The Red Ribbon Page 11

  I spat blood into the running water at the sink. “I’m fine. Rose is fine. You are fine, aren’t you, Rose?”

  “Don’t worry about me. Let’s clean you up.”

  Brigid the hedgehog passed over a damp cloth. Rose dabbed at my face. I started shaking. It was only when I tried to push her away that I became aware of the heavy throb of pain in my hand. The hand Carla had stomped on.

  “Look at it,” said Francine in awe. “It’s wrecked.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” snapped Rose. “It’ll be bruised. Sprained. Nothing serious.”

  I tucked my hand close to my chest and whimpered, like a wounded animal.

  “Sorry, Ella, we’ve got to wash it and bind it up.”

  Rose did that quickly. She was so brave that I didn’t dare cry either. We hadn’t any bandages so I unknotted the red ribbon with my good hand and passed it to her. Not once did she tell me off for daring to wear it. Not once did she say the beatings were my fault, even though I knew they were. She used the ribbon to bind my fingers straight between two pieces of stolen card. I swayed at the pain.

  Next we hid the ribbon bandage under a square of old cotton. Hardly the best first aid ever, but the best I’d get in Birchwood. Despite the awful throbbing in my fingers, I liked the feel of that red ribbon: hope was still there, just out of sight.

  “Marta could be back at any moment. We can’t let her see Ella’s so injured,” said Shona. “You remember Rhoda?”

  Everyone nodded. They remembered.

  “That was the woman who worked here before me?” I asked.

  “She was an amazing cutter. It was like material just melted between the shears. There was nobody like her.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Just a stupid mistake. She cut her finger. It went septic. She got sick with blood poisoning. Marta could maybe have gotten her medicine, but she said it wasn’t worth it. Rhoda went to the Hospital.”

  There was a murmur of fear and disgust around the room. The Hospital was a last resort.

  “Marta wouldn’t let her come back?” I asked.

  Francine shrugged. “Rhoda’s place got filled.”

  “By me.”

  “By you. The Hospital got full. They cleared it to make room for new patients. That was the end of Rhoda.” Francine sprinkled her fingers to show ash falling. “So, like Shona said, keep that hand hidden from Marta if you can.”

  Right on cue, Marta the shark slid out from the fitting room and glided between the workbenches, scattering smaller fish.

  “What’s all this? Why aren’t you working, Ella? You think because Madam likes one dress you can take a holiday? Ugh! How can I send you into the fitting room with a face like that? What have you got there?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re hiding something.”

  “Just my hand.”

  “What’s wrong with your hand?”

  “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Show me. Now. Good god, you idiot — why did you let that happen?”

  “Nothing’s broken. It’s just bruised.”

  “Bruised or broken, you’re hardly any use to me now,” Marta cried. “Oh, come on, you aren’t seriously thinking you can sew with one hand?”

  My face flamed even redder than before. “No, not for a couple of days, maybe.”

  “A couple of days? You’ll be lucky to lift a needle ever again —”

  “She just needs to let it heal, that’s all,” Rose interrupted. “She can still supervise, and sketch designs with her other hand.”

  Marta didn’t even pretend to think it over. “This is a sewing salon, not a rest home or artists’ retreat. She goes. In fact, you both go.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “Rose did the sunflower on Madam’s dress. She’s the best embroiderer here.”

  Marta shrugged. “There are hundreds of women in Birchwood who can sew flowers. Just the same as there are hundreds of cutters and dressmakers. New prisoners arriving every day, too. I can have my pick of those.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Marta,” said Francine. “Clients like Ella’s work. Madam was crazy about her sunflower dress, remember?”

  I vowed there and then to worship Francine forever after. And maybe pass her some cigarettes and extra bread too. And paper for the toilet.

  “Ella’s the best,” said Shona, in between raspy coughs. Brigid nodded, wordless as ever.

  “Besides,” said Francine, “aren’t we all family here in the sewing room? We should stick together.”

  Marta was having none of it. “Our families are dead, and I didn’t get to be a prominent by being soft. Now get out, you two . . . or do I have to ask the guard to whip you out?”

