A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [170]
Fifi had gone to her and put her arms around her, and told her to stop talking and to come and lie down to conserve her strength.
Yvette had looked at her strangely. ‘I thought I was with Mama,’ she said.
They had lain down together, and the last thing Fifi remembered before she drifted off was Yvette taking hold of her hand. ‘Sleep, ma petite,’ she had said softly as a mother might to a child. ‘May the angels take care of you.’
Remembering those last words, it was all Fifi could do to make herself look round and up, for she instinctively knew what she was going to see and didn’t want to.
Yet she still screamed when she saw her.
Yvette was dangling in space from the top rail of the cage, her brown belt tight around her neck. Her eyes were bulging horribly and her mouth gaping open as if in a silent scream. The slight breeze was making her body sway.
Fifi knew that if she was to get up, she’d faint, so she lay down again, shut her eyes tightly and pulled the blanket over her head.
It seemed incredible that Yvette had found the strength to climb up there, and the steely nerve not only to do what she intended but control herself enough to be quiet and not wake her friend. Even the place she’d picked was out of Fifi’s line of vision from the mattress.
Yet even though Fifi wished she could be big-hearted enough to be glad Yvette’s troubles were over, her whole being wanted to shriek at her selfishness for leaving her alone to die. But she was too weak to rage and shriek; she had got to resign herself to lying here while a dead body swung overhead.
Last night Yvette had whispered many things in the darkness, about how when the war was over, she and the other girls in the brothel were dragged out into the street where their heads were shaved because it was thought they collaborated with the Germans.
She spoke of walking by night towards Calais, sleeping in fields and barns by day so she wouldn’t be seen, and rooting for something edible in fields and orchards which had been laid to waste by troops during the war. She was eventually rescued by a group of old nuns living in a ruined church. They nursed her back to health, sharing the meagre rations they had, and it was they who put her in touch with the refugee organization which helped her to get to England.
Fifi had thought she was telling her this to prove how long you could survive without food if you had the will to live, as she did then. But now it looked to Fifi as if she’d been trying to say she wished she’d just given up then and allowed herself to die.
Fifi felt compelled to look up again. The light was fading, ten more minutes and it would be pitch dark, and she felt she couldn’t leave her friend dangling in space. She would have to force herself to climb up and bring her body down.
Just a week before she’d climbed up there as nimbly as a monkey, but when she tried to do it now, she found all her strength was gone. There was no power in her grip on the bars, her legs and arms had lost their coordination. This was evidence that the wasting process of thirst and starvation was well underway.
But she continued, her breath rasping with the effort. When she did finally reach Yvette and put one arm out to test her weight, she realized she was just too weak to lift her enough to unbuckle the belt around her neck, and she’d got nothing to cut it with.
Just touching her friend, feeling the stiffness of the body which had kept her warm all these nights made her cry and shake so much she nearly fell down. Every bone in her body ached, her vision was blurred and she knew it was the beginning of the end.
Somehow she managed to get back down and crawl back to the mattress, but the effort it took was so great that she could hardly manage to pull the blanket over herself again.
She would never be able to get up again; this was it, the last part of the slow slither into death. She recalled telling Yvette how she’d read somewhere that yogis