time tonight, and her sisters trudged into the house behind us with the kind of exhausted resignation you associate with refugees. When we got inside, they huddled together and looked around exactly like those refugees, too, as if they’d just crossed the border and didn’t speak the language or understand the signs.
There my mum was, though, standing by the dining table and beckoning them onward with the kind of smile that any Islander would recognize as the meaning of home. She already had the gas fire burning cheerfully, and now, she finished putting mugs of tea on the table, then went to the fridge and hauled out a platter of sandwiches.
All of that would get through, surely. That language was universal.
And, yes, that had been the reason for those sandwiches. I’d come in during the wee hours of the night with a scruffy dog and a half-drowned woman dressed in a blanket, my mum had heard that we were off to attempt a rescue, and she’d started making sandwiches and beds. Pretty much par for the course. It was fortunate, though, because I was starved, and the migraine was trying to reappear despite the earlier tablet. Migraines were like the more annoying type of personal trainer, nagging you about your sleep, your fluid intake, your stress level, and your diet.
I told the girls, who were still standing beside the door, “Come in. Take off your shoes and get comfortable,” and got my own boots off.
They did nothing but glance for one horrified moment in my direction, then look downward again, and I wondered what I’d said wrong. Was a man not supposed to notice them at all? Not talk to them? What?
“Shoes off in the house,” Daisy told them, slipping her own still-soaked trainers off and leaving them on the rubber mat by the door. Her feet had to be frozen. She needed socks.
“That’s getting undressed, though,” Obedience said in a near-whisper.
Fruitful said, a snap to her voice, “Don’t argue. Just do it.” She was already sitting on the floor, trying to keep her long skirt tucked around her ankles as she untied her enormous white trainers with jerking movements. She encountered a knot and yanked at it, then flinched as the motion jarred her ankle, but kept on struggling, and I crouched down to help.
She jerked back like I’d hit her.
Daisy said, “Fruitful. No. It’s all right.” She was down there beside me now, working on the shoelace, her fingers deft despite her own fatigue. Fruitful’s face was twisted away from me, either so I wouldn’t see her cry or so I wouldn’t see her at all, and Daisy got the shoes off, then held the ankle, moving it in a way I was all too familiar with while her sister gasped and tried to grab the sound back.
I thought I might know where Daisy got her own stoicism. It was bred in the bone, it seemed.
Daisy set her sister’s stockinged foot gently down and said, “You’ve got a good strain here. We’ll look after that in a bit, get you some Panadol, find something to wrap it with. It’ll keep for now, though. Food first, I think.”
“Too right,” my mum said. “No worries, love. You’re among friends.” She was on her knees herself beside Obedience, helping her slip her shoes off, putting a quick arm around her shoulder and giving her a squeeze while she was at it, then standing with a laugh and saying, “What a lot of bother over a few shoes, eh. Never mind. It’s nothing that a cup of tea and a good night’s sleep won’t put right. When did you last eat?”
Obedience said, after a moment, “I had dinner, but Fruitful was in the Punishment Hut, so she didn’t get any. It was her first night there. You don’t eat the first night.”
“So you’ll recognize the error of your ways,” Daisy said drily.
My mum got a look on her face I recognized. The one that would’ve had her charging out and rescuing a kid from his bullies, or telling the oblivious young bloke on the bus to get up and give the pregnant woman his seat. Nothing more terrifying than a well-built Samoan mum in the full power of her righteousness. All she said, though, was, “That doesn’t sound pleasant. We can fix that, anyway. Come wash your hands, all of you, and sit down to eat.” She told Daisy, “Those clothes can’t be comfortable, though, love, and you’re muddy as well. Come