A Five Year Sentence Read online

  BERNICE RUBENS

  A Five Year Sentence

  For Dave

  and

  Nana Wynberg

  ‘I was only obeying orders.’

  Lieutenant Calley in his defence at the My Lai massacre trial. November, 1971.

  Contents

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part 2

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  A Note on the Author

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Miss Hawkins looked at her watch. It was two-thirty. If everything went according to schedule, she could safely reckon to be dead by six o’clock. Maybe I’ll listen to the news first, she thought to herself. I won’t need to bother with the weather forecast. She checked her leavings for the hundredth time. Opening each drawer in the kitchen cabinet, she re-assured herself that everything was tidy and in order. She wanted to leave a good impression. She noticed one slightly chipped cup on the dresser, and that she threw away. She had polished the silver that morning and she kept opening the cutlery drawer to admire its shine. Then once again into the bedroom. She smoothed the candlewick bedspread, picking off the odd loose thread. Her two skirts, best dress, coat and three blouses hung cellophane-covered in her wardrobe, each garment on its own metal hanger. Below, her three pairs of shoes were polished and severely in line. And neatly folded beside them, the polythene bag that would finally enshroud the fur-lined boots she was wearing for her last appearance. In each of the four drawers of the chest there were two demure lavender bags. These she placed on top of her woollies, underwear and sundries, so that they were visible. She checked that the laundry basket was empty – to be caught with dirty linen would reap a shame that would haunt her in her grave – and that her cupboard was bare. Almost bare, that is, apart from a carton of long-life milk with a promise of three months’ life-expectation on its packaging, during which time she would certainly be found and it wouldn’t be wasted. So too, the four tins of mackerel she’d recklessly bought in an ‘end of line’ sale. All was in order. She was ready.

  She went back to the sitting-room. On the small desk lay a white envelope. On it she had written, ‘The Will Of Miss Jean Hawkins. To Whom It May Concern.’ She had no idea who on earth could be concerned with it, but it seemed the formal thing to say. She had not yet sealed the envelope. That she would do immediately prior to her final act of departure. Once again she took out the single sheet of paper and checked on her neatness and spelling. ‘I bequeath all my savings and belongings to the Sacred Heart Orphanage, Wiston Road, London, SW6. I declare that I am of sound mind.’ (signed) Jean Hawkins (Cashier) Witnessed by Mary Woolam (Mrs) (Housewife). Miss Hawkins smiled. She liked that name. It was cuddly and responsible. With a different pen and a slant to her writing, she had invented a witness. She knew no-one to whom she could entrust such a delicate authority. For she had no friends, and no family. The latter she had never known. She had never investigated her parentage. The orphanage where she had spent the first years of her life, never encouraged that line of questioning. ‘We took you from nothing’ was their blanket response to any timid enquiry. It was what they said to all the children and she ached to know the quality of her nothing, the where and the why of it. But when, after fourteen years, she was put out of the orphanage, her curiosity as to her origins had evaporated. She folded the sheet of paper and replaced it in the envelope. She stood up the flap so that it called itself to her attention. Not that she would have overlooked it, but the open flap was by way of an order. An order to be obeyed. At all stages in Miss Hawkins’ life, other people had given orders, and she had obeyed. In the orphanage, it was matron, at school, her teachers, and in the factory, the foreman, and later on, the management. During her life, obedience had assumed the nature of a passion. An order executed gave her an acute physical pleasure, and she would seal the flap of her last will and testament with a frisson close to orgasm. Now that she had reached retirement age, there would be no more orders, and how would she know what to do with her life if there were no-one to tell her? Thus it did not occur to Miss Hawkins that there was any alternative to a simple self-inflicted quietus.

  She fingered the earth of the aspidistra plant in the window. It was moist and would safely outlive her. She checked on the bottle of pills on the bedside table. ‘It is dangerous to exceed the stated dose.’ In taking the whole bottle she would not be disobeying. She would merely be disagreeing with an opinion, and that, as a last rite, she was entitled to. She put on her hat and coat, and checked once again on each drawer and cupboard. Before she left the house, she lit the gas-fire in her bedroom. It was a rare act of extravagance for one who never in her life had indulged herself. In her death-chamber she could dare to luxuriate. She shut the bedroom door and left the house for the factory for the last time.

