The Red Ribbon Page 5

  I grabbed her arm and stopped running.

  “Your headscarf! You’ve lost it! Rose, you can’t keep losing things!”

  Honestly, she was hopeless. She had already lost her spoon. We were given one bowl and one spoon each. Without them you couldn’t eat. Rose had to drink soup straight from her bowl. She said she didn’t mind.

  “Saves on the washing up,” she’d joked, as if there was anywhere to wash anything in the barrack block.

  “I suppose you had nothing but silver spoons back at your palace?” I teased.

  “Such a lot of work for the servants to polish,” Rose agreed. “We actually had a special piece of cutlery just for eating pineapples. They were the housekeeper’s pride. I love pineapple, don’t you? So hard and prickly on the outside, but inside — oh, the soft yellow flesh and the juice . . . It was like drinking happiness.”

  I licked my cracked lips. I’d never had pineapple juice in my life.

  “But where’s your headscarf? Did you let someone steal it?”

  “No! There was a woman at roll call — didn’t you see her, standing in front of us?”

  “I didn’t see anyone. . . . Oh, the one who fainted?” I vaguely remembered a little commotion as the woman’s bones folded and she’d crouched on the ground like a crab until hauled to her feet again. “The old woman?”

  “I gave it to her.”

  “Have you got sunstroke or something? Because if you haven’t now, you soon will. That was your headscarf. Why’d you give it away?”

  “She needed it.”

  “So do you! Marta will kill you for not being dressed properly. Who was the old bag anyway?”

  Rose shrugged — a little squirrel shoulder hunch. “I don’t know. Somebody. Nobody. She just looked so sad and so alone. Her eyes — lost — you know? She was shaking when I knotted the headscarf on. She couldn’t even manage to say thank you.”

  “How ungrateful is that?”

  Rose shook her head. “More like she’d forgotten there was anything to say thank you for. She wasn’t that old either. She could have been my mother — or yours. Ella, wouldn’t you like to think somebody somewhere was looking after them?”

  That shut me up.

  We never saw the crab-woman again.

  Inside the sewing room the world shrank to a set of stitches. I curled over my work so only the knobbles of my spine showed — I was so skinny I could practically feel them grazing the rough fabric of my striped dress. Needle in, needle out, thread pulling. This was how I would survive till the end of the War. Then I would start my dress shop and never see ugly things again.

  We’d opened the windows in the workshops once, just once, in early summer, in the hope that some air would crawl inside. Our hands were damp, the fabrics were limp, and the sewing machines almost burned to the touch when the sun was highest. The guard at the far end of the room had sweat patches on her uniform.

  Froggy Francine went to the windows. They were high up so people couldn’t really see in or out. The window frames were warped from the heat. Francine banged at one with the heel of her hand. It flew open. The others were even more stubborn. Finally there were squares of open sky.

  As if under a spell, all the girls in the sewing room turned their heads, closed their eyes, and opened their mouths.

  “Makes me want to run along and pop buttons in,” Rose murmured.

  With the windows open, we’d all waited for a freshness that never came. Instead there was dust. After days without rain, Birchwood mud had dried, cracked, and crumbled to a fine yellow-brown powder, which the lightest breeze blew around in little corkscrews. Now it came trickling over the windowsill.

  “You’d better close them up again,” I told Francine. “We can’t get dirt on the clothes. You know that.”

  “I don’t give a monkey’s arse about the clothes,” Francine muttered. “I need to breathe.” She drew herself up tall. She was still short. She glared at me. I glared back. My fists clenched.

  There was a sudden burst of dog barking and bullets banging outside. Francine flinched . . . and closed the windows.

  I hated the moment when we had to hand back our tools — Pins! called Marta — fold our work, and go outside to join the zebra herds in un-beautiful Birchwood.

  The camp was all straight lines. Rows and rows and rows of barrack blocks stretching out as far as the eye could see. Where they ended, the barbed wire began. Between the buildings Stripeys stumbled, sat, stretched out in exhaustion. Some of them were like ghost-women. Their bodies were the embers of a fire that was dying out.