  She was serious. She was actually going to toss us both!

  I tried shaking my head at the injustice, but it hurt too much. “After all I’ve done for you?” I spluttered.

  Not one scrap of emotion colored her face. Not one spark of pity lit her eyes. Like Rabbit-woman all those months before, Rose and I were to be thrown to the wolves. Away from the sanctuary of the workshop, we’d be at the mercy of the guards, the weather, and the relentless back-breaking labor squads. It was bad enough sewing on the pitiful rations we had. Doing hard labor would kill us slowly — if guards didn’t kill us quickly.

  What would Marta do?

  No need to speculate: she’d just done it.

  We were out.

  We stood, bruised and aching, on the doorstep to the workroom. I winced as the door slammed behind us. The air outside was wet and gritty. A work gang of Stripeys went hurrying past with planks of wood hoisted on their shoulders. Next came Stripeys with wheelbarrows of cement, on the double. All kept their heads down and their eyes on the ground. Guards screamed at them to go faster, faster.

  “What shall we do?” Rose whispered. “If we don’t work we’ll be . . . you know.” She flicked a quick look up to the stark chimneys towering high over the camp.

  I tried to straighten up. Just that simple movement made me crazy with pain.

  “Maybe we should get you to the Hospital!” cried Rose.

  “No! Didn’t you hear Shona? They don’t cure people there; it’s just a waiting room for . . . for the end.”

  I definitely did not look at the chimneys. I tried not to think about the fact that if Rhoda hadn’t gone to the Hospital, there’d never have been a job for me at the workshop.

  I took a breath, tasting iron as blood trickled down my throat. My hand hurt so much it felt like it was on fire. I could feel the ribbon, though.

  “You know what, Rose? My grandma always says, ‘If the sun isn’t shining, make the most of rain.’”

  “It certainly is raining,” Rose said, wiping drops from her face.

  “It’s like one of your stories, where the characters in the middle of it are having a terrible time and it seems impossible that they’ll ever get through it, but they do.”

  “If we were in a story, I’d whistle up an eagle to fly us both out of here, straight to the City of Light. We’d be dropped in a fountain for a wash, then whisked away in a luxury motorcar, straight to a cake shop.”

  I heard dogs barking. “Your eagle’s late. I say we run to the barrack block, hide in the bunk till roll call, then bribe Girder to find us a new job as quickly as possible.”

  “One where there’s no chance of meeting Carla again,” Rose suggested.

  “Unless one of us has a large frying pan handy,” I replied grimly.

  I was thinking of the time Grandma got up in the night, convinced there were burglars. She had the frying pan in one hand and an old hockey stick in the other. Terrifying. She’d been almost disappointed to find it was just a stray cat that had come in through an open window.

  Rose smiled. “You know, Ella, I never told you what sort of animal you remind me of.”

  “Go on then,” I said warily.

  “You’re a fox.”

  “A fox?”

  “Why not? A fox
is loyal to a small family, a cunning survivor, and it adapts to any environment. Foxes have sharp teeth to attack and defend, but they’re soft and warm for cuddling. Farmers hate them, but you can’t have everything.”

  I suppose that wasn’t so bad. I took Rose’s hand with my uninjured one, so we stood like an old-fashioned gentleman and lady.

  “Shall we, my dear?”

  She nodded. “Dearest, we shall.”

  Hand in hand, we stepped into the mud and set out to survive together.

  Rose and I faced a monstrous instrument of torture. A machine with hand cranks, metal cogs, and wooden rollers. Steam filled the air. Behind us, our new boss-woman grunted. She loomed like a big brown bear on its hind paws, not sure whether to swipe us flat and chew on us, or lumber off and leave us alive. She jerked her head toward the machine.

  “Work!”

  It was the first word we’d heard her speak. Her eyes were small, dull stones without the slightest shine of intelligence.