  Chapter 2

  Most of the four hundred employees were assembled in the workers’ canteen. The tables had been removed and the tea and coffee counter now served as a table for the business of the meeting. Miss Hawkins sat clench-fisted behind the table, and viewed the sea of faces, all of them so achingly familiar, yet each single one a stranger. She shivered and the audience thought that she was nervous, and that was as it should be, for how often in her uneventful life had poor Miss Hawkins been in such limelight. Forty-six years of devoted service to ‘For Your Pleasure’ confectionary company, had earned her this parting ceremony, this ‘small token of our esteem’, lying gift-wrapped on the table, this ‘no words can express’ speech that Jim Connell was at this moment delivering in words and phrases that he had hitherto declared inexpressible. Miss Hawkins glanced sideways at the notes he fingered on the table. ‘Has given of her cervises jenerusly’, she read, and she was appalled that he’d attained the rank of shop steward with such spelling. ‘For forty-six years,’ he droned on, threatening to itemise every single day of them, ‘she has been a steadfast and loyal colleague.’ Miss Hawkins heard herself spelling the words on his poor illiterate behalf.

  She looked at the package on the table. It was indeed a ‘small token’, measuring at most six inches square, with a depth, allowing for the wrapping, of about four inches. One hundred and forty-four cubic inches, she worked out. Whatever it was, she was not going to open it. She had it in mind to throw it away on her way home, gift-wrapped and all, so that she need never know that, with their gift, they had given her a reason to live beyond this day.

  She listened as Jim Connell bumbled on about her long and devoted service and her first green years at the factory. She remembered the day she’d left the orphanage. Matron had put her to work at the sweet factory at the end of the orphanage road. The orphanage and the factory dated from the same year, as if by arrangement, the one should feed the other, and the progress from foundling to fudge-wrapper was as natural as the night that followed day. From wrapping, Miss Hawkins had graduated to the boiled-sweet department, then swiftly through marshmallows and fondants to the factory speciality on the top floor. Chocolate liqueurs. She could go no further. At this point of promotion, most of the orphan employees, cured for life of a sweet addiction, pimpled and puppy-fatted, would seek employment elsewhere. But the management had noted Miss Hawkins’ diligence and devotion to duty, and they put her in the office and groomed her as book-keeper. In her thirtieth year she had attained the rank of head cashier, a post she retained to
this day.

  ‘We owe a great deal to Miss Hawkins,’ the shop steward waffled on, and she wondered, but with little curiosity, how they had inscribed the gift. Though she had worked at the factory for so many years, she was pretty sure that nobody among the personnel knew her Christian name. ‘Thank you, Miss Hawkins’ had been the Friday acknowledgement of four hundred wage packets, or ‘A cup of tea, Miss Hawkins?’ ‘Have a nice weekend, Miss Hawkins’, as if Miss were her Christian name. Few people in her life had ever called her Jean. At the orphanage she had answered to Hawkins as others did to Davies, Woods or Murphy. Did whatever was inside that gift-wrapped package bear any inscribed evidence as to whom it might belong? Not just any old Miss, not just any old Hawkins, but some indication that she was a little more than the sum of both parts.

  ‘She worked her way from sweet-wrapper to head cashier,’ Mr Connell was marvelling. Yes, she thought, she’d done her best. In her small way she’d been a success, and God would forgive her for what she was going to do and square the misgivings of the Sacred Heart Orphanage should her origins be subsequently disclosed. She found herself thinking again of her childhood, as if in rehearsal of a pre-death flashback.

  If anyone were to bother at any time to write the biography of Miss Jean Hawkins, who was hardly the stuff of research or commemoration, they would have fastened on to her twelfth birthday as being a key to the subsequent turnings in her life. On that day two events occurred which were the stuff of which nightmares are made.