  After work I dragged Rose through the crowds to get the best place in the soup line. Too near the front and we’d just be served salty water. Too near the end and there’d be burnt scrapings from the bottom of the pot or, worse, nothing. Somewhere in the middle was best. Then you might even get a piece of potato peeling.

  My grandma made soup so thick you could practically stand a spoon up in it. One time Grandad actually took his knife and fork and pretended to cut it up.

  I hoped Grandad was getting the groceries in and making sure Grandma was fed all right. She hadn’t been so strong back in spring. She was probably better now. Nothing kept her out of action for long. Eventually Grandad would get sick of scratching together his own meals and he’d nudge Grandma out of bed and into the kitchen. She’d slap him with a spatula a couple of times, call him an old fool, then get back to the business of being up and about.

  Life’s too short to waste time being sick, she always said.

  One day there was no supper at all. We got such measly portions at each meal, you’d think missing one wouldn’t matter, but it was agony. I was almost tempted to chew on thread just to have something in my mouth.

  That afternoon, I had a blistering headache from squinting too much. I was sewing teeny tucks on a set of lingerie for one of the officers’ wives. Rose had burned her hand on the iron, and there was no cream for it, so she was subdued too. I would’ve preferred it if she’d cried or complained. Being Rose, she just carried on, pretending she was fine.

  At least she had a new headscarf — two of Carla’s cigarettes had seen to that. The cigarettes came out of my stash, from the little cloth pocket-bag I’d cobbled together, hidden inside my dress. It was fair payment for the embroidery Rose had done.

  We were all packed up and ready to quit the workshop when a guard suddenly marched in and shouted, “Sit! Nobody leaves.”

  “We’ll miss supper!” I dared to object. There were murmurs of support from the others.

  “So you don’t eat!” Marta butted in, glaring. “You were told to sit. You — Princess — get away from the window!”

  Rose was on tiptoes trying to peek out. Her face was pale.

  “They’re moving people from the train platform,” she said. “More than usual.”

  I shuddered. I didn’t want to be reminded of the station where trains from all across the continent terminated . . . where lovely real life terminated. Platform to me now meant a place of dogs and screams and guards and suitcases. Men torn from women, women torn from babies, me being jostled along helplessly like a leaf in a dirty river.

  At the train platform we’d been sorted to right or left. Work or chimneys. Life or death.

  “Exactly,” said Marta. “It’s chaos out there. I don’t want any of my workers getting caught up and accidentally . . . going to the wrong place.”

  The guard nodded and left the workshop, closing and locking the door behind her.

  Now we heard it — the dull tramp, tramp, tramp of people walking. Hundreds, thousands of feet shuffling in the dust.

  From what I heard, there were ten thousand people a day arriving on their one-way trip that summer. Ten thousand a day. That was surely more people than lived in my whole town. That number, arriving every single day.

  Some stayed in the camp. The rest . . . I sewed extra quickly, as if each inch stitched me more firmly to life.

  The problem was, Birchwood was burs
ting at the seams. There were three, even four of us to a mattress now. One blanket between two. Not enough jobs to go around. Day and night the trains kept arriving. The locomotive whistles kept shrieking. They reminded me of my own journey across unseen landscapes to reach Birchwood. Days and nights of jolting along train tracks. Waiting. Wondering.

  In the evenings, scared new Stripeys came crowding into the barrack blocks, blinking and crying. They came from every corner of the continent, babbling in every language, showing just how far fighting had spread from the iron-hard homeland at the War’s center. Somehow we all made ourselves understood.

  Were we winning the War? Depended who you asked. The guards were always bragging about new conquests, new victories.

  In the meantime, every new Stripey was given their number and their badge — red triangles, green triangles, and enough yellow stars like mine to make a galaxy of constellations.

