‘THY WORD IS a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.’
Reuben sat in the corner of the room, the Bible open on his knee. Ted sat on the window ledge, looking down the slopes to the top of the pit winding gear, just visible from here. If he went and stood on the front step of 8 Paradise, he could see it clearly.
‘For he is our God and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his land.’
His grandfather’s voice rumbled on and the murmurings of his mother and grandmother in the room above formed a lighter descant to it.
‘Do you have anything you can say, our Ted?’
Ted struggled. They had a Bible reading every morning at the start of school, and a Religious Instruction class once a week, but he never remembered much, though he liked the sound of the words, as he liked to hear his grandfather read the Bible aloud, since it was the earliest sound he could remember, and so a familiar comfort to him.
‘Before the mountains were settled before the hills was I brought forth,’ Ted said, closing his eyes to help him remember right.
His grandfather grunted.
Ted looked at him, then out of the window again.
‘You give me chapter and verse, boy, chapter and verse.’
But Ted could not.
The voices of the two women went on like a bubbling stream above.
When he was a baby, in the pram that they had just pushed up the slopes full of clean washing, Ted had been put with his grandfather and left to listen to the words of the Bible, which Reuben read day and night, sometimes in silence, often aloud. The deep voice and the words had been the background to Ted’s waking and sleeping, and as he grew older, to his pottering about the room, in and out of the door, back again, clambering over the steep step. The voice had always been there, like the air and the light.
‘I made me pools of water, to water therewith the wood that bringeth forth trees.’
He did not know the meaning of the words but they slipped over him, wrapping him in an assurance of safety even when they were in the Old Testament’s most thundering and vengeful strain.
At eight now, he understood a little more and sometimes longed for a phrase or two of gentleness. He wanted to ask questions too, but knew better, for Reuben would never answer except with another river of words.
Ted leaned his head against the pane and watched for the file of men to come trailing up the slope at the end of their shift.
In the bedroom above, Evie sat on the straight-backed chair beside the bed.
‘Well, if you won’t show me at least describe to me what it’s like.’
Alice’s back was turned away from her. She fidgeted constantly with the button on her blouse.
‘Don’t tell him,’ she said for the hundredth time. ‘Don’t say a word.’
‘I’ve promised, haven’t I? Am I a liar?’
Silence.
‘He knows there’s something wrong, Alice.’
‘What has he said?’
Evie hesitated, then repeated the one thing. ‘That you’re not very swift about the place. Which is plain for all to see.’
‘I seem to have no stuffing left in me.’
‘I can tell.’
Alice had lost more weight. Not that she had ever been stout. The flesh seemed to have peeled off her bones and the skin hung loose.
‘If you’d show me.’
‘I’ve shown no one. I get dressed and undressed in the dark.’
Evie tutted, and then decided. She got up and went to stand in front of the other woman, took Alice’s hands in hers and held them firmly away, then started to undo the buttons of her blouse, from the top. Alice took a breath, then let it go. Let Evie carry on.
She opened the blouse carefully. Alice sighed.
The swelling was the size of an apricot, pushing against the skin. Evie pulled her hand away sharply.
‘Oh, Alice.’
Alice’s expression was blank but when Evie looked into her eyes she saw fear there.
‘You have to see the doctor. You have to go at once. Go tomorrow.’
Alice shook her head and started to put her clothing straight again.
‘I know what it is, Evie, I know there’s nothing he can do or say. And so do you if you’ll be truthful.’
Evie did know.
She put her hand on the other woman’s arm and rested it there, and so they stood, both silent, as if they were staring into the depths of the same river but from opposite banks.