  Birthdays were not over-celebrated at the orphanage, partly because the exact date of the child’s birth was often not known. So one tea-time of each month was given over to celebrations for those children whose birth was gauged to be within those four weeks. Matron would give each birthday child a candle, pink for a girl and blue for a boy – the orphanage was not unmindful of ritual – which was placed in a large communal cake. The candles were never lit, both as a fire precaution, and for economy’s sake. Hawkins held her pink candle, mourning the white and virgin wick and a sudden violent thought assailed her. One day, when she was rich enough to buy matches, she would set fire to the orphanage. She would do it on a Sunday when all the children were in church, when only matron was at home. And the children would come back and watch the fire, their faces aglow in a million candlelights. She gripped her dry candle with her small clenched fist, and she felt a trickle, slow and warm, travelling down the inside of her thigh. She crossed her legs and put up her candle hand. ‘I’ve got to go, Miss,’ she said, blushing with the shame of her grossly ill-timed but natural calling, and she rushed from the room to the nearest cloakroom. Then she wondered why she was running. She didn’t want to go at all. Yet her leg was wet, and trickling now, and threateningly close to her white Sunday socks. Matron would kill her. She leaned against the unlockable door, and looking down, she saw a thin line of blood dribble over her calf. She stiffened with fear, staring at it, willing it not to reach the sock. ‘Oh God,’ she whimpered and made the automatic gesture of kneeling. But fearing the blood would stain the floor she rose quickly. It was matron’s wrath she feared most of all. ‘I want to die, God. Right now,’ she said, seeing that as her only solution. ‘I didn’t mean it about the fire. Honestly, God, I didn’t, I was only joking.’ God had punished her evil thoughts with blood, and matron would find out and she’d want to discover what terrible thought God had found so offensive. ‘I want to die,’ she said again decisively, and then, to underline the seriousness of her plea, she knelt on the cold floor. ‘Bugger the lino,’ she shouted. ‘I want to die, God. I really do.’

  ‘Hawkins.’ Matron’s shrill voice echoed down the corridor. Each lavatory visit was matron-timed. Too long a time spent in such privacy indicated reasons other than the simple call of nature. A quick smoke perhaps for the older boys, or worse, experiments in self-abuse, or, most healthy of all, straightforward constipation. Any of these reasons called for attention, and matron was ever on hand.

  ‘Hawkins,’ she shouted, pushing open the door. She looked at the sobbing hulk with impatience and pulled her up from the floor, noting the blood on the lino and the red smudge on the sock. ‘Look at your mess,’ she said. And then, lifting the serge Sunday pinny, ‘I thought as much,’ she said, after a cursory examination. ‘Wait here, young woman, I’ll get you your rags.’

  Hawkins leaned against the towel rail, trembling with confusion. Matron hadn’t killed her. She hadn’t even been very angry. And what were the rags she was bringing? Was she going to be dressed in rags for punishment? But what resounded most in Hawkins’ ear was the order of, ‘Wait here, young woman.’ When matron was angry, she often said ‘young lady’, and if she called you that, you knew it was bed without supper or no pudding on a Sunday. But ‘woman’ was different. It was a word that belonged to old people, and she began to cry again because she was too young to be old. She heard matron’s sensible heels down the corridor. She wished she could stop her tears.

  ‘Now stop blubbing,’ matron said, not too gruffly. ‘It happens to us all.’

  ‘What happens?’ Hawkins whimpered.

  ‘This,’ she said, pointing to the blot of blood on the lino.

  Hawkins wondered what she was talking about, but she was too afraid to ask.

  ‘Here,’ matron said, holding out two wide strips of cloth. ‘These are your rags. Two is enough,’ she said. ‘Every night before bed, you go into the staff bathroom and wash them. The staff bathroom, mind you. Nowhere else. When it stops, you come and tell me. And you must tell me when it starts again. I’ve got to keep count, you see, in case anything worse happens.’

  ‘Like what?’ Hawkins was terrified.

  ‘You’ll see,’ matron said threateningly, and she was gone, unwilling and certainly unable to clarify further.