  My town was hundreds and hundreds of miles away to the northeast. The prisoners talked about cities that smelled of spiced pepper stew, or southern islands that baked blue and white in summer sunshine. There were Stripeys from as far west as you could go without falling in the ocean — Shona’s countrywomen. They were marvelously haughty, so elegant somehow. I could imagine making dresses for them after the War. Stripeys from eastern lands were more solid, like Francine. Good workers.

  Whatever their race or place, all the incomers were pounced on for news of the real world — Where are you from? How’s the War going? When will the liberators come? Some of us fed on the rumors that there were still some countries free to fight back. Our liberators, we hoped.

  That was all very well. I preferred to ask how fashions were changing. Were hems longer or shorter? Sleeves puffed or flat? Skirts pleated or straight? I spent ages concocting dresses in my head while Rose wandered off with some lumpy woman from her own part of the world — a place of fields, forests, music, and beauty, as far as I could tell from Rose’s descriptions. You never knew with Rose what was real and what was a story.

  We were overcrowded as an anthill, but still the people kept coming. Call me a custard-yellow coward, but that hot summer’s evening, I couldn’t bear to listen to that tramp, tramp, tramp of feet outside the sewing room.

  Tramp, tramp, tramp. On it went. A murmur of voices. Babies crying.

  Shona jumped when she heard the children. Beautiful, graceful Shona, all legs and eyelashes — the giraffe. She’d only been married a year when They came to arrest her because her name was on a List. Her husband and baby had been on the List too. She sometimes sang soft lullabies to her sewing machine. The guard at the back of the room occasionally caught a note and hummed the lullabies too . . . then she’d stride forward and slap Shona’s head to get her to shut up. That night, Shona’s eyelashes were wet with tears.

  “My baby,” she wept. “My precious little baby!”

  Marta whirled around. “Who said that?”

  Shona choked on her tears. Rose suddenly spoke up, “Did you ever hear the story about the queen and the lemon-curd tarts?”

  Such a ridiculous, funny, perfect thing to blurt out! It was as if someone had sprinkled cool water on us. Everyone turned to look at Rose, perched on the edge of a table with her squirrel eyes sparkling.

  Rose waited.

  Marta nodded — Go on . . .

  I already knew this about Rose — that just when you felt like snarling at the whole world, she’d start spinning some story about a girl who frowned and the wind changed and her face stayed like that. Or about an ogre who shouted so loudly it knocked the moon out of the sky.

  It had started one bedtime back in the barrack. We had an extra Stripey jammed into the bunk with us, so Rose and I snuggled close.

  “I miss books so much,” Rose had said, sighing. “Sometimes my mother used to read to me, if she wasn’t busy writing. I read under the bedcovers too, with a flashlight. Stories are much more exciting that way. How about you? What’s your favorite book of all time?”

  That stumped me. “We never really had books much. Grandad reads the newspaper — mostly for the crossword and the cartoons. Grandma has Fashion Forecast, obviously.”

  “You don’t have books?” Rose almost sat up and banged her head on the roof rafters. That made the rats jump. “How can you live without reading?”

  “Pretty well so far.” I laughed. “Stories are just made-up stuff anyway.”

  “Says who? I think they’re a different way of telling the truth.” Then, “Seriously — no books? Oh, Ella, you have no idea what you’ve been missing! Stories are food and drink and life. . . . I mean, haven’t you even heard the story about a girl who made a gown out of starlight?”

  “A gown out of starlight? How could you even do that?”

  “Well,” said Rose. “Once upon a time . . .”

  And that was that. No sleep for me till Rose wrapped up with a triumphant The end.

  Rose never ran out of tales to tell. She wove stories out of nothing, like a silkworm spinning a cocoon, or a fairy-tale maiden turning straw into gold.

  Did I ever tell you about the time . . . ? was her opening line. What followed would be amazing cascades of complete nonsense. Things like her life as a countess in a palace with egg cups plated in real gold. In Rose’s stories, people danced until dawn under the light of a hundred chandeliers, then slept in beds as big as boats, under silk quilts stuffed with downy feathers. The palace had walls made of books, and spires that touched the moon when it hung low in the sky.