  Rose rolled up her sleeves, revealing biceps no bigger than bee stings. She set her arms to the big crank at one side of the machine. Bear growled. As best I could with only one decent hand, I took a folded bedsheet and began to feed it between the machine’s rollers. Rose set her entire strength against the crank. The rollers barely budged. The handle jerked. Rose lurched, and the machine gobbled at the sheet, dragging me with it. I let go of the sheet before I got pulled through the rollers. They didn’t call this machine a mangle for nothing.

  Bear roared. The sheet was stuck halfway through the mangle, creased even worse than before.

  “We can do it” I said, wiping sweat from my face. “We just need to practice. We haven’t worked a mangle before.”

  “Never seen a mangle before!” shrieked a Stripey who followed Bear around like her shadow. She had a laugh like a hyena. It was already driving me insane. “Don’t know how to work it! Not so fine and fancy now, eh? Not so primped and proud — ha, ha, ha!”

  Rose turned and raised an eyebrow. Hyena’s laugh dwindled.

  Bear looked from me to the mangle, then to Rose. She shook her head. “Outside!” she said.

  “No, really,” I answered quickly. “We’re very quick learners. Show us how to do it.”

  “Outside!”

  Hyena giggled.

  Day one at Birchwood laundry and we were already failures.

  “My grandma always said if you want to get out of doing a job, pretend to do it badly,” I told Rose under my breath. “That’s how come Grandad never asked us to help when the drains were blocked or the roof gutters needed cleaning. Not after we’d helped him so badly the first time around.”

  Rose grinned. “No need to pretend to botch things when it comes to this job!”

  They called it the Washery. It wasn’t a laundry for Stripeys, of course, just for the guards and officers. It was a squat gray complex with stone floors and flooding drains, built around a cobbled yard. There were no washing machines. Why waste electricity when you had Stripeys to do all the hard work by hand?

  About thirty women worked slapping gray shirts on washboards, swirling green-gray trousers in tubs, and rinsing gray knickers under taps.

  “Rub the gussets! Rub the gussets!” Hyena called.

  Bear prodded us toward a door. Hyena trotted behind.

  I made one more appeal to be given a job indoors. “Look, we know there’s a Mending Room here. Both of us are professional sewers. We could do that work beautifully. I made clothes for Madam H. herself.”

  Bear stopped next to a giant wicker basket. She picked something out of the basket and threw it at me. A wet pair of underpants splatted on my face. Hyena cackled. I peeled the pants off and gripped them tightly. I was this close to lobbing them back at Bear.

  Rose said hurriedly, “You’d like us to hang the laundry out? Wonderful. It’s a nice fresh day for it, don’t you think? We’ll just need clothespins . . . and if you could be so kind as to show us where the washing lines are . . . marvelous.”

  Rose’s posh accent and politeness totally flummoxed our new boss. Bear kicked the wicker basket and grunted at Hyena, who said, “I’ll show you the drying ground. And here’s clothespins. Lots of clothespins. Clip them on, look!” Hyena put two on her ear lobes, one on her nose, and laughed again.

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Was it so crazy to be crazy in a place like Birchwood?

  The biggest laundry baskets were on wheels. We had to push them to the drying ground, pin everything out, then stand — bored out of our minds — while the washing dried. I couldn’t use the fingers on my damaged hand, so Rose had to help, and she was barely tall enough to reach the line. More than one piece of washing went down into the dust. We shook things clean as best we could and carried on.

  Our arms ached and our bruises still throbbed. That didn’t matter. Thanks to an outrageously high bribe paid to Girder, we’d been set up at the Washery just one day after being booted out by Marta. It was pretty cushy by Birchwood standards — though far below being in the Department Store, the kitchens, or the Upper Tailoring Studio.

  We were alive and the sun was shining.

  In between the flapping sheets, we could look past Birchwood’s barbed wire to where farmers gathered in the harvest as free people. Summer was almost over. I gazed out over the shorn fields to a line of smoke puffs. “I see a train. There aren’t so many arriving now, are there?”

  Rose was gazing up at puffs of cloud. “I can see a dragon, a fairy, a goblet, and, if you squint a bit, that cloud looks just like a crown.”

  “Or a meat pie.”

