The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories by Fiona Kidman

I’m worrying her, she’s young and not quite certain of her impressions about me, and I feel she’s still concerned in case I’m all right and I’m someone she should know, or worse still, ought to be kind to. I feel a little sorry for her because I know how precarious her position is. She might be being awful; on the other hand she could disgrace herself in front of the whole carriage by appearing to be familiar with me. I have it worked out that if I let on about knowing May it’ll resolve all her doubts, that’s why I sit quiet, just to keep her guessing.
    In order to make things easier for her, I stare over her shoulder now, looking at the scenery as the train rattles on towards town.
    The old familiar sights wear strange colours this morning as I look over Blossom’s shoulder and I’m moved to all the poetry my heart can muster.
    Poetry? Oh yes, once there was a magic woman one year at the workshop, a wild witch woman with a strange bell-ringing voice, who read poetry to us in the late afternoons when we wearied of our work. Some said she was one of us but I did not believe them; others said she came to do her own soul good and I cannot tell whether she had gotten enough good from us, or whether there was none to be found within our walls, but at any rate, after a while she came no more and no one seemed to notice, only me. But me, she left tongues of fire to taunt my soul with what it knows and yet knows not. As I said I am marginal.
    I peer deep into the heart of shops as we go, whisking past the little suburbs, alleys full of dresses and pretty things, a supermarket, shiny tiers of tins, bright-labelled, full of peaches, pears, cherries, lobsters, Elastoplast, and detergent, not that I have time to see, but I know them well; how I love to help in the buying of food. Food! We jolt past houses where the pale, tired women hang out double sheets and flapping nappies, side by side, swollenhands clawing space as they reach up pegs, straining backs of varicosed legs; little children on trikes, dirty still with breakfast marmalade; a ghetto of dark-skinned people who sing in the night and have their own problems when morning breaks; tired old men sitting on benches unshaven, passing a bottle, and I wonder did anyone call any of them ‘Simple Dick’ before the world was full of understanding and sympathy and tolerance for the afflicted; and there is an old lady I know, on sticks, each step a splinter of agony as, with pursed and fretful mouth, she follows a piece of paper despoiling the frontage of her ruined property.
    She knows me, for this is where the train stops for me and May and sometimes when we’ve been early we have met her, always anxious to talk for I seem to listen, even if May does not. She has worries too, that she does; one of the dark boys, she doesn’t know where he comes from, but she knows he ought to go back there wherever it is, far away, persecutes her. So she believes. ‘No one’s born wicked,’ she tells me, ‘but that boy, that boy has a wickedness inside. There’s a spirit of evil found its way in and God alone knows how it got in the child, but it’ll never leave him now.’
    She will hold my arm while the dementia (another word I’ve heard them use) shines forth from her eyes. I find it curious that she does not call me ‘Simple Dick’, for she must surely belong ‘to my mother’s days’. Instead we are equals, I fear.
    The train slows, so that I can be released with May, and I must leave Blossom.
    Dear skinny little Blossom, the problem which lies between you and me, across that short, dirty span of chewing gum and dust, is one of acceptance. I don’t even ask for your smile now, though a few minutes ago I might have hoped foolishly for that. I don’t ask for gifts, I offer only a small one or two of my own and they are not heavy ones to carry.
    When I smile at you, can you accept it, a