  “And unicorns roaming the park, and fountains spouting fizzy lemonade, I suppose?” I teased her after that particular yarn.

  Rose had looked grave. “Now you’re just being silly,” she said.

  While we were trapped in the sewing room, Rose kept her story going for three whole hours. Outside there was the steady beat of shoes, boots, and sandals: tramp, tramp, tramp. Inside we were lost in a world where queens baked tarts and lemon trees talked. There were ogres who came and took the queen, even as her hands were covered in flour. The lemon-curd tarts tasted of sunshine and tears, and they had all the queen’s rings hidden inside, where the ogres wouldn’t find them. There was a princess who hid in a tree so the ogres didn’t find her at first, either, until they sniffed her out and carried her off to their lair, which was a dismal place without trees or grass.

  “Sounds like here,” muttered Francine.

  At another point, Francine laughed so hard she was shaking and crying, “Stop, stop, or I’ll pee myself!” Later on, Marta hid her smile behind her hand. It was the first time I’d seen Marta being as human as the rest of us. Even the guard at the far end of the room listened in and smirked at the funny bits.

  It came as a shock when Rose suddenly finished the story with a flourish: “And that was the end of that.”

  “No, no, no!” everyone protested.

  “Shh,” said Shona. “Listen.”

  Silence.

  The guard went to the workroom door and opened it a sliver.

  “All clear!” she shouted. “Go on — get out — go!”

  We ran to roll call. We had to dodge the debris dropped by those marching, marching incomers. There a handkerchief, yellow with snot. There a canary-colored feather blown out of a hat. And there, already sprinkled in dust, a single shoe for a baby’s tiny foot.

  That night, as we stood in our rows of five to be counted, there were no stars, no moon, no sky. Birchwood was buried in smoke. I tasted ash and for once felt no hunger.

  “Rose?” I asked in the dark. The barrack that night was airless and even more crowded than usual. The straw we slept on seemed extra hot and scratchy. “Rosalind? Are you awake?”

  “No,” she whispered back. “Are you?”

  “Shh!” hissed the bag of bones lying on my other side.

  Rose and I huddled together so our words didn’t have to go far from lip to ear.

  “Your story was good today,” I murmured. “You should be a writer.”

  “My mama is,�
�� said Rose. “A really good one. That’s why my family got arrested — she wasn’t afraid to publish books that told the truth, instead of what They want us to believe.”

  There was no chance to ask about the arrest. Rose was tumbling on into the next sentence.

  “I’d love to be even half as good at writing as her. How about you?”

  “Me? Write! That’s a laugh. I sew.”

  “No, how about your mother, I meant.”

  “Oh, nothing much to say about her.”

  “There must be,” said Rose.

  Truth was, I couldn’t really remember much about my mama. “She had to go back to work when I was just a baby. She was at a big factory, sewing suits. Nobody talks about it, but I think my father must’ve been one of the factory managers or something. They weren’t married. Can you believe they had machines that could cut through twenty double layers of suiting wool at once?”

  “Your mother, Ella?” Rose prodded gently.

  “Grandma brought me up, really. The suit factory moved to another town, and all the workers had to go with it or lose their jobs. Mama visited every few weeks. Then every few months. Then she just sent money. Then the War happened, the factory made uniforms, and she didn’t get paid. And then . . . you know.” I shrugged in the dark.

  Mothers weren’t something I knew much about.

  Two thin arms circled me in a hug.

  “What’s that for?” I grouched.

  Rose gave me a squeeze. “Just measuring to see how far around my arms will go.”

  Later that night a woman somewhere on the bottom row of bunks began to sob, quietly at first, then uncontrollably. “Why me, why me, why me?” she was wailing. “What have I ever done to be suffering here?”

  “Shut up!” Girder bellowed from her private cubicle at the end of the block.

  “I won’t shut up!” the woman shrieked. “I want to go home! I want my husband and my babies! Why did They come for us? What had we done?”