Last Friends (Old Filth Trilogy) by Jane Gardam Read Free Book Online

his back was probably not broken but time would tell. Someone said, ‘He’s a foreigner. Speaks nowt but heathen stuff! He’ll have to be reported.’
    Yet nobody seemed to know where. Or seemed interested. The local clergyman who was on the Town Council went to see him, and then the Roman Catholic priest who tried Latin and the Cossack’s lips moved. Each thought the other had reported him to the authorities, without quite knowing what these were.
    ‘They’ll no doubt be in touch any day from Russia to get him back.’ They waited.
    ‘There was a couple of Russians died of food-poisoning last year off a ship anchored in Newcastle. Meat pies. The Russians was in touch right away for body-parts. Suspected sabotage.’
    But nobody seemed to want the body-parts of the Cossack who lay in the cottage-hospital with his eyes shut. He talked to himself in his own language and spat out all the hospital food. And only the school-girl beside him.
    ‘Back’s gone,’ they told her. ‘Snapped through. He’ll never walk again.’
     
    The following week he was found standing straight at the window, six-foot-four and looking eastward toward the dawn and the Transporter Bridge at Middlesbrough, an engineering triumph. It seemed to interest him. When the nurses screamed at him he screamed back at them and began to throw the beds about and they couldn’t get near to him with a needle. Someone called the police and somebody else ran round to find Florence.
    She was taken out of school and to the hospital in a police car, no explanations; and when she was let into his isolation ward she looked every bit woman and shouted, ‘You. You come ’ome wi’ me.
Away
!’ ‘
Away
’ is a word up there that can mean anything but is chiefly a command.
    She left her address at the hospital and commanded an ambulance. The ward sister was drinking tea with her feet up so Florrie got him from the ambulance herself, half on her back. She had a bed made ready. The aged parents, never bright, shook their heads and drowsed on. ‘Eh, Florence! Eh, Florrie Benson—whatever next?’
    The dancer stayed. He lay, staring above him now. Nobody came. Florrie went to the public library in Middlesbrough to find out about Cossacks. She came back and stood looking at his curious eyes. She imagined they were seeing great plains of snow spread out before him. Multitudinous mountains. The endless Steppe. She got out some library books and tried to show him the photographs but they didn’t seem to mean anything to him.
    She gave up school. She was sixteen, anyway. Her old parents went whimpering about the house, faded and both were dead within the year.
     
    Florence was pregnant, and even so, nobody was interested in the Cossack. Neighbours came round but she was daunting. If she had been a boy it would all have been different. Serious enquiries. But, even pregnant, nothing was done for Florence.
    After a time the man began to walk again, just to the window or the door on the street. Or into the ghastly back alley.
    One day Florrie came home from buying fish to find him gone.
    It was for her the empty tomb. The terror and the disbelief were a revelation. She ran every-where to look for him, and, in the end, it was she—out of half the parish—who found him, on the sand-dunes staring out over what was still being called the German Ocean. The North Sea.
    She brought him limping and swearing home and, at last, being well-acquainted now with the Christian Cross that lay in the warm golden hair on his chest, she went to the Catholic priest, leaving Nurse Watkins in charge for two shillings and four pence. There were very few half-crowns left now.
    The priest lived in a shuttered little brick house beside his ugly church beside the breakwater. Nobody went there except the Irish navvies in the steel-works. ‘Russian?’ asked Father Griesepert. ‘Communist you say?’
    ‘No. He’s definitely Catholic.’
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘He doesn’t believe in taking