora’s doing her traffic training?

  GWEN: Does she have a lead?

  ALI: Not funny. She has to get to the centre all by herself. I’ve been with her loads of times, there are two crossings but yesterday she did it. All by herself.