  Hawkins looked at the rags. Her name, in black marking-ink, was inscribed lengthwise on the cloth. It happens to everybody, matron had said, but by some natural instinct Hawkins knew that boys didn’t have to wear rags. But whatever matron had said, there was no doubt in Hawkins’ mind that the blood was a punishment from God. Its timing could not be ignored. Later on that day, when matron forbade Sunday baths to Morris, Davies, Downes and Hawkins, she wondered for what morbid sin they too had been punished, and like a reluctant leper, she joined the rag-girl community.

  The second event that was to terrorise Hawkins’ future, she had desperately but clumsily buried in her soul. It took place later that same night, when everybody was in bed. Hawkins woke suddenly, remembering that she hadn’t washed her rag, and that she was in no position to avail herself of further punishment either from God or from matron. Quietly she crept out of bed. On her way to the door, she wondered why Morris’ bed was empty. Silently she tip-toed across the landing to the staff bathroom. The door was closed but there was no light from the crack beneath. She turned the handle quietly, feeling for the light switch with her other hand. And spot-lit by the naked bulb, Morris hung from the ceiling. The tongue lolled out of her mouth, and the big toe of one small white foot was upturned in a rigid and offended cramp. Around her young neck was tied a reef-knotted necklace of damp rags, each indelible leprous name coupled with another. Oh, matron will be ever so cross, Hawkins thought, and she wondered what was Morris’ first name. She clasped her hands over her mouth, vainly stifling a scream. Then she was sick and sobbing, and the bathroom was full of people and smells and sighs and horror. Somebody stuffed something into her mouth, and in the morning when she woke up, matron was standing by the bed, telling her over and over again that she’d had a bad dream. ‘A terrible dream, dear.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Hawkins was happy to agree. ‘It was a nightmare.’

  And she got up and went about her orphan-woman’s business, trying not to notice that Morris wasn’t there.

  Miss Hawkins stared out at the crowded assembly and shivered. She glanced again at Jim Connell’s ill-spelt memoranda which no longer bore any relation to what he was saying. By his droning repetition, he seemed to be runn
ing out of expressions, and she was grateful that it would soon be over.

  ‘And on behalf of the staff and management, I would like to present you with this gift as a small token of our appreciation.’

  He was handing it to her. She half stood up to accept it, her hands trembling. She thought of Morris again. I never really cried for her. I must mourn her, she decided, before I go. The tears were already pricking behind her eyes. She sniffed audibly and the audience saw her trembling. They whispered among themselves that she was overcome and they were embarrassed, and the more human among them hated her for the guilt she bred in them. ‘Open it, Miss Hawkins,’ someone shouted from the back of the hall. She pretended not to hear. But the shout came again, louder this time, and it was an order. And she, who all her life had obeyed, began clumsily to untie the silver knot beneath the plastic instant bow. Her hands trembled so that she was incapable of untying it, and with great fury she tore the ribbon apart, tearing at the paper, hating them all for their pitying charity. She was like a ravenous dog with a bone, and the audience shifted uncomfortably, deciding that it was probably the first present poor Miss Hawkins had received in her whole life. Then they regretted the ungenerosity of the gift they had given her.

  At last, she’d stripped the package. It was a book. She’d guessed that by its shape as she tore the last lining of tissue. But not an ordinary book. For it was fastened with a gold Gothic lock with two small keys attached. On its green leather binding was inscribed, ‘MISS HAWKINS’ FIVE-YEAR DIARY’. She stared at it, somehow gratified that the apostrophe was in the right place. Then her knees buckled and she had to sit, gripping the edge of the table as if it were the rail of a dock. As if they had passed their verdict on her forty-six years of service. A gilt-edged inscribed five year sentence. Anything, she whispered to herself, anything on earth would have been better. With total obedience, a book would have detained her no more than a week. A simple bar of soap, with diligent bathing, would have held her for less than a month. But a five year sentence took five years to serve. No more, no less. She fingered the golden keys. Lockable too. From whom should she hide it, and for what purpose? What secrets, dark and beautiful, could it ever hold?