  “Oh, pie . . .” said Rose with a sigh.

  From the drying ground we could even see the faraway roofs of houses and shops.

  Instead of brooding about Betty the sewing machine having been transplanted into the Upper Tailoring Studio, I liked to imagine Grandma and Grandad sitting down at the kitchen table to eat. The kitchen stools had cushions that blew out rude noises when sat on. Every single time this happened, Grandad never failed to make a face that said, It wasn’t me!

  At teatime there’d be thick slices of bread and honey, boiled eggs sprinkled with salt, and tiny, briny lamb sausages. After that, cake. I could never decide what sort of cake I’d eat first when the War was over and I got home. I definitely hoped there’d be a cake shop next to my dress shop in the City of Light. Rose said there would be. She confidently predicted endless iced buns. Even though I knew she was just making it all up, she sounded very convincing. I just wished imaginary cakes were as filling as real ones.

  The view from the drying ground — and the thought of food — made me ache for freedom. Not so much Rose. She told me she was always free, in that strange story land inside her head. She passed the hours telling me tall tales of her life in a palace as a countess, with her mother scribbling books or dancing with dukes and her father fighting duels at dawn and tanks by teatime. It was all quite convincing, even though I knew it had to be made up.

  But the most astonishing story I heard in that summer’s dying days was one about Marta. And, unbelievably, it was true.

  The women at the Washery weren’t into Rose’s stories. They liked gossip, the more shocking and scandalous the better. We got used to hearing who was in love with whom. Who were best friends, who were worst enemies. Which guards were up for promotion; which guards were pregnant. I thought it was all horrible. Then one day Marta’s name came up.

  “You mean Marta from the Upper Tailoring Studio?” I asked. “Nose so sharp you could file your nails on it?”

  The main gossip, a shriveled-up girl I called Shrew, glared at me for butting in. I glared back. I had perfected a pretty good mean stare since working at the Washery (inspired by Marta herself ).

  “Might be her,” said Shrew. “Why’d you want to know?”

  “I worked for her, that’s why.”

  Despite the fact she looked no different from me, Shrew sneered at my rough striped dress and my stubbly head. “Yeah, I hea
rd you made gowns for Madam H. Then you got beat up.”

  “Marta booted Rose and me out for no good reason. She uses everyone to get ahead, then takes credit for their work. All she cares about is herself!”

  “Yeah? Tell that to her sister.”

  “What sister?”

  Shrew squirmed with delight at having this gossip to stir up. “Her sister Lila. Couple of years older than Marta. A teacher. Married — two little kids, just toddlers, and a baby on the way. Word came Lila was on a List for a work camp, and we all know what that means.”

  “Hard labor till you drop, or a one-way trip to this place. Ha, ha, ha!” laughed Hyena.

  “Right,” said Shrew. “So Marta says to Lila, ‘You can’t leave the kiddies; I’ll go in your place.’ Gave up a job at a nice dress salon, from what I’ve heard. Ends up here, works hard, lands on her feet as a prominent — who can blame her for getting ahead? I heard the whole story from a cousin who knows a girl who works for Mrs. Smith at the Department Store, so it’s practically from the horse’s mouth. Every word’s true.”

  Marta had volunteered to come in her sister’s place? She’d sacrificed her career and her freedom, in return for Birchwood? It gave a whole new twist to the question What would Marta do?

  And then there was Carla.

  “I still don’t get why Carla did this to me,” I later complained to Rose, taking the red ribbon out of my secret pocket-bag and letting it glide over my stiff fingers.

  Rose said, “She’s under a spell, of course, cast by a powerful enchanter in his eagle-nest lair many leagues away . . .”

  And so another story began.

  There were tons of possible answers — because she was bored, because she’s a brute, because she’s jealous, because she can. None of them (or all of them) made sense.

  About a week after we came to the Washery, Carla showed up. I hid behind a row of drying shirts and watched as she stopped in the shelter of a wall to light a cigarette. I was terrified she’d spot me and come to add more bruises to the collection I already had.

  I wanted to run and hide, like a fox going to ground, but I couldn’t move.